Chaos = A blog for Laurie

We are in furniture turmoil at the moment. After three trips to Ikea... ( Min and I discussed this - you always need at least three trips. Here's what we decided:

The first time you go and you see all this übercool furniture and get great ideas and think to yourself, "Wait, I'd better see how I can integrate this really great stuff into my house!" So you go home and measure and realize you don't have any space and then you have to go back determined to get stuff that fits and assume maybe something else will work better. On your return trip you realize that the stuff at the store wasn't nearly as cool as you thought the first time. Everything seems boring and won't fit and you wonder why you drove 90 plus miles through nasty traffic on the hottest day of the year to look at such a lousy assortment of cheap furniture.



In despair you return home behind all the "boat people" who are trying to escape the city heat by heading to the lakes for some fishing. The result is that everyone sits on the freeway and broils because the two boats 12 miles ahead decided to try drag racing which ended up a lot more drag than racing and now one of them is upside down under a semi truck stretched across all four lanes of traffic. After finally reaching home and re-measuring and realizing that your old furniture now looks totally shabby and even worse than the not so cool furniture you saw on your last trip to the furniture store, you undertake trip number three armed with a list of items you WILL buy and all the measurements for every single area of your house including the space in the pantry where you store the brooms and the extra video cables.

And that is exactly what we did. So,... (I resume( after three trips to Ikea we now have a couple of new pieces of furniture. The house is turned upside down and there is no place to walk because every new piece involves moving some other old piece of furniture which involves moving the bookcases, which means removing every single book and borrowing a dolly from work. We (and the cats) will never be the same again. Seriously at one point last night our dog Bart planted himself in the hall doorway and refused to move - essentially telling us that no furniture would move any more that night! I'll post pictures when I have a nice after picture to supplant the chaos.

In the mean time I thought I'd give you a different kind of before and after picture. A few weeks ago I wrote about all the gardens in magazines that I had attempted to copy. Some of you may not believe me when I tell you what an abominable failure I am at these undertakings, so I have comparison photos. garden Gate had a lovely blue, yellow and white garden that mostly had plants we could grow up in the frozen tundra. Here is theirs.



Well, even though the salvia and the anthemis should be easy to find here, when I went to my nursery there were none, so I had to reverse colors and use a yellow daisy and I planted salvia seed which will be ready in about three years. Here's mine! Woe is me!!



Yeah, I know there wasn't a rhododendron in the original, but it's the best part of the garden! In a few years if everything doesn't die, it could look nice, but it in the mean time it looks just like all my other gardens - full of possibility!