Progress report.

My house is a mess.

And I'm not talking about a "stuff strewn about" kind of mess (please never open my bedroom door). We are fairly tidy and try really hard to stay on top of the day-to-day clutter because when four people and a dog share 1200 square feet and one bathroom, it gets ugly pretty quickly. Think nightmarish stacks of school papers and overflowing laundry baskets and piles of playground pebbles and lots and lots of dog hair.

Oh, the dog hair. Yeah, we have to stay on top of that. Both for physical and mental health reasons. But, I digress.

The mess to which I'm currently referring is more of a "what in heaven's name is happening in here?" kind of mess.

I'll tell you what's happening in here ("here" being my first floor): I've lost my everloving mind.

Remember that challenge I gave myself earlier this year? The one about injecting color into my drab, tan house through thrift store shopping and DIY projects?

Idiotic. Turns out I love tan. Tan's my favorite. You know why? Because loving tan means I DON'T HAVE TO DO ANYTHING ELSE.

Seriously, who has time for this? When am I supposed to thrift and craft and paint and sew? I currently have about 52 minutes between Calvin actually going to sleep (vs. when we put him to bed an hour and eight minutes earlier) and me actually going to sleep. And call me crazy, but I prefer to use those 52 minutes to shovel ice cream in my mouth, flip through my secondhand copies of People, and half-watch The Bridge.

Occasionally, though, I find a burst of energy and wholly devote myself to this project. This typically occurs on nights when Nate isn't home. Then he comes home, looks from me to the mess I've made, raises an eyebrow, and says "whatcha doin'?"

Nate's "whatcha doin'?" is the equivalent of "what in heaven's name is happening in here?"

A fair question, and one I ask myself pretty much every time I walk in the front door these days.

On one such evening, I took down everything on my living and dining room walls. That was in June. Guess what's hanging on my walls now? Nails.

I also purchased some fabric and folded it around a curtain rod just to get a feel for how it would look in my entryway window. Three weeks ago. It's still there. And it must look okay because last weekend my mother-in-law said "oh, you got your curtain done!" Um, no. I got my fabric shoved up in that window. But if no one can tell the difference between something I've sewn and something I shoved, why bother sewing it?

And let's not get started on the insane mix of styles represented in my house right now. Modern, vintage, and traditional do not work as well together in one room (or one house) as you might think. Every time I change one thing, I realize I need to change ten more for it to work.

Thus the mess.

In all seriousness, redecorating is hard work. Really hard. When your goal is to make your house more colorful and family-friendly and everything you own is dark wood and breakable and you don't have money to buy all new stuff, well...it takes some doing.

I'm totally frustrated, but I know this has been good for me. It's helping me realize that matching does not always equal style, that nothing bad is going to happen if I take some chances and come up with crazy combinations that appeal to me and no one else, and that the beauty of our home is the result of how we live in it — not how we decorate it.

Of course we all know I will be freaking out trying to make sense of this disaster before my sister-in-law's baby shower next month.

Or maybe not. Maybe I'll just do what I did before Audra's party and take everything down. I'm halfway there already.