When Pinterest Was Heavy

I’m working diligently on cleaning out the cabinets above my kitchen desk.

Yes, again. They’re the bane of my existence, truly. I even met my friend Natasha at IKEA on Sunday so she could help me pick out some containers that will help me wrangle all the things (and keep them wrangled). Creating a system that works for the long term is hard.

My first step was basically pulling everything out and tossing it onto the desk and the kitchen island haphazardly. That was also probably my first mistake because it might take me a week to slog through the piles, but I digress.

In the middle of all that chaos, I found my old school Pinterest “account”.

Yes, that’s a plastic envelope with torn catalog pages and swatches inside. That’s how we used to have to do it, kids.

When we were in the early stages of getting ready to look for a house, this house, in the fall of 2000, I started looking around for inspiration. Pottery Barn’s catalog was my favorite and in it I found the poppy rug that I wanted to design my whole living room around, the rug that we called “Bijoux’s rug” and had to replace three years ago with what ended up being “Roxie’s Rug”. Once I found that centerpiece I started collecting ideas for the rest of that room and the others, too. Right there in that envelope, preserved for posterity, are the shade of yellow we applied to our bedroom walls before painting anywhere else, the green swirly velvet that we used to reupholster a chair that belonged to my grandparents, and the Mission-style furniture pieces we purchased for our family room (Jim’s chair) and bedroom (bed and dresser).

There’s something fun about ripping a page out of a catalog or pulling swatches out of your purse when you’re at the store and need to see if something matches. I remember carrying that folder in my car for months during that fall season sixteen years ago. I’d pull the items out of it occasionally, spreading them out on the dining room table and wondering what I still needed.

I even had some old school Pinterest fails, in that I chose these items for the house on paper along with the others but never managed to bring them home:

And suddenly we’re closing in on the fall of 2016.

Last week we covered that buttery yellow on our bedroom walls with a cool blue-gray hue. It was definitely bittersweet as I reflected on the passage of time, particularly the last sixteen years in this house. There are some changes on the horizon here; I’m not ready to go into detail just yet but I will when it’s time. For now, as I clean out those stupid cabinets and throw away all kinds of things I don’t need to keep, I’ll tuck my old school Pinterest folder away for old times’ sake and upgrade my inspiration collection method to the online version.