Spring cleaning

Since it has been 70 DEGREES THIS WEEKEND I wanted to work on some random projects around the house. Earlier this week, I had bought a bunch of tiles from Flor.com to become our new dining room rug and they thankfully arrived on Friday! Wooo, crazy Friday night at our house! Sarah is a 12-year-old elderly stateshound and when sick or under stress has let us know by exploding in some portion of the dining room. Always the dining room. What can I say, she's a creature of habit. I have actually watched her start to get sick (usually from eating grass outside) and just before she pukes in the kitchen on its convenient tile, she will sprint on her creaky little legs to the dining room to puke on the rug in there. Ugh.

I have an elaborate system for cleaning the carpet but it's time-consuming and a bit neurotic. It keeps the carpet in good shape, but it takes a good hour each time it happens. When you have company showing up 45 minutes after you've discovered an accident or you're already late for work, this can prove inconvenient.

We started using pee pads in her favorite spots on the old rug and those were working great except that our dining room didn't have much decor what with the green and white diaper mats strewn everywhere. So I bit the bullet and bought a new rug.

This isn't just any rug, though. It's from Flor.com. They sell individual tiles that are 19.7" square (it's a metric thing) so you can mix and match. They all have rubber backings on them and they clean up amazingly well. I first read about them on Dooce.com when Heather raved on how she got wine off her carpet with a baby wipe - a baby wipe, people! I was instantly hooked. But they're not cheap and I was chicken to pick out a set for a long time. Until now.

I ordered 49 tiles for the dining room, not really sure how many of them I would use and how many would become spares. With some tinkering, we worked out 35 of them in a 5x7 pattern and have stored the remaining 14 to be replacement tiles should anyone decide to pee or puke in the dining room (not naming any names or anything). I can't tell you how pleased I am with these tiles! They went down super easy, the pattern was fun to make, they're designed for heavy traffic and if we decide to put them somewhere else, they stack and fit in the back seat of a car. Try that with a Persian rug!

I'm now shopping for tiles for my craft room, which is a funky shape with two doors in it and lends itself well to tiles of carpet. Soon I will have no excuse to not be sewing all the time!

Along those lines, we finally cleaned all the crap out of the spare bedroom upstairs. I still had Christmas wrapping paper and accessories up there (and lots of them) so it was time to tidy. Those went to storage in the utility room, the piles of recycling made it to the actual recycling can and after six months of living here, I finally took all my fabric out of the trash bags we moved them in and into tubs on shelves. I have a lot of fabric and I really should work my way through these piles before I buy any more. The whole room, though, looks a thousand times bigger! Hooray finally moving in!

Other than that, I haven't accomplished much. I'm headed outside to enjoy the sunshine a bit more before it's back to work for another week. Here's hoping this weather holds out or at least comes back to stay soon!