I found this cute laptop sleeve at The Cottage Home. This would be a great idea for anyone even guys. It could be personalized so many ways! Enjoy her tutorial.
http://thecottagehome.blogspot.com/2010/10/laptop-kindle-i-pad-sleeve-tutorial.html
Tawra
Here is a tutorial from craftystaci.com on how to sew.
If you don’t like to sew here is a no-sew Coffee Cup Sleeve
from urbancomfort.typepad.com that is quick and easy to make!
Tawra
I found the cutest milk jug ghosts and they will cost you $1 or less!!! They are so cute! Check here out here at dollarstorecrafts.com.
Tawra
I saw this Laundry Ladder on one of my favorite sites- Remodelaholic. As I was working on this post, I thought this could be cute leaned up against the wall or in the bathroom leaned against the wall for a towel rack!
-Tawra
I have two things that I just love! Picket fences and old windows. Ever since we were married almost 16 years ago, I have wanted a cute little house with a white picket fence. I know it sounds corny but gardening is my passion! I especially love cottage gardens so the fence was always a dream of mine.
I also LOVE old windows. When my brother remodeled his house, I made sure hubby brought home all the leftover old windows from the 1920’s. He and my brother just shook their heads all the way back home! I’ve done several things with my old windows. Of course the good old stand-by mirror looks great in my purple kitchen. It’s also handy because I don’t have to turn around every time I talk to my family while I do the dishes.
Finally, after many years of scrimping and saving we got caught up and are debt free (except our house) so we decided to go ahead and put up my picket fence. We paid $800 for fencing that should have been $1500.
It was Labor Day weekend and Lowe’s was offering a coupon where, when you bought $50 or more, you would get $10 off. Each time you purchased something, the register would spit out another $10 off of $50 coupon.
It took us three hours to go to two stores for all of the supplies. In all, I made twenty transactions but saved $200 in coupons and another $500 because the fencing was on sale– $700 for three hours work is a great savings in my book!
Making Vintage Crate Bookshelves
I have been hauling around a bunch of old crates in all my 14 moves that I just LOVE, but I haven’t been able to figure out what to do with them. I use them to store garden stuff so the space to keep them isn’t totally wasted space but I wanted to use them in the house. Well, thanks to one of my favorite sites, Remodelaholic, I now have a brilliant idea!!!
Vintage Crates as Bookshelves.
Check them out. They are so cool! I am putting them up in the office or family room in our new house. Tawra
Homemade Kitchen Canisters
From: Rose
The other night I was in Walmart. I was looking at the knives and they had some canister sets on the other side of the aisle. A woman told me that during the holidays she went to Home Depot and bought empty paint cans (They are clean and have never been used) for gifts. She made canister sets. She said they come in different sizes. She painted the outside of them and then she cut out pictures from various magazines or stickers and she labeled them.
She dressed up the canisters differently for each household. She went to the dollar store and bought that items for the canisters. Example: For coffee, she had a bag of coffee, for tea she had a box of tea etc. I thought that was the cutest thing. I know this year at the Walmart near my house there were a lot of those little paint cans that were decorated. They had food mixes in them and some had little whisks or spatulas attached to the side. They were especially cute with the Christmassy design on the outside.
I think this is a GREAT idea! I may even use it in my pantry at our new house!
-Tawra
Polka dots are everywhere. These homemade canisters would be cute painted in a pretty color with white polka dots on them, too.
You could also spray paint them with chalkboard paint and then just write in chalk what is in the can. That way, if you use the can for something different, you could easily wipe or wash it off and rewrite on it.
-Jill
Photo By: SpookyPeanut
How to Paint Tile
For years now I have been painting everything and I mean everything— long before it was the “in” thing to do and before there was special paints to use for the job. Forty years ago people were horrified when they heard that I had painted a metal storm door with latex paint (the paint still looks good on it). I have also painted vinyl flooring, kitchen cabinets and tiles.
I always thought, “If they look ugly anyway and I am going to have to replace them, why not try it? What do I have to lose?”
When I moved into my current house it had the absolute most awful porcelain tiles I had ever seen in the bathroom. I thought, “Why not paint the porcelain tiles?” This was before the decorating shows came up with the idea that you might be able to paint tiles. :) :)
Six years later, they still look great!
Here’s what I did:
Paint with latex paint. You can use any kind of latex paint. I used flat paint in my bathroom because that is what I already had but I usually prefer semi-gloss or gloss paint for places like that because it is easier to clean.
I haven’t tried using paint in shower stalls where the water would be hitting it all the time. I’ve only used it on the bathroom walls and kitchen back splashes that had plastic tiles (Yeah, there is such a thing) and it worked fine.
-Jill
P.S. Here are some instructions on how to paint a vinyl floor.
Photo by: jpvargas
Since we are featuring gardening ideas this week, here is an older post showing Tawra’s house when they first moved in and how they set up their garden beds for square foot gardening. If you have seen her recent pictures of the house, you can see how far they have come.
We have been working on the gardens each weekend and it has been some hard work! Right after we moved in, we had to replace our septic system and afterwards, the yard was a big muddy mess. We are first working on the septic tank mess.
Here is the "before" picture, where we started outlining the garden with the free bricks we got. You can see all the dirt where they dug for the septic tank and it’s just a mud pit! My motto is, where’s there’s mud there’s a potential garden! :-)
Here is the area over the drain field for the septic system. I’m going to try and put in a huge drought tolerant perennial bed. I was going to try and do it all this year but I think my dreams are bigger than my or Mike’s energy. You can see he started rototilling in the front and then the tiller broke. We are going to have to wait until we can fix it to get the rest done. It’s just too hard to hand dig. BJ is going to put his Giant Pumpkins in the back.
This is how it looked after we got the compost filled in. We just decided to do everything as raised beds because the ground is such hard clay it’s not worth digging unless we dig it out. We are going to cut down the septic tank vents so they don’t stick out so much. All that is right on top of where they put in the new septic tank.
This is our raised beds for our vegetables. We are going to make four raised beds this year and then, if we need more later, we will add them. I am doing my favorite method of gardening, Square Foot Gardening. It is SOOO much less work than traditional gardening!
Of course my wonderful husband did all the digging to get the bed straight and then he hauled and filled in with compost. He has worked hard but once it’s in, then it’s easy!
For all the paths, we are putting down newspaper or cardboard and then mulching with free wood chips.
That’s our start for this year!
-Tawra
Here’s a quick, easy and natural way to unclog a drain using ingredients you already have at home! This method easily takes care of most clogs in minutes! (more…)
Fix it Yourself!
I’ve never been considered a mechanical genius. In fact, I was afraid to try virtually any do-it-yourself project as a teenager because I had seen my dad electrocute himself countless times on the simplest projects and I had concluded that do-it-yourself work was a dangerous business.
I tried a few car repairs when I was younger, but I had limited success, mostly with changing oil, belts and other simpler things. My dad and I once tried to change the water pump, but after spending two full days working on it, we ran into a snag and it ended up costing twice as much to fix what we did to it! ;-) After a few years, I tried again. I bought a new radio for my car and tried to put it in myself. My brother and I successfully installed the radio, but it would not work when we tried it. Finally, I realized that I connected the power to the wire from the light on the old radio and the new radio would only turn on when the lights were on, too.
Many of you may not have considered fixing things yourself, but most home repairs are easier than most people realize and a lot cheaper than paying someone else to fix it.
My first real attempts at repairing things came after we moved to Idaho. We lived in a pretty remote part of Idaho and it was nearly impossible to get a plumber or an electrician out there. One night while watching the Red Green show, I got inspired!
One winter, the true test presented itself. We had a faucet out in the yard sticking up from a metal barrel partly buried in the ground. One day during the winter thaw, we heard the sound of water running in the house. The outside faucet had frozen and the metal elbow behind the faucet had cracked. When the thaw came along, the crack produced a narrow gusher of water that had already flooded the yard around it.
It was the first day of a three day holiday weekend. The chances of getting a plumber were slimmer than usual. I had no tools for this kind of work and the nearest hardware store was 70 miles away. Somehow, I was going to have to do this myself.
After a lot of praying and pondering, I came up with some ideas. It just happened that Jill, who lived across the street from us, had the elbow piece that we needed to replace the broken one. Once I knew we had the part, I gave it some thought and figured out a way to remove the faucet using a piece of pipe, some inferior tools and some skills I learned watching "MacGyver." After that, it was simple to turn off the water, put the new elbow on the pipe and replace the faucet. That project saved us at least $200 if we could have found someone to do it at all.
We recently tried blowing insulation into the attic of the older part of our home after discovering that there was only four inches of insulation up there (as opposed to the fifteen inches it should have been.) Had we had the work done by an insulation company, it would have cost around $2,000, but doing it ourselves, it cost us $250 and about 8 hours of work.
This type of project might at first seem too difficult to do yourself, but any time you consider the potential of doing it yourself, consider that there are lots of free resources on the Internet where you can learn what you’re about to get yourself into. In recent years, I have spend a small amount of time researching exactly what it will take to do a project before we try it. For the insulation project, I went to Lowe’s to check prices and to read the information on the insulation packages. Blown in insulation was much less expensive, so we decided to do that. We found that once you buy a certain number of bags of insulation that the store lets you have a 24 hour rental of the machine to blow it in for free.
The insulation that we planned to use was cellulose which is made from recycled newspaper. I was concerned about whether or not it was safe since paper burns more easily than fiberglass, so I went down to the local fire station and asked the firefighters. They said that cellulose insulation has a fire retardant to reduce the possibility of a fire and they weren’t worried about it. Also, between the firefighters and stories on the web, I learned that I shouldn’t blow the insulation on top of certain recessed lights.
Once we learned enough to feel comfortable with the project, we bought the supplies, including masks and goggles and did the work. It took us a total of 8 hours and cost just under $250 including all of the supplies, renting the Lowe’s truck to get it home and buying $7 worth of Chinese food at the grocery store since we were too tired to cook after doing it! It was messy work, but not especially difficult and we saved about $1750 over having an insulation company do it. Not only that, we estimate that we will save at least 200 gallons of propane a year, which works out to a savings of over $400 PER YEAR that we would have spent had we not done the work.
Some problems appear bigger than they really are. Last summer, we had to spend a lot of money having a new septic system put in at our new house. No, we didn’t do that ourselves, but I did stay around while they installed it and paid a lot of attention to how the work was done. Though I was sure that there was nothing wrong with the new septic system, we started to notice the smell of sewer gas around the outside of our house, which seemed to be coming from the sewer vents on the roof. The company that installed the system assured us that there was nothing wrong with the installation, but they couldn’t offer any insight about what might be causing the problem.
One day, we started to notice the smell inside the house and we were very unhappy about it. We found that the smell was coming from a drain in one of our closets. We called out three plumbers and they gave estimates ranging from $1000-$2000 each. Our dilemma was that each plumber had a different opinion of what would solve the problem, so we were pretty certain that if we spend $1000 or more, the problem would still not get fixed.
I thought that most drains were supposed to have traps, where a bend in the pipe allows water to stand and prevents sewer gas from coming into the house. One of the plumbers said that the drain in question did not have a trap, so we were surprised we had never smelled it before. When I thought about it, I realized that the only thing that put water into that drain was the air conditioner, which we had not used the previous two months. I poured a couple glasses of water down the drain and the problem soon cleared, meaning that there really was a trap and the water had simply evaporated, allowing the smell to come through.
We had solved the problem of the smell in the house, but we still had the problem outside. After spending a number of hours looking on the Web, I found a document explaining how the chemistry works in a septic tank. Without explaining all the details, the writer recommended flushing baking soda down the toilet each week. We tried it and it solved our problem completely. Rather than spending thousands of dollars, our total cost is 78 cents per week for system maintenance.
We once had a problem where our garage door opener would not work. The door was stuck in the "up" position. After I tried a lot of things, our son, who was 8 years old at the time, noticed that the safety sensor that prevented the door from closing when something blocked it was not lit, but he was sure it had been in the past. The sensor sends an invisible beam of light to another sensor on the other side of the garage door. I checked it and realized someone had bumped the sensor and the light beam was pointed the wrong way. After a small adjustment, it was fixed.
Some of our other do it yourself projects have included:
Some projects are definitely worth hiring a professional to do. I don’t have much patience with cars, so we almost always pay a mechanic to fix them. You will no doubt find that there are some things that are too much trouble for the cost savings, but if you have something that needs to be fixed, consider whether you can do it yourself before hiring someone to do it.
If you’ve never tried to do basic home repairs before, start with something small. Once you have successfully done some small things, you’ll have the confidence to try something bigger. One thing we’ve discovered is that a lot of the projects that we expected to be difficult turned out to be easy and cost us nothing.
If you’re saying, "That sounds like a lot of work," consider this: We saved $1750 doing 8 hours of work on the insulation project. That works out to $219 per hour. If you divide that by the fact that two of us worked on it, that’s $109.50 per hour we didn’t have to earn to get the work done. Another way to look at it is that assuming that I get paid $20 per hour, that’s 87 1/2 extra hours I DIDN’T HAVE TO WORK to pay for someone else to do it.
By repairing and maintaining things ourselves, we have saved tens of thousands of dollars. If we had paid to have someone do all of the things we have done, we would have had to earn more than twice our income every year that we have been married to accomplish the same thing.
Not only did we save a lot of money, but there is a tremendous amound of personal satisfaction in successfully completing a project. I highly recommend trying it yourself!
-Mike
Photo By: Richard Thomas
Hi Tawra and Jill,
Just wanted to share something I learned the other day. My husband was taking a power nap on Saturday morning, and I went to the bathroom to dry my hair. My hair dryer would not turn on. I thought the breaker was thrown, so I went to the garage, but all appeared normal. I then took the hair dryer to our hall bathroom, and it wouldn’t turn on there either. I figured it broke, and tossed in the trash.
When my husband got up I told him I needed to get a new hair dryer. He said that he might be able to fix it, so I dug it out of the trash and wiped off that mornings grits.
Next I saw him going back and forth to the garage and bathrooms. Then he told me something I never knew. Our two bathrooms are GFI grounded, whatever that means. All I had to do was push the red re-set button in the hall bathroom and power was then restored to both bathrooms. There was not a thing wrong with the hair dryer.
If he had not been there to find this out, I would have probably headed to Wal-mart for a new one, spending $10-$15. So his few minutes of looking around saved us quite a bit of money. BTW, the hair dryer and curling iron were Christmas gifts from my mom. She always calls to see what I want and I like practical gifts, not things that just accumulate but things I can actually use. One year my dad got me new baking pans. Why do I need bottles of perfume, expensive jackets or purses?
Rachel
Photo By: Brent Kern1
We have recently been asked how to actually make a crocheted rag rug. It would be easier to show you, but I’m not able to make a video right now, so I did some checking. These videos are the best I could come up with for the moment. The first two are for a crocheted rug and the last is for what is called a toothbrush rug which is easy to make if you don’t know how to knit or crochet. If you have any questions, be sure to ask.
Jill
Photo By: katerha
Before
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 After |
By shopping at thrift stores and making do with what I had, I spent under $40 redecorating my daughter’s room. I saved almost $200 over purchasing everything at full retail. I had forgotten to take a “before” picture before I started painting. The room had a dirty beige color on the walls that I’ve hated since we moved in three years ago. We kept thinking we would move so I never messed with fixing the room up.
I finally decided that since it was almost Elly’s birthday I would go ahead and decorate her new room. (She and BJ used to share a room and we had just moved David in with BJ, giving Elly her own room.)
It took me about one day to put the paint on the walls. (That’s with the help of a 3 year old.)
To redecorate, we designed the room around a comforter that Elly had received from her grandmother as a gift.
We purchased everything from the thrift store over 2 weeks. We had to go about 3-4 times, but it was well worth the savings.
I needed to have some color on the wall so the canopy would stand out, but by the time I figured that out, I was too worn out to do any more painting. I found a twin sheet that I had on hand that I had purchased for $1 at the thrift store. I was originally going to use the sheet for something else but never did.
I ironed the sheet and then used the staple gun to staple it up on the wall. I stapled five staples along the top and three down each side.
Then I put a hook, which we had on hand, in the ceiling for the canopy. I hung the canopy and then tied it by gathering it and stapling the gather. Then we stapled a tassel on the gather. We found the tassels for $.12 each on clearance after Christmas.
We Used Book Boxes To Raise The Bed.
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Elly wanted a tall princess bed, so we took identical sized boxes of books from the garage and put one under each leg. We removed the wheels from the bed frame. Then we put a board on top of the boxes for stability. Elly’s bed frame is now about 15 inches feet off the ground. The top of the mattress comes up to her chest. She just loved the tall bed!
This also made it convenient to use the space under the bed for storing her toys.
My mom made some pillows to go with Elly’s comforter from material she already had. The long pink bolster was the one thing we bought retail. That was some new “extra fluffy soft” material that she purchased for about $5 for one extra special pillow.
I found a picture at the store to put on the wall behind her bed instead of a headboard.
We didn’t have any night stands that would work, so we stacked three boxes of books in the corner and one box in front to make a staggered “L” shaped night stand. We covered the boxes by layering a white sheet and then lace on top. She now has a nice place for her drinking cup, clock and stuffed animals.
I couldn’t find curtains to match and didn’t have any material to make any so I had to come up with something else. After moving so much, I’m sick of making curtains anyway. I found a white round tablecloth that I had. I ironed it, folded it in half and then draped it over her curtain rod. Then I took some fake flowers that I already had and put them on top. It turned out pretty nice for a free curtain!
We thought Elly would enjoy a free standing mirror and I found a nice heavy duty one for $5 at the thrift store. There were two things wrong with it. It didn’t have a base and the person had painted it black, inadvertently getting spray paint on the glass. Polish remover took off the paint in a just a couple of seconds and we simply leaned the mirror against the wall in the corner.
Elly likes crafts and we thought she would appreciate a craft area. We used a table that the neighbors had left on the curb. It was pretty ugly, so we covered it with a tablecloth that looked nice but wouldn’t be too big of a loss if she spilled something on it. Mom had a chair that was the right size, but it looked bad, too. She took some lace and tied the corners. Then she put a cluster of flowers on the back.
We also thought she needed something to hang all her art projects on. I found a corkboard that was in good shape, but had been marked up with markers, pens and crayons. I tried painting it with latex paint but the marker marks kept bleeding through. I took the blow dryer and dried the paint. (I was doing this at 9:00 p.m. the night before her birthday and really wanted to get it done and go to bed.) I took the glue gun and hot glued some lace over the top of the cork material to cover up the marks. The paint showed through the lace but the lace covered up the marker marks.
Elly had been telling me that she wanted to decorate with hearts and stars, so I took a large car washing sponge ($.75 each at Dollar General) and cut stencils out of them. I found heart and star coloring pages on the Internet and when I printed them, they were just the right size. I traced the heart and star on two sponges and then took a razor blade and cut out the edges. I only went down about ½ inch with the cut to remove the excess sponge. Then I put paint on the sponge and pressed it onto the wall. The sponge didn’t stamp the image as well as I would have liked, so I painted over the top of the mark my stencil had made with a paintbrush.
Elly’s new room took me two days work and about 15-30 minutes at a time, resting about 1-2 hours in between. I was really sick those two days or I would have been able to complete it in one day.
We were able to keep Elly out of the room while I did it so she didn’t really know what was going on in there. On the day of her birthday, I put a large sheet of wrapping paper over her doorframe and wrote Happy Birthday with a marker and bows. That way she could open her “present” from mom and dad. She was very excited about it!
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Before |
After |
Here’s what we spent on this room makeover:
Canopy-$5
Bed skirt-$3
Mirror-$5
Pictures for walls-$5
Corkboard-$2
Tassels-$0.24 for 2
Paint and supplies-$14
As mom said in her post, we worked on cleaning up and fixing up her backyard and house while she was gone. Originally part of her tree had fallen down and we were just going to cut it up but then we decided while she was gone we would get a bunch more done.
Here is the half of the apple tree that had fallen:
Here’s a picture of my brother starting on the tree. Mom has also wanted to get her fence painted for a long time but just never got around to it. Note the lovely color it is in the background. We forgot to take a picture of it, but in the back corner was an old metal shed she wanted taken down and sent to the metal recycling place. The guys got it down first before working on the tree.
Once the tree was down then they had to cut up the branches.
and there were a lot of apples to pick. The kids all got together and picked and picked apples.
They even got Jack in on the work and he was so proud of himself! Believe it or not we only got about one full box of apples, but that’s been enough to make applesauce, apple butter and dried apples. Recipes will come later.
Then we raked a lot of dead apples and branches.
Then Mike spent about 8-10 hours cleaning the siding on mom’s house with bleach. You can see the before and after. On the left side of the photo is the "after" he cleaned and right is a section he hadn’t cleaned yet (the "before"). You can see a rough diagonal line between the sections. It doesn’t look as bad on the picture as it did in real life. The problem with Kansas is that we have very high heat and humidity and the mildew just loves metal siding. As you can see, Mike didn’t mind doing it all. (Ok, about hour 10 he was getting a little tired. :-)
Then I went over 3 days and painted the fence for her. I was going to mix a bunch of brown and white paint leftovers mom and I had to try and get enough tan to cover her entire fence and shed.
Honestly, I hate mixing paint and really wanted to just find some at the recycling center or on discount at Lowe’s already mixed up. Well, I looked and looked at the recycle center for some for free but they didn’t have any. I then went to Lowe’s three times to see if they had any mis-mixes and on the last trip there, low and behold, they had 5 gallons and it was the perfect shade!! It was only $32! I was able to use a Swagbucks gift card so that was even better because it was free! I grabbed it up and the kids and I went over to paint.
Since it had been over 100 all week, we had to go in the mornings. We went over 2 mornings and then my oldest and I went one night and got it all finished. Doesn’t it look so much better!
Here’s the before and after. I took an old bench I had and put some black paint on it. Then I put some flowers in her planters and set them on the slab where the old metal shed used to be.
Her house looks almost like it had been painted after Mike scrubbed it. We found Outdoor Bleach and used that to clean it. It worked great! We just put it in a sprayer, sprayed it on, let it sit a few minutes and then scrubbed and rinsed. I forgot to get an "after" picture of the house but it does look nice.
Tawra
P.S. The pictures don’t show how really bad the siding was. When Mike was done with it, my neighbor thought they had painted the house because it was such a big change.
I bought a cheery vinyl tablecloth at Jo Ann Fabrics for 50 cents that I will sew into some pillows for the bench, which will add some color to the corner.
I do have some pretty sweet and wonderful kids/grandkids. Love you all.
Thanks again guys,
Jill (Mum, Nan)
Just wanted to pass along this little tip. Today my husband and I decided to pressure wash the exterior of our home. It was fairly dirty and it seems the spiders are really out-doing themselves this year. We used a pesticide spayer (the kind you purchase for spraying chemicals on weeds etc- the pump kind) and mixed a solution of 2/3 water to 1/3 bleach.
This was a very inexpensive cleaner and did a fabulous job. We sprayed on the bleach solution and then let it sit a few minutes then we made sure to rinse everything throughly so no bleach was left behind. Just wanted to pass the money saver along because I looked at siding washing solutions and they were outrageous.
Signed Clean inside and now out :)
Malynda from Indiana
Note from Tawra: This is great timing!! Mom was just talking about how to clean the steel siding on her house. It’s pretty grungy and she tried just using bleach water with a scrub brush but that didn’t phase it. Anyone have any other suggestions? We would love to hear them as she would love to get it cleaned this fall!
photo by: peasap