Hey friend, thank you for coming back for an update on my ORCÂ journey! This week is full of progress pictures, revelations, and solution noodling.
The Progress
If you remember, one of the items on my "want" list was something to cover up the spot on our ceiling where a ceiling fan/light used to be. We have the option of putting up our own unit, but at the moment I don't want to mess with the electrical so I'm DIYing a cover that will attach to the little plastic plate that is covering up the hole. I'm drawing my inspiration from this light fixture from CB2:
Over the past week I've been to the craft store and the hardware store collecting all of the materials I would need to put together something similar. For this project I have a general idea of how I want the cover to be put together involving dowel rods, metal rings, some chain and gold leaf, but I'm leaving some wiggle room for improve if I run into something I haven't thought of.
To start, I needed to figure out how big I wanted this thing to be so I dusted off my geometry skills and created a cone template out of paper so I could hold it up and see if it would provide the cover I'm wanting.
Over the course of a few days I cut, sanded, and stained 3/8" dowel rods to use for the main body of the cover. I then created a poster board version of the cone to act as a sort of mold for me to temporarily lay out the dowels to create the shape I want. I was in the process of meticulously spacing the dowels evenly around the cone when Sam walked in and asked me if I did the math to know how many dowels I would need... No. No I did not.
When I was done I ended up being 20 dowels short so today I cut, sanded, and stained 20 more little dowel rods to finish filling in the mold. And that's where I'm at currently with the ceiling spot cover project!
In tandem with the crafting, Sam and I went shopping and found the perfect duvet cover at Target! One of the other things on our list was to get a summer duvet insert, but because this duvet cover is considered heavyweight I decided our quilt we keep on the bed during summer would work as the insert instead. And just like that my Goldilocks journey of finding the right blanket to warmth ratio has been completed. Goodbye night sweats/chills! I've also hung some artwork I made a couple years ago over the bed with Command Strips, and another DIY project with our nightstand lamps has been started.
Revelations
A few weeks ago I hung some temporary curtains as a proof of concept to show Sam how the curtain "wardrobe" would work. Well y'all, I've learned a lot from the experiment and I'm thinking I need to go back to the drawing board...
The paper sides I put up fell down first day, but that wasn't a problem because it got the point across. Right? Well, with the sides down we got a little lazy and instead of moving the curtains aside to put clothes in the laundry sorters we just threw our clothes through the open sides. Even with the minimal interacted with the curtains the tension rod slipped 4-5" down the wall. The tension rod really needs a support in the middle, but I'm reserving the amount of holes we put in the walls to just hanging the blackout curtains for the windows.
When you're designing a space, it is important to consider your current habits as well as the habits you want to have when your space is finished. There's a reason the laundry sorters were out and easily accessible. I noticed that since the curtains went up we had just as much of a tendency to not put the dirty clothes away. Sam and I like things easy, and when the curtains went up suddenly putting clothes in the hamper wasn't easy anymore.
So, lesson learned. This does mean I'm scrambling for new ideas so stay tuned on what I come up with this late in the game! I'm not panicking, are you panicking? We're not panicking!
Solution Noodling
I've got a lot of things to noodle over the next few days so I can get everything finished for this challenge on time. Big things that need to be noodled over:
Clothing storage is still an issue
What are we doing with the hampers?
How high do we want to hang window curtains (more on this next time we talk)
So many decisions! Time to go and get back to work.
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