Sparklegirl in Minneapolis: June 2009

Monday, June 22, 2009

The Kiddie Pool Inaugural

Seza and I have talked for years about drinking margaritas in a kiddie pool in the backyard. Frankie was just a little more incentive (I thanked him for letting me use him as an excuse to buy a toy that I wanted for myself).

Sunday, June 21, 2009

The Shade Garden Evolves

This is what the shade garden looked like in April 2007 (not terribly shady in this photo because the maple tree above hadn't filled out yet).

Since then ...

... and here we are today.

Tuesday, June 16, 2009

Friday, June 5, 2009

A Cooler Closet Than J. Lo's

Here's the deal. My clothes were basically flung all over the Blue Room upstairs. All the time. I liked to blame our minuscule closets, standard when the house was built. To his credit, M never suggested that the true problem was either a) me having too many clothes or b) me being a word that starts with "l" and rhymes with "hazy." But I could just never work out a decent storage system (I tried several over the years) that I could maintain in my crappy closet.

Separately, we have this weird little room at the top of the stairs. It's legally a bedroom, but at about six feet by seven feet, it's not like we could do much with it. During law school, it was M's office; that was enough to make him hate it. I tried making it a "reading room," but neither of us ever wanted to read in there. At most, I would go in to open or close the window, and then I'd leave.

Magically, we both saw the logic of putting my need to have workable wardrobe space together with the presence of this strange little room. Add two trips to Ikea for drawers and bins, throw in an old hanging rack I was using in the basement, et voila: my new closet.

Check out the window! I was reading about how Jennifer Lopez has a room in her house just for wigs, but I bet even she doesn't have a view of a birch tree from her closet.