In February, we paid off our Subaru! I wanted to save that "extra" money to eventually buy an HDTV. I invited my parents to some electronics stores one Saturday and found my "dream" TV: a new Panasonic 50" plasma, one that actually uses less electricity than comparable LCDs! Now that I have a tangible goal, the car payment gets dumped into the savings account instead, and I figure come June I can buy that TV! Now, you must understand that Asperger's people can get obsessed, and this HDTV idea has snowballed into several other ideas for the house: I'll need new furniture to hold the new size of an HDTV. Since it's an open back, I'll paint the wall behind it a dark color. To hide the wiring for the surround sound speakers (I want to upgrade to that and Blu-Ray, too), I remember an idea of using crown moulding... that will need painting... heck let's just paint the entire room! I'll need to clean up some clutter for the new furniture; let's declutter the entire house. I need room in the basement to store some things I won't have room for upstairs any more... we need to clean out the basement (good news for thrift stores, bad news for MDH, as a lot of that is his stuff to go through). Now that the basement's clean, I finally have a place to paint the wood I bought for the kids' room shelves 3 years ago... need to buy paint to do that. I'm at the paint store, let's buy some to paint the kids' bathroom (since I've always hated the "new house beige" with their white fixtures). The basement's cleaned up now after finishing the shelves... let's play ping pong! The basement just hasn't given me any inspiration to scrap lately... what if I got a matching home office (matches the entertainment wall) for the living room and moved my scrapbooking upstairs????
Bottom line, my scrapbooking hobby, which once got done on one half of the ping pong table, is now put away on basement shelves and has pretty much remained there for three months, with the exception of World's Largest Crop (my Creative Memories consultant has had several family problems and has had to cancel several crops at her house) and as a bonus you have a pretty good idea how an Asperger's brain can work sometimes.
The bad news... the money I've saved so far for a TV just got spent on a new dishwasher. The old one (8 years old; it's a basic model that came with the house) left grit on the dishes after one washing; a second go around got them sort of clean. I refuse to wash dishes by hand (I am so grateful for dishwashers and washing machines), so they kind of stacked up until I gave in and went dishwasher shopping. Other than the fact that the motors sometimes buzz, the machine is deathly quiet and cleans better than the old one ever did. (Thanks, Dad, for helping to install it.) By coincidence, this week is the city's bulk pickup week, meaning you can put as much trash as you want out in the curb and a trash truck will take it away for you. Scavengers know this, too, and several pickup trucks and flatbed trailers made the rounds of our neighborhood this weekend taking away things people had left out. Our old dishwasher was gone in less than two hours (and yes, I took off the latch so no little ones could get trapped in it).
The good news... I have done a few things on that long "to do" list above: We decluttered the house and basement and gave away lots of stuff; I painted the kids' bathroom and their shelves. Don't believe me? I've got pictures!
This is the bathroom from the hall, to show the shade of blue I picked. (Oh, and the towel bars are uneven because a child hung from one and ripped it out of the wall, so I replaced it a bit lower than its twin.) I also bought a new light fixture to replace the "hollywood bulb" bar and a new faucet, since the plastic knobs were too hard for Julia to turn off by herself (this one's got a lever--much nicer for little hands). And the old beige soap pump, toothbrush holder and nightlight didn't match any more, so I found a white soap pump and toothbrush holder on clearance at BBB, and that neat nightlight came from Target (you can't see it well unless you probably enlarge the picture by clicking on it, but the clear plastic is embossed with a brocade-like pattern).
These next three are prints I bought at Hobby Lobby ages ago for the bathroom, and uncovered when I was decluttering. I had them rematted in white and placed them in clearance-priced frames from Wal-Mart. On clearance because they had black smudges on them. Well, I just happened to have some white paint left over from the ceiling, door, etc., and I know that the frames will then match perfectly! (I just love the bear... he's adorable!)
And this is my own design for custom shelves for the kids' rooms. A 7-foot shelf and a window seat. The seat was going to have a shelf under it too, but I forgot about the outlets under the windows (which in Julia's room is the only one not behind furniture) which also house their nightlights, so I had to forgo those. The arches are supposed to mimic those in their furniture, and the paint are the same colors as I used before in their rooms. Also, I had to cut out a bit by their beds, so the drawers could open! Other than the fact that they're a little rickety, side to side, I think I did a pretty good job and it houses their
On a closing note, I have another reason to be glad we upgraded our DSL speed recently. Updating a blog with lots of pictures used to take me all afternoon, because the pictures would take forever to upload. But today, I got it done in less than an hour! And there are several pictures here! Maybe I'll be tempted to blog more often..... nah.... I'm not a daily journalist and I never will be. You'll just have to wait and be surprised.
