Hi! and Thanks!

Welcome to everyone who might be filing in here via Ucreate or CraftersFileBox or any of the other awesome blogs who are featuring my Valentines from last year. Totally didn't expect all the link love. Fun times!

I promised the closet transformation.
You recall the before:

Let me add that this was after I'd removed ALL their toys, shoes, and sorted out everything that was non-fitting.
First things first: Remove those hideous wood-colored bi-fold doors! BUH-BYE!
We removed the wire shelving (which will probably go up in the garage), puttied, painted the closet and trim (just white), and installed these shelves.

Ta-Da! Everything fits. Now I'm comtemplating whether to put a curtain on it. Any thoughts?

Coming Soon: Transformation

We have a three bedroom house. And (soon-to-be) five children. It goes without saying that our children share rooms, right?

In our attempts to make everyone fit, it was decided that all of the girls' clothing needed to go into their closet. No room for dressers, really. And so began the great closet transformation of January 2010.

The project is almost done, it just requires a few more items. But this is just to whet your appetite.

We're going from this:


Adding some of this:

And this dresser FULL of clothes that has seen much better days:


Will it work? Your guess is as good as mine at this point.

Broken!

= my camera's card reader.
= no pictures.
= no blogging until I get a new one.
= sorry!
= old picture share?

I picked up this old tiered basket from my mom's house when I was there in November. It was quite literally in the trash. I brought it home, cleaned it up, and spray painted it RED.

Now, I just need to find a use/purpose for it. Any ideas?

The Storage of Food

I've been working pretty diligently to work our food storage to a recommended 3 months' supply of foods we eat everyday. I was feeling pretty darn good about it!


Yeah, yeah... we shop at Wal-Mart... judge us.


The above is actually a little under-the-stairs storage area that desperately needs some shelving. In the meantime, it's kindof a mess, but I know where everything is.



And this is about 10 pounds of rice, 50 pounds of flour and 20 pounds of sugar.

It seems like a lot of food. So, we took it for a test drive. It's only maybe 6 weeks worth of food. Time to go shopping.

Totally After the Fact.

My dad came and visited me last week. He flew down on Monday night and went home on Saturday afternoon. The interim was spent napping, talking, playing UNO, tickling, cuddling and more napping.

Except I did manage to put his skillz to good use.
You see, the girls have alot of books. Three large boxes of them. And no bookcase. So when we moved, I wouldn't even allow them to open the boxes of books until we solved this little problem.

Their room before:


Some during shots:

Me drilling the holes which will make it adjustable. We used a piece of pegboard as a template to have uniformly spaced holes. Worked like a charm. My dad is so smart.

I would have loved to use hardwoods to build it, but it would have cost close to $100. We opted to use a birch veneer plywood instead. It turned out awesomely.


My dad even spent the better part of an entire day working just to get our semi-cruddy table saw aligned and everything. He also did 90% of the cuts. I did none. I value my fingers, he apparently does not.


Matt was working long hours all week long, but he did manage to find a couple of hours to have my dad show him how to use the table saw. Matt made the other 10% of the cuts. We ripped a thin (3/8ths inch?) piece of poplar to face the entire bookcase, so you weren't staring at a cross-section of plywood from the front. Worked like a charm.


I had to leave the room pretty much any time Matt was operating the saw. It terrifies me. He also needs all his fingers!
Some quick coats of primer, some sanding and some paint and...


the after shot! I'm figuring a final cost to be about $40.

And now I can get to work on making a cushion-seat thing for the rest of that window seat.