Inspired

Yesterday while my son was napping I sat down at the computer and had my blog fix for the day. Usually I start out by reading the most recent post from The Lettered Cottage, a favorite blog of mine, and yesterday I just so happened to see this which you can read about here. If you want to see more details about the lovely room where this cute little tray ensemble is set, you can go to the owner's blog by clicking this. As soon as I saw how organized this woman is and how beautiful and functional her room is I had the de-cluttering itch...and I just had to scratch it!

Our sun room has been in some need of some major TLC. We usually lovingly refer to the room as "Bo-Bo's room", but I do a lot of my crafting and creating in there, and my craft table/desk was under a 2 foot high pile of junk. I've been collecting items to have in a garage sale for over a year now, and it has made its way onto and around this one table in the sun room. So, yesterday after several moments of world wide web inspiration, I was ready and set to go. Time to re-claim the room---though I'll still share it with my sweet pooch!

I threw the garage sale idea out of the window. I wanted the stuff gone, and I wanted it gone immediately, and having to put all of that time and effort into having a garage sale just wasn't sounding all that appealing to me. I sorted through 3 thirty gallon tubs and 3 18 gallon tubs and one huge pile of stuff that was just thrown on the table's top. I made a Goodwill pile, a maybe-I-can-sell-this-on-eBay pile, a take-to-Half-Price-Books pile, a pile to take to a local children's resale shop...and I made a keep pile...turns out some of the stuff I thought I wanted to get rid of was useful once again to me in a re-purposed way!

Most of the stuff went to Goodwill---8 trash bags full in fact! I got 14 bucks from the books I took to 1/2 Price and I have a laundry basket-full to take to the re-sale shop. I kept a few clothing items that must have been too small on me when I sorted through them post-baby/pre-baby-weight-loss, and I found an awesome lamp that I was going to get rid of because I didn't like the ugly brown color of the wood---hello, paint it! Yeah, I figured that out yesterday and today it's sitting pretty with a fresh coat of paint and a new shade on it on my desk!

And, speaking of my desk...the picture above obsessed me with wanting to recreate my own version of the table-top tray. I am still putting on the finishing touches and I'm quite happy with the outcome. I used the lovely blue color like in the picture for my main color scheme for the items on my desk---such as the lamp that I painted. I used red as an accent color and put it all together on top of a silver tray that I found lost on a shelf in my house. I painted several little coffee tin boxes the lovely blue color and organized a lot of my beading supplies in them. I figured I'd use the desk as a place of inspiration and of jewelry creation! I can't wait to show pictures of the finished project! (Going this weekend to shop Labor Day sales for my new camera!)