My sweet photo is two-fold this week:

Do you see those shelves on the wall behind my boy there? A few weeks ago, I moved the two cat litter boxes out of this room, my “office.” Basically, since we moved here several years ago, I’ve called it that and put my crap in it, but with the litter boxes, I never really felt like I wanted to hang out in there. (I know you get me)

So, I decided that enough was enough, and hubs and I brainstormed about what we could do with the “cat area” and decided that we could take the basement door off its hinges, get the baby gates from the kitchen/dining room (removed now that all of the kids can open them anyway) and put one at the top of the basement stairs so the dogs can’t go down and…have a litter “snack” (like they do).

Hubs removed the door for me and put the gate up, and I started trying to clean and organize my office again. It took two solid days to make some serious progress, but I still needed better storage… the coffee table with cubbies I had just wasn’t cutting it (which is probably why it was never very organized no matter how hard I worked at it). But, now I had a room without cat smell or cat disruption (ha) and I started working on cleaning off my (as is unusable) desk.

Fast forward a couple of weeks and my husband kindly offers to build me some shelves….nothing fancy, but would hold stuff. We’re not fancy and didn’t want to spend a bunch on new furniture, so I quickly told him I’d love that. And started thinking about what I might like to have and what I would put on them.

Fast forward a couple more weeks, and I brought up the shelves….when might those be built? Because I’m not kidding….I was excited about them. As excited as I had been to move the litter boxes (it’s the little things these days, yo). He told me that he could do it sometime but then I guess realized just how excited I was and went to the hardware store.

He spent last Sunday afternoon building me these shelves, and then I spent the night and next day painting them so I could (anxiously) let them dry and fill them up.

After 24 hours of drying time, I did fill them up. The whole top shelf is my own personal book collection (or at least, the books not packed away somewhere). The next shelf is my crafting/scrapbooking/card-making supply collection and all of our board games. The bottom two are the kids’ arts and crafts supplies.

Basically everything that had been hidden away in the hall closet and tucked in the coffee table cubbies now had a place out in the open, including a collection of “how to draw” books that Henry had gotten several years ago (he takes after his dad and has always loved to draw)…now that they were where he could see them, and the kids were home from school for parent-teacher conferences, he got excited about them and pulled several of the books out.

He asked me to draw a Model-T out of the “how to draw cool wheels” book and positively oohed and aahed over my finished work. He really is a huge boost of confidence, this kid. He then asked me to (carefully) take it out of the sketch pad so he could draw in the background and scene. The result (minus some coloring that has since been done) is in the picture above.

So…a sweet husband that builds me shelves that makes me more excited than such a thing should, and a sweet boy that tells me my (subpar) drawing is super awesome and “really good.”

I’m a lucky girl.

Through The Lens Thursday is a self-improvement photography project that Alison of Writing, Wishing and I are doing this year.

Don’t forget to join our Flickr group or share your own posts if you’d like to follow along and work on your own photography! And use the hashtag #throughthelensthursday to connect with others working on it, too.

Next week’s prompt is PLAY.