Well, after my last post I got to work. I cleared some space in the spare room downstairs that is going to be storage and a guest room eventually. Then I started to declutter up in my dressing room (also crafting room). DH was wondering what I was doing as I took load after load of stuff downstairs.
I did not just move my junk. I decluttered a bunch of stuff, put several things in more logical places, and even took my beautiful angel candle holder OUT of the box and put it on display in our front entry. Admission - it's been in the box since we got it.... but I'm using it now!
I took care to only put things downstairs that made sense to be there for storage: The luggage, extra pillows and blankets, 'decor' items not currently in rotation, and containers (nice boxes, empty plastic totes...).
The plan is to build my sewing table (cool idea I have from pinterest using bookshelves) in the middle of the room, so I moved what was left towards the walls. I grabbed my Rubba Sweepa and pulled up a bunch of hair :S Then I vacuumed really well.
I pulled out one of the bookshelves to build and discovered that it's a two person job, so it's going to have to wait a bit.
For now I'm enjoying my accomplishment. In the near future I'll have the table and start learning to sew!
Thank you for joining me, and I hope I can help you! It really is fun to be a Homemaking Diva!!
Love,
Valerie :D
Please comment or send your questions to me at homemakingdiva@hotmail.com
Showing posts with label rearranging rooms. Show all posts
Showing posts with label rearranging rooms. Show all posts
Friday, June 29, 2012
Thursday, June 21, 2012
The Snowball is Melting!
Yep! That's right. The snowball is melting! Not so much because I've been accomplishing it (I HAVE done a bunch, and DH actually went through half a closet.) but because I'm lowering my expectations... I set the bar way too high on that one.
The original idea was to completely declutter/ rearrange half the house with the final step being setting up my craft room. The problem is, most of the stuff isn't mine. So I need to wait for days when he's off and I think of it and we feel like it. Few and far between, but we are making progress. But since I am NOT just going to throw out all DH's stuff - that's not nice, I need a new plan. (You can read more about the snowball here.)
So the new plan is 'Do what I can'. What a concept! I can't declutter DH's stuff for him while he's at work, but I can move some of it over now that he has partially moved into his office. That will make enough space for me to move the luggage and a few other things out of my dressing room so that I can declutter my stuff and then set up my crafting area.
No worries, we will still be doing the DH decluttering, but now there's no pressure and I don't feel like I won't be able to work on learning to sew for months and months.
Wish me luck, I'm diving in!
Thank you for joining me, and I hope I can help you! It really is fun to be a Homemaking Diva!!
Love,
Valerie :D
Please comment or send your questions to me at homemakingdiva@hotmail.com
The original idea was to completely declutter/ rearrange half the house with the final step being setting up my craft room. The problem is, most of the stuff isn't mine. So I need to wait for days when he's off and I think of it and we feel like it. Few and far between, but we are making progress. But since I am NOT just going to throw out all DH's stuff - that's not nice, I need a new plan. (You can read more about the snowball here.)
So the new plan is 'Do what I can'. What a concept! I can't declutter DH's stuff for him while he's at work, but I can move some of it over now that he has partially moved into his office. That will make enough space for me to move the luggage and a few other things out of my dressing room so that I can declutter my stuff and then set up my crafting area.
No worries, we will still be doing the DH decluttering, but now there's no pressure and I don't feel like I won't be able to work on learning to sew for months and months.
Wish me luck, I'm diving in!
Thank you for joining me, and I hope I can help you! It really is fun to be a Homemaking Diva!!
Love,
Valerie :D
Please comment or send your questions to me at homemakingdiva@hotmail.com
Wednesday, June 6, 2012
It's HERE!
Our new sectional was delivered this morning. It's our first major investment piece, built to last but expensive. It's our splurge from DH's bonus, but still... spending that much makes me want to amp up my frugal-ness, at least for a while. :)
Here are some frugal ideas:
So anyway, thank you for joining me, and I hope I can help you! It really is fun to be a Homemaking Diva!!
Please comment or send your questions to me at homemakingdiva@hotmail.com
Have great day!
Valerie :D
Here are some frugal ideas:
- Don't buy new until you've used the old. We have several pieces that we've bought but not put together yet. A couple bookshelves, my bistro set that I got for $5 (Thank God for Canadian Tire Money), mini-blinds that need to be installed, painting that needs to be done (just some touch-ups here and there). So the house doesn't get anything else, at least until we've put together and used these things. And yes, we're working on it - I put together my new desk chair on the weekend.
- Eat out of the freezer. I'm all stocked up, I buy a club pack or two of the meat that's half price most weeks, so I have lots in the freezer. Last night I made Frittata, because I already had everything I needed for it.
- Do a project, for 'something to do'. There's not much in the way of entertainment where I live, at least not that I'm interested in. Movies, restaurants, and shopping is 95% of it. Next time we're 'bored' and looking for something to do, time to work on a project! Build that bookshelf, clean the fish tank, work on setting up the guest room (currently storage room).
- Watch the movies you have. We're into movies, and we like to buy new ones a fair bit, but there's a medium-sized pile of movies we haven't watched since we bought them. We need to watch them before we buy more.
So anyway, thank you for joining me, and I hope I can help you! It really is fun to be a Homemaking Diva!!
Please comment or send your questions to me at homemakingdiva@hotmail.com
Have great day!
Valerie :D
Wednesday, November 2, 2011
Christmas is Coming! But First: Company and Carpet :)
Confused by that title? :D Let me explain.
First of all 'Christmas is coming' - not very difficult to comprehend. I know many of you are groaning: 'But it was just Halloween, gimme some time!' Please don't get upset, I agree with you! It drives me crazy that there's Christmas stuff in all the stores already and personally, I refuse to decorate one iota before December 1st.
But! NOW is the time to plan and prepare! Flylady's Holiday Cruising Missions are in full swing, and the organizing sites are bursting with time-saving ideas. What's a Holiday Cruising Mission? Well, simplest way to put it is Flylady sends out one mission per weekday, starting mid-October, and she helps us to baby-step our way through preparing for Christmas. There's a fun little game behind it where you're pretending you're going on a cruise December 1st-21st and you HAVE to get everything done ahead of time. It's a great system, keeping you on track, one baby-step at a time.
While I'm not exactly following the Cruising Missions, I am baby-stepping my way through Christmas.
My sister and I do our baking together, and we've already planned what we're making, who's bringing which ingredients and supplies, and when we're making each recipe. This is our third year doing it, so we have it down to a science, I have a simple spreadsheet with recipe names across the top and ingredients down the side and the amounts of each ingredient per recipe in the middle with columns on the end for totals and initials (who's bringing what). We mostly make our same traditional goodies each year, so all I had to do this year was pull up last year's spreadsheet, do a 'save as' and make some minor tweaks. We're making 7 recipes, plus icing over 3 days together and we already did one day. We have fun and get it done, and THAT'S the Flylady way :D
I pulled out my Holiday Control Journal (a free printable from Flylady.net) and I have all my little notes from the last few years. I don't use it quite how Flylady set it up, but I do have everything together. I added a non-Christmas section, and that's where I have my sheet of paper that lists how many kids we had for Halloween each year, so I have a good idea of how much candy to pick up. I also have my Thanksgiving meal planners in there - one page checklists of what order to make each dish, how far ahead... Sound like a lot of work? Saving Dinner just posted theirs and you know it's gonna be fool-proof :D
So I'm starting to THINK about Christmas now, plan a bit here and there, I've picked up a few things already. I got all the stocking stuffers already - a friend of mine had a craft sale with all kinds of pretty and useful and yummy things :D A word of caution: If you're picking up gifts ahead of time and hiding them, be sure to either note where they are (put a reminder in your phone's calendar to ding at you on, say, December 12th, and then you can wrap the gifts and put them under the tree) or keep them all in the same place. I have a spot in my house that I usually hide DH's gifts, and he hasn't found it yet, not that he's been looking. So I know where things are, because they wouldn't be anywhere else :)
ANYWAYS, what was the rest of the title? Oh yes! 'Company and Carpet' right.
So I'm having overnight guests on Saturday. They said they'd get here around 8pm and they're visiting someone else on Sunday before they go home, so I'm figuring a snack Saturday night plus breakfast Sunday morning. I'm keeping it simple, but fancy at the same time. Old bananas were reduced drastically a while back and they called to me, so I brought them home and made two loaves of banana bread. We ate one, but I froze the other, so there's my Saturday night snack :D
Also, I wanted to do something fun for breakfast. I have a cookbook that was a fundraiser for the hospital I bought at a concert and recently I've been trying some of the recipes. And guess what?? The chocolate crepes recipe (which is sooo good - oh yeah, I'm making that today, too for post-night shift 'breakfast' - see my post on shifting) it says to make the batter 1-24 hours ahead of time! (I actually didn't notice that the first time I made it, and didn't care the second time... whatever) So I can make the batter and the whipped cream to go with it (I do Dream Whip: packet + milk + vanilla = DONE) sometime on Saturday before they arrive and then breakfast will be a snap!
Really, I've let the housework slide a bit too much, so having company coming is a great deadline to get myself into gear. And THEN once I've tidied everything up, it's so simple to maintain and I can have a stress free Christmas!
Carpet: My last post was all about how I'd finished painting DH's office. Well, the carpet guy is coming on Friday, so I need to tear the old carpet out (it's cheaper if I do it, once I get into it, I'll decide if it's worth the $35 savings :D it's probably easier than you think). So not only do I have to prepare for company, I have to make space for the carpet guy. But that ALSO means that we can start setting up DH's office :D and then my 'Joyous Snowball' will start rolling down the hill!
Please comment or send your questions to me at homemakingdiva@hotmail.com
Have great day!
Valerie :D
First of all 'Christmas is coming' - not very difficult to comprehend. I know many of you are groaning: 'But it was just Halloween, gimme some time!' Please don't get upset, I agree with you! It drives me crazy that there's Christmas stuff in all the stores already and personally, I refuse to decorate one iota before December 1st.
But! NOW is the time to plan and prepare! Flylady's Holiday Cruising Missions are in full swing, and the organizing sites are bursting with time-saving ideas. What's a Holiday Cruising Mission? Well, simplest way to put it is Flylady sends out one mission per weekday, starting mid-October, and she helps us to baby-step our way through preparing for Christmas. There's a fun little game behind it where you're pretending you're going on a cruise December 1st-21st and you HAVE to get everything done ahead of time. It's a great system, keeping you on track, one baby-step at a time.
While I'm not exactly following the Cruising Missions, I am baby-stepping my way through Christmas.
My sister and I do our baking together, and we've already planned what we're making, who's bringing which ingredients and supplies, and when we're making each recipe. This is our third year doing it, so we have it down to a science, I have a simple spreadsheet with recipe names across the top and ingredients down the side and the amounts of each ingredient per recipe in the middle with columns on the end for totals and initials (who's bringing what). We mostly make our same traditional goodies each year, so all I had to do this year was pull up last year's spreadsheet, do a 'save as' and make some minor tweaks. We're making 7 recipes, plus icing over 3 days together and we already did one day. We have fun and get it done, and THAT'S the Flylady way :D
I pulled out my Holiday Control Journal (a free printable from Flylady.net) and I have all my little notes from the last few years. I don't use it quite how Flylady set it up, but I do have everything together. I added a non-Christmas section, and that's where I have my sheet of paper that lists how many kids we had for Halloween each year, so I have a good idea of how much candy to pick up. I also have my Thanksgiving meal planners in there - one page checklists of what order to make each dish, how far ahead... Sound like a lot of work? Saving Dinner just posted theirs and you know it's gonna be fool-proof :D
So I'm starting to THINK about Christmas now, plan a bit here and there, I've picked up a few things already. I got all the stocking stuffers already - a friend of mine had a craft sale with all kinds of pretty and useful and yummy things :D A word of caution: If you're picking up gifts ahead of time and hiding them, be sure to either note where they are (put a reminder in your phone's calendar to ding at you on, say, December 12th, and then you can wrap the gifts and put them under the tree) or keep them all in the same place. I have a spot in my house that I usually hide DH's gifts, and he hasn't found it yet, not that he's been looking. So I know where things are, because they wouldn't be anywhere else :)
ANYWAYS, what was the rest of the title? Oh yes! 'Company and Carpet' right.
So I'm having overnight guests on Saturday. They said they'd get here around 8pm and they're visiting someone else on Sunday before they go home, so I'm figuring a snack Saturday night plus breakfast Sunday morning. I'm keeping it simple, but fancy at the same time. Old bananas were reduced drastically a while back and they called to me, so I brought them home and made two loaves of banana bread. We ate one, but I froze the other, so there's my Saturday night snack :D
Also, I wanted to do something fun for breakfast. I have a cookbook that was a fundraiser for the hospital I bought at a concert and recently I've been trying some of the recipes. And guess what?? The chocolate crepes recipe (which is sooo good - oh yeah, I'm making that today, too for post-night shift 'breakfast' - see my post on shifting) it says to make the batter 1-24 hours ahead of time! (I actually didn't notice that the first time I made it, and didn't care the second time... whatever) So I can make the batter and the whipped cream to go with it (I do Dream Whip: packet + milk + vanilla = DONE) sometime on Saturday before they arrive and then breakfast will be a snap!
Really, I've let the housework slide a bit too much, so having company coming is a great deadline to get myself into gear. And THEN once I've tidied everything up, it's so simple to maintain and I can have a stress free Christmas!
Carpet: My last post was all about how I'd finished painting DH's office. Well, the carpet guy is coming on Friday, so I need to tear the old carpet out (it's cheaper if I do it, once I get into it, I'll decide if it's worth the $35 savings :D it's probably easier than you think). So not only do I have to prepare for company, I have to make space for the carpet guy. But that ALSO means that we can start setting up DH's office :D and then my 'Joyous Snowball' will start rolling down the hill!
Please comment or send your questions to me at homemakingdiva@hotmail.com
Have great day!
Valerie :D
Monday, October 24, 2011
A Joyous Snowball
Finally, Finally FINally DONE!! DH's office is 100% painted!! YAY!!! (Can you see me happy-dancing??)
That took WAY longer than I thought, mostly because it's RED and required 80 million coats! Whatever. It's done and it looks great!
When we're done this set of nights, I'll call 'Uncle Jimmy' and make an appointment to get the carpet installed. Still need to get DH to have a 'boy party' so they can haul the carpet from my parents' house to here... that's in the works. Almost happened on Thursday, but it was too rainy :( (My dad had bought this carpet for their bedroom and, of course, my Mom then decided she wanted hardwood instead... although I think she's just procrastinating clearing all the junk in their room, it's Hoarders-worthy in there).
After the carpet's in, I can install most of the baseboard - provided I pick up finishing nails... (I repainted the old trim, but a few small pieces broke...) And Dad said he'd be available in November for helping with the rest of the trim (that needs to be cut). But after I install *most* of the trim, we can put together DH's desk and chair, maybe the other three bookshelves that have been sitting in the way in the entryway...
Then DH can move into his office, which will clear out the spare bedroom downstairs, and the closet down there, plus there are two closets in the office (one is HUGE) and then I'll be able to get stuff out of my dressing room (luggage, extra pillows...) down into the spare bedroom, and THEN I can set up my dressing room nice-nice for scrapbooking and sewing!
And THEN I can spend some extra time from night shifts doing fun, crafty things :D
And in case you were wondering, yes, we DO have a ridiculous amount of space :) We're two people in a large bungalo with a finished basement.... 5 bedrooms altogether ;) It will be really nice to have use of the closets in DH's office, we have a lot of space, but not that much storage space, very little furniture... we're baby-stepping that :D
Can you tell I'm excited? :D
One thing at a time. This will be a big oppourtunity to declutter, especially for DH, but I'll try not to be too pushy :)
So anyway, thank you for joining me, and I hope I can help you! It really is fun to be a Homemaking Diva!!
Please comment or send your questions to me at homemakingdiva@hotmail.com
Have great day!
Valerie :D
That took WAY longer than I thought, mostly because it's RED and required 80 million coats! Whatever. It's done and it looks great!
When we're done this set of nights, I'll call 'Uncle Jimmy' and make an appointment to get the carpet installed. Still need to get DH to have a 'boy party' so they can haul the carpet from my parents' house to here... that's in the works. Almost happened on Thursday, but it was too rainy :( (My dad had bought this carpet for their bedroom and, of course, my Mom then decided she wanted hardwood instead... although I think she's just procrastinating clearing all the junk in their room, it's Hoarders-worthy in there).
After the carpet's in, I can install most of the baseboard - provided I pick up finishing nails... (I repainted the old trim, but a few small pieces broke...) And Dad said he'd be available in November for helping with the rest of the trim (that needs to be cut). But after I install *most* of the trim, we can put together DH's desk and chair, maybe the other three bookshelves that have been sitting in the way in the entryway...
Then DH can move into his office, which will clear out the spare bedroom downstairs, and the closet down there, plus there are two closets in the office (one is HUGE) and then I'll be able to get stuff out of my dressing room (luggage, extra pillows...) down into the spare bedroom, and THEN I can set up my dressing room nice-nice for scrapbooking and sewing!
And THEN I can spend some extra time from night shifts doing fun, crafty things :D
And in case you were wondering, yes, we DO have a ridiculous amount of space :) We're two people in a large bungalo with a finished basement.... 5 bedrooms altogether ;) It will be really nice to have use of the closets in DH's office, we have a lot of space, but not that much storage space, very little furniture... we're baby-stepping that :D
Can you tell I'm excited? :D
One thing at a time. This will be a big oppourtunity to declutter, especially for DH, but I'll try not to be too pushy :)
So anyway, thank you for joining me, and I hope I can help you! It really is fun to be a Homemaking Diva!!
Please comment or send your questions to me at homemakingdiva@hotmail.com
Have great day!
Valerie :D
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