Organized Breaker Box

 I'm almost always a little afraid when from the other room I get one of those "Honey, I have a project for youuuuu...." honey-sweet calls from Mr D.

(In all fairness, I did this to him this week also when I pounced on the bed whilst he was sleeping and announced I had a project I wanted him to do because I found free plans on the Internet. He was less an impressed.)

Turns out this was a really fast & simple project.

We actually traded circuit breaker boxes with my dad when we moved into the Hobo-Chic project as our current panel was too small (and illegal). My dad got a new panel & took our old one to use as a pony panel for his garage, as my brother recently had started using a welder out there and it was blowing the entire house every time he turned it on.

My dad, had all the breakers labelled, however, with our new set-up we need to make some changes to double breakers, etc, and ended up with a wonky numbering system.

The small project was to create an organized label system as the current one was bothering D, and I think he was also tired of getting phone calls from me in our impromptu kitchen saying "so, I blew the kitchen breaker again - which number is it?"



Enter my brilliant solution, using a page of label paper, and an Excel spreadsheet.

I measured out the width, length and depth of each of the slots, and then created a little document with the numbers in it with the groovy free font Bebas.



Ready to do yours too? Print one for your house here.

Pictureless

Hi, I'm Holly and I have a photo fixation. There. I admitted it.

So you can understand my distress last weekend when my 12 year old computer went ka-blew-y and would not allow me access to anything.... it wouldn't even turn on. But I wasn't phased by this. I'm a smart cookie (or so I thought), so I plugged in my handy external hard drive.

This is when I started to panic.... it went on... but nothing happened. A small connecting to Windows noise and then a decidedly bad sounding "kerchunk-kerchunk" noise and the Windows disconnect noise.

I had never considered that my one back-up might not be enough.

Of course, I have entertained many friends and family through the main videos and videos we have been taking of our growing J-man. In this one instance, I thought I had lost every photo and video I had taken of J over the last 10 months. Every birth until now picture, wiped out in this pictureless moment.

I admit sometimes I don't print pictures as fast as I would like. Heck, sometimes I don't print them at all. I certainly am not displaying some of our favourites throughout our home, and almost everything I have printed recently has been for grandparents or great grandparents.

How did I not pay attention to protecting these photos that are equivalent to gold to me? These are irreplaceable.  I think I started to cry and panic around this point that I realized I may not be able to get them back.

My April resolution is to find a better way to back-up these photos in a way that they will still be around in the case of a total misfailure like this, and to print more for display and use, because I definitely have favourites.

The good news is, the computer saviour found that it was just my video card that fried. Upon removal on that, the computer went back on and I could get at some of my precious pictures. My loving husband and son went to Wal-Mart and purchased a new 1T external hard drive to save them on to. Phew....

Junk Drawer & Stock Pile Organization

We're moving into our next phase of renovation, our upstairs bathroom is complete (minus a mirror and the shower tile), our bedroom is waiting for carpet (minus a closet organizer & ceiling fan) which should be installed early February.

We are again taking advantage of the ecoENERGY grant from the Gov't of Canada. If the gov't wants to put some dollars back in our pocket for projects we were completing anyway, we're all for it! The deadline for completing items this year is March 31, again. So we sat down and did so math with square footage for our next projects to maximize our return.

Eligible projects this year in the Hobo-Chic Project:
1. 98% efficient furnace - complete.
2. Exterior Wall insulation, upstairs - 50% complete
3. Ceiling insulation - 50% complete

So that's what we will be striving towards in the next 2 months - complete more insulation, aka rip out more walls and go crazy with the sledge hammer.

In the meantime, I got my organization on again. First up, the stockpile organization. I have been storing it within our room under our kitchen in piles.

Today, because the linen closet is back - I moved a great number of personal care items into the linen closet & I was able to move my interim shelf (remember this?) down to the basement into the old laundry room to house the stockpile in the meantime.

Gotta love repurposing things you already own. We've been using our stockpile massively this month (It's Make Do Month) so it is smaller than usual at the moment, thankfully it all fits. Every thing is currently lined up with the things expiring first at the front of the pile, and longer expires at the back. I used Mrs. January's free downloadable Stock Pile Inventory List to keep track.

This basically opens up the room under the kitchen so that we can pile things that need to be stored in there in the meantime, as the living room is the next room to get the sledge hammer. This is going to be a big change for us, as the living room has been our drop zone ever since we moved in. Better believe I will be purging that pile (yet again, about the 3rd time now) before I attempt moving it.

My second project I finished today was the junk drawers.

I scored 2 Rubbermaid drawer organizers on clearance at Home Hardware for $1.77 and they were the perfect size for rubber bands & twist ties. I bought the other organizers from Dollarama - the long ones were 2 for a $1 and the coloured ones were 3 for $1. Total project cost: $5.82

I really struggled (!) on what to do with the second drawer, but settled on it for a place to store our Kitchen Aid attachments and tablecloths for now. It's not the best use of space, so I'm going to think on it a little more.

What are you organizing this week?

Brrr... and Bedroom Progress

It's a balmy -26 C here today, brr!

Was suppose to get much colder, but I suppose we'll see what happens as the day goes on. Hope you are keeping warm, we sure are.

We've been working hard on our bedroom - crow bars a'flying as we tear out the hardwood floor. This floor is original to the house, and I still believe it's lovely but it sure was showing it's age. From the manufacturer's brand on the back of our hardwood was made by Royal Oak from Crosset, Arkansas. Boy, it's a long way from home.

If you're tearing out your own floor, set your skill saw to the depth of your floor, floor typically is less than 7/8", start by making a cut into the floor for a place to start tearing out and pry up with your crow bar. 

On our case, because we have moved our closet and the extra space from the opposite side was carpeted, we had a natural break in our hardwood floor to start from.

The best pry bar in our collection is from Lee Valley, 25" Renovator's Bar. The longer you get, the better it will save your back!

Here's the before shot (love the light that this room gets during the day):

After a little nostalgic dump run to the most picturesque landfill site just in the knick of time on Saturday with a truck load of floor.... and a tonne of nails sticking out....

We've got a new sub-floor and a call in to our favourite local flooring place with hopes of carpet soon so we can move our bed back in.

Somehow our bedroom has become the room where the smelly hockey equipment goes, in the meantime. Pee-you.

Here's a peek at the carpet we'll be installing:

Same as what is in our other bedroom - the preferred place of our dog to shed as much as possible. He sure keeps us busy with the vacuuming. On to my next project of the day....tackling my junk drawers. That's right, I have two.

Will reveal them in all their glory, next post!

Organize Clothes

We're nearing the point where we can move our bedroom back into our master bedroom. In case you missed it, we've been sleeping in the living room since about July, but we did paint our bedroom and pick out a closet organizer.  Sadly, the closet organizer was not up to our standards so we are going to take it back.

So since our next project is tearing out existing floor and putting down a new sub-floor, it's time to get one of the biggest organization projects to date and one that strikes a little fear into my heart - the clothes.

Right now, I'm currently enjoying about 3-5 different categories of clothes:
1. Maternity wardrobe
2. Summer wardrobe
3. Work wardrobe
4. What actually fits wardrobe
5. A size or two too small wardrobe

This was housed in a few different ways:
My Dresser (a stunning Mission-style dresser from BG Furniture, Canadian made), 1 Rubbermaid bin, 5 random moving boxes, 1 hanging rack.

I started with dresser and emptied the entire contents on to my bed.

It felt a little overwhelming.

Each drawer in my dresser is lined with scrapbooking paper and it always makes me smile. It's a really simple way to line your drawers and have it look really cute.

I used two laundry baskets to sort - one for my maternity clothes, one for my too-small clothes, and piled the out of season clothes into a clear under the bed roll tote.

I tried on literally everything I own. 

After a few hours of work, we're left with this:

Steps for success:
1. Try everything on. I mean, EVERYTHING!
My mom used to make me do this every year at back to school time to find out what we needed to get. It cuts way down on impulsive spending because you know what you need to make your wardrobe better! Plus, along the way, I always find new combinations of outfits I might have not thought of before.

2. Store out of season clothes out of sight.I don't know about you, but in Alberta in winter, there's really no call for shorts, therefore put them away! I usually switch my sweaters with my shorts every year once the seasons change.

3. Ask yourself if it's really going to work for you again.
In this purge, I actually had to give up quite a few blouses from my work collection because of breastfeeding the ladies are a different size, and even when they are back to their new normal, some of my shirts just aren't going to work. Ditto on things I've been keeping out of nostalgia or clothes that are just too "young".

4. Ask yourself how many you really need.
I have a lot of pjama's. I like pj's, and when I was pregnant I was very sick a lot, so they represented comfort. I purged a few older pairs because I just didn't need that many pairs of pj bottoms.

5. Get rid of clothes that don't make you feel good or that you don't love.
Or that aren't flattering! Get a friend or your spouse to tell you ruthlessly what is good or not if you can't tell for yourself.

One step closer to a new bedroom & closet :) What are you organizing today?

Organized Linen Closet

Gotta love it when a plan comes together. Last February, I ripped out our linen closet, and it looked a little like this:

The closet was so deep, I could fit my entire body in and close the door with the shelves still looking as they did. It was a lot of wasted space, and a jumble of expired products, towels, towels and more towels.

For the last (almost) year, it has looked a little something like this in our living room (otherwise known as the place where everything goes to die, it-shall-not-be-named room) in our house:

There's been a lot of grumbling about it recently, as our bedroom is also taking up space within our it-shall-not-be named room, it's tight and it's hard to get to. As a result, the towel and linen pile has migrated to the bench in front of my desk downstairs which is really ugly and messy.

So I maybe may have been pestered my dear husband to finish the shelves within the new bathroom closet as quickly as possible to get rid of this mess, be able to also use the shelving somewhere else (cough stockpile cough cough). 

We did it the smart way - I purged a lot of our outdated stuff. I purged a lot of stuff back when we moved into the interim situation, and before we moved into the lovely new closet, I purged some more.

We also got 2 - 5 pk of clear shoe box holders and sorted the small items into categories and then labelled them with a strip of 2" scrapbooking paper and large stickers from my scrapbooking stash. I'm really happy with how they turned out.

We also spent some time measuring our tallest items and toilet paper to have an idea on how it would stack up in the closet. That being said we actually customized 2 of the shelves to fit our items.

Low and behold, here is she in her final glory:

We opted for 5 distinct sections:

Top Shelf: beach/kid towels, washcloths (we don't use these frequently) - still room to grow
Shelf 2: 9 stacked clear shoe boxes with small frequently used items, 2 large totes with meds & first aid
Shelf 3: Hand Towels and Bath Sheets with pairs matching (we're doing laundry ;))

Shelf 4: Stockpiled bathroom items -everything from soap, body wash, Listerine, shampoo, Q-Tips, Conditioner, it's all there, all of our frequently used items.
Bottom: Storage for paper towel, toilet paper and Kleenex

What organizing project are you working on in the new year?

PJ Project: Customized Laundry Cart

Each week, we'll bring you a small project you can do to organize your world - in your pajamas. What could do more comfortable?

Since having a baby, the amount of laundry we have done has practically tripled so I find myself spending a lot of time looking at my closet. We are talking about building a shelf across the top, but in the meantime, while browsing through organizational products at Lowe's, I came across a sweet laundry cart from Home Logic.

It looked about the right size, to tackle my laundry related clutter which was currently residing on the dryer.

TOOLS NEEDED: a Phillips (star) screwdriver, a dab of Krazy Glue (optional)

CUSTOM ITEMS NEEDED: 1-2 sheets of scrapbooking paper, double sided tape, paper cutter, ruler.

Total Time: 20 Minutes (with baby and dog entertainment!)

The back of the box offered up instructions on how to put the cart together, but it was fairly simple.

The one thing that the directions did not mention is that you will need a star (Phillips) head screwdriver, so half way through my project I had to take a look around the house for one, however, if you grab one before you start no need to get up!

I actually didn't follow the directions, but rather put on one side at a time, the side panels snaps into the shelving and then you tighten the two screws with your screw driver. Don't tighten them too tightly or you will strip the plastic.

Voila, one side on!

A little more screwing later (ha ha), and two sides are on. I then snapped in the rollers so the cart is movable. I didn't glue them in, but a dab of crazy glue to keep them from following up might be a terrific idea if you had any laying around.

I had to move my washer and dryer slightly before I rolled the cart in, so I would suggest measuring before you start! When I slid it in, the WHITE cart beside my WHITE washer and WHITE dryer, I needed a pop of colour.

I went into my scrapbooking stash and pulled out a favourite piece of paper and my ruler. I measured out the middle of the cart and cut my paper using my Fiskars paper cutter to size, and taped it in using Scotch Double Sided Tape (my favourite kind - it's awesome).

You could also add paper on the top and bottom compartment squares or prior to putting the end on, wrap the entire side with wallpaper or wrapping paper for a truly colourful effect.

Close Up View

Freezer Jenga & Bathroom Floor Reveal

It's time again for our favourite game - Freezer Jenga.

We inevitably buy a buttload bunch of meat everytime we go to Costco. We love the quality of the meat and the price per kilogram is pretty sweet too.

A couple trips ago, we did math in store and realized the striploin steaks that we keep buying would actually be cheaper if we did the cutting of the striploin ourselves. So since then, we have sharpened up our chef knives and got chopping.

For a striploin that is about $80-90 we find we tend to get about 18-20 decently sized steaks. With the cost per kg, this works out to about $4/steak. A far cry from the $6 we were paying to have the butcher chop them.

So D got slicing and I got to take everything out of the freezer. Here's the before shot. (I actually had done the door a couple days ago when I had some time).

One of our main impediments in our tiny freezer is the turkey that didn't get eaten on Steaksgiving (or Thanksgiving). I had a freezer-side peanut gallery too.

 

One of the tips I found recently was to take the ground beef and flatten it in the freezer bag so it's thin and you can get more in. This helped a lot! Plus it makes the meat defrost quickly in the sink, which I love.

Here's the finished product after an hour or so of work by both of us to bag, label and sort. This is enough meat to last us several months.

In case you're wondering what's in there:

• One big turkey
• 6 medium freezer bags of ground beef
• 1 bag of homemade wontons
• 2 bags of Kraft shredded cheese
• 2 blocks of mozzarella cheese
• 14 drinkable yogurts
• A large ziplock baggie full of frozen breastmilk
• 11 frozen waffles
• 1 medium bag of frozen peas from our garden
• 1 large bag of frozen beans from our garden
• 6 lbs of butter
• 4 spiced packages of haddock
• 1 slab of peameal bacon
• 1 lb of strip bacon
• 2 leftover frozen casserole dinners
• 3 packages of burgers
• 4 boxes of frozen tart shells
• 2 large freezer bags full of pork ribs
• 8 medium bags of chicken breast
• 2 medium bags of chicken cutlets
• 2 medium bags of turkey breast
• 5 medium bags of pork souvlaki
• 2 salmon steaks
• 8 large bags of striploin steaks
• 1 first-aid cold package

I find our stacking impressive. But not as impressive as the grout in the bathroom.

It was a huge sigh of relief that the grout went very easily with these tiles after the disaster we had in our other bathroom. We used a higher quality tile sealer, and the expense of this, we feel has been well-worth it. The product we used this time is DuPont StoneTech Professional Enhancer Pro Sealer. 

We are all looking forward to having a toilet on the main level again, we have not had one upstairs since Jo was born!

 

Yay progress!