Little things make a lot

OK, the crunch time for any “every day” resolution – its 8 o’clock on Friday night, you’ve been to the pub form tea and there’s a cold bottle of Chardonnay waiting in the fridge (yeah, no, I’m not doing Dryathlon – dry Mon-Thurs is as far as I can go!)

You need an instant result and you need it fast. So what did I do? I reJanimated the hallway. As in excavated it from underneath two pushchairs (Two! I have but one child), about five coats and an army’s worth of boots.

And then – and THEN! because once you ReJanimate you just can’t, er, stop – I did the accessible under-stairs bit (the inaccessible bit is a ReJanimate task for another day), and then – and THEN! I went upstairs and harking right back to day 1, ran myself a bath with some aging bath foam which I remember buying when I was pregnant, so about two years ago.

Before and after pics today (I spoil you, I do):

,

There was a hall under there!

January 12th: reJanimated hallway, under stairs and some bath bubbles.

Back to school (for pens)

Right, first off, there’s no neat after photo today, mostly because I made more mess than I started with.  I believe the appropriate emoticon is :S

But I have liberated some stuff from lying-around-being-covered-with-dust-itis which is the important thing! OK, you need to know that I’ve never really had my own classroom before – I sort of have, a few times, but I always ended up sharing it, or moving out loads of lessons a week, and I wound up with all sorts of school stuff at home.  So today I started to sort it, and in the ReJanimate style, I started small.  That pointless pot of pens on the windowsill in J’s bedroom? Dead ones chucked out, the good ones in my school bag.  Pot gone.  Woop.

Plastic box under bed raided for post-it notes, tippex, board markers and all the other things I don’t want or need at home, but both want and need at work.

Bonus one: found some teenage fiction books for my shelf at school.

Bonus two: found a book and listed it for £8 (!!) on Amazon. Woop woop!

Space acquired, classroom replenished, crap thoroughly ReJanimated!

January 10th: reJanimated some school supplies.

How to keep your resolutions – by cheating.

As I was clearing up after today’s project, I wondered why I’ve managed to stick to this resolution when so many have gone to the wayside long before the 9-day mark (tell me I’m not alone in this!). Then I worked it out – it’s because I’m cheating! I don’t mean I’m lying about having done a ReJanimate task every day, or that I’ve faked photos or anything like that (surely nobody would fake a photo of an airing cupboard?), but in the way that Amazon cheats.  No, silly, I’m not a multimillion pound tax-dodger, (topical!) but in they under-promise and over-deliver.

You see, basically, what I wanted my resolution to be was to sort my entire life out from top to bottom – every piece of paper filed and alphabetised, a spreadsheet to keep my cutlery sorted, a pyjama schedule to make sure J never wears the same pair twice in a week, that sort of thing.  Like those blogs where people have only one colour of clothes pegs and keep them in a cunning, ribbon-bedecked jar, rather than handily scattered all over the lawn like I do.

But you don’t make that resolution.  That’s nuts.  You’d never achieve it and every moment you weren’t stitching an uber-caddy to keep your iPod, kindle and tablet caddies in you’d feel you were failing.

ReJanimate lets you set your sights way low, on the other hand, and feel very pleased when you do more!

Today I just set myself the task of emptying a little basket we had and redistributing the contents.  Done.  Easy. Energy to spare.  So I took the basket downstairs and used it to store the crayons, paper and sticker books in the side board.  Then I stacked the photo albums neatly, threw away some old paperwork and boxes, sorted out the place mats and coasters and dumped a load of paper in the recycling.  By the time I got to the drawers, though, I’d had enough, so in stopped.  Am I going to get annoyed with myself for not doing the drawers?  Hell to the nizzle, I was only going to empty that one basket! I’ve kicked ass this evening!

And that, my friends, is how to cheat your way to success.

And here are my cupboards:

January 9th: rejanimated sideboard cupboards.

Five Minute Wonder

The great thing about ReJanimate is that its not just huge projects that count, it’s five-minute jobs as well.  In fact, the five minute jobs are really at the heart of the whole thing, because it’s about changing little things. So when you do a task you’ve been putting off for ages, walking past it every day thinking “I should really…”, you’re rejanimating not just that object or place, but that tiny part of your brain that was being occupied with that thought every day.  That’s right, on this blog I’m not only providing scintillating inside-drawer pics, but I’m giving you a bigger brain.  For free.  What kind of tea do I drink? Generosi-TEA.  Yeah.

Today I reJanimated a bit of my brain, then, by folding everything in my airing cupboard and stacking it neatly.  Look, I never said I was going to be splitting the atom here!  Anyway, it did look a lot like an explosion in a slightly-worn-duvet-cover shop (don’t you just hate those shops? GREAT sales though) and now it doesn’t, and now I don’t have to close the door of it really quickly so I’m not found three days later under a pile of towels we keep for mopping stuff up with. (“Police say the missing woman was eventually found under what appeared to be once-good tea towels.  A neighbour said she was shocked by the news: ‘I always saw her buying Vanish but apparently those towels had never seen a drop of it.  I shudder to think what her nets are like.'”)

And here we have it.  Who thought folding could give you a bigger brain, eh?

January 8th: reJanimated the airing cupboard.

A simple idea for a simple day

First day back at work after Christmas – luckily a low-key INSET day so a chance to get us all back into the old routines without too much stress.  And a chance to reJanimate my classroom a little.  I say a little because, unlike my house, my classroom is actually pretty tidy and well-organised!  Drawers are labelled, papers kept together neatly and I can lay my hands on, not one, but upwards of a dozen pairs of scissors any time I like.

 I know.

 It cray-cray.

Anyway.  So I went for the absolute simplest form of reJanimation – digging something out and using it again.  In a dark, dark building, up some dark, dark stairs, in a dark, dark classroom (bear with me, this is going somewhere), in a dark, dark cupboard, in a dark, dark box…were some books.  And papers and stuff.  Sorry, that was anti-climactic.

These are the books and papers and stuff I stored when I went on maternity leave.  There’s good stuff in there, too, which is why I didn’t just chuck it all, but it’s no good to anyone in a dark, dark cupboard [that’s enough: Ed] so I went up there today and liberated some books for my bookshelf, a veritable sheaf of line guides and a load of resources that will come in very handy this year and that I would obviously just have remade if I hadn’t been bothered to go up there.

Then I spent a pleasant few minutes reorganising my drawer and desk tidies.  Ahh.  Let’s just look at them for a moment.  Take some time out and enjoy them.  Check out the way those glue sticks are lined up, the little box crenellated with paper clips.  Don’t call me sad.

January 7th: reJanimated my classroom.

Put it in a Box

ReJanimating isn’t just about saving money, it’s about unleashing potential in things.  And what could be more of an emblem of potential than the humble gift voucher?  I don’t know about you, but I always hold onto them for ages, waiting for the perfect item to buy. Of course, by the time you wait for so long, you forget you have them, and by that time you find they don’t even sell anything for 12/6.

I had a gift voucher that had been a present for J’s birthday (five months ago!). Now, this child needs no more toys, no more clothes…so what to spend it on?  It was only after surveying his Christmas swag pile that I decided to look for some better toy storage (what is referred to in catalogues as “Storage Solutions”).  So I went and spent his voucher on this, and I’m very pleased with it.

I love that he can see the books clearly and reach them down for himself, and it’s also let me ReJanimate some toys by rescuing them from the hellish tumble at the bottom of the toy box, where pirates rub shoulders with Olympic mascots,  puzzle pieces and always at least one MegaBlok.  Finally the pirates have the space they’ve always dreamed of!

It does make his room start to look like a boy’s room, though, not an baby one, which is a bit of a sniff moment, but I suppose it’s inevitable.
January 6th: reJanimated some gift vouchers into some toy shelves.

Framed

So, it seems the thing is, once you’ve reJanimated one thing, it gets you thinking about others!  As a result I have loads of things I achieved today; firstly, dug a long-unworn pair of trousers out and wore them (this has NOTHING AT ALL to do with post-Christmas podge making the rest of my trousers not fit, no sir),and secondly, when my reprinted photos arrived in the post, rather than flick through them and put them aside for another day, I took the time to fill my albums (looooong put off – one was J’s “Baby’s First Christmas” album, which was actually Christmas 2011.  Oops.

However, thinking about that inspired me to dig out a couple of cheap framed prints I’d hung in our last house.  They didn’t go anywhere here, so I took the prints out and used Photoshop to resize some Bob the Builder pictures I found online.  Then I hung them over J’s cot so he can amuse himself by lying in bed saying “Dizzy!  Bob-bob! Bud!” to himself.

That photo is awful, but it just shows what we already have lying around ready to be put to use.

January 5th: reJanimated some old frames with new pictures.

Some Like it Slightly Less Hot, Actually

An easy one today as I was quite busy – instead of pulling on the same old coat, I went a-delving under the stairs.

Having been assured that all signs pointed to a winter filled with depths of cold the likes of which had ne’er been seen before (I don’t know why discussing the weather makes me talk like an old farmer, but it does. Deal with it.) I bought a Merrell Haven – an extremely toasty, well-insulated coat.  It keeps all the chills out and makes me really snug and warm. Which is great in freezing weather, but it was 11 degrees today. Wear that and you start to understand how a jacket potato feels, slowly but surely heating up to the point where yes, you might explode, if you haven’t been stabbed a few times with a fork. (Analogy fail.  Sorry.)

So it was spelunking gear on, safety rope attached and under the stairs I went, into That pile.  You know the one, the pile of all the coats you’ve ever owned, ever.  Scientists have proved that on average, each person keeps 94.7% of all the coats they’ve ever had* and that means every under stairs cupboard contains at least fifteen coats of varying sizes, styles and degrees of decrepitude.  Throwing aside my duffel coat from junior school, the Girl Power era turquoise pleather cropped jacket and the full-length fun-fur Muppet-skin coat,  I found a cord blazer that had once been a wardrobe staple but got thrown aside for the Hotinator (as I call my Haven). Together with my GIANT SCARF (seriously, I own tents with less fabric) I rocked that bad boy all day.  And I found an unused tissue in the pocket.  It’s like that tissue was free! That’s a penny in my purse, good buddy.

January 4th – ReJanimated an old coat.

* might be a lie.

Life Through a Lens

Ok, this is kind of a cheat as I started it yesterday.  But it started as a little, teeny-tiny reJanimate and it ended up as a massive one, so it’s definitely two days’ worth.

It started with a boy.  Doesn’t it always?  This boy happened to be my little boy; my son, J.  Who also happens to be the absolute spitting image of his dad (no beady eyes at the milkman round here, no sir).  It was while contemplating the incredible cuteness of J that I remembered a pile of old photo albums we had; pictures from my husband’s childhood and of his mum and dad, lent to us by his sister.  We’ve had them about six months and I’ve always been about to scan them in and reprint them, but of course, there’s always a good reason why not – the scanner’s a pain in the arse to set up (God, though, it really is), I don’t want J to get sticky fingers all over them (a very very real possibility for any belonging at any time of the day or night – don’t get me started on the morning I found half a banana in my boot on the way out of the door), I need to do something Very Important like eat half a tub of Celebrations while playing Words With Friends on my tablet…OK, they’re all crap excuses and the fact is I’m lazy.

But inspired in a reJanimate kind of way, I decided it was time to bring them back to life.  Not just by scanning them, but by Photoshopping out blemishes and scratches, cataloguing them properly into folders and ordering the prints.

Actually, this is one time I half wish I’d chosen lazy.  SEVEN HOURS it took me, although that also included taking a deep breath and wading into the murky waters that is the DSLR’s SD card (8gb of storage and we’re permanently at the take-one-delete-one stage.  Not good enough.)  Now that I knew was a big job, fraught with possible perils like the hard drive suddenly ejecting itself, multiple files with the same name and of course the ever-present threat of the Freeze For No Reason.

Now, however, all the photos are scanned, labelled, put into folders, uploaded for safe keeping and I’ve ordered a load of prints (OK, this cost me money but it’s one of those things that are really worth it.)

January 3rd: reJanimated old photos

Cocktails for breakfast

Go and have a look in the cupboard where you keep your glasses (your drinking glasses, that is; I doubt you have a cupboard just for spectacles unless you’re Su Pollard, in which case Su Pollard reads my blog? Awesome!). Let me guess – shelves of extremely random glassware, of which you only ever use the same – let’s say four – glasses. The sad remains of once-proud sets, random promotional glasses bought or stolen long ago, novelty tankards saying things like “World’s Best Chip Shop Owner” (wait, where did that come from?) and some special wine glasses you bought in a fit of Nigella one year to put on the table at Christmas and immediately forgot all about.

Today’s ReJanimate suggestion is to use all your glasses.  No point having best ones if you never use them! Let the kids drink their smoothies from the Christmas glasses (you might want to make them sit in some kind of duvet fortress just in case), let your husband enjoy the brief thrill that a passer-by might think he actually is the world’s best chip shop owner, and as for you, drink juice out of a posh glass.

I am drinking my orange juice from this Martini glass.

Lovely, isn’t it? I got two as a present from friends about ten years ago and have mostly been too afraid to use them. I’m not much for a Martini drinker but it always seemed too nice to use for anything else.  But how is it being appreciated sitting in my glasses cupboard?

January 2nd: reJanimated an old glass.

Why don’t you try this today, and let me know what you found?

Cheers!