Catherine Ensley ...: Spiritual Journey

I'm celebrating a new routine, which is enabling me to get far more done each day than I'd been able to for the past two years. I've moved my writing from the third floor (formerly my son's bedroom) to the basement and into my scrapbooking room.

The reason? From the time of his birth, our grandson and his mommy have been living with us. He's now two years old and can break through every barrier to get upstairs and pester grandma. He gets plenty of my attention, but he doesn't need all of it!

(In this picture, he's sitting in his grandpa's KitFox. Boy oh boy, does this little guy love airplanes.)

He doesn't yet know how to open doors. So my retreat to the basement to work is safe ... for now.

Have you started any new routines recently that are working especially well for you?

Late in 2003, my daughter-in-law invited me to a scrapbooking party at her house. For years, probably decades, I'd been talking about "doing something" with boxes of loose photos, which I stored in my linen closet. That night at the party, I saw a sampling of beautiful ways to showcase family pictures.

I'd always loved being crafty, so when I saw all those products--colored marking pens, cutters, patterned papers, colored cardstock, stamps, ink and a whole lot more--I was in heaven. I knew I would combine my love for art with "doing something" with the family photos.

As the years wore on after 2003, I became an avid scrapbooker and collector of scrapbooking supplies. For over a decade, I worked only a few blocks from a Michael's and a Joann's, which was conveniently located next door. During my lunch hour, I would often happily wile away the hour, browsing the new products and shopping for sales.

For a while, my scrapbooking room was located in my son's old bedroom, along with the other bedrooms on the third floor. He had vacated it several years prior to marry and start a family.

Still, a lot of room swapping went on during the years 2004-2010, when my two adult daughters moved out, back home, out again and home again (one of them). Hubby's and my offices/scrapbooking rooms got moved around like checkers on a checkerboard, especially when both daughters (one with a husband and two kids) lived here at the same time. For a while, hubbie's office was in our bedroom!

Eventually, the girls cleared out. Our six-bedroom house now has two dedicated offices, a dedicated scrapbooking room, two guest bedrooms and our master bedroom.

Three years ago, a cement wall in our basement, in my scrapbooking room (!) sprung a leak. Right before Christmas! There was an inch of water all over the floor and swiftly flowing out into the basement at large.

Considering that it was Christmas time (with all of its busy-ness), that I was expecting guests for Christmas Eve dinner the following evening, and I was working long hours to enter a manuscript in the Golden Heart before the deadline, my heart developed an electrical problem.

I spent an evening in the Emergency room at a local hospital while the doctors worked to get it to stop beating like a runaway locomotive. One that had also jumped the track.

Anyway, a few days later, we removed everything from the room, tore out a bunch of sheet rock and patched the leak. The room was usable again, but we didn't have money to fix the sheet rock until this fall. Our son-in-law does all of the repair jobs on our house. When he fixed the sheet rock, I asked him to make some other improvements as well.

I asked him to paint the whole room instead of only the area over the patch. The yellow (original color) was cheerful, but I wanted a more neutral color that wouldn't interfere with choosing colors for layouts. I chose a beige that is the same color as the floor and the new counter tops.

Yes, new counter tops! My son-in-law built a wrap-around counter, which enabled me to eliminate two fold-up tables.

I had collected so many supplies over the years that every square inch of wall space was taken up with shelves. The room was so busy that it was sometimes overwhelming. So when I started putting everything back into the room again, I was determined to leave an empty wall.

I succeeded. The other three walls look crammed, for sure, but the wall that I stare at is refreshingly empty.

Here's some pictures: