The Painting Room

I keep waiting for the day when I'm no longer tired and feel very much awake and alive! When is that going to happen? It's so hard to wake up in the morning to go to work. I mean, it's hard enough that I don't like my job but after being sick it's twice as hard to get up! Sigh!

Tonight's dinner is Spaghetti Pie... thought I'd blog while waiting for it to cook. Since my cookware (which is not the best) is in Ohio I'm using my Mom's old pots and pans, which are really quite old. They consist of odds and ends from different cookware collections. Basically, they suck. Both my parents were amazing cooks but they never had a really great set of pots and pans. In our current collection Robin and I don't even have a regular frying pan or a stock pot. I love to cook but this makes it really hard to do so! I've been salivating over this Calphalon cookware at Bed Bath and Beyond. Now I just need to come up with the $300 to buy it!!! Being poor sucks! One day it will be mine!

I've been working on Mom's painting room this week. I tell people about how much stuff she had and how incredible overwhelming it is. I'm not sure people believe me so I decided to take a couple of photos. Keep in mind that the room is a total wreck right now because we have used it for storage also. It used to be quite organized and tidy!

Mom has tons of BRAND NEW gift items bought with the intention of using them for her secret pals in the painting group.

Boxes, boxes and MORE boxes of craft items!

Need some tulle? I have multiple rolls in every color! Never opened!

The general mayhem of the room! Ugh!

Don't you love the border? Note the billions of art pens and pencils on the right, the patterns on the bulletin board and the painting palette collectibles. There's more where those came from!

Sprays for painting, crafts and whatever else!

Paintbrushes, albums full of photos of Mom's crafts, misc. craft and painting items and her old dog and cat's ashes on the third shelf down!

Need some craft wood? I have so many pieces that have never been used! The boxes are photos of Mom's painting club, The empty shelves had those expensive painting magazines from craft stores, which have already been boxed up.

Got paint? I have HUNDREDS of these bottles!

The black binders have tons of painting patterns cut out one by one by my Mother and put in sheet protectors. They are arranged by type of pattern... still life, holidays, flowers, etc. The blue thing on the left (there are 3!) have little craft items in each drawer. The top left are sketch books and also notice the hundreds of vinyl albums on the bottom. What do I do with those??

See what I mean? Mom also had a bunch of those plastic storage units with drawers with every kind of craft item you can think of. Scrapbooking stuff, watercolor pencils, bags of feathers, dozens of craft doilies, stickers - so much stuff!

One thing I did find was one of my Mom's painting aprons. I don't think she did the lettering or even painted the picture of Rainbow Row. A lot of the women make aprons as secret pal gifts... I'm thinking this was one of them. What IS hers are all the brush strokes that were made on the bottom of the apron. It just seems so fresh... like she wiped that brush full of paint on that apron yesterday. I must say that finding this made me a little sad. I folded it up and put it in the "keep pile".


My friends Carol and Dave came over the other night to pick up the first of the paint give away stuff. Dave is a great artist and I gave him some sketch books and a bunch of oil paints with the promise of painting me a picture. I can't wait to see it!

I'm thinking I might even paint something. Unfortunately I did not inherit my Mom's talent and I totally have ADD when I have to sit there and do something like that... I'll save some paint and canvas in case I find some inspiration later on.

I did do a small project in the bedroom. I painted the windows. It's kind of a ghetto stained glass effect. It looks totally tacky, but it's really quite beautiful in the morning when the sun shines on the window. I like waking up to it!

One day the painting room project will be done! My goal is to make it partly usable by the end of the month!!

Oh! I almost forgot!

When I posted the blog about my Father's roses the other day I emailed a copy of it to my Grandfather's wife, Mil to show to Grandpa. This is what she wrote back:

Grandpa and I were elated with your note and the picture of the rose. Grandpa was so happy. I printed it out to an 8x10 and have it sitting in the living room where he can see it all the time.

So sweet!