A Little Privacy Please

This week I targeted small house projects. You know the kind...that idea that's been sitting on the back burner for months (years). It really only needs like 30 minutes to finish but you just can't seem to get around to it.

Yep. THOSE projects.

I'm probably a little strange in that I have a list of 14 separate painting projects for the interior of my house. FOURTEEN! None of them are decorative either. It's all trim and doors and walls. Blah.

I digress. Back to what I actually managed to do.

The Not-China Cabinet

This cabinet, which should be filled with pretty china and crystal and beautiful trinkets, is the vertical equivalent of a junk drawer. Seriously. Crafting supplies that I need higher because the baby is going to. Crawl. Any. Day. Now. They go here.

I ordered a 12" x 83" strip of rice paper made by ArtScape. It was the perfect width for the cabinets. It adds just the right amount of "No, you're not looking at a mess" vibe.

The picture shows it only half finished as both sides got the rice paper. But I had to split the work between a nap/preschooler playtime effort and an awake baby content on the floor with toys while the preschooler was actually at preschool effort. It took 28 minutes to physically do. But I had to spread those minutes over 3 hours. Kids!

The Front Door

Our front door isn't lacking in the privacy department. It has rather smallish windows at the top that I can't even see out (I'm short but that's not the point). It lets in the brilliant glare from our front light which the flat-screen TV then beams directly into my eyes. At night. When I'm trying to sleep. Ouch.

Sleep is a precious thing to me. I haven't gotten enough of it since the baby arrived. So this issue with the door and it's little window, um, ahem, rankled.

One night between returning from preschool pick-up and dinner's mandatory start, I slapped some of that rice paper in place. I timed the real work: 25 minutes!

The kids liked helping with this one...

Add in the kid factor including 2 poopy diaper changes (I stopped the timer for them) and those 25 minutes looked a lot more like 65 minutes. Kids again!

There you have it. Two boring, basic little projects at Villa Ruth to add a degree of privacy and a little less glare. Plus you get to see the reality of kids--they slow everything way down. Oddly, seeing these tasks timed and recorded with the kid delays makes me feel better about what I do get done in a day.