Paige Wakefield

I’m always looking for smart storage ideas.  I’m a pack-rat, and I admit that I have a hard time throwing things away.  But often times the things that I want to hang onto have no real value other than sentimental.  And that is a real problem, because I’m a Virgo, and I need to be practical in everything that I do.

And I suspect that no matter how large a house I had, I would still fill every nook and cranny up with more and more “stuff.”  I just hope that I don’t end up on some reality television intervention show like “hoarders!”

Having said that, I’ve been thinking about using some glass racks in my kitchen to help me to better utilize my kitchen storage space.  I’m thinking that I could put a stemware rack on the underside of one of my cabinet shelves and then store platters underneath the glasses.  And I’d like to get a wine glass rack to organize all of my wine glasses. It seems that too often I am pushing them around in the cabinet to find something else, and then one of them falls out and breaks.  Then I end up with a bunch of mis-matched glasses, which annoys me to no end!  After all, I am a Virgo!

I’ve always loved flowers.  I’d much rather tend a flower garden than a vegetable garden.  I think that stems back to many years ago when I would plant a vegetable garden and then have to go visit out-of-town relatives the exact same week that the vegetables were ready to harvest!  Talk about a waste of time and energy!  So it didn’t take too long for me to figure out that I’m better off just buying my vegetables and just grow flowers at home.

I especially love the look of window flower boxes on a house.  I think that having window boxes full of cascading flowers, like petunias, add a beautiful cottage feel to a house.  I can remember when I lived in New England there was a barber shop near where I worked that always had the entire front of the building covered with beautiful cascading petunias!  Try as I hard as I could, I could never get a window box as beautiful as that barber shop’s boxes!  I wish I knew their secret!

Ever since I can remember, I’ve been interested in conservation.  Not just conserving energy, but conserving wildlife, and conserving the environment.  I can remember going on field trips while in elementary school to places that taught the importance of conservation, and I was very impressed by it all.  That’s one reason why I’ve become interested in rain harvesting as a way to conserve water.

I think that if enough people used a rain water barrel to collect rain and use it to water their gardens, that we would not have as many drought-related water restriction days during the summer.  I’ve seen quite a few really nice rain barrels on the market lately; some just look like fancy planters and actually make the outside of the house look nice!  So you can conserve water and look good doing it too!