I’m not a huge fan of yard work. I don’t like gardening; I don’t even have any house plants.

But I’m on my own now (another story for another day) and I have a half acre of yard to take care of.

I have what mostly qualifies as a lawn – at least the parts you can’t see from the street. There are still a lot of bare patches. I bought some seed and starter fertilizer hoping I could get some baby grass to grow, but it turns out that you need water it – a lot. I had a few issues with this:

• We were getting regular rain, until I seeded my yard. This put a huge crimp in my lawn-growing plans.
• I have a sprinkler, but it doesn’t move itself around the yard. Since I work all day, it would take me a week to get the whole lawn watered just by leaving a sprinkler on.
• I work all day, and I really don’t want to spend a couple of hours after work soaking my yard to get things to grow.
• It’s a half acre. That’s a LOT of yard to take care of after work and on weekends, especially when I’m trying to have a social life too.

So now that all my grass seed has turned to dust, there’s rain in the forecast this week. Oh, and have I mentioned that the weeds are taller than my dog now? Because they are. She doesn’t like going in the yard because the weeds tickle her belly.

I have a big beast of a rider mower that I have no interest in riding, so for the cost of some delicious home-cooked meals, I’ve managed to get my nephew to come over and take care of that for me. At the very least I’d like to not lose my dog in the yard because the weeds are too tall.

After years of living in Las Vegas and not having to worry about this stuff, I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I can’t wait for winter. I love the look of my white, snowy yard because I don’t have to do anything to it.

Ok, folks – here’s where I give you all the inspiration for what I want to do with my craft room.

Source: granvillehouse.blogspot.com via KirstenL4W on Pinterest

Source: houseofturquoise.com via KirstenL4W on Pinterest

Source: flickr.com via KirstenL4W on Pinterest

Source: etsy.com via KirstenL4W on Pinterest

Source: apartmenttherapy.com via KirstenL4W on Pinterest

So, the first picture is pretty much what sealed the deal for me. It has pretty much everything I want – aqua walls, white furniture, and all the right accent colors.

The second picture is neat, organized, feminine without being too sweet, and already features my K everywhere. Love this!

Third picture, again with aqua walls and white furniture. The accent colors aren’t as obvious, but this is probably a more realistic look of what my room will look like when it’s done.

I love the Peacock Girl print by my friend Eve, and I had to have it. Now that I have a room of my own to put it in, I had to buy it.

And the final picture, the initial wall. I have the perfect spot to put a K wall, and I intend on putting it to good use.

I thought a LOT about what color to paint the walls. There was a part of me that’s always wanted aqua walls, so I was determined to do that. But then I thought about it and thought that with all the crafting and such that I want to do, having an actual color on the walls might interfere with any colors that I want to work with. I was also wary on overdosing on the aqua (Shut up! It could totally happen.) So I considered pale gray and a darker off-white, just to contrast with the white furniture. I also considered pure white, but the slightly different whites in my furniture dictated that I not do that.

Ultimately, though, I went with my first love. I figured that if I’ve wanted it for this long, then I may as well go for it. The winner? Sherwin Williams Retiring Blue. It’s a nice pale aqua, and I plan on getting a quart of Maxi Teal, the darkest color on that strip, to use for accents. I have a nightstand I want to repaint and use for storage, and I bought a blank wood desk tray that will also be teal.

As far as the aqua overdose, I plan on tempering that by using accent colors like purple, lime green, and bright pink. Yes, you heard me right. I said pink.

I’m currently on the hunt for some fabric to use for curtains, since I’m not having much luck finding pre-made curtain panels. I’d like something that incorporates all the colors I want to use, and preferably with a pure white background. I’m leaning towards big, bold patterns, probably a modern floral. The only thing I’ve found so far that I would really consider, but is currently out of stock, is this Amy Butler fabric. It doesn’t have an option with those colors and a white background, so I’m still searching. I might end up going for pure white panels if I can’t find anything I like, which would give me something without the feeling that I need to settle on something.

So what do you think? Is it me or what?

So we had a hurricane blow through here the other day.

I stayed home while Mister went to work. I took Greta out in the morning, taking her in the backyard to shelter her a bit from the wind. She was fine for her morning break.

I tried taking her out in the early afternoon, as the wind was picking up, and she was having none of it. It took some doing to get her off the porch and into the backyard. She looked like she was doing fine until a big gust of wind came along, and she started looking to run. She was going in all directions until I picked her up and carried her in. Even then, when we got around to the front of the house and got hit with the full force of the wind, she wanted to scramble out of my arms to run away from the big scary wind. But I got her in the house, and determined that she could go potty anywhere inside without getting in trouble.

She was good, though. She held it all day. I finally got her to go outside when the wind started subsiding around 10 that evening. She did her business and ran for the door to go back in. She got treats and a bunch of praise for being such a good puppygirl all day!

There was some damage around here, but being a bit inland, we didn’t get it as bad as NY and NJ did. Damage up this way was mostly limited to large branches and some trees falling, taking power lines with them.

My new house survived just fine. The garage, on the other hand, lost a few shingles. Just a few.

Ok, now that we’re moved into our new house, I need to give a house tour. And I will, but not now.

I want to talk about my craft room slash office. Or office slash craft room. Or as I like to call it, MY room.

When planning how to use the space in this house, we discussed the two extra bedrooms we have and how we wanted to use them. We decided that we didn’t see the sense of having a dedicated guest room when we really don’t have guests all that often, which meant that the guest room turned into a bit of a dumping ground for most of the time.

We also discussed our home office situation. In our house in Las Vegas, we shared a home office, and it became apparent that it didn’t fulfill our needs as well as we had hoped.

First, there was the size of the room – just 10×11. It’s a fine size on its own, but when you try to cram two desks in there, it gets crowded pretty fast.

Then there were the desks. Mister insisted on glass desks, since the clear glass desktop would help open up the room. We selected sleek desks with large surfaces, but they lacked a fundamental component: storage. Remember this? Yeah, that’s when my desk was clean. There was just nowhere to store anything, and trying to craft anything was difficult since I had so little space to work with.

Don’t forget that due to the layout of the room, Mister and I always had our backs to each other. It was kind of annoying when we were trying to spend time with each other. Before we even left Las Vegas, we decided that something like this desk inspired by Young House Love.

When we moved into our cozy little trailer, we tried a form of the long double desk at YHL. We whipped one up with some stock lumber and a $20 solid core lauan door. Long story short, I hated it. It still had no storage, plus I felt crowded out by Mister’s giant gaming monitors. There was paper creep – seems like every time I sat down the paper pile would get closer and closer to my keyboard, and I had to keep moving it back so that I’d have a little breathing room or get to the leftmost keys on my keyboard.

Then the noise. Mister’s a gamer, so there’s game noise, guild talk noise, and he likes having music on. It’s way too much for me to process, and I couldn’t concentrate. Not happy. And of course, no crafting room whatsoever. This idea, while great in theory, would not work for two people who have two completely different ideas on what we wanted out of an office. It was time to forget trying to compromise.

We decided that we’d each have our own office.

This means that I have a quiet room. I have plenty of storage for my crafty crap. I have plenty of room to work on my crafty crap. And I can paint it whatever color I want. Don’t think I won’t.

Now that I’ve built up a whole bunch of anticipation for you, here’s what I’ve got so far for my room. White furniture (Mister is allergic to all things light and bright) from IKEA (Mister threatened divorce when I dragged him in there).

Stay tuned for my next post, in which I show you inspiration on how I want to decorate my room.