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Well, I was going to blog at least twice a week.

Or at least once a week.

Or, at the very least, once a fortnight.

Then April happened…  And I don’t have any good excuses except to say that the writing muse wasn’t with me.  Which is, frankly, a sucky excuse because I know better than to wait for the muses to move me.

Spring has sprung in Chicago (kinda), which gets my gardening nerd going.  One problem for my inner gardening nerd: we have no outdoor gardening space.  Just a tiny deck in the back that has just enough square footage for the grill and ZERO sunlight.

What about indoor gardening?  Well…  I’m lazy.  Which means that watering doesn’t happen as frequently as it needs to happen for an indoor garden.  Also, we don’t have much direct sunlight.  Oodles and oodles of indirect light (our home is wonderfully bright and airy), but not many actual sunbeams.  Since I favor planting useful, edible plants, that is really a problem.

Nevertheless, I keep dreaming about a little container garden in the sunroom/office.  Cat-friendly plants in self-watering containers that require little direct light but still look and taste good…  Yeah, this is a pipedream.

But dreaming is free and fun (in moderation).  And in the meantime, I’ll plant our Aerogarden with chives and basil in the kitchen (where there’s easy water access and we’d actually use the plants!) and try to be content with that.  Even though the Aerogarden totally feels like cheating…

One of the elements I adore about our home is the foyer.  I didn’t realize it until we had one, but it’s just so nice to have a space wherein you shed and store all the outerwear and shoes.  In a perfect world, I’d furnish the foyer with a small desk or console table (to handle all incoming and outgoing mail), a small bench (for putting shoes on and taking shoes off), and a shoe rack.  Oh, and an indoor/outdoor rug that’s machine washable would be nice to keep dirt from tracking in.

But there’s three doorways in the foyer: one for the entrance, one for the hall closet, and one that leads to a small den (which we’ve repurposed into a storage room), plus the archway that that leads to the living room.  Three sets of doors in this small space makes furniture placement… interesting.

So it’s always been a bit of a hodgepodge: all sorts of random furniture has made its way there.  Right now, we’ve got two plant stands in lieu of a console table, one rolling cart that doesn’t hold my shoes very well but does hold a basket on top for all our outdoor accessories (scarves, gloves, hats, etc), and a small shoe rack for Chris’ shoes.  No bench.  No effective mail system.  But what is driving me nuts the most right now is dealing with my shoes and boots.  It’s freakin’ cold here in Chicago and I love knee-high boots, but storing these things are a complete PITA.  In a perfect world I’d have something like this:

The Sarah Storage Tower from Ballard Designs (but I think I’d want this in white/cream).  At this point, however, this piece is aspirational, not attainable.  So this is what I’ve got instead:

It doesn’t handle my boots, but it handles plenty of shoes.  Unfortunately, Chris doesn’t think it’s sturdy enough to serve as a bench if it’s on its side (and he’s probably right), but it will tidy up my shoes.  Now all I need is to figure out how to work in a bench or a chair and perhaps a boot tray…