gray day...

very excited to announce that it may be gray in the sky, gray on my house but there is no sign of gray on my head...yipee! those pesky roots have been banished for a few weeks and it has cheered me no end...

apart from my hair being sorted i also spent yesterday sorting my laundry cupboard...now if you recall my hallway is rather drab...actually without having the sun tunnels put in, it was completely dark. i have counted there are eight doors on my upstairs hallway which accounts for half the doors in the shed...when the painter was here doing his best with my french doors he took pity on my 'door' painting and offered me a 'you won't be able to resist' price for doing my landing doors...i caved dear readers, the price was too good, he needed work and i needed help...i calculated that it takes me two days to paint out one door and another two days to do the frame, that's four days, times that by sixteen doors...well that's a lot of days ( i would tell you the total amount but alas i was never good with figures), so i have halved my total of work days on the doors in the shed, leaving me to get on with the window frames and walls upstairs...

anyhow the point i am trying to get to is for the last two weeks we have been without doors upstairs...this makes for very interesting family life, especially with teenage girls and their bathroom habits...i have been most creative and pinned lovely thrift store sheets from certain doors, but when the frames were wet it was proving more tricky and did i mention that was the same time as having no water...no doors and no water for teenage girls is not a good combination...still we have got through it and i am busy putting the doors back on (hurrah!). now i am quite sure you are aware that i am not a 'beefy' lady and do not pack much of a punch, when i removed the doors myself i was rather chuffed that i achieved such a task...to put them back on i have devised a technique of balancing them on books so they become level with the hinges...

the point of that last mumbling paragraph was to get to the fact that yesterday i did a little experiment with my laundry cupboard...i am most lucky to have two big closets in the hallway to hide all the towels, bed linen and pillows, plus i am quite sure a moth or two...i did consider painting the brown shelves but quite honestly i am getting a little burnt out with painting (shock, horror). i was told by my friend Suzanne that it is possible to cover shelves with fabric using starch...(this is where you all go "well duh, Tif...didn't you know that?") well actually i didn't...and so i made a starch/water solution of 50/50 and dipped, wringed and placed fabric onto my brown shelves. the fabric i used was very light weight cotton and from the clearance aisle...for an experiment i am happy with the wrinkly crusty results. (please excuse the terrible picture but i knew you would want to see it even in a blurry state)...however, i cannot be bothered to do the other cupboard...i think wallpaper would look much better and so have plans to buy some anayglyta wallpaper and use that instead...

this weekend we are tackling our #4's room, who has waited patiently for me to get around to his space...at the moment he sleeps on a mattress in his closet (doors removed)...now here's the thing that has always amused me living in the states, and i'm not sure this is the case for the whole of the states or just my neck of the woods. if the room contains a 'built in' closet then it can be sold as a bedroom, if it does not then it is not classed as a bedroom...if that had applied to my last house in the UK then we would have been selling a house with a lot of 'reception' rooms and no bedrooms at all...so the plan is to build a raised platform in the closet space with storage underneath and a mattress on the top, painted out in green (his choice) and the rest of the room painted out in white, (my choice, surprise surprise)...

i am hoping that next week the dreadful rain will disappear thus resulting in my blog being a little less damp and a bit more cheery...

she's wishing you a pleasant weekend ~ Tif

footnote: pics in today's post are courtesy of my children and their creations...due to lousy photo taking conditions i have rummaged through my flickr archives :)