“How come, sweetie?”

“Cause you seem too stressed out lately and I want you to be on summer break.”

Sigh.

Out of the mouths of babes and all that. (She’s still my baby, even if she is 15.)

As I explained to her, I’m not really stressed out–just really, really busy and having a hard timekeeping up with it all.

Cane and I have taken on a new writing gig (which we can’t tell you about yet for two more weeks), and I’ve been writing posts to persuade my old classmates to attend our upcoming reunion (which you can peek at here, if you’re interested in knowing why you might want to attend a 30-year high school reunion), and we’ve been taking the dang MOOC design class (which Cane wrote about here and here).

In this screenshot from my course site, you can see my really lame “chair” sketch (which stretches the definition of “chair”).

All that stuff crashed on me this weekend, which is why you’re getting the Monday post on Tuesday and I didn’t turn in any of last week’s MOOC assignments.

This bummed me out (as we’d have said back in the ’80s, which are now taking up way too much residence in my brain), because the previous week’s assignments led to a big breakthrough in solving the design dilemmas of our family room.

You might remember that when we started the class it looked mostly like this:

Thanks to assignments that required me to thoroughly analyze the design gaps in the room (all the ways in which the room’s design is currently lacking) and identify and analyze the room’s user needs (which involved asking all of you for input, and thank you for leaving comments with such great ideas), we’ve made two big decisions that are moving the room forward:

Decision #1:  Move the Couch

As you can see in the photo above, the sectional couch has been living back in the corner of the room. That seemed like the logical place for it, especially where the TV is.

However, that put it quite a distance from the fireplace, which is at the other end of the long room:

(This  and the shots above were taken last fall, in the midst of an earlier room rearrangement.)

We talked about wanting some table space in the room (for games, puzzles, homework, craft projects), but it didn’t work to put a table between the couch and the fireplace.

The weekend before last we decided to try moving the couch closer to the fireplace and setting a table up on the back side of the couch.

(And yes, we’ve finally gotten up all the horrible carpet–first shared in this post–but not all the horrible carpet glue. That’s in our sights for the upcoming holiday weekend.)

We liked this so much better, that it led us to our next decision:

Decision #2:  Kill the TV Nook

When we first looked at our house, the previous owners had a huge TV in it that weird little nook space:

I love how you can see the big recliners in the reflection of the TV. We’re pretty sure this room was a man cave.

The kids thought that was about the awesomest thing ever and that it would come with the house, but Cane and I mostly hate TV and we’ll never ever ever have one like that.

When one of the kids expressed a strong desire for a desktop computer in this room (all we have are laptops now), and I considered my desire for a place to work on sewing projects that could both be left out and be hidden, we decided the nook would work much better as an office closet. You know, something like this:

(Clicking on image will take you to source.)

We’re going to put doors on it, and we’ll be able to use the walls above the desk to meet some of the storage needs we want this room to fill.

How do we know we’re on the right track?

Because even with no rug, junk piled up, and a couch/TV that aren’t quite lining up right, the kids are wanting to use this room:

Yep, homework was done at this table last weekend.

In fact, when we decided to play a game of Risk last Saturday night, both Ella and Will wanted to play down in the family room. (Grace was at a friend’s.) So we built a fire in the fireplace and cozied up on the couch.

That has never happened before. Ever.

We’ve always known this could be a good space the kids would want to hang out. It feels great to see us finally figuring out how to make that happen. (If you’re interested in seeing what the design gap and user-need analysis looked like–they were key to this breakthrough–you can see them here.)

We didn’t quite finish our game. Cane and I are about to duke it out for the western hemisphere.

Still, there’s been too much going on, and you know something’s wrong when your kid tells you that you need a break because you haven’t been much fun lately.

Last week, the class took a backseat. This week, it’s going to be the blog.

One thing we decided when we rebooted the blog earlier this year is that we never want to post something just to meet a schedule. Everyone’s time is precious, and we don’t want to waste yours with content that isn’t the best we can deliver. Today’s post is all we’ve got for this week.

We’ll be back next week–you can look for us on Monday or Tuesday.

(We’re hoping we can spend some time on sprucing up our deck this weekend, just like we did last year over the Memorial Day holiday. That’s when we built and planted this box. Look how it’s come back!)

If you want to make sure you don’t miss us, please follow us or sign up for email notifications of new posts. You can find places to do both in the sidebar or on our Subscribe page.

How about you?

How is your week going? Have any feedback on our family room plans? We’d love to hear from you, even though things are busy. I’ve always got time for comments.

Oh, and just for fun:  Can you give me some reasons to attend a high school reunion?

I’ve come up with 3, but I need 27 more!

(Linking to the William Morris Project at Pancakes and French Fries.)

Happy to share with all of you that it’s in!

And I just want to say right now, before we go any further with this, in big bold letters, that:

We don’t know anything about gardening.

So, if you decide you want to do what we’re doing, you’d best read our disclaimer first. We have no idea if this is going to work out. (But regular readers know that’s our usual modus operandi and that lack of knowledge doesn’t usually stop us from blundering forward.) This all started a few months back, when I found this at the library:

Fritz Haeg is on a quest to replace front lawns with edible gardens. Only a few pages in, I was waving the book in front of Cane’s face and declaring:

“We need to tear out the front lawn!”

He was not really on-board with that. He’s rather fond of the lawn.

And–as he reminded me–I don’t know anything about how to grow an edible garden. Considering how much work we’ve done to improve the curb appeal of our house (painting the exterior, painting the front door, tearing out and putting in a new garden), neither of us wants to do something that would make the front of our house look all janky.

So we decided that the backyard–which was already quite janky, thank you–would be the perfect place to experiment with growing an edible garden.

(Why was the backyard janky? Well, it started like this:

This is what the backyard looked like when we bought the house. We were none too fond of that giant, boxy hedge. So last year, in the midst of our long summer of painting, we up and tore it out. (The hedge was right where we needed the ladders to go, a great excuse for getting rid of it.)

Or rather, we attempted to tear it out. After working on that root ball for a really long time, we conceded defeat and realized it wouldn’t come out without some kind of major equipment. At the end of the summer, we just left the yard with a big, scabby-looking bare patch in it. So that a few weeks ago, it looked like this:

We were able to kill the roots of the other shrubs, but you can see that first one down near the door, growing back.)

So:  a  vegetable garden. Not only could we grow some of our own food, but we could cover up the stumps and root balls that we never got out. Win-win!

While I liked this solution to the backyard problem, I quickly became overwhelmed with all there is to know and do:

• What to plant?
• When?
• How?
• What do we need?

We decided to make it simple by creating a pretty narrow scope for the garden:  Our goal is to grow the ingredients we need to make our own tomato sauce.

This project may have gotten its true start back last summer, not when I found the book at the library. That’s when we made jam for the first time.

We couldn’t believe how much better our blackberry jam tasted than any jam we’d ever bought. I think it was then that we began thinking about how we might bring more real food into our lives.

Tomato sauce seems fairly simple. We just need to grow some tomatoes, onion, oregano, and basil. We also decided we’d grow some carrots and peas, at the request of one of the kids. And that’s what we planted:

We bought starts for most of our plants.

But we put in seeds for carrots and beans. (We’re too late for snow peas.)

We know there’s lots to know to be a good gardener, and we know that we don’t really know anything.

We’ve done a little bit of reading, and we talked a bit with a person at the nursery where we bought our starts. We know the soil needs to be amended, which we did with compost and minerals with trace elements. We also know that we’ll need to separate and move the onions as they get bigger, and that the tomato plants will need some cages as they grow taller. We know they’ll need to be watered.

That’s about all we know, right now, about making our garden grow.

But what we also know about doing any of our projects (in our yard, our house, our life) is that  if we wait until we feel we truly know everything we need to know, we might never start anything. We also know that we tend to learn best by getting in and doing and seeing what happens and learning what we need to learn next.

This approach wouldn’t necessarily work for really big things (like a kitchen remodel, or tearing out the whole front yard to turn it into an edible garden), but it feels pretty safe for something small like this.

Worst case scenario? Everything will die and we’ll rent some equipment to tear out those stumps and we’ll throw down some grass seed. We’ll be out a few weekends (that we really enjoyed regardless of the outcome) and a little bit of money.

Yep, we’ve still got some stumps in there. We’d have to really deal with those.

We’re not sure if we’ll really be able to make our own tomato sauce with our own tomatoes. Or if we’ll be able to make very much. We’re OK with that, though. We know we’re going to learn some stuff in the process of doing this. (Maybe that we’re not cut out to be growers of our own food.)

As with almost everything, for us the process is more important than the product.

The important thing for us is to get in there and get our hands dirty.

And so far, the process has been all good–which is good enough for us. (And we’re liking the way the product is going.)

We had a lovely little light rain the day after we planted.

Your turn!

We’d love to hear your thoughts, tips, stories–about growing gardens, trying new things, leaping before you look a whole lot. Hope you’ll chat with us in the comments.

(Sharing with The William Morris Project at Pancakes and French Fries.)

For our week one assignments we were charged with finding an object (artifact as it’s called in the class) that we really liked and describe why. We also had to set up our class website. I used the tool suggested- Weebly. I’ve used Weebly before so I was familiar with it’s interface. I could have just as easily used a free WordPress site (we use WordPress for this blog), but I went with Weebly to try something different. I’m finding I don’t like it as much as WordPress so far, but it’s been easy to maintain and add content.

We also had to find some annoying gaps (design problems in need of solution) in our daily lives. You can see mine here and Rita’s here.

Rita identified these plastic mini-blinds as a gap because they “hurt my soul.” My gaps were a little different from hers.

Nothing about these assignments brought any real enlightenment for me. I think it’s because I went into the course with a set idea about what I wanted to design. What did happen that was valuable is that I spent a lot of time thinking about my design problem. If you read my description of the problem I want to tackle here you’ll see that I’m interested in doing some design work on our kitchen eating area.

You can see the bench off to the right. The table is not the right shape and is really too small when all 5 of us are home.

I picked this area for a few reasons. First,I knew it meant I could make some cool stuff.

I’ve been wanting to make a bench for the spot under the window for quite a while. You can see the old piano bench that’s there now. Everybody likes to sit on it in the window. It’s not super comfortable and really is too small. I’ve been holding out on making one, though, because I could never quite settle on a design. Now that I’m making the bench part of the overall design of that part of the room I’ll be able to address its design holistically.

Here’s Ella hanging out with Daisy while we make dinner. The kids love to sit on this bench in the window.

The second reason I wanted to do this area is that it’s really the only space in the house where everyone gathers together regularly. That’s important.

I want to make a space that really enhances that experience. I’m hoping that if I make the space really comfortable and inviting that kids won’t always be in such a rush to leave the dinner table and we’ll have longer, more leisurely dinners together. This is, of course, a mixed bag with our children as they are as likely to aggravate each other during dinner as they are to get along. I know in the long run though, they’ll remember those dinner times more fondly than they remember whatever it is they rushed off to do.

This is the kind of moment I hope we can get more of. (We look much more well-behaved in this picture than we really are.)

The benefit from the course so far is it’s gotten me to think quite a bit about the space and how I think it should look and function. The tough part is that I really haven’t had much time to put those ideas on paper.

We did have to sketch a design solution for our gap and create a prototype of it, even though we haven’t yet dug into how to create a design. You can see what both of us came up with here:

I’m looking forward to tackling the second week activities today. I won’t have nearly as much time to get them done as I want, but maybe all the thinking I’ve been doing about it will pull me through. I need to interview the kids to find out what our user needs are. That should be fun and enlightening.

No we can’t have trap doors and a big screen TV in the kitchen…

Want to help us get our homework done?

We’ve each had to identify our gaps into one clear question:

Mine:  In what way might we better design the kitchen eating area so that it is more comfortable and functional?

Rita’s:  In what way might we better design the family room so that it will get more use?

Our assignments this week focus on digging into user needs. We know you aren’t users of our particular rooms, but you’ve all got (or have had) eating areas and family rooms. If you can think of any user needs that are important to you in these kinds of spaces, we hope you might share those in the comments. Preferably before 6:00 pm today. This course is tough on deadlines; once we hit 9:00 Pacific time, we won’t be able to upload anything.

(It just never occurred to me that a napkin could be made from anything but paper. Just like it was high school before I learned that cakes could be made without the purchase of a box of Betty Crocker cake mix, and then I was absolutely astonished by that fact. True story.)

I’m happy to report that I’ve since owned and used quite a few cloth napkins.

However, when the kids came home and saw the table set for dinner earlier this week, I realized that the nuts didn’t fall too far from the family tree.

“Why’s the table set all fancy?” one of them asked.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“What’s with those napkins?”

“Yeah, why do you have those out? I want regular dinner.”

Apparently, cloth napkins means fancy dinner, not regular dinner, and my kids pretty much hate any kind of change because it signals a departure from regular, which means normal.

The offspring were not pleased to learn that the cloth napkins are intended to be the new normal for meals around here, and that the paper napkins are on their way out.

One child mocked the whole project by running around the kitchen using the napkin as a cape. The other one made a matching cape for one of the dogs by tucking a napkin into its collar.

Clearly, there are quite a few things I should have done earlier in this parenting/homemaking game. Using cloth napkins more regularly is the easiest of those things to implement now.

I’ve long felt uncomfortable with our use of paper napkins, and I’d like to say that I figured out how to make the switch to cloth napkins all on my own, but I was the girl who could not conceive of any way to make cake other than from a box.

It wasn’t until I read this post on Go Gingham, by one of my favorite bloggers, Sara Tetrault, that I realized cloth napkins could be a workable option for us.

The crucial parts of Sara’s plan that converted me?

• Everyone has their own napkins (distinguishable by different fabrics).
• Napkins don’t get thrown in the wash after every meal. Each user determines when his/her napkin needs laundering.
• Napkins have a clear storage place and everyone returns their napkin to it at the end of the meal.

When I read her post, cloth napkins suddenly seemed like a very manageable change to make in our household. So why are we only just now switching, when Sara first wrote about it back in March?

Because I got hung up on wanting to do this thing perfectly. I wanted to make our napkins (like Sara did) and I wanted them to look pretty with our plates and the fabric on our kitchen chairs.

Sara, a frugal living expert, made her napkins with scrap fabric she already owned. I have scrap fabric (boy, do I have scrap fabric) but none of them were pretty/matchy enough.

So I spent a good chunk of an afternoon at the fabric store, looking at the fabrics and having all kinds of “fun” trying to find prints that would complement the colors of our plates, the fabric on our kitchen chairs, and our children’s personalities/preferences. Yes, I spent time in the fabric store trying to choose fabrics I thought each kid would like. ‘Cause I can hop on the Crazytrain so, so fast, forgetting where I really live and what kinds of things really happen there:

I mean, seriously: This is the kind of thing that goes on in our kitchen while I’m out shopping for napkin fabric.

After spending way more time than I wanted to, and about to spend way more money than I wanted to (home-sewn is not the economical choice it was when I was growing up and my mom sewed my dresses), I ended up walking away from the fabric store with nothing because the woman in front of me wanted to return about a million tiny little things, and she wanted to chat about all. of. them. with the one girl working a cash register, and I reached a point where I simply could not stand there without screaming, and I decided it would be better to leave the store with nothing that to cause that kind of ugly scene.

(That’s what happens when I climb aboard the Crazytrain: I want to scream at perfectly nice people because I’m about to go over some edge.)

After calming down, I realized that the Woman with a Million Things to Return was a gift. She kept me from spending more money than I wanted on a project that–let’s be real here–would probably still be sitting in the bag, waiting for me to get to it, long, long after I’ll hit Publish on this post.

I let the idea of sewing my own napkins go and landed on a solution that makes sense for who I really am and what our life is really like.

World Market makes sets of solid-colored cloth napkins that are a pretty reasonable deal, and I already had two sets in two different colors (white and gold). You get 6 napkins for $10, which makes them less than $2 a napkin. Unless you have a 25% off coupon–which I did–in which case you get 4 sets (24 napkins) for just under $30.00. That’s way cheaper than any napkin I could make.

And, we finally have cloth napkins!

And, they match our stuff!

Except, I realize right now, just this minute, that this might all, in some respects, be horrible.

I don’t know anything about where or how these napkins are made, or what it is that allows World Market to sell them so cheaply. Honestly, I didn’t think that far until I sat here writing these words.

Turns out that they were made in India, and that’s all I know. I have a sinking feeling in my stomach, imagining sweatshops and fearing that I’m all kinds of some ignorant, privileged, First World white person who deserves to rot in Hell for a) worrying about whether or not my napkins are pretty; b) contributing to horrible conditions for people on the other side of the world because I wanted cheap napkins; and c) for maybe inciting others to contribute to awful things by posting pictures that make my napkins look pretty.

Crap.

Is it better if I put a very mediocre, not-pretty picture in this post?

It would be easy for me to get back on the Crazytrain right now and try to find out how the napkins are manufactured and then somehow rectify this situation if I’ve made a bad choice so that I can feel like a better person, but…

I’m not buying that ticket.

Here’s what I know:

The napkins are bought. I can’t un-buy them. (They’ve been used.)

Cloth napkins, I think, are better for the world than paper ones. I hate that we’ve used and thrown away paper at every meal for years, and I hate that doing so contributes to a throw-away mentality in our society.

The napkins are not more cost-effective than paper or using scrap fabric, but they are affordable for us. So the cost part’s OK.

I need to own that I am a privileged, First World white person and my whole napkin angst right now is the kind of problem people make snarky First World memes about.

I am a privileged person who wants to be more thoughtful in my decisions about how we make this home, but I am not (and never will be) perfect in it. I sorta hate that, but it’s true.

All I can do is keep trying to do this life better, and buying the napkins is some kind of progress for me. At least I didn’t buy fabric and then not use it because I never got the dang napkin-sewing project done. (And anyway, how will I know that the fabric comes from an ethical source? How far can/should I go in this kind of thinking?)

Hey, buying napkins gives me more time to feel bad about not doing the chair cushion project.

All of this is confirmation for me that there is no one right way to go about intentional home-making, which for us means being (ideally) frugal, environmentally conscious, and socially conscious. It can get really murky, really fast–and I think there are likely no perfect solutions in our very, very imperfect world.

Which is why we need to extend to ourselves the gift of some grace. Next time, I’ll probably think a little more deeply before I buy. And do some research. I’m taking some comfort from the words of Maya Angelou (one of my most favorite thinker/writers) who says, when we know better, we do better.

The Powerful Lesson Maya Angelou Taught Oprah

Before this quick little post on ditching some paper products went all off the rails on me, the plan was to tell you the other way we’ve reduced our use of them–so I want to do that before signing off.

A few months back we invested in a couple packs of microfiber cloths, and we use those for all the things we used to use paper towels for. We keep them in the places we need to clean, and they work great.

Why are there two toilet brushes in that cabinet? I dunno…Still working on decluttering.

We haven’t missed the paper towels at all. In fact, it was seeing how easy it was to give them up that also convinced us to make the switch to cloth napkins. We highly recommend it.

Just in case you’d like to pass our tips (and trials) to others, here is the highly-Pinnable graphic that just didn’t seem quite so appropriate once I started thinking a bit more deeply about this topic. (But I hate to let a good graphic go completely to waste.)

How about you?

Ever stumbled in your intentional living attempts? Have other great ideas for reducing paper/plastic products in our homes? Got your own tickets to the Crazytrain? You know we love to hear from you.

Oh, and linking up to The William Morris Project. This week Jules rants about the sad state of young celebrities, which has little to do with her curtains but it did make me laugh out loud (IRL), which is pretty dang hard for anything to do at 5:30 in the morning.

Last weekend we built these and put them into the ground.

We needed some good dirt to fill up those vegetable beds. Also, while I was waiting for Cane to finish doing something last weekend, I noticed the horrible state of the bed surrounding the lawn and started pulling weeds and taking out dead stuff. We decided that whole area was sorely in need of mulch.

(Of course, I didn’t get a good “before” shot. This one–with Cane triumphing over his cheapy sawhorse–will have to do.)

So far, we’ve been filling our soil and mulch needs with bags from Home Depot that we can carry in the back of one of our cars (a Honda SRV and a Jetta wagon), but that wasn’t going to be cost- or time-effective when we needed a large amount of both.

What to do?

We’ve got a great local source for dirt, mulch, firewood, Christmas trees, and other kinds of stuff (Boring Bark). A yard of their 4-way mix for gardens is $35.00, but to have it delivered is $85.00. Ouch. And we needed mulch, too. That would add another delivery charge. Delivery was not an economical option.

(Cue Cane’s longing for his old pickup truck.)

Boring Bark does provide a free trailer with dirt/mulch purchases, but neither of us has a trailer hitch on our vehicles.

That left us with a third option, renting a truck.

Which is just what we did.

At first, this went down a little hard with us. Adding nearly $60 to the cost of our soil/mulch (that price includes the gas we used) didn’t feel great. But, we decided we needed to look at it a bit differently.

When you own your own pickup, you tend not to factor in those costs. You already own the truck, right?

But if we owned a truck, we’d really need to factor in all the on-going costs associated with a truck–insurance, maintenance, storage, licensing. Suddenly, the U-haul truck looked a lot better to us. In fact, it started looking like a great deal.

It got us thinking about how many times we buy things we need only occasionally, and how much smarter it is to pool resources with others, or just rent the item we need when we need it.

We know that’s not always the best option; we’re still glad we bought a tile saw back when we were working on our bathroom renovation because it gave us the time we needed to go slowly.

But much as we would occasionally like a truck, we don’t need one. (Not right now, anyway. We do have two 15-year-olds in the house, and if I find myself getting another vehicle for them, I’ll have to consider making it a truck.)

Because we had the truck for just 6 hours, we had to make the most of our time.

First we got a load of soil, which we put into our garden beds.

My workout shoes haven’t seen the inside of the gym in a while. Much prefer this kind of exercise anyway!

After putting the soil in, we took the piles of lava rock we removed from our front yard parking strip and created paths between the beds.

Then we hightailed it back to Boring Bark, where we got two yards of mulch.

By the time we finished spreading that all around the back yard, we still had a few hours left. Is there anything else we should do while we have the truck? Why, yes!

This nasty old grill has been hanging out in the back of our driveway ever since we rehabbed our new(old) grill last spring. Yesterday seemed like the perfect time to take it to the recycling center (aka known as the dump, which is what such places were called when we were kids). Along with the grill, we cleaned out a bunch of yard debris that’s been sitting at the side of our house since last fall, and a basketball hoop that no longer stays upright.

You can see Cane’s knees peeking out from the base he’s detaching.

By the time we got back from the dump and had returned the truck, we felt pretty darn good about our progress.

Someone felt good enough about the barkdust to lie right down in it!

And our backyard now looks pretty good, too.

Of course, we still have some areas we want to improve on. Taking photos helped us see how much our side neighbor’s back yard piled with junk is an eyesore for us. We’d like to plant some taller things along the fence to visually block that. (We’ve been here nearly two years now, and we’ve never seen any of that pile change.)

Lest you think we are perfect in our own yard (hah!), right around the corner from our hammock, you see this:

Not a super-nice view for our neighbors on the other side when they are in their back yard. (In our defense, they are rarely in their back yard, and we cannot see this when we’re in ours unless we go around the corner.)

And there are small things, too, like this sad barrel:

Cleaning it out and freshening it up would make this little corner so much nicer:

(That’s one of Cane’s easy-to-make Adironack chairs. You can find the how-to for that right here.)

But we’re getting there, all in good time. Next weekend we’re planning to put in vegetable starts, which we’re really excited about. Maybe I’ll take care of the barrel this afternoon. (Or maybe not. It’s supposed to be in the mid-80s here again today, which might be a little warm for plants to adjust to a new home.)

Today, we’re feeling pretty great about how much we were able to get done, for not too much money. It felt great to realize that renting was a better option than buying, it felt great to be able to re-use the lava rock instead of buying something new to put between the garden beds, and it felt great to get rid of junk that’s been hanging around here for too long.

It also felt great yesterday to get the first set of our design class assignments in on time!

After our long day of shoveling, we each had just a few hours to get our design prototypes made. If you’re interested in knowing more about what we’re planning for our kitchen and family room, you can see Cane’s design here and my design here. But you can get the gist of where we’re going with it right here:

Cane’s prototype for the kitchen table/storage benches.

My prototype for the family room media nook.

The best part of all our productivity yesterday?

Sitting here at the end of it, together.

How was your weekend?

Now that we’ve told you all about ours, we’d love to hear what you were up to. How was your weather? We were in the mid-80s all weekend (with more of the same expected today). Don’t really want to complain about sunshine, but our split-level sure gets uncomfortably warm once we get above 82 or so. Was a great excuse to go buy a sundress on Saturday! And might be a good one for spending some time afternoon just chillin’ in the hammock, enjoying the fruits of our weekend labors.