Girl with paintbrush

On the road to better organization, the kids' shoes now have bigger and sturdier homes, a necessity when their feet do nothing but grow and the force with which their shoes are hurled into place also only intensifies. We decided a bench to house them was overkill both in labor and cost when these baskets can be found so easily and inexpensively at discount stores like Marshall's.

When I said Kevin was on fire with all his plan drawing I wasn't kidding. The day after, he came home with fully built shelves and he and I quickly installed them. Here, unpainted,

and now primed thanks to yours truly. What you can't see is the area below where the kids coats will be hung on new hooks, and on the sides will be more hooks, one for each backpack and maybe a fourth for a mommy bag. In a house with one 2 foot closet under the stairs on the first floor, this new area is pure luxury.

That big space in the middle is for the 3 recycling receptacles I ordered the other day. I'm not going to know what to do with myself. After photos will be forthcoming.

Painting among other types of physical labor always gets my mind going or not going, I can't figure which. I tend to space out, but then it seems my thoughts really are dancing around, no matter how aware of it I am or not. Perhaps it can best be described as simple meditation, which is why I highly recommend painting, or weeding, or cutting grass with a push mower, or taking your own trash to the dump, or baking bread, or swinging a hammer, or axe, what have you.

I was thinking about the familiarity of the paint smell and my mind was quickly flooded with image after image of when Kevin and I remodeled the house. I mean gutted it. All the way to new wiring, heating/AC, plumbing, floors, walls, ceilings, insulation, everything. I have distinctly embedded visions in my mind of tearing out plaster walls and the lathe behind them and pulling down ceiling board on top of my head and how the hickory nuts from the squirrels in the attic would fall down the back of my shirt along with 70 years of dirt and insulation. It was not a job for the faint-hearted.

I'm still pretty amazed we did it and can't really believe that I've primed and painted literally every room of this house and several more than once. As much of an undertaking as it seems, I highly recommend it, not just for the cost-saving aspects, not just for practicality or learning how things are done, not just so you gain an appreciation for what some people do for a living and how hard they work, but more importantly for the opportunity to learn more about yourself. Give it a try, I promise you'll learn something valuable about yourself that you didn't know before.

I sit here too, thinking that this is preparation for the next step, getting ready for a possible addition that is, if it's plausible in this crazy, downturned economy. Time will tell. In the meantime, I can at least blab about it all to you while I drink a little tea with honey and eat the last two pieces of the homemade bread I baked yesterday. Almost nothing smells better. Well, okay, maybe a baby.