Elfa Drawers

I have always kept my sweaters in a hanging canvas storage organizer that was droopy and hard to keep up.  I started to research options for drawers that could be hung, since we have a very generous closet.  Rubbermaid and Closetmaid both have options, but the reviews were less than exciting.  Then I came across the Elfa system from The Container Store.  Everyone seems to love Elfa.  And they should for the price!

This is just after our closet remodel a couple of years ago:

It just so happens that The Container Store was having their annual Elfa sale and everything was 30% off.  Better that than nothing, so I allotted some of our Christmas money to buy the track, rails and hardware for two drawers.

Here it is now, with plenty of room to add more drawers once I get some more ‘free’ funds:)

Living Room

Bradley mounted the living room television over the weekend, and I am just getting around to taking pictures.  When we got married, he brought with him a large projection tv.  We were able to ‘custom build’ around it using two bookcases and a shelf suspended between the two.  When we inherited a couch and loveseat from his parents, I shuffled things around to accomadate them the best I could.  As a result, we invested in a flat panel tv, which has been sitting on top of the buffet-turned-media cabinet.  A small portion of our Christmas money was used to buy a mount for it.

The old set up with projection tv and ‘built-in’

New set up with new-to-us couch and loveseat

Now with the television mounted on the wall.

We were able to reclaim some table top space on the buffet now that the television is up off of it.

Wondering where our components are?  Bradley is super genius with all things technology.  Here they are, and no, we don’t have to keep the cabinet doors open, check this out.  See our receiver right there in the top right corner?  You didn’t notice it in the pictures above did you?  And that’s the point!  That little receiver takes the signal from the remote and relays it to the components.  So smart!  We also used something similar in our bedroom so that the components could live in the guest room closet that is located directly behind the tv wall.

We removed the back of the cabinet because the dvd player is deeper than the cabinet, but unless you contort yourself around the side of the cabinet, you can’t see that anything is out of the ordinary.  I attached our plant spot lights behind the cabinet to shine up on the wall around the tv, because Bradley likes them when we have all the other lights turned off while watching tv.  And yes, we have LOTS of cords, and no, I don’t do anything to try and hide them:)

Dining Room

We are on our second day of ‘winter storm 2011’ and I am trying to catch up on some scanning.  We have also gotten the FastTrack system in the garage up, the Elfa drawers installed, and the living room television hung.  I will try to get pictures up of those finished products soon!

For now I thought I would share our most up-to-date dining room picture.  Over the holidays, I made a few changes that I never blogged about.  When we first moved in to our home, we discovered that the dining room was basically a square.  A table that expanded long-ways did not seem practical.  I searched Craigslist and found our dark wood table that expands from a rectangle to a large square.  Perfect fit!  It came with six chairs, and I had hoped to find two more so that when the table was expanded, we could fit 8 people around the table.  After years of trying to refinish chairs or find the perfect match, I made a compromise.

This was before the big furniture-basket-turnover:

This shows the setup after I placed the bookcases on either side of the window.  Six chairs are plenty when the table is a rectangle.

I found some clean-lined chair covers on deep discount at J.C. Penney.  I knew there were chairs very similar to ours, but not exactly like them in several stores.  The chair covers could hide the discrepancy.  I got two new chairs at Garden Ridge.  The biggest difference  was that they have half as many slats in the back of the chair.

I feel like the covers also help to lighten up the room since it is painted a dark brown and the table and bookcases are dark wood.  I like that the covers are short so that you still see the wooden legs.  I haven’t set the dishes back on the table like I always had in the past because I was constantly pushing them to the side to work at the table.  I am trying to decide if it looked too staged anyway.  I don’t want to be stuffy, but I do like having pretty things out that make me happy.  Surprise, I am feeling indecisive about something.

Snow 2011

In Georgia, this is rare.  The whole metro area is completely shut down.  We are not equipped for severe winter weather – really though, why should we be?  It is such a remote happening, why throw money at something that might happen, when there are other much more valid things that can utilize state resources?

I am not a big snow person.  I didn’t enjoy the slopes on youth snow-skiing trips, just the extra chance for socializing.  Bring on the 65-75 degree weather and I am a happy clam.

We got about 5″ at our house.  It was almost immediately encased in crusty ice.  We got out and brushed the snow off Bradley’s truck windows before it had a chance to freeze over and become a pita to scrape off.  Looking down our street:

The poor mourning doves don’t perch in trees like other birds, and since there was no clear ground for them, they huddled en masse along our fence.

I scrapped the snow off the flat feeder for the birds and put out an extra batch for them.  There were a lot of Juncos out, which are ground feeders, so I scattered a few handfulls across the crusted-over snow.  It was fun to watch them and the Song Sparrows slide around chasing seeds.  In addition, we had quite a few Cardinals, Chickadees, Tufted Titmice, House Finches, and Blue Jays.  They are so much fun to watch on a solid white backdrop.

New Projects Ahead

Thanks to our extremely generous families, we received quite a chunk of change for Christmas.  Here are the projects we will be tackling using our unexpected funds:

1)  Mounting our living room television.  Here is the post from getting the new tv in May.  The setup is still the same.

The Before:

A great place to get super inexpensive mounts and wires is monoprice.  We also used some of our Christmas moolah to bring in an Apple TV and an UPS with automatic voltage regulation.  (We have learned that our tv setup and garage door opener are on the same circuit and every time we opened and closed the garage door, it was straining our television and components.)

2)  I will be tackling the side wall in our master closet using an Elfa system from The Container Store.  After researching the options for hanging slide-out drawers, the Elfa drawers had the highest praise for reliability.  You can see the post from our big closet reorganization back in November 2008 here.

The Before:

 

3)  And lastly, we will be installing the Rubbermaid Fasttrack system on the wall next to my workstation in the garage.  It has become increasingly cluttered since my garage makeover back in October 2008, and I am ready to get things up off the floor, but still easily accessible.

The Inspiration:

 

Check back later for some awesome after pictures!