Things I Learned on the Internet

In the past year I've gone from being a normal person with normal hobbies and normal expectations of the things in my life to being a woman obsessed with boards of tiny pictures that shine a spotlight on exactly how I've failed as a wife, mother, and woman because I don't wear a scarf perfectly layered over every outfit while making adorable lunches that transforms mere slices of cheese into the faces of Angry Birds and cracking glow-sticks open to delight my children with 20 different glow-in-the-dark experiences in their new PVC tent fort. I should probably spend 90-days doing simple exercises to get perfectly sculpted arms so I have a proper place to display the bracelets I made out of only brass washers and ribbons recycled from plastic shopping bags. And I should tint mason jars. I'm not really clear on why anyone would want to tint mason jars, or what one would use them for once tinted, but I get the distinct impression that I should be tinting them by the buttload.

 Usually I take it all with a grain of salt, but sometimes some of that sinks in. So this weekend when I had nothing better to do, I decided to make the laundry room more Pinteresting!

Calling it a "Laundry Room" is, I concede, a bit generous. It's a closet, really, but it's in the hallway right outside the bedrooms. You know, where the laundry actually is. This is the first house I've ever had that didn't have the laundry down one or two flights of stairs, usually in an unfinished basement full of spiders (or worse!). What this means is that the laundry actually gets done! Unfortunately, when the laundry is done, it's way too easy to just let junk pile up in there. It was pretty messy:

I warned you.

I'd spray painted the laundry baskets red for a laundry room of years past, but now it just leaves red scuffs on everything. The green basket used to be in the kids' room. The giant pile of lint gets saved up for making firestarters. It's important that you know it's there for a REASON and not just because I'm too lazy to throw it away. The unmatched socks... well they are all piled up there because I'm lazy.

Anyway, I won't drag it out. Here's the AFTER!

Oooh! Ahhhh!

The wire shelf was perfectly functional, but not lovely, so I attached a piece of trim to the front to make it look more finished. The paint was also fine, so I Mr. Clean Magic Erasered (yeah, it's a verb now) all the red marks off of everything. I painted the red baskets pale yellow, and this time sealed them with clear enamel to help keep things from getting yellow marks instead.

Technically speaking, it's art.

To fill up empty space and prettify things, I painted some weird flowers and stuck it in a frame that was in the basement. Then I called in my Pinterest training.

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THINGS I LEARNED FROM PINTEREST:

RULE 1: You *MUST* label everything, even if you already know what is in it. 

RULE 2: No project is complete without chevrons. 

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Label? Check. Chevrons? You betcha. 

To hold all the stuff that I haven't gotten around to ironing yet (which I do pretty often because I'm the only one who ever wears anything that needs to be ironed, and I have a LOT of clothes so I can put it off for awhile) I cut up some cardboard, covered it with burlap and added some trim and made a box to keep it all out of sight. 

I also upgraded my lint storage.

Much better, don't you think?

So now I can feel all fancy the next time I'm washing a load of t-shirts I've turned into maxi dresses to wear with my DIY fork ring. Which, for the record, is a ring made out of a fork, not a ring made FOR a fork. I know, I was disappointed, too.