Signs of Spring

Daffodils are in bloom! It is so nice to see one of the first signs of spring.

Basketball season is also in full bloom here and my backyard is sprouting basketballs along with daffodils. I hurried out to cut a bouquet of daffodils before they are all smashed by the stray basketballs from next door.

First bouquet of the season.

This is my Van Briggle pottery vase. Since it has daffodils on it, it seems like the perfect vase to put them in. It is also a great size and shape for those bouquets of mixed flowers from the grocery store. My grandparents purchased this vase from Van Briggle pottery in Colorado Springs while on a vacation in the 1970's. When I had to empty their house I chose to keep it. I use it often and it is one of my favorites.

Start Your Own Herb Garden with 5 Easy-To-Grow Herbs

I am so ready for spring to get here. Last week we had a couple beautiful sunny, warm days and I had hopes of ditching my winter coat. Sadly, they were just a tease and it is back to cold temperatures and rain here. It is officially the first day of Spring so I am taking that as license to start making plans for gardening and being outdoors.

If you have ever wanted to plant a garden but didn't know quite where to begin, I advise starting with a few basic herb plants. They are easy to grow, can be purchased inexpensively, and don't require a lot of work.

In my experience herbs aren't too picky about where they are planted and as long as you plant them somewhere that is sunny and not too wet they will thrive. Herbs also do well in containers. Although many herbs are easy to grow from seed, I suggest buying plants, especially if you are new to gardening.

Here are 5 herbs that are easy to grow and are usually easy to find at garden centers or home stores that sell flower and vegetable plants in the spring:

Basil-- is an annual, which means the plant will just grow for one season from spring to fall. It is sensitive to cold, so be careful not to plant too early. Basil will flower and it is best to harvest it before it starts to bloom. Pinch off the blooms to make the plant last longer.

Parsley--this old favorite might not seem very exciting but it is really very useful in cooking and is so easy to grow. Parsley is a biennial plant which means the plant will usually grow for 2 seasons. It will die down when the weather gets cold and start to sprout again in the spring.

Chives--I have had the same chive plant for years. It is one of the last plants to die back in the cold and usually the first to come alive again in the spring. Every few years we will have a mild winter where the chives will stay green all winter. The new growth on my chives is already a couple inches high.

Rosemary--Here in the lower Midwest (growing zone 6) rosemary is considered an annual plant. If you live in a cold climate you will almost always have to plant a new plant each year. I have had rosemary winter over a few times but that is always unexpected. In warmer climates, rosemary is a perennial evergreen and can grow to the size of a bush.

Thyme--Thyme likes dry soil and grows close to the ground. It is a good plant at the front of the garden or for the edge of a container garden where it can spill over. It is a perennial that goes dormant during winter and then greens up again in the spring with new growth.

Herbs are almost fool proof to grown and require much less time and work than flowers or vegetables. If you are new to gardening or if you have not grown herbs before, I hope you will give them a try.

Better Nesting Book Club: After the War is Over

Better Nesting Book Club recommends:

After the War is Over

by Jennifer Robson

Are you a fan of Downton Abbey?  I arrived a bit late to the party but was completely hooked after watching the first season on Netflix. It didn't take me long to catch up and I have been a fan ever since. With season 5 just ending it will be a long wait for season 6. While you are waiting, I recommend reading After the War is Over by Jennifer Robson. If you like the world of Downton Abbey, I believe that you will enjoy this book.

Set in England at the end of World War I, it tells the story of Charlotte Brown who has finished four years of service as a military nurse and is ready to start a new chapter in her life. She moves to Liverpool to take a job helping the needy and is just settling in when she reconnects with her best friend's brother.

Edward Neville-Ashford, now Earl of Cumberland is struggling to recover from battle wounds and needs her help. Charlotte wants to help, but should she risk her heart and her future on a man who can never be hers? Edward needs to marry an heiress in order to shore up his family's fortunes and Charlotte is but the adopted daughter of a clergyman. She knows they can never be together even though he may be the love of her life.

This romantic novel is full of historical detail that gives it more depth than the average romance. On the serious side, it takes a look at conditions in post-war England, addressing the changing roles of women; changing conditions for the aristocracy: poverty; and social unrest.

Craft Caddy

Quite some time ago I had the idea to use some of the various vintage tins, boxes, jars, and other containers that I have collected to organize my craft and sewing supplies. You can see some of the vintage eye candy that inspired me here. As is often the case with me, I have the inspiration and the idea. but I fall short when it comes to actually executing the idea. This project is a little baby step toward my vision of organized vintage bliss.

I had this wooden caddy gathering dust in my basement. It it holds 4 pint-sized berry baskets (or tills) and is meant to be used for picking small berries such as raspberries. I have always heard carriers like this referred to as a handy, but a quick search didn't turn up any information so this may be a local or regional term for them.

Anyway, I have kept this berry handy because it reminds me of my grandfather. It belonged to him and I am pretty sure that he made it. Since I have no plans to do any berry picking, I thought it would be a nice idea to re-purpose this as a holder for some of my crafting tools.

After cleaning up the wooden carrier, I added an empty cocoa tin to hold my collection of decorative edge scissors, a couple cans covered in wallpaper scraps for pens and pencils, and the bottom of a vintage refrigerator dish to hold a set of shorter-than-normal markers. There is still a little room in one corner and I am on the lookout for a container that will fit there and work for holding glue sticks.

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House On a Diet: Let's Shred Paper

It's a snow day here.

While it's tempting to curl up with a good book, a snow day is also a good opportunity to tackle some of those projects that you can never seem to get around to. For the past several days I have been working on reducing the amount of paperwork that is stored in our house.

Sometimes it seems easier just to keep the paper than to figure out what is really needed and what isn't needed. I ran across a box full of bank statements. Since it has been 3 or 4 years since our bank went electronic and stopped printing and mailing bank statements I knew they had been around a while but I wasn't sure how long I needed to keep them.

Not sure what household records you should keep or how long to keep them? Here and here are guidelines that I found helpful. Turns out bank statements only need to be kept 1 year unless they are needed for tax purposes, then it would be 3 years.

Almost 12 years ago I was the executor for my grandmother's estate and before that I was her legal guardian and power of attorney. All of that required keeping careful and detailed records but there was no need to keep them all these years. I have just finished shredding them and have 3 large bags full.

Now I just need to get to those bank statements and I will have successfully downsized our paperwork and I will be ready to work on improving how it is organized and stored. I currently use multiple file boxes and folders but I think that a small 2-drawer file cabinet would be an improvement. It would be much easier to retrieve and put things away and I think it might be a solution to some of the paper that accumulates on the dining room table and sometimes on the buffet or on one or more chairs.

To finish up I just want to share some paper shredding advice. If you have large quantities of paper to shred make sure you shred for just a 5 to 10 minutes at a time so that you don't burn out the motor in your shredder. Most of the small paper shredders are not designed to be used for more than a few minutes at a time. If they overheat they will usually shut down but by that time you have likely burned out the motor. I have learned this the hard way. Twice.
 

Better Nesting Book Club: The Rosie Effect

The Better Nesting Book Club recommends:

The Rosie Effect by

Graeme Simsion

We are having a snow day today. It has been snowing all morning. If you are in the Northeast where there is 5 or 6 feet of snow on the ground you will probably laugh but we could get up to 12 inches of snow. That is not a record setting amount but it is a lot for us and pretty much everything is closed down. I am so happy that I don't have to go out in it today.

What could be better than being warm and cozy indoors curled up with a good book and a cup of something warm on a snowy day?

The Rosie Effect is just plain fun. A nice, light read that will entertain you. When socially inept scientist Don Tillman's wife tells him they are expecting a baby he approaches impending fatherhood the only way he knows how. As a scientific project.

This book will remind you of an old fashioned screw ball comedy with hilarious misunderstandings and mistaken identities galore. From receiving contradicting advice to devising a Standardized Meal Plan, Don tries his best to be a helpful partner to Rosie but it's hard to tell if his efforts are helping or hurting.

This charming, off-beat romance is the sequel to The Rosie Project. You need not have read the first book to enjoy the second, but you might want to.

House On a Diet: Motivation and an Update

Previously I shared how I put our house on a diet. In the original House On a Diet post I explained how, for me, reducing the amount of stuff in our house is not just a matter of purging or de-cluttering or organizing. It is a plan to responsibly remove excess from our house, prevent unwanted items from entering our house, and ultimately organizing our possessions.  From the beginning I intended to do this at a pace that worked for me, slow and with intention.

Right before Christmas I accomplished some work on the House On a Diet project. After discovering that we still had a fairly large number of old 3 1/2 inch floppy disks I went through all of them and checked to see what was on them and transferred anything I thought needed to be kept to a jump drive. Now that we no longer have any 3 1/2 inch floppy disks the ancient computer with the 3 1/2 inch drive can go too! 

That's not all, It occurred to me that we had way more towels than we need so I went through all of those and only kept what fits in our linen/bathroom closet. I also went through our kitchen towels (we bought 10 TEKLA towels when we went to IKEA and we really like them, so far), and old towels that I had saved to use as rags. I was able to take a stack of used but not worn out kitchen towels to our church's soup kitchen and I took 2 big bags of bath towels, hand towels, and wash rags to our local animal shelter.

I was pretty happy with the progress I made in November and December and since I started the process over a year ago I think I have done pretty well. Even so I have to find ways to keep myself motivated. There are certainly no shortage of ideas. Just spend a few minutes on Pinterest and you will find all kinds of ideas, plans, and techniques for purging, de-cluttering, and organizing. Here are some of the ideas that I either considered and passed on or actually tried:

Pretend move -- A friend once told me that she was going to pretend to move and get rid of everything that she would not want to bother packing if she was actually going to move. This is a motivational technique that I have given a lot of thought to trying but I can't seem to overcome the fact that I am not really moving. 

An area each week -- My mother and a friend of hers had really good results with this plan. Each week they each picked an area in their house such as a drawer, closet, or cabinet to clean out. Then they checked in with each other to talk about what they found and got rid of. That also gave them the opportunity to discuss things they weren't sure about getting rid of.  They kept this up for quite a while and when they ran out of spaces that hadn't been cleaned out they started over. It was amazing how much they found the second and third times they looked at those same spaces. Just so you know how serious they were, my mom's friend decided to get rid of her wedding dress.

A garbage bag a day for X days -- One thing about having a small house is that although our house might be too full, we still have a lot less than the average household so this one doesn't work so well for me. Although I have challenged myself to fill up our very large garbage can a few times. For the most part I think filling up a lot of garbage bags quickly works well if you have a lot of clothes or bulky items like children's toys.

Blog de-cluttering  and organizing parties -- A couple years ago I started to do one of these but I don't have many of the typical spaces (no coat closet, no pantry, no laundry room) that the parties tend to emphasize and once they came to a few of the spaces I didn't have I stopped and didn't follow through. Since I actually keep my kitchen cabinets, medicine cabinet, linen closet, and such, pretty de-cluttered and pretty well organized this could be a helpful way for me to maintain what I do have in order. Maybe I should try one of these again.

100 Thing Challenge -- I used to see lots of bloggers doing these. (There seem to be two versions of this. One where you get rid of 100 things and one where you try to live with just 100 things. Just to be clear, I have never tried that and don't plan to.) A few years ago when I first heard of the 100 Thing De-Cluttering Challenge I started following along with one of these. I was on my second 100 items when I found out that I was doing it wrong. I was counting each item as one thing on but I was supposed to be counting each category as an item. Therefore, the 30 magazines I had parted with only counted as 1 item rather than 30 items. I know this is silly, I could have made my own rules, but I got discouraged and quit.

30 day purge -- This is one that I read about recently and decided to try. Here is how it works. On the first day you get rid of one thing, on the second day you get rid of two things, and so on and so on. If my math is correct, at the end of 30 days you have gotten rid of 465 items. I started this mid-November and at first it was easy. I was breezing through those single-digit days and I was even ahead going into the teens but then I got bogged down around 17. It was a lot harder than I anticipated to round up stuff and I wasn't very good at keeping count. While I didn't get all the way to 465 in one month it did provide me with some motivation.

Being asked for donations -- This is what has worked to motivate me the most. I have been asked for donations for fund raiser yard sales. These requests always prompt me to take a good look around and gather up some things to donate. It's a win-win. Right now I am working on finding things for a yard sale that will be held in June. The organizers have storage space so I can drop things off as I find them which is very nice.

To keep myself accountable, I plan to share more of my House On a Diet progress in the future.

P.S. My mother tells me that she just ran across a box containing all of the curtains for a house that she has not lived in for 10 years. None of the curtains fit any of the windows in her current house. She is wondering how she has failed to notice this box in her closet for the past 10 years.

Why I Like Marsala: The Pantone Color of the Year for 2015

Lots of people in blog land are talking about Marsala which Pantone announced as its Color of the Year for 2015. I was reading comments on one blog where there was quite a bit of hating on the concept of the color of the year and on Marsala.

I am not a trend follower when it comes to colors (or other things) in my house. When everyone else was decorating with hunter green, navy blue, and wine, I spent years searching for a peach comforter (which, by the way, I never did find).  I can’t say that I am unhappy to have missed the hunter, navy, wine trend. So yeah, I do hate that it is almost impossible to buy home decor in a color that is not “in”. Which brings me to Marsala and why I am actually glad to see Marsala as the color of the year.

This is my vintage rug. This picture really brings out the individual colors more than what you would see if you were looking at it in person. The background is darker and the flowers and foliage fade into the background making the pattern more subtle than what you see here.

You may think it is hideous. You are entitled to your opinion. My great grandmother bought this rug for her dining room approximately 90 years ago. It is now in my living room (yeah, my family never throws anything away) and I like it. I think it goes with my vintage vibe but it has posed something of a decorating challenge with its old fashioned colors. Depending on the light, the darkest color either looks like brown or dark wine. Could it be Marsala? 

Maybe it is just because I need something that goes with the rug, but to me Marsala is a perfectly nice color. Pantone's press release says that Marsala is an excellent choice for rugs. Ha! No, I will not be painting the living room Marsala. That would be a bit much. Some pillows might be a nice touch though.  I’m glad this color is having its year in the spotlight. Maybe I will stock up on accessories in Marsala. The old rug still has some life in it and who knows how long it will be before Marsala comes around again.

By the way, Pantone says that they don’t just pick the color out of thin air. They claim to look at current culture, trending colors (especially in fashion), and surveys of designers in order to come up with the color of the year. Could I be on trend by accident?

Obviously, the Color of the Year is all about marketing. Take it for what it is and unless you have a vintage rug that is impossible to match, you might just want to ignore it.

The Year Ahead 2015

Image courtesy of krishna arts at FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Usually, I don’t make New Year’s resolutions but I have been thinking about some of the ways I would like to improve our house in 2015. Until I find a new job (and maybe after) most of what gets done around the house will have to be low-budget or no-budget projects.

All of our home improvement focus and funds for the past 2 years have been devoted to getting the house painted. Now that’s finished, I think most of our home improvement energy this year will go toward finishing up exterior details like:

Finish painting the garage. Only the 2 most visible sides of our garage have been scraped and painted. I already have all the paint for this. I might have to buy some blades for the carbide blade paint scraper but that should be about the only expense.

Replace gutters with period-appropriate, half-round gutters. I have not even priced this so I don’t know if this is realistic for 2015.

New screen/storm doors for front porch and kitchen door. My husband wants to go with an old-fashioned wooden screen door, especially for the front porch. At less than $100 unfinished wood screen doors are a very cost-effective option. I have plenty of paint left over from painting the window sashes to paint them with.

Strip and repaint the front porch outside light fixture. This fixture appears to be original to the house and just needs a little spruce. It has had way too many coats of paint over the years and they need to be removed before the fixture gets a new coat of paint.

Do something about the foundation. The foundation of the house has been coated with some kind of textured paint or stucco. I’m not sure what it is but I know it is peeling off and needs to be re-coated with something.

Make over the front yard. The freshly painted house makes our crummy front yard look even crummier. Good thing it is about the size of a postage stamp because we need to remove all the old grass, level, and re-seed. We also need new landscaping in front of the house. And, maybe a tree. This project will likely take most of our home improvement budget for the year.

New front door. Our 1929 Craftsman style house has a 1950’s Mid-Century Modern style front door. I have a new door on my wish list.

Inside, I will continue to work on de-cluttering, organizing, cleaning, and other projects that I can do without spending a lot. 

The inside of the house could use some freshening up and it would be nice if I could do at least one room this year. Most rooms just need some paint and a few tweaks. The bathroom is the exception. It is horrible and needs to be completely remodeled. I don’t even dare dream about getting this done. Not only is it the most expensive project that needs to be tackled but it is the most inconvenient as well because it is our only bathroom.

Here's to 2015 and making our house a better place to live.

Year In Review 2014

Happy 2015!!! We had a very quiet New Year’s Eve and New Year's Day. Before we get too far into 2015, I want to do a brief review of 2014.

For the first 4 months of 2014 (pre-blogging) I was working long hours with little time for anything else. By late spring things at work had slowed down and I had time to get my flower and herb gardens weeded and mulched and possibly looking better than they had in several years. I also planted our tiny backyard vegetable garden but for the second year in a row, it was pretty much a failure.

Spring also found me working on the House Diet by rounding up items to donate to a fundraiser yard sale.

The front porch got new coat of concrete paint on the floor. The old wicker furniture got a fresh coat of white paint. And, I sewed new cushions and pillows for the porch furniture.

My job of 17 ½ years ended at the end of July and being unemployed gave me the opportunity to start this blog.

For over 2 years the restoration and exterior painting of our house has consumed all of our home improvement focus and money. More about that here, here, and here. The painters finished up in the spring as soon as the weather permitted, leaving me with the window sashes and back doors to paint.

I spent August and September painting window sashes (in between looking for a new job and helping my mom through a knee replacement). For its size our house has a lot of windows. There are 11 double-hung windows, 2 stationary windows, 3 louvered vents, and 3 doors (the front door is natural wood so only 2 doors needed to be painted). Before painting I repaired window glazing and caulked wherever needed. The basement door needed some extra attention and I attempted to repair one of the panels by putting in a new piece of plywood. Each window and vent, as well as the 2 back doors, received a coat of primer followed by a coat of high gloss paint. The kitchen door needed a second coat of paint. I also gave most of the window frames an additional coat of paint because I wasn't completely happy with the way they looked with the primer and one coat of paint that the painters were contracted to do.

All of the storm windows were freshened up with white spray paint. I added some weather stripping to the bottoms of the windows before putting the storm windows back up.

In October we took a short vacation followed by a long weekend. In between our refrigerator stopped working and had to be replaced.

Also, in October, I had my first IKEA shopping experience.

The year ended up with holiday decorating. Usually, I am lucky to have to time to put up a Christmas tree. This year the decorations were still simple but I was able to put out some old favorites that I usually don’t have time for. 

Those are the high points of the year. On the home improvement front, 2014 will be remembered as the year that the exterior of the house was finally painted.