Room of Sanity

Anyone else ever feel like they live in a crazy house?

When most of my house looks like this:

It makes it hard for me to feel sane sometimes.  The problem is, the majority of my house looks like this, even if I've spent hours every day cleaning....a child's friend (or five) come over, the kids play unsupervised in a room for fifteen minutes, and voila!

Professional-grade mess, made by professional mess-makers.

It gets frustrating.  Irritating.  Annoying.  And lots of other "ings" that aren't very fun.

My room used to be one of the worst.  As the room in the back of the house, it tends to be the "catch all" for our clutter or mess that we didn't want visible in the front rooms or kitchen, and when I taught piano lessons and had a TV in there that I would send the kids to go watch, it would get trashed.  Our room was one of the last to be decorated, and although it's been coming together for a while now, today I decided to do a deep clean and a few extra touches in order to finally make it a nice place for both Steve and I to go.

My husband was given an orchid a couple of years ago by a good friend of ours, and although it's in its dormant stages right now (for those of you who are unfamiliar with orchids, the big stick poking out of the leaves usually has gorgeous flowers on it), it outgrew the previous pot we had it in.

I replanted it into a bigger pot:

And then I decided that the pot, although nice, was rather plain looking.  So, in keeping with the Asain theme of our room (I served my mission in Taiwan and love Chinese decorations), I decided to paint it!

I did a cherry blossom theme (although in colors that matched our room's scheme rather than the traditional pink and white), and wrote the Chinese character for "love" on the back.

The stamps are Steve's and my Chinese names.

Kinda neat, huh?  Incidentally, this counts as number 2 on my 30-before-30 list--to paint something worth displaying in my home.  For my first time painting since Jr. High (where I created a pretty compelling picture of a rose....cough), I'm happy with how it turned out.

And look how nice it looks up on Steve's book shelf! (If you don't think I hurriedly cleared off a ton of clutter from our dresser and threw it in the hamper before taking this picture, you obviously don't know me well at all).

The bed is one that I made my Dad and Jayze helped me make made for me (I did help--I handed them the tools and sanded the wood) for Steve last Christmas.  It's not perfect by any means, but I like it.  Its mine.

The fans and other Chinese touches were gifts that Steve gave to me for Valentine's Day last year.  SO incredibly thoughtful.

And here is the wall between the doorways to our bathroom and walk-in closet.  I'm no photographer (as you can obviously tell from these pictures), but it gives the basic idea.

Not to sound cocky or anything here, but I LOVE how my room looks now!  It's truly a peaceful place where I can go, light a candle, and read or hang out (scoff--as if I had time to do that during the day) instead of yet another messy room, and it makes me happy that it also reflects a little part of me that served on my mission.

Yay for fun projects that turn out nicely!

Now, if you'll excuse me, it's time for me to go shovel out the mess from the kids' rooms.  Anyone have a hazmat suit I could borrow?