Speaking of HGTV....

I'm trying not to open the Pandora's box that is my desire to over-decorate, over-furnish & over-spend on all things having to do with the house.  I'm taking my time with the unpacking, telling myself there's no rush, really.  Except for the impending visit from family in less than a month.  Who will be staying in a room that is currently lined with moving boxes and furnished with a California king bed frame supporting a regular king sized mattress (not exactly conducive to a good night's sleep).  So I guess there sort of is a rush.  I should probably continue to sit on my butt in Starbucks and write then, huh?

Thanks to Pinterest, I need about 4 houses worth of rooms to use all the color palettes and styles I've fallen in love with in the past year.  Because I probably can't have a shabby chic living room adjacent to an industrial/modern kitchen attached to a rustic-but-not-country dining room. And because if I want a deep eggplant hued wall in my bedroom, I probably can't have bright blue & yellow walls in the master bath.  Husband & I are already debating furnishing our dining room with mis-matched sets of chairs because we like so many of them (damn you, West Elm & Pottery Barn!!!).

And built-ins! I need built-ins! Because on Pinterest there was a pin that showed you how to surround your TV in a way that makes the TV kind of disappear into the wall.  Because we don't want people to know that we watch TV all. the. time.  So surround it with books!!

And maybe we can knock that wall down--because they do that on Love It or List It every single episode (just don't have that woman do it because even though it all looks great at the end, she is ALWAYS finding problems and I don't trust her one tiny bit).

Sabrina Soto! Someone get me Sabrina Soto! I need a dining room that looks like it cost me 20K to decorate and furnish but really only cost the loose change I found under my sofa cushions (have you seen what that woman can do with a barn door and some hinges???!!)

Clearly, I need to reign it in.  My "I've got all the time in the world to get this stuff done" and my "House. Must. Be. Perfect. Now!" sides really need to have a good old fashioned come-to-Jesus with each other & work this out because right now, I'm feeling a weird  mixture of frenzied laziness and that is just not good for my sanity.  And I have to get the inside of the house under control before spring because there is a whole other level of indecision outside.  Decks that need furnishing and plants that need killing    pruning.

But friends and family will be thrilled to hear that I am in fact, finally and for the first time in my life, going to employ a cleaning lady. Or ladies.  When we were getting information about the house from the previous owners, I asked the woman who her cleaning lady was & she replied that she'd never used one.  So I casually said to Husband, "perhaps I will try to keep the house up without a cleaning lady."  He was not amused.  At all.  I'm not really a "great" house keeper.  The word "abysmal" comes to mind, even with my best efforts.  The "housekeeping" part of the brain must be somehow linked up with the part that also controls mathematical abilities, because I'm about equally proficient (meaning not at all) in both.

At least Ethan's room is done.  After 4 years of sleeping on a mattress on the floor (because we're dirty hippies), we finally bought him a bedroom set at Pottery Barn Kids & it was delivered last week.  Ethan likes it, but there was a minor misunderstanding when the set arrived.  At the store, the bed was covered in PBK's Star Wars sheets, shams, pillows, quilts, etc, the likes of which would have been almost as pricey as the bed itself.  So even though I absolutely 100% remember telling Ethan in the store that we were getting the bed and bureau, but NOT the Star Wars stuff yet & that we could get that piece by piece over time, when he came into his room & saw his same old sheets and pillows on his mattress, he may have melted down in dramatic style and told me that I had lied to him. Yeah.  Called me a liar.   Sadly, this cost him dearly, as I had to put the kibosh on Husband's plan to surprise Ethan with the Star Wars bedding set that weekend.  Sigh.  The issues of gratitude & attitude are a whole other blog post for another day.  But yeah.  Someone's going to be waiting a long time for a Death Star quilt.

For now I'm trying to stay off of Pinterest as much as possible (is there a 12-step program for that?) and avoiding HGTV (do I have time in my life for a second 12-step program for that?) and focusing just on getting what's in the boxes out of the boxes and finding a home for them.  I'm also fighting the urge to get a membership at Costco because I have pantry! And storage closets!!  And a big fridge!!! Think of all the toilet paper & cheese sticks I could fit in this house!!!

::deep breaths::