Limbo

If Limbo does exist, it must touch the physical realm between Christmas and New Year's. Those six days of no man's land where all the loose ends of the current year get tied up but nothing for the next year can officially be started. It's either a time crammed full of high speed stress or a lazy daisy wandering... or a little of both.

It is in this time of instantaneous yet delayed change, that my house is a mess. It seems this happens every year after Christmas. The onslaught of presents causes the need to find new spaces for everything, which triggers the need to go through closets and chuck what we're not using. Our dinning area/entryway is currently storage for piles of recycling, donations, things that need to be returned to their proper owners, and stuff for an 'out with the old, in with the new' clothing exchange. I suppose you could say it's the blessing and the curse of a small space that we can't just cram everything in.

The good news is, all this craziness made my husband realize that we really do need to figure out a workable, defined, maintained use for our spare bedroom (instead of just letting it be the catch-all room that functions as guest room, crafting room, office, library, attic, and garage). It still does most of those things but we've shifted the primary purposes around. I claimed it.

I've been trying to let it be mostly Dustin's room. Since I stay home during the day I feel like the rest of the house belongs to me and I feel it's important for someone who has to face the working world everyday to have a space in their home that is a kind of personal haven. That led to a room covered in electrical wires that may or may not be connecting anything and, bless his heart the man can be organized when he wants to be, tools everywhere but mostly just inside the door. Why they always ended there, I don't know, maybe because that's close enough to his side of the closet that they were quasi-put away. It drove me nuts, but I tried to just shut the door most of the time.

When Dustin expressed a desire for the room to be reorganized so that it wouldn't be messy all the time, I was thrilled. We finally moved the computer into our living room entertainment stand (hey, it's entertainment) like we've been meaning to since we moved here, which moved the 'office' out and freed up the desk. I asked Dustin if I could have the desk. He said yes. I asked him if he could not put anything on the desk at all, or on any of the shelves. He gave me a funny look but said yes.

I spent most of yesterday going through all my crafting stuff (yarn, fabric, thread, patterns, tools) and chucking all those odds and ends I've been saving 'just in case' but know I'll never use and reorganizing everything into boxes. It freed up about a quarter of the space in the closet and I now have a very sweet and darling space. My sewing machine can sit out and with the love seat tucked into the corner and the new lace tablecloth from Belgium my mother-in-law gave to me for Christmas, it makes me giddy happy whenever I glance in the door.

It is pretty girly. Which is what I was trying not to do, but the boy seemed pleased when he saw it, so I guess it'll be alright. Now, if I can just get my dinning area back...