Stay at home weekend

This weekend was all about the home life ... enjoying the last of the sunshine (it's started raining today, finally) and slowly helping number one get the beautifully re-painted room back to rights. It's a slow process: small room + plenty of stuff = much head-scratching. On Saturday afternoon the two of us spent THREE HOURS in Ikea making decisions. That is way too long for sensible decision making, and items were purchased that may have been quite unnecessary. Of course we didn't get the one completely necessary thing - king single sheets - because Ikea doesn't make them. 

I also got some new bookshelves. I have been resisting this on the basis of "books in piles means too many books, not too few shelves" but the reality is I have a huge "to read" pile that lives in the bedroom because that's where I do most of my reading, so I may as well bow to the inevitable and get some proper shelves. Instead of piling them all on the Indian desk.

I like this desk very much. We bought it to go in the entry hall of our first house. It was a tiny little cottage and pretty much every room came off the entry hall, which was relatively big and square. When we re-painted the bedroom (Easter 2000, with gloss paint! so young, so keen) we dragged the mattress into the hallway and slept there, and it was a queen-size, so there you go. We call it the Indian desk because it is very like furniture that we saw on our honeymoon in India, but actually we bought it from Target.  It's gone from the hallway, to the dining room in our next house, to the bedroom in this house, and now off to the beach house to replace the plastic fold up table we're using as for jigsaws / general junk (if we can get it in the back of the car. This has yet to be tested).

I replaced them with the good old Billy book case - or rather two of them. I've moved in some of my quilting books so I can have more room for fabric in the sewing room. That narrow top shelf is for library books and if I can't fit in any more than I have to stop borrowing, or take some back. And there are still some empty shelves! I will take that as a personal challenge.

It's not elegant but it makes me happy, and I put it together in an unusually zen-like state on Sunday. Number one also had some fun putting things together - not entirely done yet but we're getting there. Perhaps installing the changing-colour LED light strips under the window wasn't the highest priority (but they do look cool).