Today's new beginnings...

First, news:   Got a letter from my grandmother's attorney yesterday.   I'm getting 5% of the trust.  Which could still be small, after her final medical and burial expenses, or it could be HUGE.  Doesn't matter to me either way.  The family, I'm sure, is basically destroyed over this though.   My aunt got 50% and all the personal possessions including the house, cars, all personal belongings - she was closest to my grandmother after all.  My 5 uncles each got 10%, and my father got 5%.  Though I know I shouldn't, I wonder if he's going to blame me for taking his other 5%, because I doubt he'll realize it's because he and she didn't get on very well.   Anyways, the revision to the trust looks like she added me to it the week before I went to visit her in 2010 (she knew I was coming and it was an AMAZING trip.)   Ok... enough thinking in this direction....
 
I dog sat yesterday - and I didn't dare leave the crazy mutts alone to go skiing, lol, so I took the opportunity to do some cleaning in the house.   How is it that the slightest amount of dirt can take so long to clean up (didn't help that I did lower body weight training and couldn't bend yesterday, lol).  I'm still finding places where I missed dusting.  Yeah, it's not perfect - especially when we hit 53 degrees and the dogs kept tracking in mud - right after I cleaned the carpet, of course.  
 
I started moving furniture around - at first, just to get behind and under for that cleaning.   But then I started thinking.  Everything in my house is a hodge-podge of stuff with no real decorating sense behind it.   So the more I cleaned, and the more I organized, and the more I saw potential (and in some cases, not, lol)....
 
My bedroom is the worst.  Mismatched furniture, moderately dark walls (cedar panels), right after the separation, I bought this gorgeous, colorful quilt to brighten up the room - and just made the "color scheme" worse, lol.  It's a good sized room as it makes my king sized bed look like a double, and then there's the dresser (which is very dark), a very battered antique makeup table with drawers (I plan to fix it and paint it this Spring to match the quilt), an upholstered rocking chair that does match and a love seat that doesn't  (I'm thinking about reupholstering it to make it match too).   As I slowly headed toward the back stairs with the stuff I don't need upstairs anymore, I got to thinking about ways to change the layout.   
 
The first thing to change today is going to be that dresser.   A monster of a dresser, with a monster of a mirror with shelves on the side.   The X and I bought it when my son was born.  He didn't want it (probably just didn't want to have to lift it, lol) and I barely use half of it now. And there's a full sized mirror hanging on the wall beside my closet so it's not like I need the mirror either.  So since it's snowing today (with 50 mph winds), I think I'm going to move it into one of my guest rooms and move the small guest room one into my bedroom closet.  (sarcastically) Yippee, I get to clean the closet today too!  Not looking forward to this challenge... I have to carefully haul the dresser around the stairway rail, around a very tight corner, through the laundry room, around another tight corner and I'm there.   Btw, did I mention that the dresser is 7 feet long?    I spent all day yesterday trying to remember how I got the darn thing in there in the first place, then remembered I had to lift it on one side to the height of a person and then slide it.   Fun (not).
 
I'm a believer in feng shui.  Years ago, I bought a book on how to decorate following the "rules" for it, and as soon as I put the bed in it's currently location, I had the BEST sleep EVER.  But the room is wrong.   It feels cluttered because once the bed was in place, everything else had to be set around it.   So I'm going to move it all around today - put the bed in the opposite direction, open up an area in front of the closet so it feels more open, put the makeup table across from the bed and under a drafty window (my head goes there right now) where the furnace vent is, allowing the room to circulate better - and hopefully still enjoy my sleep, lol.  Once everything is in place (and if I'm comfortable with it), I'm going to blow up some photos I took of barns in Wisconsin during my visit with family last summer - barns with barn quilts on them - and frame them, and then hang them on those cedar walls and create a quilt storage area out of an old baby changing table (painted to match that quilt too).   Yep, I'm into country.   I like to call my South Dakota home my Wisconsin farm house, lol.  (I grew up in farm country in Southern Wisconsin).  Yep, I'm one of those crazy people that has apples in the kitchen, lol.  
 
And we're expecting a possibility of "significant" snowfall by Tuesday.   The weathermen are such teasers - we've had one of the driest winters yet this year, and "significant" means FEET (we usually get 2 to 4 feet during these kinds of storms).   I would LOVE a monster snow day where I can do some cross country skiing, and then come home and do more nesting, but doubt we'll get it.   Oh well.... it's not like I'm in any hurry!  
 
Time to get started.... LATER!