Day One in the Life of a Part-Time Copywriter

Day one of the new part-time schedule is off to a great start. I worked my last day at Virtucom (which may or may not be the same Virtucom Dr. Evil created in Austin Powers) on Thursday and then Chris and I headed out to Turning Stone in Vernon, NY for some dinner and to see Lewis Black. Both he and his opening comedian were really funny and we had a great time.

Even better was the next day when we got to sleep in and hang out and play games all day. Chris used a vacation day so we could have a nice little three-day weekend together. Since today was his first day back, I decided that technically it's my first day of my new schedule as well. Tomorrow is my first day with Type Partners. 9am start time. How do you like that? Seeing as I used to get up at 6:20am for my old job, I'm beyond thrilled.

I started off the day with a couple hours of much-needed cleaning. I dusted and vacuumed the main living spaces in the house, (effectively completing the first item on my list of weekly goals). Not only did I vacuum, but I sent Mr. Roomba under the couch while I used the dust buster to pick up little dust bunnies that he unearthed around the edges. That's three, count them, THREE types of vacuuming going on this morning. I also installed the motion detector for our security system and cleaned off Chris's desk and wiped it down and replaced everything. That glass top was so dusty and smudged it was scary. I picked up a few random pieces of furniture and decorative items and moved them down to the basement to the garage sale pile. I've decided if I don't have room for it right now, it's not worth keeping until I do. I've either got to find a place for it or find it a new home.

The most noticeable thing I did, however, was clean off the coffee table. I put everything away and gave it a good scrubbing.

Yes, the couch is oddly off center with the table and the rug. I never noticed that before now. lol

You may recall old pictures I've posted where it looked like this:

Yikes. Mess-o-rama.

And now it looks like this:

Yep, still don't have a spot for the dust buster. And Chris's blanket over the chair to keep the kitties away is oh-so glamorous.

Much better, no?

Over the little three-day weekend, I also continued working on my wall o' white picture frames. And it's about time I posted some in-progress pictures of that.

If you recall, the wall used to look like this:

The color was called creme brulee, but really it was just light yellow. I liked all the picture frames, but after seeing the house tour on younghouselove.com I knew I wanted to copy their hallway of white frames. I even used the same wall color because it looked so fantastic. I painted the walls and the ceiling with Benjamin Moore's Moonshine in eggshell. I think painting the ceiling really helped to take the focus away from the ridiculously low ceiling upstairs.

After painting, I began assembling a collection of white frames. Most of the frames we already owned got a nice coat of white spray paint and the rest of the frames I found at Target, Michaels and Christmas Tree Shop. I still need more to complete the wall, but enough talk. Here's what I've got so far.

Once again, please excuse the mess. Cleaning off the dining room table is next on my list. And once I complete the wall, those frames will be off the guest room floor.

So obviously I haven't finished putting things in the frames yet. I'd really like to do a mix of things so it's not just all pictures. I did put up our homemade postcard with pictures from our trip to Mexico, as well as a print from Lisa's friends Jen and Lynn (it's the kitty cat near the bottom). The strange looking piece between that posed picture of Chris and I and the picture of me with my bridesmaids is one of the poems we had read at our wedding. I wrote it out by hand in a twisty design and really like how it turned out.

I've still got some smaller frames to fill in the spaces, but I really need to come up with a few more large frames for the upper portion. And I'd like to find a few little trinkets and things to fill in a couple of those spaces that I left intentionally.

Oh, and if you scroll back up, you'll see that I also painted that piece of trim next to the stairs white. I think it helps break up the mass of wood that is the stairs.

As for how I came up with this particular layout, I'm afraid I don't have any cute tips about newspaper templates or laying the frames on the floor. I'm not that much of a planner. Also, I started on this a couple weeks ago with the couple frames I had. You can see the beginning stages here:

Basically my method is to start with a couple of the larger frames and then add little ones around them. But if you scroll back up, you can see that the arrangement has changed as I added in more. So it's probably not the best strategy, but it works for my impatient self. If I waited until I had all the frames and made a template I would ... well, I wouldn't wait. I like to see it up there and live with it in stages while I tweak things.

Oh, and here's a close up of the new painted trim.

And here's the wall and ceiling right after I painted.

And this last picture is to help show the new paint color. The portion on the left is the ceiling with the paint. On the right is the old flat white ceiling color. The beam in the middle is at the top of the stairs and in this picture it's still the creme brulee color. But I've painted the entire hallway too. More pictures to come.