Dust Be Gone

Thank you so much to all who commented so sweetly last week about my small bathroom and its bouquet of glass! The bathroom refurbishment also gave us the opportunity to do something about my dressing room. Here is where I admit that about the only reason I can call it a dressing room is because it contains my closet, something that was missing in this 1920 farmhouse bedroom when we bought it.

Other than the closet, this tiny 8 x 10 room also held an ironing board that always seemed to be up and was a handy place to hold a multitude of things and even a surface to wrap Christmas presents. The main thing that used to be in this little room was a huge industrial shelving rack holding my collection of mostly women's magazines dating back to 1865. The collection has taken me over thirty years to amass and is all inventoried. They have given me hours of good reading but they were a dusting nightmare. I know I should have gotten before pictures but here is a shot of some of the magazines stacked all over our small dining room during the redo. We call it the small dining room but there is no large dining room.

After painting the bathroom and dressing room, in came a large piece of furniture, our old entertainment center. Nobody seems to want these old dinosaurs, even on Craigslist, but I knew it would look much better than the industrial shelving in my "dressing room."

I know bloggers won't understand why I didn't work some magic on this old cabinet with some Annie Sloan Chalk Paint. Sigh. No, I didn't, and R.H. made it perfectly clear that he was not going to either.

What he and our son Gurn did, however, was to make sturdy new shelves in it to hold all those magazines and a nice solid back to keep out all the dust.

A nice young friend spent five hours dusting each magazine and then arranging them not only by year but by month, January through December. I'm talking about 1865 through 1970. It was a dusty job.

Gurn made labels so that I can see the years at a glance.

Son Zack, who moved all the dusty magazines out before work began, had said, "Mom, we're giving all these magazines to Goodwill when you're gone."

"Heck no," big brother Gurn said. "I'll take them all and sell them on eBay!"

(Where buyers will tear them apart and sell all the old Coca-Cola adds on eBay themselves. Arrgh! Don't get me started on that destructive practice, except to say, "Once they're gone, they're gone for good, folks.")

My dusty dressing room is gone too. There is even a place for the ironing board to hide.

I'm never going to mess up this room again. I promise.