Rearranging the house…again

Well. After no little bit of deliberations, both Bear and I realized that we only live in five rooms of this eight room house (that’s counting each bathroom). The ‘Den’ is used for storing books and lots of paperwork. The ‘Exercise’ room is used for storing the treadmill and Health Rider and our New Balance sneakers.

My Studio is used to store my art supplies and myriads of projects begun and not finished. I tend to want to work in the living room or the kitchen so I can talk to my husband without shouting or having to move away from the task at hand.

This leaves us frequenting the living room, the kitchen, the bedroom and the two bathrooms. The other three rooms are sadly neglected.

NOT ANY MORE!!! We bought a new sofa! And how does this fix the problem? Well, it is slightly confusing, but essentially very logical. First we move the old hide-a-bed, which I dislike intensely, from the den to the cabin. Then we move the treadmill and the Health Rider to the den from the exercise room. This makes the exercise room no longer an exercise room. It is now a spare bedroom, but without a bed. Oops.

To remedy this, we move the wonderful sofa sleeper in the living room to the extra bedroom, creating a sitting room that will double as a spare bedroom for guests, like my daughter from Nevada who will be here over Christmas. Yay!

Other household objects like the bentwood rocker will go into the sitting room, maybe my desk from the living room and even maybe another bookshelf. It will be a nice sitting room and the sofa sleeper will fold out into a very nice bed. We even plan to buy a new mattress that can hide away, too.

This leaves a gaping hole in the living room where the sofa sleeper used to be. I mean large       empty       area. Thus, voila!, the new couch. Which we will pick up next Saturday. Found it on sale for Veterans’ Day and since I have THREE (count them) veteran ancestors and one living veteran on my side, I got an extra $$$ off. Actually it’s more like $$ off, but who wants to quibble over dollar signs?

This weekend was spent rearranging. Unfortunately rearranging does not include sorting and throwing away stuff. But as more time goes by, I am becoming more enamored with the simple manner of home décor. That is, not much to collect dust. We’ll see how that goes. Stay tuned.

Back to school, summer's end

Our little dog of 17 plus years died a few weeks ago and I still can't really talk about her. Suffice to say that she lived up to her name, Sparkle, by adding a sparkly glint to our lives. Her constant sweetness is missed. I'm also unaccustomed to just walking into my kitchen to silence. Sadness still rules, so a true tribute later.
Everyone at school is involved in in-service days, textbook counts, lesson plans, student performance evaluations, and simple unpacking what was tucked away for the summer. Well, it is not all that simple. Hubbes talked me into painting my Whole Artroom last month and now on top of that effort is helping me move everything brought home back into it's rightful place. He says it is like moving a child into a university dorm room Every Year. I say, so?
I have begun my sketchbook for The Sketchbook Project! The website is http://www.thesketchbookproject.com.
Pictures of progress soon to come. But I digress.
The goal of the next few days is to ready the artroom for my students, label the new, exciting, wonderfully magical new textbooks, hang the first week's art prints and order supplies. The artkids will be surprised by how much real drawing we will do this year.
Oh, I have a website now. (Oops, digressing again) It's www.jpauletterickert.com. Coolness, huh? But still under construction. You're gonna have to wait for it. I have a bunch of masks to show you, but some need tweaking before they go online. And unfortunately this takes a backseat to art lesson planning. A new crop of minds to enlighten. What fun!
So all is going well in whimsyworld, and next week when I walk into the artroom, unlike my kitchen, it won't be silent.