Prioritizing

My house is normally clean and tidy, well, fairly clean and tidy, I do have a teenager and many pets living here after all.  On a normal day my house is looking pretty good. The exception to this is when I am involved in a project, and since I’ve been involved in nonstop projects since last June my house has been in various states of crazy for about a year now. My usual approach ends up being me concentrating all of my focus to the project while neglecting most of the house cleaning in favor of getting the project down in as little time as possible. On paper that sounds great but it really isn’t feasible. Projects are inherently unpredictable, little things that should take just a few minutes end up taking ten times as long, Murphy’s Law at its most devious. The delays add up and ultimately screw up any chance of making a schedule and sticking to it. Of course, this means that the project isn’t getting that much closer to being finished and the house still isn’t clean. It definitely starts getting a little overwhelming.

The current problem with this system is that my daughter’s BFF is visiting from Hawaii and I’ve got to get this house under control. Last June, we started transitioning her room from Disney Princess cute to Geek Girl Eclectic. We painted the room, I built a loft bed but there was sorting and a few other things to finish. I also needed to get the rest of the house back in order. Nothing like company coming to accelerate my cleaning schedule. Yikes!

 

BB loft bed

 

Preview …

I’ll be posting more about the changes that I made in this bedroom, so keep an eye out!

I took this pic of the loft bed about 30 minutes after it had been assembled.

Scotty and Wesley were quite helpful during assembly. At this point, they are conducting their own inspection of the desk.

 

 

A brand new start…

…with a brand new name.

Welcome to…

Logo with compassI decided to change the name at the end of last year, after stumbling across a blog with a similar name with teaching/school content. It was a little used blog but it still made me uncomfortable. I did a lot of research before choosing the original name to ensure that I wouldn’t be copying any aspect of an existing blog. It’s possible that the blog didn’t show up in my original searches because it hadn’t been used in so long.  Anyway, it made me uncomfortable and I wasn’t super excited about the name either. So after a couple of weeks, a few of what must have been seriously annoying conversations with family and friends, and many pages of scribbles, I finally landed on a name. I did a lot of research and found nothing with the same title, no blogs and no websites.  Yay!

I immediately loved the idea of using More Like Guidelines.  There are several reasons that it appealed to me so much, first is probably the most obvious, the Pirates of the Caribbean movie was so good and the quote “The Code is more like guidelines rather than actual rules” was just too funny and perfect.  For me personally, using More Like Guidelines was really fitting, because I seem to lack the ability to follow a pattern or instructions* to the letter.  I am constantly modifying and tweaking different aspects of a project to make it fit what I want.  So, to me patterns and instructions are really more like guidelines.

It’s been a while since I posted and I’ve been busy with several projects so I’ve got more than enough ideas to share.  For now, I’ll leave you with the Pirate hat that I created for Scarlet. I’ll be talking about this soon in future Costume Corner posts.

Red Pirate hat

Halloween 2013

*When I say instructions here I mean creative/arts & crafts instructions.  When it comes to tools, machinery, etc., I follow instructions to the letter.  Safety always comes first.