Hiding Clutter

Oh dear! Has it really been NINETEEN days since I posted here?? My bad!  I'm waiting with bated breath for my big re-do courtesy of The Blog Fairy. After seeing La Bella Vita's beautiful new layout I was sooooo jealous. I found The Blog Fairy link at the bottom of her blog and hopped over to take a gander.  Wow! What beautiful work this lady does, and the fees are just so reasonable I couldn't pass up the chance for a beautiful new blog look. Hopefully she will be able to start soon.


I've met some wonderful artists and found some fun new blogs that I will share with you tomorrow.  I've been hard at work on some of my Christmas items for my Etsy shop (which is still a mess, too - sigh).  I'll be bringing you up to date with that stuff soon.

Now - to the point. One thing I can't stand is clutter.  I love looking at cool table arrangements that look good enough to be a still life painting. But one of my problems is where I live.  It tends to be very dusty on my property. We're on a prairie, beautifully surrounded by small mountain ranges. During the summer all our windows are open and surfaces in the house can get pretty dusty. During the winter I pull out a few more pretties, but during the summer I try to keep them fairly lean.


My bathroom counter has always been a huge annoyance.  There is only one outlet in my bathroom so there in this corner of my counter there was mega cords, electric toothbrushes, cotton balls, et al.  No matter what container I used it always looked messy. This is the before picture - at it's best. It's been known to look waaaaaaaaaaaay worse. 

Lurking in my Shabby Chic stash of stuff to re-do was two small shutter sets. I had just been investigating kitchen appliance garages and a HUGE light bulb went off in my head.  I grabbed the shutter but it was about two inches too tall meaning the medicine cabinet couldn't be opened. So my hubby offered to saw an inch off the top and bottom. Even though I handle a electric saw pretty dang good, I wasn't going to turn that down.

Here's the little shutter on one of my work tables getting ready for paint. I'm using the trim color from the bathroom 'cause I'm too lazy to run over to Wally World for some spray paint in the right shade. And why spend the money if you don't have to?

It's not completely finished yet but I just had to see how it was going to look. So here is the counter looking clutter free.  Everything is behind the little shutter. I'm going to dig out a cute tassel I have to hang on the little knob. And yes, Mighty Mom, I'll be sanding the edges....

Isn't this much better?

 

For those of you with sharp eyes you will notice there is no hardware on the cabinets. This is typical ADD behavior. I completely painted the bathroom including the ceiling, all the trim, and all the cabinets except for the bottom two drawers.   The remedy is about a 15 minute job and then all the hardware can be put back on.  How long has it been like this? For so many months I can't even remember. Heh!