Where O Where Has Mae-Mae Been?

Dude!  It has been a while!  My house has gone through a major transformation.  Oh! Yes!  Mama got her entire house painted and got new wood floors! 

Let's first start with the paint!  My new favorite person in the world, Cristi Holcombe from Charm Home and soon to be HGTV's Elbow Room star picked the colors of my house!  (Thanks Nancy for the referral!) OH MY!  I told her I wanted Coastal Living but on a teacher's budget and she gave it to me!  When my other favorite person in the world, Alex, painted the house, I sat and cried.  All the furniture from the family room, office, and kitchen was piled in the kids' bedrooms.  I had concrete floors (DH and I pulled the carpet up to save a couple of hundred dollars) and boxes of wood on the floor.  Every night coming home was like Christmas for my three ring circus and myself.  Each night, we would run inside and see what present of perfectly painted walls Alex and his crew had left us!  I sat marveled at the beautiful walls until it was time to eat dinner on the floor of my bedroom!  The ugly pinky beige that I have hated for EIGHT years and the chocolate brown that was supposed to be a camel tan were gone and the beautiful new colors are breathtaking. And the floors! The floors!  The floors!  The floors look beautiful! 

To have the painting and the floors redone was a lot.  I'm not complaining!  I know I am extremely lucky.  DH & I have saved and this is what we wanted!  But it was and continues to be a lot to a person who has OCD!  "It's only for a month" has been my motto for three weeks now.  I do not like the chaos of it all!  It is hard to function in chaos.  I had to get serious this weekend though.  The poor children only had a path in their rooms.  My room was covered with stuff!  You couldn't sit on the couches and my housekeeper was coming today.  This weekend mama had to get her organizing on!  The office got put back together.  (No computer for three weeks!)  The children's rooms were dug out from mass chaos.  I even got the kids beds made.  For the first time in over three weeks, everyone slept in their own rooms last night!
  There are still boxes of stuff that I need to go through and my motto has change a little.  It's just for a few more weeks until I get out of school and have the time and energy to put my life back together!  So until then, I'll just sit here and look at my new floors and walls and think how lucky I am!  


I know.  I know.  I've got to figure out how to do the whole uploading of pictures thing!

Clutter, Clutter Everywhere

Dude!  Really?  How in the world does it keep finding its way back into my house?  Clutter!  I decrapify my house during every school  break, but it keeps coming back!  It's so frustrating!  And why does it always come down on me to get rid of it all?  Oy vey!  I need to go room by room and purge the clutter.   . . . Thought about it and I'm not going to decrapify anything today.  Just don't want to!  Wow! Just sitting here looking around in this one room.  Man, I've got a bunch of stuff!  The kids and the husband.  OMG!  They keep bringing stuff! 

I solved my paper issue a while back.  I keep a big recycling box in the kitchen.  As my kids'  folders come home, I go through and recycle the not so important stuff!  Okay!  The papers that the kids do at school are important- at school.  Not so much when the work comes home.  We would all be on the hoarders show if we were to keep every paper our kids brought home.  Soooooooo.  We keep the the things I think my kids might enjoy looking back at when they're older.  We recycle everything else after we review the papers together.  Paper problem solved! 

But what do you do with all the other stuff that comes home?  Sometimes, I'll make the trip to Goodwill.  My new found pleasure though, is to donate it to a local church that has a thrift store.  So the thrift store is a total addicition for me!  So maybe my DH and my sweet little 3 aren't  the only ones who bring home the stuff.  But my stuff is good!  It's my stuff after all!  Once I get this blogging and posting pictures thing, I'll have to show you the awesome thrift store find of mine!  Target is currently selling chess figures for about 12 bucks each!  Well, this Fantistically Southern gal found two chess figures at her favorite thrift store for about two bucks for both!  Helloooooooooo!         
   
Well, today I'm going to put my house back together again (aka put everything where it's supposed to go!)  Wish the people who live with me would follow my philosophy!  Everything has a place and everything in its place!  Not sure if that is the saying but it works for me!      

Here goes nothin'!

Okay.  So why am I doing a blog?  Good question.  Maybe . . . I really don't know.  Like I need to add something to my list of things to do!  Really?  Okay, so maybe this is my motivation to finally get my house looking the way I want it to.  Eight years ago (yes, I said eight people) I just wanted to get in this house!  Oy vey!    Now, when I look around and I see stuff just in here.  We (we=DH & myself) just need to get motivated.  Got to find a sheet rock guy.  Then floors.  Then paint.  Hey!  I do already have the colors picked out.  Okay, so fine I didn't necessarily pick them out.  But the colors are picked out!  Oh my!