Monthly project update

Well in February my goal was to finish as many of our ongoing house projects as possible. You know, those projects that you get to the 'good enough' stage then forget about. Except you never really forget about them, cause every time you take a bath you notice the streaky edges of the paint job you said good enough on and didn't go back and do the second coat... Or the taped plastic covering the join between the kitchen's old laminate and the new wood floor in the rest of the house... My list goes on and on, and if I think about it too hard, I get totally mired in all the stuff that needs to be finished! But enough rambling...

I keep my photos sorted by month for the current year, and after the year is over I combine all the monthly folders into one yearly folder so that the folders don't get too overwhelming. This month, whenever I sat down and felt like the to-do list was still very overwhelming, like I wasn't making any progress, I would look in my February 2011 picture folder and look at all the projects I made progress on or finished. It was so encouraging!

The baby pictures scattered in the monthly folders encourage me too!

I think I have been quite successful in making progress and getting things done this month. On the home reno/organizing/decorating front, I finished the bathroom trim and made serious progress on the livingroom/diningroom/hallway trim. I purchased enough trim to finish the doorways in the hallway, and more than enough for Little M's room. I purchased wood to start working on the trim on the windows and patio doors. I moved my desk from the nursery to the guest bedroom closet, making both spaces so much more functional!

On the garden front I got exciting mail -  my order of seed packets, and planned my seed starting & garden layout. I found an old shop light left in the garage by the old owners, and moved it to the sunporch to use as a seed starting light. And I restarted a pot of herbs on my kitchen windowsill that was looking rather sad and old, and started some new basil seeds in it.

On a personal front, we went across to the west side of the state to visit my husband's family and have a late first birthday celebration with them for Little M. At the last minute I knitted a toque (or, as my American friends and family say, a hat) for a good friend's son for his first birthday. We got new renters moved in to our rental house, and put it on the market. We even had someone go through and look at the place! Our carefully tightened down budget survived having no renters from late January through early February, and we were even still able to put a teensy little bit into our emergency fund. We aren't up to our 3 month goal, but we're slowly but surely getting there. Hopefully with our tax return we'll get it finished and can move on to retirement, college, and paying our house off early!!

I guess, when I look at all the things we accomplished and see such a great list, I can ignore the things I really meant to do but didn't... The manuscript that I promised would get submitted by the end of the month (really, I still have tonight!!)... The monthly chore list that I only finished one task off of... The sunporch that I keep meaning to finalize a new plumbing plan for... But I guess that's why there is next month! And luckily I have a lot of the prep work done on some of my outstanding 'to-do's', so hopefully next month I will manage to make even more progress :)

I'd love to proclaim a 'no-new-things-added' policy in regards to my to-do list, so that I get all those almost-done projects finished before starting (and not finishing!) new ones, but maybe for next month I'll stick with trying to limit new things as much as possible, or at least not adding 2 new things for every one old thing crossed off! :)  I may even put up a monthly goal list, like one I've been admiring by Kim of NewlyWoodwards.

Knitted present - finished!

This afternoon we are heading over to some friends for their son's first birthday party. Even though it is still very much winter here, with up to a foot of new snow forecast over the next few days, it is a pool party! They have a small pool that the little kids can play in inside, so Little M and the other little kiddos will be able to have fun splashing in the water. Hopefully I can manage to stay relatively dry! My husband has to work, but they live right outside of the town where he works so hopefully he will be able to drop in briefly.

Before we go I need to finish the hat I am knitting for their son's birthday... I should have started (and finished) it days ago, but its been busy here and I have been working on other projects. Now I'm trying to finish it while Little M alternates between stealing my balls of yarn and using me as her own personal jungle gym. Makes knitting hard!

Hopefully I will update this post later today with a completed picture... Hopefully!!

**UPDATE**
So I didn't get the hat finished in time for the party this afternoon, but this evening I finished it off. I'm meeting them again Tuesday for our weekly mama & baby walk, so I'll give it to them then :) Here's the final product! I think it turned out really nicely :)

Found: grow light for seed starting!

I mentioned recently that I had recently realized there was a shop light hanging in the garage. Here it is above one of the work benches:

I figured we don't really need it there, and definitely not right now, so I moved it onto the sunporch to use as a seed starting light this spring. I had to have some serious discussions with my husband about how our pepper plants (among others) will be much better this summer if they have the grow light on them over the next couple months. He doesn't like the artificial lights and didn't want them in the house, even on the sunporch.  He eventually agreed to have the grow light on the sunporch for the spring, as long as I had it against the inside wall so it wasn't overly visible from the main room... Of course, this means I will have to constantly shift plants from the grow light to the window, but whatever, sometimes you gotta be content with small steps :)

I shifted some things around, and used a bit of extra rope from my clothesline to lower the light from the ceiling, where I had screwed 2 hooks into the ceiling joists. I still need to lower it a bit more, or use more bins to raise the 'stand' level up so that the plants will be closer to the light.  Ignore all the extra boxes of xmas decorations, I need to figure out someplace else to put them - they were stacked up in that corner. I've got a timer that I will put on the light so that I can easily set it to be on at certain times of day. Hopefully this will seriously beef up my pepper plants this spring!

2011 seed starting schedule & garden planning

I've started seeds indoors for my veggie garden for the past 2 summers, but never made a schedule, I just would decide, hmm, seems like about time to start my seeds, and that would be it. I started them all at the same time regardless of what type of plant they were, and never thought much more of it than that. Last year I even had to restart all of my seeds since they accidentally froze on the sunporch (courtesy of our old leaky sliding glass doors).

Spring 2010 - Little M supervising me re-planting my seeds

This year, since I've been blogging and seeing everyone else talk about their seed starting schedule, I decided to give it a go. First I looked at when the last frost was last year, which was unusually late and hard - May 21st. At that point I had corn and beans just peeking above the ground, and the pile of towels I spread over the sprouts didn't do a very adequate job at keeping the sprouts frost-free. That frost also killed most of our orchard flowers, so we had a very spotty fruit crop last fall!

May 21 2010 - towels protecting sprouts from a late & hard frost

I did some looking at the calendar, and turns out I still have 13 weeks until what I will consider our last frost date, so I guess I still have a bit of time before I need to start planting. I sat down and looked over the seeds that I bought this year and those that I have leftover and saved from the past couple years. I was surprised at how many different types I have! I planned out my garden layout, although there are some herbs and flower mixes leftover from last year that I really want to grow somewhere - hopefully I can get some sort of garden set up by the chicken coop as I have mentioned previously, so that I can have a bit more space.

Planning for my 2011 garden!

Now that I know I have 13 weeks or more until I start planting my start outdoors, I can relax a couple weeks and wait until at least next month to start planting my first seed starts.  I may start my peppers and some flowers earlier than that though, because last weekend I was working on cutting some trim boards in the garage when I realized that past owners had left a shop light in there that would be a perfect seed starting light! Yippee!! Sometime in the next week I will wrestle it out of the garage and put it up on the sunporch somewhere, and maybe I'll even be able to find an old heating pad somewhere to keep under my plants so they stay nice and warm. I figure with that light, I will be able to grow things like peppers and some flowers to a bigger stage than I would without that extra light, which will be perfect since last year my peppers were pitifully small at the time when I would have planted them out. I say 'would have' since a little mouse got into the sunporch while we were gone for a couple days, and when I came back the peppers were just little snipped off stalks... darn rodents!

Amaryllis in bloom

My amaryllis is in bloom! It is a very pretty flower, and the past 2 years that I have had it it has produced one flower stalk with 2 blooms on it. Last year I tried to pollinate it and get seeds from it, but with Little M being, well, very little, I missed watering it briefly and it got too dry before the seeds matured. Hopefully this year I will have better luck.

My mother has grown and crossed amaryllis for years and years, and has lots of very pretty flowers from all of her crossings. My mom always has amaryllis plants all over the windowsills at her house, and just tosses the ones she doesn't love. I think it would be great to sell some bulbs at the local farmers market in the fall and earn a bit of money (and get rid of some extra bulbs!).

desk area move

On Friday I mentioned how last weekend I moved my desk area from the nursery to the closet of the guest bedroom, and I promised more details to come soon, well here they are! I got this great idea a while back from Jen over at iheartorganizing, who has done a couple of closet office makeovers in her own home.  I was so inspired by her beautiful and functional desk space that I wanted to try it for myself!  I know mine is far from pretty (and nowhere near how amazing Jen's looks), but I love how our closet went from this:

to this:

not to mention the nursery went from this (on a good day when my desk was 'relatively' clean & tidy!):

to this:

Obviously the guest bedroom (aka 'the office') needs some tlc: paint, a new light fixture to replace the bare bulb, baseboard trim, window & closet trim re-installed, new closet door,  paint job for the door, not to mention some wall art and decor items! Its fairly low on the priority list though since the room is more functional than the sunporch :) At some point I will figure out a better solution to the gift wrapping items that currently take up the 2 upper shelves in the closet, but that's a task for another day. Overall I'm pretty happy with my new desk situation, and have actually spent some time working at it! My old desk spot was rarely ever used - I preferred the dining room table. Here's hoping now I can reduce the clutter on the dining room table by working more at my desk!

trim trim and more trim

So in the last week I have seen small but amazing progress on our house's to-do list. Firstly, I finally finished the bathroom trim that I started months ago! With my husband's help, we renailed the trim to the wall (I am fairly good with most power tools but using our finish nailgun is not one of my strengths!). I still need to do some touch up's on the yellow wall paint, but since I am not in love with the color (I think I should have gone with the gray-blue that I originally picked, even though I thought a rubber ducky bathroom would be so cute for Little M and any future kiddos to grow up with) I am putting off finishing the touch ups since it is good enough and likely I'm the only one who notices the small imperfections. There is still a lot to do in the bathroom, but for now I am trying to ignore it and stay focused on other things :) It felt so good to finally be done that trim!

Since we finished the bathroom trim, I felt like I was ok to start the next trim project - the living room/dining room/hallway trim. My husband wanted it black. Initially, I was totally opposed, we have a lot of dark wood or black furniture, and the floors are fairly dark, so I was worried that it would be too dark - but we have some of the baseboard trim up in the hallway, and it makes the hall look much nicer, don't you think?!

There was some crazy drama on the weekend caused by this project - my husband was really excited to use the paint sprayer that he got for the trim, and set up a work zone in the garage to use the sprayer. He isn't generally as overly cautious and careful as I, but even I thought this set up looked pretty good. Unfortunately, the sprayer got a bit gunked up and really didn't spray a uniform coat, and while trying to fix it and get a good coat on the trim he made a bit of a mess of the garage... Oh well, I guess that's why we used the sprayer in the garage and not in the sunporch! I brought the trim pieces in later that evening and over the next couple nights managed to use a brush to get them evenly black :) Using the sprayer definitely cut down my brushing workload, but overall, not something we will try again with trim!

I haven't finished cutting the door trim boards, but hopefully this weekend and next week I will make some progress and can start painting them. There are also some sections where we need to figure out what to do with another project before we can install the floor trim even though it is otherwise ready:

• behind the TV there are a couple cords that I either need to run under the house and up through the floor (and trim), or run along behind the trim from the sunporch wall.
• there are a couple spots near the entryway where the wood flooring doesn't come close enough to the wall (oops!) so I need to pull up a couple pieces and fit in slightly larger ones, should be relatively easy with our great click-lock flooring.
• the sliding glass door that goes from the living room to the sunporch doesn't have trim boards around it on the inside, so before I can put up the baseboard/floor trim, I need to figure out how thick the trim boards will be on that.

It's amazing how every time I try to do one project completely, I uncover 3 more that have to be done before I can actually finish the first project!

We need to pick up more trim boards the next time we are across the pass at Home Depot, because at the moment we don't have enough to finish the nursery trim completely, so I don't feel motivated to start.

I haven't made much progress on the sunporch, apart from moving and rearranging some stuff out there and turning the washer and dryer back so that they are side-by-side and flush - so that its easier to use them. Hopefully I will start making some progress there soon, as there is so much potential storage space out there once we get the floor done! (at the moment I worry about losing things down the cracks and holes, not to mention losing dogs down the subfloor entry when I have the trap door up!). I think the sunporch is looking a bit better now than last time though, don't you?

I have to admit that I did a bad bad thing last weekend though, I added (and kinda even finished) something to my to-do list... I moved my desk/office space from Little M's room into the closet of the guest bedroom where my husband's computer desk lives. I love how well this has worked to improve the function and appearance of both rooms, so I'll post more on this later - stay tuned!

(re)using ashes from our woodstove

Our driveway isn't very long, but the entire thing is on a slight slope, with a steep section right before the road. There are days (or months) during the depths of winter when my little front wheel drive car won't make it out the driveway. Sometimes I even need to put the truck in 4 wheel drive to get out. This winter, the steep section hasn't been too bad, but the relatively 'flat' stretch I have to walk from the front door to the garage/barn where my car is parked has a slight sideways slope, and when the driveway is pretty much skate-able, that slight tilt means slipping and falling... So I suggested to my husband yesterday morning that perhaps he could walk around and spread the ashes from the stove on it. This is something my dad used to do on his driveway when I was a kid (he still does this even now). It really works! This pic was taken this morning and no more fear of slipping! The driveway is totally walkable now. I can tell where he missed areas with the ashes too, as they are still shining with ice. The dark ashes heat up from the sun's rays and melt the ice faster than it otherwise would - for free!

ash & sun successfully melted my glare ice driveway

How we do it
We keep a large metal garbage bin on the front porch and once a week or so (depending on the wood we are burning and how long we've had the fire going each day) we empty the ash tray into it.
I keep an old yogurt cup in the top and use that to sprinkle ash on any ice that develops between the front door and the wood shed, but yesterday my husband dragged the whole metal bin full of ashes out onto the driveway with him so that he didn't have to walk back and forth so much as he sprinkled ashes everywhere.
The only thing I am careful to do is when I am just starting to fill the metal bin up I keep the bin on dirt, so just in case a warm coal gets in there, there is no danger of the wood porch below the bin getting too hot. Once I have a good layer of cold ashes down, I bring the bin back up on the porch so it's easy to step out and dump the ashes without having to even put my shoes on.
In the summer time we store the can out of sight in the wood shed.

What's blooming this month?

I'm excited to write my first Bloom Day post! Carol over at May Dreams Gardens hosts this great event on the fifteenth of every month, where gardeners all over can share their current flowers & link up to her party.

'americana white splash' and 'rocky mountain salmon' geraniums

This month I have 3 plants in bloom on the sunporch, 2 overgrown planters of geraniums (one has Americana white splash and one has Rocky mountain salmon) and one Primula. I also have an amaryllis in my kitchen windowsill & an African violet on the dining room table that have buds, maybe they will be out for next months Bloom Day :)

Primula plant (ignore the weeds & succulents)

African Violet

My husband gave me an African Violet for Valentines Day. Really, I had been planning on getting one since my grandma passed away in December. One of my favorite memories of my grandparents house is my grandma's light unit where she kept African Violets. When she passed away I wasn't able to go to the funeral, so in her memory, Little M and I bought some peanuts in the shell and put them out for the Stellars Jays at our bird feeder, like we used to do for Blue Jays at my grandma's, and I promised myself I would get an African Violet for in the house to remember her by. I hadn't seen one locally in the last 2 months, so my husband picked one up for me when we were across visiting family on the west side of the state last weekend. It has some buds coming, although with the temperature and humidity changes it has been through from the store to here they may not make it, only time will tell :) Here it is:

How to deal with (blog-derived) idea overload

Since I began reading and following blogs (just last fall!), I have been struggling with balancing my available project time with the ideas for projects I get by reading all the great blogs out there. I've posted previously about how I need to slow down and finish up old projects before I start on new ones. This led me to set a goal for this month to get all my current projects done before I let myself start any new ones.

Even though that was barely over a week ago, I am already finding myself (after reading some of my favorite blogs) coming up with new project ideas. This would be ok if I was just writing them in my garden/house idea & to-do book, but earlier today I found myself writing some of these new projects on my weekend to-do list, which I try to make most Friday's so that I know what I need and want to do over the weekend. Shoot! This can't happen - I really haven't made all that much progress on those old projects that I pledged to get done this month!

One thing I have noticed is that I tend to see a great idea, file it away in my head, and then weeks later when I have time (or put off current projects to make time... arg...) I can't remember where I saw the idea, and I end up wasting my free time just trying to re-find the blog post or site that I was inspired by. I realized that a great way to solve that is to bookmark any ideas or projects that I want to implement around my house - calling them things like 'bathroom storage ideas', or 'cupboard refinishing techniques' or whatever key phrase will help me remember what I wanted to do with them.

I think bookmarking great blog posts will really help me save time down the road, and it will also help when I am sitting down thinking about what I should do next. I also really hope that using bookmarks will let me keep my focus on my current projects, and not get all distracted planning new projects!

Tomorrow, I will finish the bathroom trim. I will!

Herb update

Well a week or so ago I shared how I grow my herbs for my kitchen windowsill. There have been some fun little seedlings emerging over the past few days and I wanted to share them with you! Here is a picture to show you the forest of seedlings:

Unfortunately those are all weeds. If you look down closer to soil level, you can see the chubby seed leaves of the basil seedlings just starting to unfurl above the dirt.

Last spring, when I was starting my seeds, I spread my good, weed-seed-full, garden dirt out on baking trays and baked it in the oven for several hours on low heat to kill all the weed seeds. It was great, especially for the seedlings that I wasn't positive I would be able to distinguish from weeds! For the basil though, I wasn't worried about being able to distinguish the cute chubby seedlings from the tall skinny weeds, so I wanted to leave any helpful soil organisms (including those mycorrhizae I keep hearing about lately) intact in the soil, so lots of weeds and no oven.

Oh, and here is my creative solution to keeping the moisture in, an empty cereal bag. I usually use veggie bags from the grocery store, but I couldn't find any around the house, so cereal bag it was! It actually worked quite well, letting some light in, keeping the moisture level up, and best of all, because the cereal bag is a little sturdier than the bags I usually use, I didn't have to put any toothpicks in the soil to keep the bag off the seedlings - perfect!

Digital Cash Envelopes

We started getting serious about our budgeting near the end of last year. I started reading Money Saving Mom and then Dave Ramsey, and the rest is history. I don't get into politics or religion on here, but in terms of finance, Dave Ramsey has been awesome. Our budget doesn't completely follow how he suggests - we have it tailored more to our goals and situation.

I've budgeted my entire adult life, but until now I never had a zero based budget. And definitely since my husband and I got married and I started budgeting for both of us, my 'budgeting' was really more record keeping. We weren't going into any debt, but we weren't really saving any money, and definitely not like we are now that we have our strict categories. Yay for saving money!

I have played a lot with tracking each envelope month to month, and currently have a system that really works well for us. Since I get paid monthly and my husband gets paid twice a month, we do our budget monthly. I have a column for expenses, a column for income, and 3 columns for the envelopes: one has the remainder from last month, one has the additional new money for this month, and one shows how much we have total in each 'envelope'.

Every time we spend money, I put the entry into the expenses column, and subtract that from whichever envelope it belongs to. Similarly, every time we bring money in, I put it into the income column, and if it is extra on top of our paychecks, then I add it into the new money column. It works quite well for how I think, and I love how in excel when I make a mistake, I have cells set up to show me that my overall totals don't match, so I can go back and fix my mistakes!

I love how this budgeting system means I am no longer the nagging wife - 'shouldn't we save that money instead of spending it on X'. Now we just have to look at our excel spreadsheet to see if we have money to eat out, or buy clothes when we find a really great deal online. I print the totals about once a month and hang it on our fridge so that even if I'm at work with the most current version of the budget, my husband can look to see approximately what we have in any given 'envelope'.

Happy seed day, happy seed day!

My seeds have arrived!

Well, actually they arrived a week ago, I just forgot about them until I was downloading pictures off of my camera (oops!). I realized that not only had I forgotten they had arrived, but I had forgotten to post about them, even after I took some fun pictures to show!

I ordered from Seed Savers International, and boy did they come quickly - it was under a week from when I placed my order to when they showed up in my mailbox. I ordered 12 different types of seeds, and don't the packets look beautiful?

I forgot to take a picture of my existing stash of seeds, which takes up a small rubbermaid bin. I'll try and get one up at some point in the future though :) Has anyone else been receiving any new & exciting seed packets in the mail recently?

Unfinished Project To-Do List

Lover of lists that I am, I figured after pledging earlier this week to start getting some of the 'almost done' projects finished up, I needed a list. That should help remind myself of how many projects we have yet to completely finish, and to motivate me to start crossing things off that list! I've made the tasks small & simple, cause crossing things off my list makes me oh so happy :)

So here goes, the list to finish unfinished construction-related projects around the house:

Back in October - there was a backsplash hiding this classy wallpaper

• Bathroom paint & trim

--touch up the corners & edges with yellow (and a clean brush with no leftover green oil based paint - whoops!)
--finish tacking the trim up (who knew how hard it would be to pound finish nails in after the nail gun was set too low?!)
--finish filling nail holes in trim with wood filler
--touch up white paint on trim over wood filler

• Living room, Hallway, & Nursery trim

--measure, measure again, & cut trim for floor & doors to length (this may take some time...)
--spray paint trim white (nursery) or black (hallway & living room)
--nail in place (my husband is much better with the nail gun than I)
--use wood filler for holes
--touch up paint on trim over wood filler

• Hardwood flooring edges/joins with other flooring types

--measure 2 bathroom, 1 hallway, 1 kitchen, & potentially 2 patio door thresholds
--decide on edging type (Home Depot where we got our amazing click-lock engineered wood flooring has 2 types of reducers for our type of wood)
--buy edging
--measure, measure again, and cut edging to length (my dad is one of those 'measure twice, cut once' guys, and I always do tell myself to do the same)
--install the edging so we don't stub our toes, wear down the edge of the floor, or trip! (Luckily the little one has gotten secure enough in her scooting to not fall over the edge & bonk her head. That was always painful...)

• Finish replacing the 5 sunporch patio doors with new doors/windows

--re-set (shim out) patio door so it closes easier
--put plywood house siding back up around windows & doors
--put house siding back up around windows & doors
--put insulation back up around the exterior of the windows & doors
--foam-insulate the interior of the re-set patio door
--finish putting flashing at bottom of windows & doors

• Sunporch... I likely over stepped myself here by planning to re-route some plumbing and electrical (among other things). I won't even list all the steps necessary because its a little embarrassing how much there is to do! Instead I'll put in some pictures so you can see the horror that awaits... 

At some point we will have to redo the plumbing in the whole house. The main line is a mis-matched mess from past freezes, fixes, and additions. The sunporch contains the water tank and laundry, at either end, so at least some plumbing fixes are necessary to make the sunporch a fully livable area.

The laundry drain froze briefly last year, so I plan to move the pipes to the interior wall to the right of this picture, stack the washer & dryer, and add a laundry tub so we have running water out there for the dogs, or watering plants, or washing hands...

Looking towards the other end of the sunporch, you can see that plumbing is perhaps the least of my worries. That shiny stuff you can see between boards at the back wall is foam insulation, which at least where I grew up isn't to code in an inside space without drywall. Just ignore Remi in her kennel with the cone of shame on, she got in a tangle with a stick and it won, so she had some stitches that we didn't want her chewing on.


See, even the little one thinks its hilarious that I think I am a match for the sunporch... and I'll leave you with this happy, mischievous face. Till next time!

Reining in my DIY enthusiasm

I haven't lived on acreage since I was in high school living with my parents. I've always liked getting things done -  I like planning out projects and crossing things off my list. Until we bought our current home, I never saw the problem of having both - acreage and an affinity for lists...

Whew. As I walk around my house and look out over the property these days, all I see are potential projects - its getting a little overwhelming to be honest! In the past year and a half since we moved into our current home, we have gotten an impressive amount of work done. But in order to get the house livable before the baby came, we focused on getting the big stuff done to the 'good enough' point. This meant painting primer everywhere, ripping up the carpets and putting down wood flooring, replacing the old wood stove and hearth, but not painting the rooms, putting trim up, or finishing the edges of the wood floor.

None of things are critical to daily living. But as the sleep-deprived blur of the days post-baby has slowly given way to having a one year old, I'm starting to come up for air and look around. I've started to realize that while having a work-in progress house is ok on some levels, not making any progress on the on-going projects that I see on a daily basis is just depressing! And finishing these small things make our house feel cozier and that makes me feel much happier when I'm at home.

That's why my goal for this month is to start making some progress on those 'almost done' projects, including finishing the trim in the spare bathroom, removing the excess foam from sealing the windows, and dealing with the mess that is currently our sunporch.

Wish me luck!