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.

You can follow Better Nesting on Pinterest here.

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.

Exterior Painting and Restoration of Our Craftsman Cottage

I don’t want to let 2014 end without a post about painting the exterior of our house. This has been the project with no end. Seriously, it has just gone on and on and on. There are still some little, related projects that aren’t done and one big one—landscaping and re-seeding the front yard--but the painting is finished! I can hardly believe it. It’s taken more than 2 years but the house is painted.

Here is where we started. This is our Craftsman style cottage with aluminum siding (which was probably added sometime in the 1950’s) that had been painted (by yours truly) a few years after I bought the house. Here is what the house looked like 10 years ago. The big maple tree has since been removed.

Several years ago (I can't remember exactly how when) we had the worst ice storm I have ever encountered. The gutters on one side of our house were filled solid with ice and the weight of the ice pulled them off the house and caused them to twist and bend. Where they bent, the aluminum split. We had a contractor take a look. He said that way our house was built, there was nothing there to properly attach the gutters to and he would need to build something, blah, blah, blah. It was going to cost a lot and it was difficult to understand how he was going to do it without removing the aluminum siding. At this point we didn’t know what to do and didn’t have that kind of money so we didn’t do anything.

Then, a year or so later, comes a spring storm with very strong winds. Not a tornado, but straight line winds strong enough to take the roof off a car wash about 4 blocks from us and do a lot of damage to roofs, trees, and such in our neighborhood. Our house did not escape undamaged. The wind got behind the aluminum siding and peeled off a couple pieces . The siding was still attached to the house at one end and that long piece of siding was flapping back and forth in the wind. Can you imagine waking up to that noise? Our bedroom was on the other side of that wall and it was pretty scary until we figured out what was happening.

It didn’t make sense to invest a lot of money trying to repair 50-year-old aluminum siding. On top of that we already had the issue with the guttering. With some of the aluminum siding gone we were now able to peek behind it and see that the original wood clapboards were underneath and from what little we could see, looked to be in pretty good condition. We decided that we should probably remove the aluminum siding and try to restore the original wood siding but we didn’t have time for such a massive project.

I can’t remember exactly how long it was, but we just ignored the damaged siding. Since both my husband and I were working really long hours and we only saw the house in the dark, it wasn’t that hard to just pretend that we didn't have a problem. Then in early spring 2012, the brother of one of our friends was looking for some work and offered to remove the aluminum siding and haul it away for a few hundred dollars plus the proceeds from recycling the aluminum. An offer too good to refuse.

Here is the house right before the aluminum siding was removed.

Now, with the aluminum siding gone, we could see more of what we had gotten ourselves into. We were pleased that the wood siding was sound and there was no rotting anywhere. We were also delighted to see that the gables had cedar shingles and that the rafter tails (ours are purely decorative and not the ends of the actual rafters) which are a signature of Craftsman style houses were intact. Also, with the aluminum siding that had boxed in the overhangs gone, the proportions of the house were much improved. Here is a picture with the aluminum siding gone. The storm windows and aluminum trim around the windows is still on the house but you can see the rafter tails and cedar shingles in the gables.

Until the aluminum trim was later removed from the windows we didn't know that the tops of all the window frames had been chiseled off. We did know that the corner pieces of the house had been removed and although we could see where there had been decorative knee braces under the overhangs they were all missing. Much as we expected, the old paint was badly peeled and needed to be thoroughly scraped before any new paint could be applied. Here is some of that peeling paint.

That spring and summer, whenever the weather and my work schedule of 6 days most weeks allowed, I worked on scraping paint. It was going slowly and I wasn’t making any visible progress.  I tried all kinds of different paint scrapers; some very expensive paint remover that was supposed to work miracles (it didn’t); and an infrared paint remover. None of these things speeded up my progress. No matter what I tried, it was slow, dirty, hard work. Later, when I was working on painting our garage, I discovered paint scrapers with carbide blades. I highly recommend the carbide blade scrapers. They are more expensive than other scrapers, but they are worth the money. Change the blades often and be careful because they are sharp enough to shave the top layer of wood off.

By October of 2012, it was clear that I was in over my head with this project. My husband spent some time helping me (he always works 6 days a week so has little free time either) but with our work schedules it was going to take us years to just get ready to paint. During all this time, the house looked terrible.

So the next spring (2013) we found painters who liked to work on old houses, had the skills to do the carpentry work needed to replace the missing elements (not having to coordinate between carpenters and painters was a huge plus), and gave us a very reasonable price. To save money, I planned to paint the garage, back doors, window sashes, and the inside of the front porch myself. We got on the waiting list and started saving like crazy hoping to have the cash by the time the painters got to us.

While we waited, the house looked worse than ever and our next door neighbors were trying to sell their house. I felt so bad. Who would buy a house next door to a place that looked as bad as ours did? So here is what our neighbors had to look at for over a year. This side of our house showed up in their listing pictures.

We waited all summer and into the fall and all that time spent waiting gave me time to agonize over choosing paint colors. I had a very difficult time making up my mind. You can read more about what I learned about selecting exterior colors here and more about how I finally made my decision here.

I know that any color can pretty much be color matched in any brand of paint but the painters use Porter PPG paint and using their colors simplified things. The body of the house is Baritone. The shingles in the gables are Mountain Stream. The window sashes and back doors are Blue Bayberry. All of the blues are from the same card. The white trim is Delicate White. All are PPG colors.

By the time we came up to the top of the waiting list it was late fall and unfortunately the weather was not cooperating. The painters were able to finish scraping and priming but then we had the worst winter we have had in years and there was nothing to be done but wait for spring. I failed to take any in-progress pictures of the painting.

Finally, finally, this spring, 2 years after the aluminum siding was removed, the painters finished. Still, since I planned to do the window sashes and back doors, the painting wasn’t quite finished. The windows had been protected behind the storm windows so they were not in bad condition. Even so, to do the job right and not paint the windows shut was time-consuming. The doors needed quite a bit of scraping and one needed a bit of repair work.

By the end of the summer, I had the window sashes and the back doors painted. We salvaged the storm windows and I gave all of the frames a coat of white spray paint. The storm windows were designed to be part of the aluminum siding but with some generous applications of caulk we were able to re-install most of them. We have a couple that either need some additional work or possibly we will have to replace them.

Here it is before and after. 

Our house has never looked better. As I mentioned at the beginning of this long story, there are still a few things we want/need to do. The foundation was coated with some kind of textured coating that is peeling off so that needs to be re-done. We need new storm/screen doors for the front porch and for the kitchen door. We plan to have the same half-round gutters that would have been on the house originally installed. And, we have plans to completely redo our front yard. All of those will be projects for 2015.

No-Spend Gift Wrapping

It's crunch time now. Less than a week left before Christmas. Is your shopping finished? Mine is. Now it’s time to get all those presents wrapped and I just can’t see spending a lot (or spending anything for that matter) on the wrapping.

I definitely experienced sticker shock when I saw the prices on those gift bags. I nearly fainted right there in Kroger. Granted, they can be used more than once, but I would prefer to spend my Christmas budget on the gifts rather than the wrapping. I try to be creative and I can usually come up with some wrapping materials without having to shell out at Christmas time.

Pinterest is full of clever ideas for gift wrap using things that you don't have to buy. Here is my Wrap It Up board where I collect no-spend gift wrapping inspiration:

Follow Better Nesting's board Wrap It Up Gift Wrapping Ideas on Pinterest.

Here's a list of a few of my favorite ideas for no-spend gift wrapping:

Leftover wrapping supplies—I always start with my leftovers and I am pleased (or ashamed—not sure which) that I haven’t had to buy any wrapping paper for several years.

Re-use gift bags—Most everyone I know re-uses gift bags. Unless they are looking creased or crumpled just add some fresh tissue paper and use them.

Store bags—Many stores have attractive shopping bags that are perfectly acceptable as gift bags. Yesterday, I took my mother to do her Christmas shopping and she made a purchase at a local gallery. They bagged it in a brown Kraft paper bag with colored tissue paper and tied on a raffia bow. No need for any further wrapping. Small, local shops often have attractive bags that do not have the store name on them. I always save those for future gift bagging when I buy something that is not a gift. And, if you have any of those clever bags from Trader Joe's you'll want to use those.

Craft supplies—Raid your craft supply stash. Scrapbook paper is a great wrapping for small items. You can get creative with rubber stamps, stickers, and washi tape. Raffia, yarn, lace, rick rack, and strips cut from fabric can be stand-ins for ribbon.

Natural materials—Cut evergreen twigs from your yard or pick up pine cones. They are free and make great rustic packages.

Brown paper—Whenever I finally use up my inventory of wrapping paper, I plan to make brown paper my signature wrap. A huge roll of brown paper comes in handy for all kinds of things, not just wrapping, especially if you are a D.I.Y. er. And, white paper makes a pretty package if you happen to have a roll of that around.

Wallpaper—I regularly see rolls of wallpaper at my favorite thrift shop. If you have wallpaper in your project stash, it makes great gift wrap. This is adorable.

Newspaper—Really. Look at my Pinterest board if you don’t believe me. Here is proof.

Make gift tags from old cards—Check out my tutorial for simple gift tags from Christmas cards.

Downloadable gift tags—Many generous bloggers share free downloadable gifts tags.

Time to get busy and get those gifts wrapped!

     

Favorite Meaningful Christmas Decorations

In keeping with our small house, the Christmas decorations are simple. Both the area available for decorating and the limited storage space mean that I have to be pretty selective with what I keep and use. Of course, I have things that I have bought (after all, who can resist Christmas decorations?) but the majority of my decorations are things that people have made for me and things that have been given to me as gifts. And, I am lucky to have some family decorations that belonged to my grandparents'. I enjoy these things that hold special meaning. Here are a few of my favorites:

For me the most important thing is the Christmas tree. I think the best part of the Christmas season is having the Christmas tree lit on a quiet, dark morning. It is just so peaceful. 

Quite a few years ago I bought an artificial tree that I can put up quickly and easily by myself. It's just the right size for our living room. And, I can put the tree together and decorate it in just a couple hours. Knowing that I can put it up early in the season if I have a chance or I can wait until the  last minute if I need to and that the tree will go up with no problem eliminates so much stress.

The tree is decorated only with white lights and glass Christmas ornaments that I have collected gradually or that belonged to my grandparents. Someday I may add ribbon or strings of beads or but for now, I am happy with my simple tree.

For some reason that I don't understand, many of my grandparents' old ornaments have string tied to them. My mother remembers the string always being there but it doesn't seem to serve any practical purpose. I leave it on out of sentiment.

As far back as I can remember, my grandmother had this bottle brush tree on a music box. It has seen better days and is now a bit lopsided and is missing some of its decorations. Along with Christmas ornaments, it was one of the decorations that I selected to keep when I emptied my grandmother's house.

 A friend of my mother made all of these St. Nicholas figures. She molded them out of plaster of Paris using vintage candy molds and hand painted all of the details.

As a child I did not care for this hand carved nativity scene. It was made by an older man who went to our church. His hobby was carving and he each year he donated some of his items to the annual Christmas bazaar. Back then it bothered me that the cows and the sheep are almost the same size and that the wise men are taller than the camels. As an adult I came to appreciate its charm and I 

am very happy to own and display such a wonderful piece of folk art.

Do you use decorations that hold special meaning for you?

This post is linked to Christmas Tree Party, 2014 at Thrifty Decor Chick.

Raggedy Ann Christmas Tree

Our local historical society holds an open house each December at our museum which is in a house built in the early 1800's. My mother is in charge of decorating the Christmas tree, the fireplace mantel, and window sills. Every year she tries to come up with a different theme--something vintage or nostalgic. Since there is no budget for decorations she mostly uses what she has.

This year she decided to do a Raggedy Ann theme. She collects Raggedy Ann items and her collection includes quite a few Christmas ornaments. To have enough decorations for the tree she supplemented the ornaments with small dolls, plaques, and even some cards. Red and white striped ribbon, small red balls, and over-sized red rick rack filled in the gaps and brought some cohesiveness to the overall look.

I think the tree turned out well and accomplished the goal of evoking nostalgia on an zero budget. Have you ever thought of using a collection to create a themed Christmas tree? Almost any small items that can be hung on the tree or nestled in the branches would work. Using toys would be a great way to decorate a small tree for a child's bedroom.

Four Easy-to-Make Christmas Treats

Heaps of cookies and candies may be a Christmas tradition but over the past few years I have learned to bake in moderation. I do enjoy making and indulging in sweet treats at Christmas time but baking dozens and dozens of cookies but I don't enjoy being exhausted and stressed. Making cookies is time consuming and tiring work that I find is not very much fun when done in excess. My current approach is to bake for a specific purpose. I also use the word bake loosely since I like to make some no-bake treats to balance out the work of baking and make it an easy and enjoyable process.

This holiday season I needed to fill a small tin with homemade goodies for a gift. Additionally, I needed a plate of cookies for our historical society museum’s open house and another plate for a pitch in. Given the quantity I needed, I decided on four recipes and decided to make a double batch of one.                                                

When I am making up a box or plate of assorted goodies, I like to have a variety of ingredients, flavors, textures, and shapes. Here is what I decided to make:

These are probably my favorite cookies. My grandmother used to make them. We always called them Seven Layer Cookies. Here is the recipe from the Eagle Brand website where they are called Seven Layer Magic Cookies Bars. This is exactly the same recipe I use and I think that my grandmother must have gotten this recipe from the Eagle Brand sweetened condensed milk label.

I like to double this recipe because all the ingredients, except the sweetened condensed milk, come in packages larger than the recipe calls for and I would rather have more cookies and fewer leftover ingredients. The butterscotch chips that I bought came in an 11 ounce package which is 1 ounce short of what is needed to double the recipe. I just divided them equally and it there were plenty for both batches.

My next selection was Mexican Wedding Cookies. I have been making these since I started baking as a preteen. They are very easy and I have received many compliments on my version of this iconic cookie. I am not sure where the recipe came from but I am happy to share it with you. I left out the nuts this time since 2 of the other recipes I selected had nuts. Without the nuts the recipe made around 42 cookies.

Mexican Wedding Cookies

½ cup powdered sugar, plus some to roll cookies in
1 cup butter
1 teaspoon vanilla
2 ¼ cup flour
¼ teaspoon salt
¾ cup finely chopped nuts, optional

Cream butter, sugar, and vanilla. Work in the flour, salt, and nuts until the dough holds together. Wrap the dough in wax paper or plastic wrap and out in the refrigerator until dough is chilled. Roll dough into one-inch balls. Place on baking sheet. (I highly recommend using parchment paper.) Bake 10 minutes at 400 degrees. Roll in powdered sugar while hot. Roll again when cool. (My secret is to sift the second layer of powdered sugar over the cookies instead of rolling them.)

Chocolate Fudge Cups, is a new recipe from a recent issue of Woman's Day magazine and is pretty simple to make.

I couldn't find the foil mini muffin cups at the grocery store so I used some cups that I had. They are paper and a bit smaller than mini muffin size. With the smaller cups, the recipe made 18 rather than 12. And, the paper worked alright. I was worried that the fudge would stick to it but I selflessly tested one and it seemed fine.

I don’t know if I didn’t get the milk hot enough or if it was because I had oversize chocolate chips (the only thing I found in bittersweet or dark chocolate) but the chips didn’t completely melt. I just popped them in the microwave for a few seconds to finish the melting.

My final selection is so simple there is no recipe and no picture(not sure how missed taking a pic of the pretzels)—Candy Coated Pretzels. I had never tried these before but I had the candy coating and the sprinkles on hand so I only needed to buy some pretzels. I followed the directions on the candy coating and melted the candy with a little bit of solid shortening. Once it was melted and smooth, I threw about 6 pretzels at a time into the candy. Using a fork, I turned them over a couple times to coat them and then removed them one at a time. I put them on wax paper and added sprinkles. This was very, very simple but not especially fast.

So those are my four easy to make Christmas treats. My holiday baking for this year is complete.

Christmas Gift Tags To Make from Christmas Cards

It is something of a tradition with my family to use Christmas cards to make these gift tags. We have made hundreds of them over the years.

The original inspiration was a similar tag on a gift that we received. These are easy enough for children to make (I know because my mom started me making them when I was still in elementary school). They are a great way to upcycle (of course when we started making these we had never heard of upcycling!) Christmas cards that you receive. Or, if you are like me and don’t get many Christmas cards these days, you can also use scraps of wrapping paper or scrapbook paper that are too small for anything else.

Here’s what you will need to get started:

• Pinking sheers
• Hole punch
• Lightweight cardboard for templates. Something like a cereal box is fine.
• Christmas cards, patterned wrapping paper, or scrapbook paper for the front of the tag.
• Solid colored paper for the middle layer where you will be writing your tos and froms. I usually use white paper. Printer paper works fine.
• Printed or solid colored paper for the back of the tag. This can be wrapping paper, card stock, scrapbook paper, construction paper, etc.
• Ribbon (Any narrow ribbon will work. I usually use curling ribbon but didn't have any on hand when I made these tags), yarn, raffia, twine, etc.

Here’s how to make the tags:

Start by making 3 cardboard templates of graduated sizes. My templates are 1 ½” x 2”, 2” x 3”, and 2 1/” x 3 ½”. You can use adjust these sizes or if you are really good at cutting straight you may be able to skip the templates.

Lay the smallest template on the Christmas card over the design that you want for the front of your tag. Some cards may have motifs that fit perfectly on your tag while others may lend themselves to a more abstract design. You may also be able to feature a word from the card on your tag. You can place the template either vertically or horizontally on the card.

Hold the template and the card together and cut around the template with the pinking shears.

Repeat the previous step, this time using the middle-sized template to cut the middle layer of your tag. Use paper that you will be able to write on.

Repeat the previous step, this time using the largest template to cut the back of the card. Use colored or patterned paper that compliments the front of the tag.

Stack up the 3 layers of your tag and use the hole punch to punch 2 holes at the top.

Put a piece of ribbon, yarn, raffia, etc. through the holes and tie to hold the 3 layers of the tag together.

There you have it. Easy, simple-to-make Christmas gift tags. And, they are free because you made them entirely from supplies you have on hand.

PS If you read my House on a Diet post you will know that using up wrapping and crafting supplies is one of my strategies for reducing the amount of stuff in my house.

Better Nesting Book Club : The Boston Girl

The Better Nesting Book Club recommends:

The Boston Girl by

Anita Diamant

The book begins with Addie Baum’s twenty-two-year-old granddaughter asking her to talk about how she got to be the woman she is today. As her life story unfolds we learn that Addie was born in 1900 and was the daughter of Jewish immigrants from Poland. She grew up in the North End and is the Boston Girl.

As an eighty-five year old wife, mother, grandmother, social worker, and teacher, Addie recalls living in a one-room tenement apartment with her two sisters and their parents who had difficulty adapting to a new way of life in their adoptive country. From joining a girls club at the neighborhood settlement house as a teenager to falling in love and from marriage to going back to college, she tells about her adventures with honesty and humor.

While Addie’s particular fictional story is unique, it touches on subjects that are part of every woman’s and every family’s stories. Family values, friendships, and the changing roles of women in the twentieth-century are things that my own family has in common with this character.

As I read this book I couldn't help but think of my own grandmothers and their stories. This is the kind of story that will inspire you to ask your own family members about their stories.

Decoupage Dictionary Page Christmas Ornaments

For many years I have had a 5-inch thick, vintage dictionary tucked away in the closet. I bought it at a yard sale with the intention of using it for craft projects. Until this week I had never touched it. I finally found a project where my old dictionary was perfect. Christmas ornaments decoupaged with book pages are all over Pinterest (see my Made From Book Pages board here) so this is not exactly an original idea but here is my twist on the idea.

I used Mod Podge to glue the pieces torn from the dictionary pages to the glass ornaments ($5 for 15 from Big Lots) and as a sealer coat on top of the paper. After allowing the Mod Podge to dry thoroughly, I sprayed on a light coat of clear acrylic sealer. In our often-humid climate the Mod Podge ends to become sticky or tacky and I noticed the instructions recommended the sealer. Once the sealer dried, I added glitter and tied a ribbon to the top to finish them off.

For plenty more inspiration, follow Better Nesting on Pinterest.