Nesting

I have to say if I were pregnant, the baby would be coming any day now. That is to say, I've been nesting like crazy. Troy got this all started. (Hmm...I guess that would be true of the pregnancy scenario too, but I digress...)

So how did it start? Troy wanted to insulate the kitchen. He wanted to start with the windows--the worst heat sinks in the house. So he cut foam insulation to make oh-so-attractive window inserts.

So lovely...so je ne sais quoi...so...white trash is, I believe, the phrase you're all waiting for me to say. (Troy instructed me to add that many great ideas are mocked and derided early in their development before being adopted by a few and then assumed by all. Think, for example, personal computers.)

So anyway, the kitchen will be warmer; the house will be ever less enticing to thieves (I assume). What this has to do with nesting is that in order to do this Troy had to clear away all the junk that has been sitting around in that corner of the kitchen. He managed to find new homes for most of it, and as far as I'm concerned it just disappeared.

So I am looking at a blank wall in the kitchen and thinking, "Wow, I could really put that to work." First step was to move the shelf serving as a pantry in the entry way to that corner of the kitchen. Reorganize, dust clean (let's be honest) and move everything on the shelf and throw in the canning stuff that had been piled up in the other "dumpy" corner of the kitchen. (I mean, have you ever heard of storing food in the kitchen? Very novel ideas I have these days.)

Step two was to turn the table 90 degrees so that it runs along the [now insulated] window wall instead of coming into the room. And sweep the floor. That alone made the kitchen feel like we could square dance in the middle of it.

It was quite amazing.

It was also a little disconcerting because the floor slopes madly away from the center of the room. (The porch they built that part of the kitchen on is sinking.) It wasn't really noticeable when there was just a pile of junk there, but now the black shelf could be dubbed the Tower of Pisa, it tilts so wildly. Troy and I both felt a bit like we were walking on a ship, but we've gotten our sea-legs since then and hardly notice it now.

Next step is to tackle the entry way. Moved the shoe shelf to where the food shelf was. Put up a rod to hang coats on. Remove old crappy space-hog of a coat rack that we inherited with the house. That will make such an improvement. I can't believe we put up with it this long, but it was there, and it had coats on it, and inertia is a hard thing to overcome!

And now that we're parking in the shop and coming in through the back door, we'll be putting some coat hooks back there too. We're just considering it all a sort of dress rehearsal as we wait to finish the house. Right now we can punch holes anywhere in the wall without real consequences and try out any arrangement we like. (Or should I say any arrangement we have the energy to implement.)

If I really get going on this, we might even have some Christmas decorations out this year. Can you imagine?

PS: Fun random tidbit: The other day Troy was working in the shop and one of the mousetraps he has out was in his way. So he put it on the hood of the pickup to keep it out of the way. Next time he walked into his shop...you guessed...he had caught a mouse! On the hood. Would not have thought that was the place to trap them!

PPS: Fun extra: In case the opening paragraph made you wonder what I might look like pregnant, here's a pic from Halloween a few years ago: