T Stands For The One I Didn’t Post Last Week Plus Kitty Updates

Hello Friends and Happy Tuesday!

We have been hibernating as we have been battered by not one, not two but THREE storms one after the other.  They all have names too, but to me it has just felt like one long continuous storm, and my roof is leaking on top of everything else!  It would be nice if the weather was not trying to kill us for a change!  It has been slow progress on the decluttering this week due to all the sick/injured kitties but I have the details from the decluttering efforts from the previous week which I was not able to post last week, so scroll down to see that below.

today’s art which was really from last week . . .

…this was a WIP shot from last week…
I was working on a DT project and I thought I would show what I have to work with in my current craft studio situation where everything is still in boxes and have limited supplies within my grasp.  I am recycling a manilla tag with some bad stamping on the reverse, and an old unused floral stamped card panel, and at least one of these cats from cat food packaging, a chipboard birdcage and possibly some washi stickers.  It was all I could find as I didn’t have the energy to dig through boxes.  It all came together in the end though and I will post about it soon or you can see it here on the MTW Challenge blog where it went live last week.

decluttering efforts from two weeks ago. . .

I am still in the “messy middle” as I did not achieve much in the last week, although I did take things to the charity shop, it hasn’t actually made a dent in the stuff that is still filling the two rooms downstairs.  I took photos of everything that has been donated because I know at some point I will forget that I have donated something and start looking for it.  This way, at least I have a photographic record of what left the house.  And since I do have a record, I thought it would be fun to share it here.

Here is Miss Lily “helping” as I photograph and pack up clothing for donation.  See that lovely pink lotus candle next to her?  Yes well, it is no longer lovely as she managed to knock it off the table and it hit the radiator and got some of its petals chopped off.  I’m sad about that as I used it as table decor rather than a candle, not sure I can fix it but I will add it to the list of things to fix.  🙁

Here is a total of what has been donated so far (emphasis on the so far as I am just getting started and haven’t even looked at the craft stuff yet, which is the biggest problem FYI)

Books – 85 books donated last week.  This might seem shocking to you if you are a book lover and have a library, as I too am a book lover and have a library, but I have 1000s of books in my house and pulling out 85 of them from the shelves was very easy and isn’t even noticeable on the shelves!  It would be really noticeable if you only have 100 books but when there are 1000s, not so much.  I really need to donate a lot more – books I won’t read again, books I haven’t read at all, often gifted books that I have no interest in reading, duplicate copies etc.  I want to say there are currently 18 bookcases in my house, that’s without checking, but there is no more room for any more bookcases, and as it is, some of them are stacked two deep on the shelves, so more books will have to go, but it will get harder to choose which ones.

I remember years ago making a list of my cookbooks and at that time I had over 200, that was a while ago and I definitely have more now.  I tend not to use cookbooks since I know how to make most things that I want to make so they are only there for what? display? inspiration? reference?  Same goes for craft books and magazines – ugh – I did have a bit of an obsession with magazines which I am happy to say I don’t have now, but I do have an obsessive collecting streak, (frustrated collection development librarian here) so I have collections of things, including magazines that again, I don’t look at, but it does seem like such a waste to get rid of them – who would want them?  Definitely not the charity shop.  I could try selling them on ebay or somewhere but shipping magazines… magazines are heavy things to ship.

I have taken photos of all the books I donated just in case, because I have in the past donated books by mistake and then spent many hours checking the shelves for them, only to discover later that I must have donated them… and then had to go out and replace them.  Let’s not do that again!

Shoes and Boots – 6 pairs of shoes, 3 pairs of boots.  I have foot problems so I can no longer wear any of the shoes I donated.  No point in keeping them when someone else can use them as they have hardly been worn due to the aforesaid foot issue.

Clothing, accessories etc – 141 items so far including dresses, jeans, pants, suits, jackets, scarves, shirts, skirts, jumpers, the Smalls for All bras, sports bras etc.  Again these were easier to let go since they don’t fit and also I no longer have a wardrobe so there was nowhere for them to live, and so it was easier to let them go that it has been in the past.  As I looked through the photos, counting the items, I already felt regret about losing some of them but too late now!  That was why they had to leave the house fast, and that is also why I am donating and not selling, the craft supplies.  They need to leave the house fast or I will change my mind and keep everything! And the quickest way for them to leave the house is to donate them not try to sell them!

Other items – 5 pairs curtains, 4 tablecloths,  6 pillowcases, 4 napkins, 5 tea towels.

I packed all of this plus the books, into my car and drove it to the charity donation drop off point.  I hope they will do well selling everything, as everything was in good or new condition, and quite a lot of things were unused (or unread in the case of books) and there were even clothing items still with the tags on.  Yes I am that person, or I was that person, as I will not be doing that going forward!

and finally an update from this week . . . t stands for gratuitous cat pics, bread and decluttering . . .

As I mentioned last week, all the kitties are on 2-3 medications due to illness and/or injury.  Miss P’s ear is looking a lot better and now that the infection is gone it is much easier to see what’s what.  You can’t see her ear in this photo but it looks kind of frilly along the edge now.  Here she is spying on me through the sunroom window as I had moved the desk – I’m not sure it’s staying there as I don’t like things that block windows but we’ll see.

Miss Lily had an unfortunate reaction to the antibiotics that was a bit messy and took a bit of cleaning, but it was luckily a one-off and she is doing a lot better and hasn’t coughed once in the last week.  We have to monitor her as the antibiotic will wear off in another week. Here she is also checking out the new desk position!

Mr G has some good, almost normal days and some days that are not so good (today was one of those) but for the most part he is doing OK and taking his medication like a good boy.   Because of his IBD and because the other two are on antibiotics, they all have to get probiotics on a daily basis.  This is a quite gritty powder that has to be mixed into food and the best/easiest way to get them to eat it is to mix it into some cat yogurt (chicken flavour). Here is Mr G rediscovering that there is catnip on his scratchers, and actually all over the rug because he’s been rolling in it.  Cat drugs are the best!

I have one more cat photo which was taken this morning, they looked so contented I had to share it.

As I mentioned earlier, not much has been done this week in the effort to declutter the house, mostly due to sick kitties and horrible weather, but I did get a few little jobs done.  This is the colour of the walls in the craft studio.  It’s been like that since I moved here and I really dislike it but since the bottom half was mostly covered by storage furniture, I never did anything with it.  However, since I did just rearrange and/or remove all the furniture in this room a few weeks ago, I decided to paint as I moved each piece out.  So I would move a bookcase, paint the wall behind it, move something else, paint behind it etc.  This one bit of wall was left as there was a lot of stuff in that corner, but I finally painted it all white yesterday.  I don’t know why there is a dado rail in a bedroom, it makes no logical sense to me, so I assume it was just a bad design choice.  It was a kid’s room and the whole thing was painted pink, including some awful Barbie pink shades.  I dislike bumpy textured wallpaper but I have a horrible feeling that the walls are not good underneath or that there are several layers of wallpaper underneath this one, so I am leaving it on the walls and can live with it now that it is all white.

I made bread today using a new (to me) recipe as I was curious to see if it would work.  I found it on Youtube. Here’s my bread…

This bread uses plain flour (all purpose flour in the US) and yeast.  I have only used plain flour to make soda bread not yeasted bread so I was curious to see how it would turn out.  Also it is a no-knead bread, so you mix it and leave it for several hours and then dump it into a bread tin and bake it.  It’s more of a batter than a dough so it would be impossible to knead anyway.  It makes very crusty bread and it would be very handy to mix up hours ahead of time and then bake it say when you get home from work.

One small thing I have been working on between kitty monitoring and medications is trying to get my shelves sorted out now and putting the craft studio back together.  This table and these shelves used to be in a separate room which I wanted to use as my jewellery workshop but that room ended up with so much stuff dumped in it that there was never any space to sit down at the table, and so not much every got done.  Now that I have completely rearranged this room, I now have two tables in the same room, so I have been rebuilding/reorganising my cobbled together shelving.  These shelves are all made from things found in my house.  Circled in the bottom right is a stack of notebooks which the first shelf sits on.  The arrow on the top left is pointing to a cat food box that has been painted black.  I did that yesterday as the shelf supports on that level also used to be stacks of notebooks, so I replaced them with two cat food boxes.  I would have replaced the bottom supports but they have stacks of 11 notebooks and the cat food boxes are only 9 notebooks high, so yes I do have 40 unused notebooks lol.  The white shelf supports are actually shop fittings designed for shop displays but I used to use them for craft and trade fair displays.  The shelves themselves are a variety of old unused shelving, three from a bookcase, one from a wall shelf that was here originally, and an IKEA lack floating shelf that is not suitable for my walls.

My ticket to tea this week is in the photo below but a little hard to see so I have circled them.  One is a white cat shaped mug and the other is actually a cat lady mug that I forgot I even had (also still in the box!).  Also in this photo are some small IKEA boxes that I have painted with black gesso and then used a white pen to write the contents on (see pink arrow on the right) I have done the same with all the shoe boxes that no longer contain shoes haha.  More on that in the next update.

So that’s it and I see that it is now after midnight so I am going to go ahead and just post this one.  Let me know what you think in the comments and Happy T Day!   As always, thanks for reading, stay warm and have a great week!

Ingredients
all the stuff in my house!

Challenges

Altered Book Lover – T Stands for – 

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