Scrapbooking

... but not in the sense of photos and keepsakes of family events with captions. One of the architects I work with told me he keeps an inspiration book. Instead of keeping 30 years worth of Architectural Record magazine, he clips out articles and photos that inspire him and puts them in a binder.
I kind of do this with recipes. I have a pile of Food & Wine magazines; I put sticky notes on the recipes I want to try. Last year I did that and tore the recipes out that I wanted to keep.
I need to do the same thing with the Architectural Record, GreenSource, Architect magazine, Ecostructure, ED+C and Construction Specifier magazines. (I don't pay for any of those subscriptions separately; they are all "included" in my membership dues for various organizations.) I have an entire bookshelf devoted to these magazines, plus several piles around the house. They can be condensed! (Think the Hubs could reduce the car magazines, popular mechanics and porn this way? haha)

What brought this on? Several reasons:
1. magazine pile overload
2. needing inspiration for a couple projects I'm working on.
3. I don't know when we'll move out of this house, but we'd like it to be in good enough shape that we could put it on the market and let people tour it. Right now, the Cloffice doesn't make the cut.

OK. So this is where I explain the Cloffice. The house that we purchased nearly 3 years ago is only 24'x28', not including the front and back porches. There are two bedrooms. To get our king size bed to fit in the front bedroom, we had to take out the (small, we're talking 3'x3') closet. So the other bedroom is the Closet-office, or cloffice. This is because my desk, my bookcases, all of my hanging clothes and my hopechest are in here. There is also a rack with our luggage, a couple boxes of pottery from my ceramics classes, the china I got when Aunt Linda died, seeds, and the growlights. All in a room about 10'x10'. I would take a photo, but it's quite embarrassing to almost be an architect and have a room like this in my house.
Why such a small house? We bought this house because of the low payments. Our rent was $600 a month and the payment on this house is less than $350. We're doing a snowball (I think this is the website the Hubs uses.) effect on our bills and when I graduated three years ago it was our plan to have everything paid off in 5 years: credit cards, school loans, car loans and house loan. We are down to my school loans, the house loan and a couple payments on the car. (We would be done with the car loan if I hadn't lost my job for half of last year.) It's an amazing sense of freedom to say "That's paid off"!

Tweet

Pin It