Very Exciting News and Before and During Pics of My Sewing Studio

Well, now! Where do I begin? In my last post I stated that I had returned to work after being off for 32 months on LTD for two bad shoulders that needed surgery. My first day back was November 1st. The first week of orientation was ehh, ok, not so bad. I had so been looking forward to getting back to work and doing what I do best....nursing! What I did not anticipate was my RESPONSE to the rekindling of ALL THE STRESS RELATED TO THE JOB!!! After the first week I developed hives the size of dinner plates....all over my body!! At first I thought it was from the paint fumes, but that thought was pushed aside when the hives became WORSE when I was at work the second week. THEN!!!....I started having chest pressure, nausea and vomiting, my blood pressure was 165/98 and I had worsening insomnia (I forgot to mention that I had also been unable to sleep since returning to work).  OH MY GOD WAS I UPSET!!!!  Here I was returning to a job I loved and my body was saying,  "NO! DON'T GO THERE!! RUN! RUN! AS FAST AS YOU CAN!!!

I also could not help but notice that the corporate atmosphere of the hospital had changed. IT WAS NOT FRIENDLY! Yes, I renewed the acquaintance of some coworkers, but I could not ignore the fact that there was an underlying current of negative electricity snaking its way through the comings and goings of all that was going on there!

Oh how I cried! And oh how TERRIBLE I FELT FOR LETTING MY FAMILY DOWN!!!  And I tried to reason with myself about how wonderful THE MONEY WOULD BE!!! How we would be able to pay off the bills that had accumulated and we would finally be able to re-side the house and put in new windows and travel and, and, and........

And then........

Well.................

I came to my senses!

I will repeat.

I CAME TO MY SENSES!!

My senses were saying.....my senses were SENSING (and screaming!!!!)  that I was IN DANGER!!

I realized that if I stayed there it would not be long before I was sick again either physically or mentally!!  I tell ya, the chest pressure I had was very real AND I DENIED IT!!! And I am a frickin' cardiac nurse!!!

SO!

I QUIT!

I DID!

I RESIGNED!

IMMEDIATELY!

(after some long hard thinking!!)

On Monday November 15th!

And so now I am a free agent. I am unemployed. I have no income.

BUT!

I know....

that everything is going to work out.

One door has closed...............

Another door has opened!

Please come with me as I walk you through a new beginning.

This used to be our daughter's bedroom. She painted it a dark chocolate brown a number of years ago. She moved out on her own a few weeks ago. A few hours after she was gone (October 30th) I started to tear up the carpet!!!

  

And rip out the underlay.

It was such a dark room. But it was her room, her cave, her refuge from the world of college and every day life.

Ali graduated in June from Culinary Management at Loyalist College in Belleville and is now working fulltime hours at Pizza Hut. She loves it there and they love her! And she loves being on her own!

I gotta tell ya that I am not a dark chocolate person when it comes to a paint colour. NOPE! Not this GIRL!!

I have wanted to get into this room and wave my magic pink shabby wand for years!!!

The ceiling angles and nooks and crannies are soooooo English cottage beautiful!!

The windows look out onto my perennial gardens (and in these photos, the SNOW! that was falling that day (October 31st)

This is my 24 year old son, Wes. He is so big and strong!!! He is my hero!!! He took out all the carpet and underlay that I had ripped out!!!!   I love you Wes!!!

The heating ducts in this room are screwed up royally. We will need to rip up the sub floor in this room and the master bedroom next spring to reconnect the heating ducts which have for some unknown reason become or have been disconnected.

You can see in the next pic that someone cut a hole in the floor and then cut a hole in the heating duct to let warm air from the furnace into the room. The problem is  that (we think this is what happened) when they (the goons who did the work) were cutting the hole in the pipe, they loosened the connection from the pipe in the masterbedroom. Soooooo...not one bit of heat gets into this room. The heat just goes off into the space in the floor beneath our bedroom.

Snow on the roof October 31st, 2010.

Back to the transformation!

AH!!! 

 THIS IS MORE LIKE IT!!!

BETTER!!!

MUCH BETTER!!!!

OH YAH!!!!!

I picked up two matching bookcases at Sally Ann in Belleville. It was the opening day of their new store on Sidney St.  The bookcases were $24.99 each!!!

This wardrobe was $20.00 at an auction a few years ago.

I removed the wood spline that held in the cardboard backing and mirrors so I could paint it.

There is a piece of vintage linoleum inside on the bottom.....I kept it!!

AH!!!!   Much better all nice and clean and WHITE!!!!!

Proof that you can paint ordinary junk crap bookcases and make them shabbyfabulous!!! I used CIL Melamine paint in Ultra Pure White from Home Depot.

I had a couple of green glass knobs left over from another project so I used them on the wardrobe. You can  clik on the pic to get to a bigger pic and then clik on that pic to enlarge for a better view.

The next pic is very dark, but I wanted to show it to you because there is something very important in it. See the funny looking metal wire wine bottle rack near the middle of the pic? I used it to store the bookcase shelves while they dried after I painted them (the shelves).  You can barely see one shelf sitting along the bottle supports. My girlfriend Anne used it when she painted the doors of her kitchen cabinets. It is a fabulous idea and I will use it again when I paint my kitchen cabinets next spring!!

Are you ready?

Would you like a teaser picture?

Or two?

John Cabot roses from my Eastern Ontario November garden

A "Victoria" vignette!

Please come back tomorrow for Pink Saturday when I will be presenting my new sewing studio.

Thank you for tolerating this long post. I think that even though I wrote about two different happenings, you can see that they are inexplicably intertwined.

Oh.......

another thing to mention..........

the hives.........

the nausea..........

high blood pressure..........

and the chest pressure....

THEY ARE GONE!!!!!!!

HALLELEUJAH!!!

THANK YOU GOD!!!

Love and warm hugs,

Laura xoxoxoxo