DIY Mess

While I have been sitting and rocking my sick Freddie, I've been doing a little too much of surfing and blog-reading.  Sometimes I will read home blogs and get discouraged - sometimes inspired.  Been getting a little too much John and Sherry this time, I think.

As I was sitting ans sitting and rocking, I spent a lot of time looking at my house, and noticing all those things that I mean to get around to sometime, but usually don't, and then I see those things so often that I don't see them anymore.  Ya know what I mean?  Well, I started noticing them again while I was sitting.  And folks, we have a missionary send-off party that will be happening here in not a whole big heap of time, so maybe I ought to start addressing a few of those issues.

Here's my list, to remind myself (because I usually jot things down on a bit of scratch paper that gets lost and tossed into the recycle bin) of things I would like to get done in the next couple of months:

finally finish fixing dining room ceiling
fix light over stairs that won't turn on
fix back doorbell so it actually rings
pretty up front porch
pretty up back patio
pretty up lower patio (we have two patios, which I love until they collect junk - and they are good at collecting junk!)
stain coffee table a darker color
stain mantel a darker color
update family room picture shelves
update family photos in living room (yeah, we took the pictures, but I never printed or hung them!)
clean out the rec room (again)
take out the kitchen cabinets above the stove (dreaming!)
clean out sun room (which involves a lot of organizing and purging my craft stashes)
get a couple more bookshelves to hold our book hoardings collections
organize the office
paint the kitchen (more dreaming!)
make new valance for family room sliding door (if I paint the kitchen because then the current one won't match anymore)
tidy the garage enough to walk through without fear of bodily damage
reduce the "used car lot" feel of our front yard
landscape the front yard we scraped last spring (or at least de-junk it)
sell/give away unused desk
sell/give away two unused dressers
sell/give away unused tv
sell/give away outgrown toddler bed

That should do for now.

And I thought, as I was putting these sick little little sweeties to bed, that I would just jump on one of these projects and git 'er done.  Here is my awesome coffee table, which the kids love to do their homework on because the top lifts up and locks like a giant TV table.  I partially roughed it up with some coarse sandpaper, because that's what the stain said you needed to do.  I had to go over a few areas more to get out some long scratches that happened while the table was in storage.

See the dark scratch?  It has a few friends and they drive Trent crazy.  So I'm doing him a favor, besides de-orange-ify-ing the whole thing.  After some hard work and making my hands look deformed like the crazed arthritic witch from Snow White, I was ready to re-stain the top.  I made sure there was plenty of ventilation, because the stain was very stinky.  Wipe on, wipe off.  Easy.  And it looks great.

It looks great if you like a very slightly darker orange color with dull brownish skid marks where I took out the scratches, that is.  And one of the scratches is still there.  So now I have more work to do to get it back to a presentable state.  And this time, I can't just ignore it as something that would-be-nice to get done, because it looks bad.  Really bad.

And that, my friends, is how to make your own mess.  Our house still stinks.