Sweet Catastrophe

I spend a lot of time in my computer chair. A lot. I watch television and movies on my computer. I read on my computer. I listen to music on my computer. I play games on my computer. I chat with friends on my computer. And that’s all in addition to general internet things like social networking and blog reading. A lot of the hobbies other people enjoy on their couches or elsewhere, I do at my computer.

This means my current computer chair, while ridiculously fabulous and amazing, has seen better days. It really is a great chair– pretty much perfect for me, but it came to me second-hand. It had been lightly used, but still used, and I’ve put a considerable amount of mileage on it in the last 4 years, so it’s time. Minor tears in the leather have torn open into noticeable holes, and if you sit just right you can feel the bolts in the seat. Poor chair. It’s been good to me.

I was so lucky to find that one on sale so now I’m looking for something similar in a lower price range. This Madison Leather Executive Office Chair would probably do the trick. I need something wide enough that I can curl up in or sit with my legs in the chair and just be comfy. And I have to have something with a high back, and enough padding to keep my rear cozy for extended periods of time.

A hundred bucks is definitely in my price range for something I plan to use that long and free shipping is always a plus, especially with furniture.

I’ll add this to my ever-growing list of ‘must-haves’ that need to be saved for. Gotta make it through Kristi’s wedding first!

I haven’t had a headboard for quite some time, but I recently stumbled across a design that really appealed to me, and now I kind of have to have it. If you think about it, I’m sure you could guess what that might be– storage bed =)

Currently I’m eying this Manhattan 6-Drawer King Size Platform Storage Bed and Storage Headboard. The image isn’t very detailed, but the drawers run on either side with a 20″ depth with finger pulls on the bottom edge of the drawers to eliminate the need for knobs that I’d inevitably stub my toes on! The shelves on the headboard are 11″ deep– I’d just have to keep Ryan from even beginning a habit of leaving drinks there or we’d end up with soaked heads!

I think I want to replace my desk first, though. I just bought something on sale when I moved out on my own and while it’s held up great, I hate the thing. It’s wobbly and nothing but particle board and metal rods.

I want this Corner Work Station! I love corner units, but so many of them have shelving up top and only open room for a single monitor– I need an open area to fit both monitors. And I love that this one has a little mobile CPU stand. My case has fans on the top and both sides so I can’t shove it on a shelf and I really hate to just have it sitting on the floor. I’m gonna keep looking around to see if I can find it in a darker wood, though.

Despite recent financial pains, I’m not writing off all the things I want to do. We’ll figure out a way to make everything work, and I’m just gonna keep saving every penny I can, and working towards our goals bit by bit, and just going for them when the opportunity presents itself.

The last thing we’ll be working on when we upgrade all of our living room furniture will be the coffee tables and end tables. Believe it or not, we actually have a matching set already *shock* and they’re in great shape, I just don’t like them. They’re made to look like green marble and yeah….they’re just not pretty at all. But for now they’re functional and look nice enough since they aren’t falling apart or anything.

I finally went through all the sale items today to see if I could even find pieces I like, I’m still a little on the picky side, but I was actually surprised to find something I loved on the first page of results!

This Jamison Rectangular Storage Cocktail Table by Ashley Furniture is perfection! It’s got almost the exact coloring I want, offers 4 working drawers for storage, and this thing weighs 100 lbs! It’s not particle board that’s going to fall apart after a year or two of abuse, this is hardwood. Ryan can be pretty hard on furniture, so something sturdy is a must.

And they have the perfect matching Jamison Rectangular Storage End Table as well! Again, this one is 80 lbs so it’s a good, solid piece of furniture. And I love the big storage space. The cabinet would be a great space for tossing random clutter into when you have unexpected guests ;)

And believe it or not, both pieces offer free shipping! I hope I can still find these, or something similar when we can afford to get them.

After we secure new couches for the living room, I’ve got my eyes on a new entertainment center. The one we have now is probably at least 12 years old and was never really meant to last this long, but it has! I’d like to retire it to the bedroom, for now, and get something nicer for all our pretty things in the living room.

Compartments are key– we’re looking at something to hold the television, Xbox, Wii, PS2, controllers and other gaming accessories, video games, my DVD box sets, and ideally all the rest of my DVDs. That’s not a must-have, but it would definitely be nice.

Drawers and cabinets are fine, but I’d actually like my DVDs in an open display. *shrug* I dunno if I just like seeing all my DVDs out there, or if it’s just how pretty and organized they always are even if the rest of the house is a disaster– lol!

I really like the look of this entertainment center, but I don’t like that it’s three separate pieces. I guess that gives more options for how to arrange it all, but I really like it all as one unit.

I could get behind this corner stand, for sure. It wouldn’t hold all my movies, but the consoles would all fit nicely and shoving it back into the corner would open up space for other shelving. It looks a lot brighter here in the picture, but I usually like a good cherry stain.

I like all the space this modular unit offers. I think I could get my whole collection there. I’m not sold on the composite, but I do like the design. I like the open feel– it would be suitable for the small living room we have now.

Again, I just wish money would fall from the sky and land in my Jeep or something. I hate knowing what I want and not being able to just go out and get it. For now I’ll have to stick to putting money aside and keeping my eyes peeled for an awesome sale and just hope I have the money for it when I see it! I think that’s the worst– finding an incredible deal and having to pass it up *cringe*

It wasn’t terribly long ago that I had an epiphany and realized it was time to start working on some more adult furniture for my home. Time to slowly phase out all the hand-me-down pieces and things left over from my childhood– I’ve had my entertainment center since I was like 12. I don’t think that thing was ever meant to last so long.

Unless we just run into items on sale, I’m going couches first, then entertainment center, then coffee table/end tables.

Our poor couches– we haven’t actually had them for too long, and they were nice couches at some point, but they’re just old and worn. They’re a cream leather and ugh, the cushions won’t stay in place for anything. But I paid $20 for both of them so *shrug* Can’t exactly complain.

So now that we’re talking about it I’m having to actually think about what colors I want in my living room. If I thought I could get away with it, I’d have every room done in red and black, I swear, but I think I finally talked myself into limiting that to the master bathroom and kitchen…ya know, when a few million dollars falls from the sky into my arms and I get to design or redo my own home.

I think I want to go with a warm brown and maybe blue. This leather couch would be perfect, or even the whole set. I thought I’d get tired of leather and the way it holds the cold, but really that’s minor compared to the benefits– the easy cleaning and great look. I always use a blanket on the couch anyway. I really want to go with a solid, dark wood on the entertainment and shelving in the room so the deeper brown in this couch would really fit great with that.

Just one detail at a time!

…and I want my electric blanket. But let me tell you a story. I went on a rampage, organizing all our junk in both closets a long time ago. I pulled the cord off my electric blanket so I could fold it up more easily. At some point, the blanket got moved and the cord did not. I spent all last fall and winter searching for that cord at random times with no luck.

Sometime last Spring, I found the cord, I remember finding the cord and being incredibly annoyed with myself.

So of course I moved it and put it with the folded up electric blanket.

WRONG. I left the damn thing where it was and now I can’t find it again!! I’m not going without it again!

I was thinking about snagging one on sale this weekend, but I ended up avoiding stores as best as I could. I wouldn’t even go out for groceries.

<<< Mine is just like this one, only in green. I think now I’ll upgrade to a king size for our bed.

I keep it cold in here even in the winter, I can’t sleep when I’m just hot, and there’s nothing more relaxing than being cold and crawling under a warm blanket to slowly raise your temperature.

I think we’ve always had blankets from Sunbeam so I know they won’t burn up and they’ll warm up just as quickly at the end of the year as they did at the beginning. And I think all the ones I’ve ever had have come with an auto-off feature after a certain amount of time so I don’t have to worry about it overheating if I’m bunkering down to catch up on sleep or I forget to turn it off.

Yeah, I’m definitely not doing without my electric blanket again this year. Ryan is warm, but a blanket is better.

Wow! I can’t even begin to tell you how impressed I am with this cleaner!

Our apartment is old, and hasn’t been professionally cleaned in probably more than ten years. We’re not in the typical setup where people move out, the landlord sends someone in to clean and repaint, and then someone new moves in. These apartments have been passed down– sometimes switching out one roommate at a time. For the past 6 years it’s been primarily boys so only mild surface cleaning has been done.

Our bathroom was the worst. (I can’t tell you how excited I am to put that in past tense!!) Every crevice of the shower floor and wall was covered in a gray or yellow sheen of years of impacted mildew and soap scum. It was bearable only because it had been there so long that it was pretty much just a part of the tile, ya know?

In the time I’ve been here I’ve tried multiple things only to spend over an hour scrubbing to get maybe a square foot looking clean….yeah I just can’t do an entire shower like that– who could?

I saw this Arm & Hammer in the store and I had been looking for something with a bit of bleach in it to give the shower another go. I completely ignored the ’scrub free’ part since that’s NEVER true. It was only a few dollars so I threw it in the cart.

I’m still at a loss for words for how great this worked. I sprayed it on, expecting some scrub time but it was never needed! Most areas I never touched at all! The most I had to do was wipe a sponge across the major problem areas with very minimum pressure. At first I thought I’d have to scrub with the rough side of the sponge through each of the crevices between tiles, but I soon realized that if I let the product sit for the suggested amount of time, it took care of it!

I don’t have a before picture of the shower because I wasn’t expecting these miraculous results, but you can see now that my shower walls are totally white again and the window in the shower– I honestly always thought the glass was frosted. I’ve wiped it down many times before with no different results so I had no reason to believe otherwise until now!! I’m only partially done with the ceiling so you can see the differences there with just spraying and you start seeing the results by the time you start on another section!

My bathroom is almost spotless now! It’s ridiculous, but I’ve been stopping to look at it often. It excites me that much….

Anyhow, the only downside really is that it is a bleach cleaner and comes with the strong smell. Because of my asthma, I’ve been having to do it all in sections to get away from the fumes for a bit.

The smell lingers, but not in a way that makes it hard to be in the bathroom, and in my experience it’s been gone by the next day.

There’s a lemon-scented version without the bleach that I came across a few great reviews of as well, so I’m definitely going to look for that one to try for maintaining this cleanliness without the bleach smell.

I’ve got some staining on the kitchen counters as well so I want to try it out there and see if it can stand up to that. I’ll let you know!

If you try one new cleaning product this year, I highly recommend that it be this one.

No. Just no.

I’ve been having a problem with Willow lately. Since there’s a cat outside getting attention, she’s stopped covering her waste in an attempt to establish dominance (so a Google search tells me, anyway). Of course it’s also summer so she’s drinking a lot more water so she’s going more often.

The automatic box was becoming a mess, so I got a cheap box to see if maybe a change of scenery would do her some good, and it has! She’s not covering 100%, but I’d say about 85%.

I’ve been trying different litters too to cope with the extra moisture and jeeze–this Tidy Cats Scoop (for multiple cats no less) sucks big time! It doesn’t absorb anything! It just turns into something akin to thick modeling clay that sticks to the box like glue! I had such a fight trying to get it all out and even ended up having to scrub the scoop by hand after using it to pry the clumps out. It was NOT a pleasant experience!

So skip over this one–seriously! Of course I’ve used litters that I’ve liked more than others, but I’ve never thought, “wow this litter seriously sucks” until this one!

I’m happy to say that while searching for a picture, I ran across a product review praising the super cheap litter I just picked up last night and they used a picture of this Tidy Cats as an example of one of the crappy, overpriced litters!

Not long after I moved to Valdosta, I went out and invested a little under $100 on a LitterMaid self-cleaning unit. It’s one of the best household purchases I’ve ever made.

Inside the box is a small sensor that detects when your cat is there. Ten minutes after your cat exits (it gives kitty plenty of time to get away) a row of tines slides through to sift the litter and drop anything into the receptacle at the end.

I love this thing. It takes very little to get used to the small bit of noise it makes when sifting through the litter. The receptacles keep the air fresh since any waste is basically sealed inside.

It was a great investment up front and only a small expense to upkeep. There are 12 waste receptacles in a box and I usually pick up a box for under $13. And you can extend their use by simply emptying the receptacles rather than throwing them out.

I wouldn’t trade my LitterMaid for anything. I don’t think you could pay me to go back to a regular box.

Back in the house, Willow ended up with a flea problem. The house was prone to bugs, with the new construction surrounding us and Willow got out a handful of times.

The house was covered–especially my bed. After using the miracle pill from the vet, I had to find something to use on the house so she wouldn’t just get fleas all over again.

I found this Bengal flea spray in Wal Mart and after reading the specs, I thought I’d give it a try.

FULL SEASON FLEA KILLER PLUS II

• Kills three stages of the flea (egg, larvae, adult)
• NYLAR – Breaks life cycle of the flea
• Controls reinfestation for 210 days

Sounded good to me! I sprayed half a can around the doors, randomly over most of the carpet, and after realizing it didn’t have any weird odor–my bed! I had two cans, but I never had to use it again. That half a can did it for the entire house and we never saw a single flea again.

I’m definitely a Bengal advocate now and I’ve since recommended this to three other people who’ve all reported back the same amazing results as I encountered!