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Plumbing Pipe Closet Organizer

(No, the flange is not attached to the attic access panel.)

(Most accurate wall color representation above.)

Plumbing Pipe Closet Organizer Domestiphobia

I made it myself.

(Details soon.)

In All Seriousness, I’m Not Sure If I Bought Enough Nipples.

Okay.  To those of you thinking of building yourselves a closet organizer made of plumbing pipes, because people do that all of the time, I have one piece of advice for you:

Don’t.

It’s only 8:30 in the morning, and already I’ve used up my math cache for the entire week.

Yep.  See, I only have a limited cache of math skills.  It’s so limited, in fact, that I’m forced to dole out math-related problem solving brain cells in carefully regimented quantities throughout the week so that I don’t run out before they have a chance to replenish.

And this project is using them all.

Even if you’re great at math, I would still not advise you to take on this project, unless you want Home Depot employees to run screaming for the exits every time you enter the store out of fear that you ask one of them to spend 2 hours — two hours! — custom cutting and threading galvanized pipe to your specifications in order to save a little moolah.

Obviously, I’m not above that.

And I’m going back today.

Crap.

I probably shouldn’t publicly warn them on the internet.

Because I’m sure they read this blog, just to see if the crazy woman with graph paper and an extensive plumbing fitting vocabulary plans on coming back.

That’s right — due to my extensive research, I can talk flanges and elbows and tee fittings and nipples with the best of ’em.

I can even say “nipples” to a male Home Depot employee named Kelly without cracking a smile.

I’m that good.

So.

My point?

Unless you have beyond stellar math and 3-dimensional planning skills and an extensive knowledge of pipe fittings and absolutely no fear of possible retaliation from disgruntled Home Depot employees, you probably don’t want to make a closet organizer from plumbing pipes.

But if you do, I’ll have the instructions for you eventually.

Unless the HD peeps slash my tires and start sending threats to my family.

Wish me luck.

The Best Kind of Progress Isn’t Something You See. It’s Something You Feel.

Okay, so it might be because I ate approximately 80,000 calories worth of crusty, cheesy fried-then-baked eggplant parmesan, leftover spinach feta quiche, and German pancakes drizzled with a homemade sugary syrup yesterday.

Dutch Baby German Pancake

Check out that Dutch Baby, baby.  And please ignore my filthy oven.

Or it might be because I just ordered 26 galvanized malleable floor flanges from Amazon before having even one sip off coffee this morning.  Or it might be because I spent the entire day yesterday, aside from a 2-mile walk with the dogs and shoving approximately 80,000 calories worth of delicious, artery-jamming crap into my system, sketching out a design for a closet organizer made entirely out of plumbing fixtures and pine boards.

It might be one of those things.

But whatever it is, I’m feeling mighty accomplished this morning.

Fat, but accomplished.

On second thought, none of these things are the reason I feel accomplished.

They’re most certainly the reason I feel fat, but not the reason I feel accomplished.

I know exactly what it is.

But first, I need to take you back to Saturday.

Saturday, my friends, is the day I made an important and disturbing discovery about the person with whom I’ve chosen to live (aka. my husband).

This discovery wasn’t a complete surprise, mind you, since inklings of this issue’s existence have been cropping up, here and there, for the past 9 years.

But apparently I’ve been living in a protected shell of denial.  Apparently I haven’t wanted to make this discovery, because then I’d have to admit that the issue exists.

But on Saturday, I could ignore it no longer.

While Justin was busy doing this:

I ventured out to The Shed.

The Shed is a wonkily assembled, pseudo mini building attached to the back of our house, presumably added by the previous owners.  When we moved in 5 years ago, I quickly labeled the non-ventilated space as man territory, clearly, and have rarely ventured back since.

Until Saturday.

On Saturday, I walked into The Shed.

On Saturday, I saw this:

Messy Shed

Actually, I should clarify.  This is after I removed the lawn mower, a weed whacker, a small hand cart, and approximately 35 (or 6) large, assorted bags of garden soil.

That’s right.

My husband is a hoarder.

It turns out, every time I asked him to get rid of something — like the chicken wire we’d once used to line the inside of our fence to keep the pups from squeezing out — this is where he put it.  Not only that, but this is also where he put project supplies that he bought but didn’t want to immediately tackle.  So, it turns out, for years we’ve been storing oil-rubbed-bronze doorknobs (all of which we’ve since bought and replaced in the house), outdoor light fixtures (since bought and replaced), and giant bags of garden soil and mulch, all — you guessed it — re-bought and used multiple times over during the years that these things have sat, forlorn and neglected, in the bowls of The Shed.

I found bags of trash.

I found an unopened, unused seed starting kit.

I found a tupperware bowl I’d long – long – since given up finding.  Unfortunately, it was filled with oil-soaked newspapers, but still.  Finally discovering its fate brought me peace.

And so, my dears, did cleaning out that shed.

Clean Shed

If the difference doesn’t look drastic to you, keep in mind that this “after” photo, as opposed to the “before,” now contains a lawn mower, hand cart, weed whacker, large rake, cylinder of propane (where is the best place to keep this, by the way?), and several garden tools and flower pots.

I would have carted out the 7 bags of concrete mix, but I found that moving one from the bookshelf in the back to the rest of the pile may have caused me permanent back damage (just kidding — I think), so there they will stay.

This discovery was important because it made me admit — finally — that while Justin is an out-of-sight, out-of-mind type of person, I’m most definitely an it-might-be-out-of-sight-but-it’s-still-right-there-in-mind-so-it’s-still-giving-me-an-eye-twitch type of person.

And also, call me crazy, but I like to be able to access things without wading through a pile of garbage.

But — and pay attention because this is important — if I can just accept the above statements as fact and realize that Justin is about as likely to change his habits as I’m likely to sit in a cubicle for the rest of my life, then we’re one step closer to reaching a symbiosis that actually… I don’t know… might allow us to get things done.

A partnership, if you will.

If I can keep the shed looking like this, despite his rat-pack hoarding ways, then I’m giving him the tools he needs to do things like this:

Photo taken, unfortunately, on a much drearier day.

What happened on Saturday is that I made a mental leap.  One of acceptance, if not understanding.

And that, I think, is what we call accomplishment.

Life Just Got a Little Easier

**UPDATED**  Good news! It looks like my “invitations” to Pinterest regenerate each time I send one, which means I’m thinking there might not be a limit for how many I can send. So if you want one, let me know in the comments and I’ll keep sending ’em until it doesn’t let me send ’em anymore.

You seriously have no idea how exhausting it is living inside my head.

Unless you’re like me, in which case I feel for you.

I do.

It’s like this crazy, tangled mass of dreamy ideas, creative projects, and bucket list items juxtaposed with practical to-do lists, books to read, and inquiries to write.  It’s like Jackson Pollock has set up studio inside my mind and is redecorating the whole thing by tossing over neatly organized file cabinets and scattering the contents of card catalogues and painting over all of the sterile, whitewashed walls with this:

Except with more orange and less black.

If you do know what this is like, or you have no clue what I’m talking about but you love being really organized, I have found the answer, my friends.

And it most certainly is not blowing in the wind.

I realize I’m way behind the times on this discovery, but hey — I’m one of those people who stubbornly refuses to sign up for the newest “it” thing for as long as I can justify waiting ’till they work out the kinks or ’till my friends and readers start pestering me day and night and their urging voices creep into my dreams and haunt my thoughts and I finally, finally succumb to the peer pressure and add yet another user name and log-in password to my mental database of access codes because of course I’ve waited so long to sign up for the latest gimmick that the user name I’m trying to standardize for myself is already taken and the password I’m trying to standardize for myself isn’t long enough or doesn’t have a special character or has too many sequential letters and WHY DO YOU HAVE TO MAKE EVERYTHING SO DAMN DIFFICULT?!

See that paragraph above?  I don’t blame you if you didn’t read it.  That is what it’s like inside my head all. the. time.

Exhausting.

So.  Enter the latest craze (at least in my mind) in social media and “cloud” networking:  Pinterest.

I cannot tell you how thrilled I am that I finally decided to give this a try.  Right now, I have tons of web browser bookmarks, saved file images on my hard drive, actual printouts in folders, and excel spreadsheets with links to various home improvement ideas, rooms I like, vacations I want to take, art projects I want to try, etc.

They are everywhere.

The fantastic news is that these ideas — these things I stumble across online that I like but can’t process right this second so I bookmark it to revisit at a later date that doesn’t EVER arrive — can now all be easily accessed via Pinterest.

For example, Kelly from Tearing Up Houses posted this beautiful kitchen on her site.  I love so  many things about this kitchen, that I know I’d like to save this photo for one day — in the far, far future — when Justin and I might stay put in one place long enough to build our dream home.

Rather than right-click the photo and save it to some random file somewhere on my computer (which will inevitably get lost when I buy a new computer or another hard drive crashes), I click the little “Pin It” button that’s now on my bookmark bar, and BAM!  The photo is saved on my Pinterest page to whatever “Pin Board” I designated (in this case, Inspiration Rooms), along with the link to where I originally found the photo!

So assuming Kelly’s page is still there in 50 years when we build our house, I can go back and find the source of the photo and see whether there’s any more information about it.  I can also type my own notes on each photo, so even if the original source no longer exists, I still have whatever information I bothered to note.

Also, whenever I browse my “Inspiration Rooms” pin board, I can easily delete any photos I no longer like.  Pinterest also lets me browse other people’s pin boards for a virtual slurry of inspirational goodness.

It can be a time waster,  yes.  But it also turns my Pollock’s into tranquil beach scenes complete with calming breezes and sweating bottles of Red Stripe.

And that, my friends, is priceless.

The one annoying thing I’ve found about the site so far is that you need an “invitation” to sign up.  That required me requesting one from the main page, and it took a little less than a week to receive my invitation in the mail.  I have no clue why they do this.

The good news is that it appears Pinterest has given me 6 of my own invitations to send to friends, so they can sign up immediately.  So, if any of you are interested and haven’t already joined, leave a comment below telling me so (hey, I rhyme!) and I will email the invitation to the first 6 people who ask.  Just make sure you actually want it so that it doesn’t go to waste!

**UPDATED**  Good news! It looks like my “invitations” to Pinterest regenerate each time I send one, which means I’m thinking there might not be a limit for how many I can send. So if you want one, let me know in the comments and I’ll keep sending ’em until it doesn’t let me send ’em anymore.