Mari Bickmore Design | Having a Blast In Interior Design and Staging

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Quaratine Can be Dangerous 480 640 Mari Bickmore

Quaratine Can be Dangerous

Day 432 of my quarantine. Oops, got that wrong again. Heck, I don’t even know what day of the week it is. I thought it was Saturday all day on Thursday, but I think it really is Saturday now. Wait…I’m not quarantined anymore, but I don’t even think I hated quarantine…am I not supposed to say that?

What new things did you do during quarantine? Well, I should really ask, are you still quarantined? I think some places still are. The first few weeks I did a lot of things: reading, playing the piano, painting, and genealogy. That was the first few days anyway. Then, since it was almost spring, I took advantage and did some deep spring cleaning (hahaha…as if I do spring cleaning every year). As if. I tried to have projects everyday. We just moved into this house at the end of August. Then I was gone all of September, most of October into November, and then there were the holidays, so all those boxes that I just unpacked and put the contents somewhere I thought they should be…sort of willy-nilly…actually got put where they should go. My husband is super weird and wants all those moving boxes unpacked and taken away pretty much immediately. So it seems like you have a lot done, but in the end you just have to organize it twice.

So the first project I had was to organize the pantry. I got a little kick in the butt to do that first, as my children had gone together and given me some organizational items for the pantry for Christmas. Is that like getting a vacuum cleaner as a gift? In any event, I must’ve ordered more bins, food storage containers, and spice jars, etc., from Amazon; Bed, Bath and Beyond; and the the Container Store a dozen times, just ordered three more, but now I’m just about done…still waiting for my last order to arrive.

Then I started working on sorting my huge boxes of photos, at which time I whacked my head on the lowered ceiling under the stairs and received a pinched nerve/bulging disk in my C-spine. I still haven’t figured out how I could have hit my head that hard! May I tell you that pain is more than excruciating. For the first two weeks I just tried to find a position that would alleviate some of the pain. I gained a whole new understanding and empathy for those who have chronic pain. By day 22, although I still had residual pain and two fingers on my left hand were numb, I was able to do some small things, albeit on medication, and started working on some client’s projects thank goodness. Had an MRI which wasn’t so good, so I had to get a C6-7 spinal injection. What fun! Top that off with my mother-in-law passing away (not from coronavirus) and slicing a bit of flesh off my thumb with a mandoline (and leaving the bandage on too long so it stuck to the wound). Suffice it to say January and February were just as bad, so 2020 can just….

In any event, that was 3-1/2 weeks ago and and you can imagine how immensely grateful and blessed I feel that I was able to start playing tennis again this past Monday. I’ve been able to stay on top of design projects, even though providers are not working or working more than before, or hard to get in touch with, which has been an issue and still is. Life goes on and I hope that we get back to normal soon, even if has to be a new normal for a little while.

No exciting photos this time, but nothing exciting happened. Certainly didn’t get anyone to take a photo of me when they were sticking needles in my neck, or during the worst of the pain. So…this is what you get. It doesn’t look like an ad for pantry containers, because this is a real, working pantry and everything is not all the same color.

Excuses 1024 768 Mari Bickmore

Excuses

Don’t you hate excuses!?!?!  Well I’ve got a list for you.  I haven’t posted in ages and ages, BUT I have been otherwise engaged.  Let’s start back in March.  I spent March and April living with a family with an illness.  That is not a complaint.  I love them more than I can say and it was a blessing for me to be able to do that.  I wish beyond wishes that the need hadn’t been there, but to be able share the time with them was priceless.  Towards the end of that stay, I got the call that I had been expecting for about a year.  I didn’t answer the number the first time it rang because I knew when that number came up what it was going to be.  My biological father had passed away.  We hadn’t been particularly close, but death as a way of changing your perspective on that.  In point of fact, we had been estranged for many years.  But that is a story for another day.  I did make the decision to leave where I was and attend the funeral in Houston.  Luckily, another family member was due to arrive very soon to stay where I had been.  During the time I was away from home, we found that we were going to take a new job and move from the Midwest to the West Coast, Northern California to be precise.  So began a series of trips to look at our new surroundings and shop for a home, and back to our home to pack my car and drive out leaving most of our possessions in a house that was for sale…a house that we had just finished building in July 2014…a house that I loved.  In all our searching, we never found a house that we loved in our new town, but we did buy a house.  We closed on a Monday and left that Friday for a 2-1/2 week vacation; a few days in Amsterdam and a 2-week cruise on Celebrity to Scandinavia and Russia, and a throw back to early June when I had a ____ year high school reunion back in Houston for a long weekend (great time, wonderful people)…and then in Vegas in late June to attend my nephew’s wedding (Joejoe Diggs), along with my daughter, Amanda, and her husband, Bradley.  I got to see my bestest niece and nephew and their Mom!  They are so great!  All that traveling, especially the cruise, have added an ugly 10 pounds that I have got to shed.  In any event, it’s been a very full year so far and not likely to let down.

We are now in the midst of a huge renovation to make that house we bought a house we will love.  The people who lived in this house for the past 13 years did not have the word “maintenance” in their vocabulary.  The air conditioner filter had about 1/2 inch of lint on them when we replaced them.  The spa leaks, which they did not disclose, so that will be an entry for another day.  There were a couple of other nondisclosed items, but they don’t make me as mad as the spa does.   We’ll see how than story pans out.  We are in the middle of painting all the cabinetry and walls and trim, etc.  We completely deconstructed a wall in the living and that is almost finished reconstructing.   Darned if I don’t have to leave in the middle of this to go to London for an interior design job.  This may be the only time in my entire life that I am not biting at the bit to leave for a trip like that, but being in the middle of this makes it difficult.  I’ll just end with a few before pictures and early reno pictures.  I can’t wait to get back to cooking and food pix!  Oh, and there is an election year coming up.  That should be fun!  And right now I won’t get started on the Muslim invasion that is taking place, forever changing the face of Europe negatively.  I’m glad I’ve been able to travel there prior to this, although it had been getting worse over these past few years due to a smaller version of the same thing.

This post seems like such a short one when I think of all the things that have happened this year!IMG_2640_2 IMG_2638_2 IMG_2609_2 IMG_2608_2 IMG_2607_2 IMG_2604 IMG_2603  IMG_0759_2 IMG_0757_2 IMG_0753 IMG_0751_2 IMG_0750_2 IMG_0749_2 IMG_0746_2 IMG_0745_2 IMG_0744_2 IMG_0743_2 IMG_0740_2 IMG_0739_2 IMG_0738_2 IMG_0737_2 IMG_0735_2 IMG_0731_2