Inspired: Metamorphis Monday

Today, I'm joining Susan at Between Naps on the porch (here)

for my first time participiating in her Metamorphis Monday. I really needed this incintive, because I have guests coming for dinner tomorrow night, and the downstairs is a wreck. This corner in my office/library which is open to my living room (our house is a classic shotgun with all of the downstairs rooms opening to each other with no hallways). this corner invariabley becomes a collection of debris. It's partly because we have so little built in storage; there are no closets downstairs. But mainly it's because I'm a natural slob. I've tried using a coat rack, and that just became a huge dumping ground for coats and hats that hung there for months. I then tried leaving it empty--and you see the result. It just became a place to dump client items and things that i've brought home to work on. Look--a piano bench I need to slipcover for a client. Canvases waiting for the client's bedding so I can do some paintings, and, in a fit of optimism, the vacuum cleaner I brought out two days ago.

So I became inspired for a fresh start. First up, a clean up. I moved the piano bench to my sewing station and the canvases to a more hidden spot. The lap top backpack which I kept in the office for transporting the computer, I moved to an empty spot in a bookcase in the room. Since I never actually use the umbrella, I put it in the closet upstairs. A quick vacuum (seriously, sometimes when I consider the amount of pet hair one dog and two cats can produce in the course of a week, I am amazed they are not bald). Second, I lined the panel of a discarded pantry door with cork to make a long slender inspiration board that is perfectly scaled for the narrow space. I then decided to move a table in the corner (in this house, an empty corner quickly becomes a junk site--if something there, maybe I'll start putting things away when I come home...I can always dream, can't I. It's the perfect spot to drop the messenger bag and paint swatches I use almost daily. A tropical leaf from the yard in a vintage vase, and voila, organized chaos that won't embarrass me if clients and colleagues drop by (I no longer worry about trying to impress friend, relatives, and neighbors--they have already seen my worst and know what to expect if they come by without giving me time to clean.

View Susan's and others' transformations at Between Naps on the Porch 26th Metamorphis Monday (here).