Space-Saving Coat Storage

My husband thinks I'm crazy sometimes, but I think I'm genius!  Ok, let me explain.  See, we had our home built about 6 years ago.  We basically went with a house at the top of our budget, at least the budget we wanted, not the bank.  That was when the housing market was booming, so they approved us for much more than we actually felt comfortable with.  Good thing we had some common sense (thanks, parents!), 'cause it probably wouldn't have been good.

Anyway, back to the genius part.  Our builder wasn't a custom builder.  As in, we had a few choices but not many.  We picked our flooring, countertops, cabinet style, and siding color from a limited selection.  Most things were upgrades that we would have had to pay extra for, so for the most part we stuck with the basics.  We didn't even have a choice in paint....everything was painted flat white.  My mom and I painted almost the entire house in the 2 days before we moved in.  Fun times!

One of the great things about our house is that it is a perfect DIY house!  Everything works and there is nothing we had to do, but there are lots of things we (or at least I) want to do.  One such project was to add storage near the main entrance.  Our front entrance and garage entrance are close to each other, and there is just a small 2x2 coat closet in between.  Not enough coat storage for a family of 5!  So, I started googling (this was before I knew about Pinterest.com!) and found a couple inspiration photos that I thought would be good for our situation.

Here's the project:

Basically, when you open the door from the garage, there is a blank wall that is just not doing anything.  Here it is in the photo below.  The door you see in the background on the right is our 1/2 bath, behind me is our front door, and to the left is the coat closet.

Anyway, I decided the best solution would be to add a coat rack behind the door.  My parents have a 103 year old farm house, and it has coat storage flat along the wall, so I kind of use that as my inspiration as well.  I would have loved to add a "locker" or a bench or something, but obviously there is no room for something like that.  So, off to the hardware store I went.  I basically just purchased some 1x6 boards.  I picked the pre-primed composite ones, because I'm pretty new with woodworking and didn't feel competent to work with raw wood.  If I had to do it over again, I would choose the raw pine wood because it's a little nicer material than the composite ones I chose.  The only extra step is to sand and prime the wood before you paint it, but that doesn't take very long to do.

So, basically once I purchased my wood, I came home and cut it to the length of my wall, painted it, put construction adhesive on it and then screwed it into the wall.  I wanted 5 hooks on each board, so I measured them out equally and put the screws in so they would line up behind the hooks.  No patching... genius!

Here's how it looked with the screws, before adding the hooks.

And here is the finished product:

It's the perfect place to hang the backpacks as well as some of the jackets that we use the most.  It also turned out to be a good place to stash a couple of baseball caps.

Here's a close-up of the hooks I used.  I found them at Lowes.  But unfortunately there was a supplier issue and I had to go to 3 different Lowes to get all 10 of my hooks :(.  But I really wanted hooks with two places to hang things on.  Plus I didn't want something that was tiny or huge since the door would hit them if they stuck out too far.  These were the perfect size.

So, those 10 hooks added a lot more storage room in a previously unused wall space.  For a little extra shoe storage, I hung a closet organizer on the back of our closet door...it's the perfect size for all of those toddler and little boy shoes. Plus our adult sandals fit in there as well.

Hope this post gives you a little inspiration for a totally easy DIY project!

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Cure for Wet Electronics

In the past month, I have gotten a lot of experience trying to salvage electronics that have gotten wet.  Not just splashed, but submerged into water of some type.

On Christmas Day, the boys found my iPod in my bag and decided to carry it around my Grandmother's house.  We were expecting like 35 people there that day, so it took it away from them and put it in my back pocket.  I didn't want it to get lost or stepped on, and thought it would be safer with me than the boys.  Which is usually true, but as I pulled down my pants to go to the bathroom, I heard a plop and turned around to see my iPod at the bottom of the toilet.

*Not an actual image of my iPod in the bottom of my Grandmother's toilet :)

I quickly grabbed it out of there, used a tissue to try it off and went to the kitchen to find a zip-loc baggie and some rice.  I didn't attempt to turn it on at all, but waited a couple days and voila...it worked!

The next instance of drying out electronics was at night.  I was responding to a couple emails for cake requests (my home-business) and the boys decided to take a bath.  Steve was teaching that night, so it was just me at home.  I guess I was more focused on what I was doing than I thought and the next thing I realized, the bathtub was full of water (just under the overflow protection thing) and also full of toys.  Ryan had added some pillows, a towel, some toys from the toy box and these two electronic toys:

  

The first is a night light, music thing that Tyler uses in bed at night and the other is a NEW flashlight that Ryan had gotten for Christmas about 2 weeks earlier.  UGH.  I immediately switched both toys to the off position, removed the batteries and stuck them in zip-loc bags of rice.  Ok, I guess it wasn't immediately because I emptied the tub of water, made the boys get their jammies on and sent them to bed.  And then I took care of the stuff in the tub.

Guess what?!  Both toys still work.  Here's my tips for if you ever have an electronic submerged in water:

1. Immediately turn it off.  Do not try to see if it still works.  You will fry it.
2. Use a towel to dry it off as much as you can.
3. Remove any batteries that it contains.  Keep the battery "door" off to help dry it out.
4. Put about 1/2 cup of rice into a zip-loc bag that the toy will fit into.  You will want to use a bag that can close with the toy/electronic device in it.  
5. Shake the rice so it get's as close to the water inside as you can get it.  i.e. make sure it gets into any holes that are in the toy so it can suck out as much water as possible.
6. Leave it alone for a few days.  I would say try 2 days and then remove the item and see if it feels dry. You can also smell the rice, and it it's wet, you might want to get new rice and let it sit for a couple more days.
7. After it's all dry, remove the item, add the batteries and turn it on.  

Hope this works for you!

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The Dave Ramsey Plan...how we survived!

Just about 1 year ago, we became debt free except for our mortgage.  It was such an exciting thing for us and totally a life-changer, so I thought I would share our journey with you.

It all started almost 10 years ago.  Steve and I met, fell in love, got married and within a couple months went out and bought a brand new car.  Steve had already purchased a house shortly before we met, so we already had a mortgage (a small one, because the house was tiny!)...what a better way to start out our marriage than by getting into debt?  Of course we got an awesome deal of around $18,000 for a CAR...but it was at 0% interest rate and the payments were affordable.  Then, I bought our wonderful Kirby sweeper. Now, I do love the thing and it works great, but it was like $1200 and we put it on financing...we had the cash, but it was at 0% interest for like 9 months, so we paid it off right before the first payment was due.  And then, we bought a washer and dryer...and you guessed it, 0% interest for a short period and we took advantage of the great offer and financed it again.

Then we decided we needed a bigger house.  Ok, so it was more me that Steve.  Because he had purchased the house on his own, it wasn't in a location I would have chosen, it wasn't the style of house I would have chosen, and we could afford more of a house, so why not?!  It took us almost 2 years to sell the stupid thing, but we finally got out and just about broke even.  I think we maybe made $500, which we put to paying the bill for storing our stuff while we looked for our bigger and better house.  We finally decided to pay a little more than we initially wanted to get a bigger, better house than we originally thought.  So, we stretched ourselves a little, but not too much because we were both working.  Our payment was about 25% of our take-home pay, so definitely still in the conservative category.

We had some cash savings, but instead of using that for a down payment we got creative with our financing and financed the entire house and used our savings for a fence for the yard, new appliances (and not the cheap ones, either), some new furniture to fill up the new house, you get the picture.  About a year after we moved in, we decided we also needed a newer vehicle.  Mine was literally falling apart and was still my car that I had from high school.  But, we decided we needed an SUV and we also needed a car payment to make it happen.

Everything we did from the time we were married (even before) to about 2007 was just living the normal American lifestyle.  It wasn't until we were pregnant with our first child that we really thought about what we were doing with our money.

My mom was (and still is!) a stay-at-home mom.  I am the oldest, and my youngest sister is still in high school.  I'm grateful that my mom was able to stay at home and care for us, but I always thought I would be bored and didn't ever want to stay at home full-time.  I thought that I would like to work at least part-time so I could keep my sanity.  But then I got pregnant and everything started to change.  I couldn't imagine leaving my precious baby with someone else all day or even part of the day.  But there was a problem.  We had too many expenses each month for the amount of money my husband brought home.  Almost enough, but not quite.  The difference?  The stupid $315 car payment for our lovely SUV.  I wasn't going to let that come between me staying home or working, so we promptly started chucking $1000 payments towards the thing.  I was able to stay home with my son for the entire 12 week leave that I was allowed to take (but it wasn't all paid!) but then I had to go back to work for 6 months until we could get the vehicle paid off and I didn't have to work anymore.  We paid the car off on a Friday and I turned in my 2 weeks notice that Monday.  I loved my job, but with having kids, suddenly priorities shifted.

As I said, my husband could now cover all of the expenses with his income.  Except that our house payment was about 50% of our income now.  My income was just slightly under 50% of our household income, so while we could do it, there was no breathing room at all.  Finally, in 2009 after reading about this Dave Ramsey guy on a lot of the blogs I followed, I decided my new year's goal was to find out more about him and do the Financial Peace University course.  Because we had baby #2 on the way and I was scared.

So, early in 2009, we had a chance to do the FPU course for the first time at our church and it was a life-changer.  While we lived within our means before and had only once carried a credit card balance (our first Christmas together), we realized that we didn't have a plan.  And without a plan, it seemed like our bank account was always teetering towards $0 and that we would never get ahead.

So, during the course, we got our act together, wrote everything down in a budget, and made a plan for the future.  Our debt snowball was pretty easy...only one item that we put on it.  The 20% portion of our mortgage (which wasn't exactly 20%, but it was what the loan officer told us to do).  Technically it was over 50% of our annual income, so it should have been put in Baby Step #6 (mortgage) instead of #2 (debt snowball), but we didn't have any breathing room and needed to knock it out in order to make it.

So we ATTACKED it with a vengeance as Dave Ramsey likes to say.  From around April 2009 - January 2011, we had baby #2 and we paid off our 2nd mortgage!  WE'RE DEBT FREE!  It was amazing how much extra money we found in our budget when we wrote everything down, stopped making those small impulse purchases that added up to hundreds of dollars, and cut our lifestyle for that time in order to get ahead.  I mean, we didn't make any extra money during that 20 month stretch (Steve didn't get any raises) but yet we were able to find extra thousands of dollars to chuck directly towards the principal on the mortgage.  It.was.awesome.  It was also a lot of hard work, sacrifice and tears, but totally all worth it.

So, from now on, whenever our house buys a new car, takes a vacation, or buys Christmas presents, you can be sure that we paid cash for it :)  Because we will never again be "slave to the lender."  We  do have our main mortgage still, but we chuck extra money at that every month and have a goal of paying it off in 8-10 years max. Because being debt-free is worth it.

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Progress!

So, I posted pictures of my house on Tuesday evening.  Just wanted to show you the progress I made on Wednesday.

In the living room, we picked up the junk new toys, put the train table back together, took down the Christmas tree and the Christmas decorations from the mantle.  I also swept and really need to shampoo, but didn't get to that yesterday.

In the kitchen, I swept and mopped and even pulled out the stove and fridge and swept and mopped under them as well.  That's a job that I think should be done every 3 months or so but I usually only get to it once or twice a year.  Yuck.  Anyway, I also organized the Christmas cards and presents that were on the counter.  I cleaned the microwave.  I still need to put away the dishes in the drainboard and get rid of the pile of stuff in the corner of the counter, but I still have a few Christmas goodies to give away so it will stay there until I am finished with that task.

The dining room was the dumping ground for most of the new Christmas presents.  It now looks much better!  And even better than looks, most of the Christmas presents are actually put away!

I still have a lot left to do, but it's progress!

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Keepin' it Real

Does your house look like this?

Because I seriously think someone snuck in and sent a tornado through our house.  Or, maybe it was Santa?!

Whatever the case, tomorrow will be spent cleaning the entire first floor.  Then Thursday will be spent cleaning the entire 2nd floor.  And then Friday, it's time for the basement.  Saturday, Steve can help me with the garage.  Sheesh.

Oh, and I will work on some blog posts in my "free time" when I'm not cleaning and not keeping the kids from destroying the progress....

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Homemade Laundry Detergent

Something totally unrelated to Christmas!! 

I found this recipe online a few months ago and decided to try it.  I love clean smells, like soap, rather than perfumy or floral smells.  This detergent smells lemony/soapy and I really like that about it.  It also cleans really well and it's very inexpensive.  The borax and washing soda were each between 3 and 4 dollars and will make several batches of detergent.  The bar is between 1 and 2 dollars and you use one per batch.  I haven't measured to see how many loads a batch does, but I would say it is similar to a regular sized bottle or box of detergent.

To make it, combine 1 cup each of the borax and the washing soda (both found near the laundry detergents, as is the bar of soap).  Grate the entire bar of soap (Fels-Naptha) with a cheese grater and combine with the other ingredients.  Store in a tub and use 1 tablespoon per load (sometimes I use 2).

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Homemade Grout Cleaner

Undoubtedly, this is not the most exciting post ever.  I realize that, but I wanted to share it with you anyways.

As you might know from reading this blog, I had a baby about 4 weeks ago.  During this recovery time, I have watched WAY too much HGTV and DIY Network.  My project to-do list is growing longer by the day.

After discussing possible projects with my husband, I took a "research" trip to Lowe's and Home Depot.  My plan wasn't to purchase anything, but to check out a few options for different projects and try and figure out some pricing to see what we could tackle and when.

One of the projects I would like to do is to tile my backspalsh in the kitchen.  While in the tile aisle (BTW, I didn't find anything I liked at either store...boo), I realized that our kitchen floor grout was getting pretty gross.  So, I picked up a bottle of heavy-duty grout cleaner and another bottle of general tile cleaner and light sealer.

I continued on to a couple different departments to price things out and then made my way to the checkout.  And then...the checkout lady gave me the total...$16 for the two little bottles!  Yikes!  Plus there was a warning on the heavy-duty grout cleaner about prolonged exposure to the fumes.  Definitely not something I wanted in the house with a newborn.

So, I came home and promptly googled "Homemade grout cleaner".  Up popped a cool article that gave several ideas depending on your tile material and how dirty things were.  Our floors are a natural stone, so I decided to go with the most mild suggestion:  baking soda and water. Brilliant...because baking soda costs less than a buck!

Here's my before photo...the grout started originally the same color as the tile.  Ew.

The recipe calls for 3 parts of baking soda to 1 part of water.  Depending on how big of an area you need to clean, I suggest starting out with 1 cup of baking soda to 1/3 cup of water and test to make sure this is going to work for you.  Here is the baking soda and water mixture.

Here's the fun part.  I used a tooth brush to put this on the grout lines.  The boys enjoyed helping me for all of 2 minutes and I got stuck with the rest of the job.

The article says to leave on the baking soda for 10 minutes and then rinse clean.  But I have 3 kids to take care of, so the baking soda stayed on for about 45 minutes until I could get back to it.  But that just makes it cleaner, right?!  I figured it wouldn't hurt at least, so I didn't worry about it.  When I did get back to remove it, I used the toothbrush to scrub the lines again.  And guess what?  It works!!  Here's a shot where I used the baking soda mixture on the right but nothing on the left.  What a difference!

And here you can see I used the baking soda on the bottom half but not the top half.

The only downside of this project is that I had to mop twice after finishing each section.  We have a commercial mop bucket and mop (like they had at McDonald's, for example), so maybe it was the fact I used that and wasn't on my hands and knees scrubbing.  Not sure, but after mopping once, the tile still felt "gritty" from the baking soda, so I had to do it all again.  Considering the alternative of using the expensive, toxic-fumed stuff, this didn't bother me.

We have this tile in our kitchen, dining room, hall, 1/2 bath and entry way.  So needless to say, this wasn't a quick project.  I'm in the process now of finishing up the entry way area and then I will be done (YAY!).  Next on the to-do list is find a block of time long enough that I can mop and re-seal everything!

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Costco vs. Sam's Club?

So, we used to have a Sam's Club membership.  While I loved it, we let it expire at the end of 2010 because I found I didn't go there as often as I would like.  Plus, I used it mainly to purchase supplies for my business (making wedding and special occasion cakes), and with expecting baby #3 I decided at that point to stop taking any additional orders until 2012.

There is a Costco just down the street from the local Sam's Club.  I've only ever been in Costco twice.  I didn't see much of a difference, but I had kiddos with me both times I went, so I couldn't really compare things.  Anyone had any experience with both of these stores?  Do you think it's worth it to have a membership?  Any tips or tricks to getting good deals at either of these places?  I would probably purchase mostly bulk baking supplies plus some fresh fruits, veggies, etc...

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Countdown!

So, this is the final full week before baby girl arrives!  I've been creating a to-do list to make sure I get all the last-minute things done.  None of them are necessary, but all of them would be helpful to have finished before I try and manage life with 3 kiddos!

Last weekend, we took a train ride to mark one thing off my list (do something memorable during our final weeks as a family of 4).  Lesley took some maternity photos a few weeks ago as well...though I hate how big my belly is, this is the last baby and wanted a few shots of the kids with "baby sister" in my belly.  We've also been hitting the pool a lot because taking 3 kids is going to be a lot harder and it's been so hot here that it's pretty much the only place I can stand being outside without swelling up like a balloon!

Here's the remainder of my list:


This Week:
-clean kids bathroom
-clean our bathroom
-clean 1/2 bath
-mop kitchen
-shampoo living room carpet
-re-organize kids closets
-organize garage
-organize/clean basement
-Finish gifts for the boys from baby sister
-Birth Announcements?

Next Week:
-change sheets on all beds
-clean & arrange carseats in van
-pack hospital bag
-touch up bathrooms and kitchen
-all laundry
-move chair/changing table to baby room
-setup pack-n-play in dining room
-Abby (our miniature schnauzer) - bath and haircut


Any other suggestions of fun/important/necessary things to accomplish in the next SEVEN days?!

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Beth's Pinterest

After Lesley posted about her Pinterest a few weeks ago, I decided to check it out for myself and start pinning ideas and things.  I love it!  I always have a ton of tabs open in my Google Chrome browser, so this is a perfect way to save some of those ideas and unclutter my browser a little!  Here are some of my favorites that I've pinned:

Check out these photos and more at MY Pinterest page :)  If you need an invite, just leave a comment here and I will send you one!

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