We’ve been in the house for a month now, have thrown the housewarming party, have assembled the IKEA, and are just finally to the point where we’re not spending every single spare moment of free time (which isn’t already dedicated to Milo) working on the house.

It took us nearly a week just to unpack and put everything away. One of the challenges of living in a 90-year-old house is that there is hardly ever any storage space: the closets are miniscule when compared to today’s walk-ins, and we don’t even have a linen closet, so all of our linens are currently being stored in zipped bags in Milo’s closet or in plastic bins in the basement.

Right now, we’re choosing to see the lack of storage as a good thing: if we don’t have anywhere to put extra stuff, we’re much less tempted to buy extra stuff.

After a few days, our living room went from looking like this:

holy box nightmare

just looking at this picture nearly gives me a panic attack

to looking like this:

It doesn't fit all of our books, but it will do for now.

a million times better

The living room was the first space I started to clean and organize, since it’s the first sight I saw whenever I came home, and living in a cyclone of boxes and effluvia was making me nuts—not to mention the fact that it was really unsafe for 21-month-old Milo to be running around in, no matter how vigilantly we were watching him. Toddlers need for their homes to be safe spaces.

Milo, it turns out, also needs for his home to be a clean space. We brought home a new vacuum cleaner, and he’s convinced that it’s his new toy. He won’t let us put it away, and his word for vacuum (mum-mum) is now one of the top 10 most frequently used words in his vocabulary.

Milo likes the vacuum, a LOT

And of course, after the living room was sorted out, you know where I went next. That’s right: the kitchen.

The first thing to get organized was the spice drawer:

spice drawer

The rest of the kitchen is… coming along. It’s manageable as is, but there a few things that need to be changed sooner than later for me to be happy.

Chiefly: wall color. The entire house was (and for the most part, still is) painted in a Pottery Barn pallette of beiges and burgundies. Fine for some people, but so completely wrong for Matthew and me. We are attracted to bright colors, and when we do the neutrals, we gravitate towards the greys, accented with cool pale blues and greens rather than the browns and reds.

Because we haven’t had the time to paint all of the rooms yet, we haven’t hung any photos or artwork, and that is what is really keeping our house from feeling like our home just yet. Right now, it still has the feeling of a house that is being staged to sell, and we are just living here killing time. I have spent almost a year living in other people’s homes, and now I’m ready to see my giant Death Cab for Cutie & Dismemberment Plan tour poster hanging on the wall, dammit!

I have managed to get some painting done:

Mama loves Milo Bear

Milo’s bedroom has a chair guard, so rather than paint the walls above and below the moulding two different colors, I thought it would be much more fun for him if the bottom half of the wall were chalkboard paint. I love how it turned out. We are planning to have an artist pal come over and do a small permanent painting on one of the walls, to inspire Milo, but for the time being, I’m leaving up this little testament of adoration.

I have a whole other entry in me (about the nooks, oh the nooks), but this is running long as is, so I will leave you with a photo of my best kitchen helper stirring the maple-ginger root vegetables for dinner the other night:

Milo stirs the roots