baby rocking chair reveal and other stuff...

so, my squishy little niece lucy is 8 months old now and is sitting up like a pro (and just started crawling!) so the tiny rocking chair that i bought for her awhile ago (actually i'm pretty sure i bought it months before she was born) with the intention of fixing up is now done! here are the before and afters:

before all brown and beat up

after sanding, priming and painting with 3 coats of semi-gloss

after!  whales and bubbles...it's not perfect, but it'll do....

detail of bubbles

whales

detail of whales

all done, i can't wait for her to sit in it!

i also spent the last couple of days organizing like mad.  awhile back i posted that i wanted to organize our front coat closet, as it looked like this:

it was driving me nuts, scarves and purses all over the floor and my boots kept falling over, it was just a mess.  so i organized it.  i wanted to put the folding chairs somewhere else but we literally have nowhere else to put them in our place and it's not convenient to put them in the storage in the basement of the building.  so i had to keep them there, but i fixed the rest of it:

still not exaaaaactly how i'd like it to look, but good enough for now.  i hung some of my scarves on shower curtain rings and placed the rings on the bar thingy.  it works well.  then, i became obsessed with re-organizing the pantry again because the way i had previously organized it wasn't working.  before picture:

i moved stuff around and consolidated.  i moved the things that we use most often to the middle shelves, put some random stuff in boxes and put our tea/coffee in a flat box in the middle since we use that stuff all the time.  everything is much more accessible now:

then, i've been wanting to organize my baking cupboard forever.  it doesn't look as bad in this photograph as it actually was, but everything was just stuffed into this plastic bin i had, so there was different bottles of extracts, cupcake liners, and 6 bags of different kinds of wheat flour all floating around in the box along with a bunch of other baking paraphernalia.  it was super irritating to sift through not to mention messy:

  so i bought a few containers at the dollar store (seriously, buy that stuff at the dollar store!  so much cheaper!), put all the appliances on the bottom shelf and everything else on the top shelf and moved the bowls to a different cupboard.  so now everything will stay fresh and won't make a mess and it's easy to find:

i also bought a small little wire rack that the flours in the back are sitting on

everything in the box is much more tidy

and lastly, i bought a wire cart thingy hoping i could use it in the coat closet, but because i have to keep the chairs there, it didn't work out.  so i decided to put it on my deck to use as a vertical plant holder:

so, that's my past few days.  next on my list is to organize the blasted cupboard that holds my tupperware and pyrex and vacuum underneath the pull out drawer at the bottom of my stove/oven.  it's gross under there.  then i'll organize my coffee table area, hopefully find a better place for my houseplants or at least make the area that they are in look better, get a new bookshelf in the living room and make it look organized, put up/change some framed photos....there is so much more.  so, what are your summer projects?