Better (Tree) Homes & Gardens

Last summer, we were fortunate enough to get a great deal on a playset for the kids.  They immediately set to making it their own little place.  I love watching them work on it. 

Over the past few weeks, as the weather has warmed up, the tree house has been getting a sprucing up.  Natalie is creating her own "homestead" out there.  She has added a firewood pile, for the "fireplace" a raised bed flower garden, a place to keep her little chickens, a compost bin, a clothesline, and a flower box filled with pansies.  It's likely that I'm completely and utterly biased, but I think she's one of the most creative little people I have ever met.

Here's a peek inside.

Welcome!

Putting the finishing touches on her window box garden.

 

 

A closer look at the newest addition to her "homestead"
 

The animal quarters, notice they have an escape route behind the barn.

The fireplace

The Kitchen

 

 

 

Sinks and storage for clean & dirty dishes

We hope you enjoyed our treehouse tour!  Happy Sunday :)

Treasure Hunting

  It is full on rummage sale season around here.  The not so great part is that the big rummage sale days in my town are days that I work.  Fortunately, I wind up with a few hours to kill in town each week.  And sometimes when I'm really lucky, there is a sale close to my work that I can check out on my lunch break.  It has been a good couple of weeks of thrifting.

There are so many things I love about rummaging/thrifting.  I love to look for unique things.  Maybe they were very average household items in their day, maybe they're a one of a kind creation..  I like to take these things and give them another life in our home.

While overly theme-y canned decor isn't my thing, I think I have come to have a more defined style.  I know what I like and what I don't.  This is a huge help when trying to find an item for a certain function. I like certain styles of things, so I no longer buy the first cheap thing I find.  I wait until I find one that I'm going to want to look at every day. As you can see, I kind of have a thing for enamelware and vintage linens.

I've been wanting a vintage kitchen scale for quite a while.  Every so often, I need to measure produce by weight, and it would be nice to have a measurement when packaging meat, instead of just eyeballing what is a pound.  I found this snazzy one for $15.  This is the highest ticket item I've bought in a long time, but so worth it.  I got the cute little beehive that is sitting up on it for $1.25 at the same shop.  I just love that place. 

Sorry this isn't the best picture.  Oddly,
this was a hard thing to photograph.

The purchase of the scale led to a total revamp of my kitchen storage situation.  See, it didn't really fit on my counter like I had hoped it would, so I had to come up with plan B.  Plan B turned into clearing the top of our fridge, cleaning it (you know how they get that weird gunk on them), and putting out some of my other items that had been stored in a cabinet and moving the other stuff to the cabinet.  The top of the fridge has been a real eyesore forever.  I have no idea why I didn't do this about five years ago.  This concept isn't original.  Obviously I'm not the only person who decorates the top of their fridge with this kind of stuff, but it is actually very functional.  And, it looks a lot better than having our lunch pails and electric griddle up there.  This just makes me smile when I walk by it.  Best of all, I spent next to nothing to put this together.  All this stuff was either a gift or was purchased at rummage sales or thrift shops. Oh wait, I lied.  See that wooden jobbie the squirrel basket is sitting on, that's from The Pampered Chef.  It is a stand for mounting an apple peeler.  It was taking up space in the cabinet, so I decided it could be a stool for Matt's squirrel basket (yes it is my husband's basket.  It was a cheeky birthday gift from his sister).  Even though its all pretty up there, it is still the place where our bread goes and where we stash the candy away from little hands.

This nifty little dish is a piece of vintage Pyrex.  It originally had a ribbed glass top and was part of their refrigerator collection.   I found it at Goodwill.  No lid, but I liked the size and color of it so I got it anyway.  It is a great place to keep the plug for my sink and my scrubbies.

This apron was too cute to pass up.  It was 99 cents at Goodwill.  I bought it a while ago and wasn't sure what to do with it.  Lucky for me, Dion gave me a great idea to hang it on a vintage hanger.  We found this gem the on the same treasure hunt as the scale.  It has an advertisement on it for the E.R. Moore Company in Chicago and set me back a buck and a half.  They hang in the laundry room.  Don't they look cheerful?

It has been great to have all my little treasures find homes. Finding cool stuff is only part of the fun.  Figuring out just how its going to fit in the house is the real adventure.  Its even better when one item brings together a display of stuff that has otherwise gone unseen.

Have you found any treasures lately?

Spring at Last

I think I can safely say that it is finally Spring.  Since I last posted, a few feet of snow have melted, fallen, and melted again.  We have lots of bare ground in our yard and experienced our first rainfall of the Spring this morning.  The birds are slowly returning.  I saw this confused looking robin from our living room window last week.  I like to think it was asking the red squirrel what's going on.

In my head, their conversation goes something like this:
Robin says to squirrel "What's with the snow?  I heard it was all melted?"
Squirrel says to Robin "That was last week.  You missed it."

We've been busy during this time of waiting for green grass and sunshine.  We got an invite from some friends of my Dad's to go see their newborn calves.  A visit to a farm is always fun for us. We met a day old calf and her ornery mama, two big dogs, some bunnies, a flock of chickens and a duck.  The kids had a blast!  And, I asked them a million questions about their chicken and rabbit setups.

The General leads Matt and the kids into the birthing pen.

She does not look happy to see us.

We celebrated Easter.  The kids dyed eggs, we went to Easter Mass and out to brunch with Matt's family.

We've had a few birthdays in the family.  Joey turned 4 and had a party at the local bowling alley the same weekend as Matt's sister, Tina celebrated her birthday.  Their birthdays are two days apart and both of them were born on Good Friday.

We got our spring chicks. We added five Rhode Island Red pullets, five Marans pullets, one Buff Orpington, and one Brown Leghorn to the flock this year.  I am especially excited for the Marans because we've never had them before and they lay eggs that are very dark brown.  We've lost a few hens since the last time we bought chicks and a few more are getting pretty old and rickety and may not make the year, so its time to add some new ones.  I hope to add two more chicks this year also.  If I can get to L&M when they have them, I'd like to get a couple of Buckeye pullets.  They are a reddish brown chicken that looks much like a Rhode Island Red, but they were developed in Ohio and have a "propensity for catching mice."  I'm all for anything that eats mice.

One little Rhode Island struck a pose for me.  She kind of looks like Paris Hilton.

We have begun cleaning up from the winter both indoors and out.  Matt finally took down the deer bones that have been making our front yard look like a scene from a horror movie and I've been organizing.  We've finally taken down the Christmas/winter decorations from the porch and replaced them with more colorful cheery warm weather things.

Thrifted buckets, crate and flower art.  The chicken and silk flowers are from Walmart.
The red thing is a piece of sidewalk chalk that happened to be laying there.

  

The spring flowers are starting to peek up through their blanket of leaf mulch.  Seeing the peonies coming up always makes me smile.

I see a few more crowns than last year.  This is promising!

I've tried several new recipes.  Cinnamon Roll Cake is heavenly.  The recipe says to serve it warm, but I think it tastes better the next day.  Chicken and Dumpling Casserole got mixed reviews.  We'll see how the Rutabaga and Carrot Mash goes over tonight.  It looks tasty and Joey informed me this morning that he just loves rutabagases, they're from Canaba you know.

I've been doing some thrifting.  In my travels, I've found some clothes for the kids, a few more vintage bowls for me,  toss pillows for the living room, some metal and ceramic containers to serve as planters and several books for me to read.  I also picked up a family size George Foreman grill and a waffle iron for very reasonable prices.

I hosted my card swap group over the weekend. There are five of us in the group and we meet every other month to share cards.  We each take a turn hosting, have a potluck lunch, stamp and gab.  Its nice relaxing girl time.  And, the cards are always beautiful.  I'm very happy with this last bunch.

We've also checked out the new Cherry Berry frozen yogurt place in town, (it was ok, but over priced and not enough tables), been to the public library, had some play dates and a sleepover with the neighbor kids.  

Springtime is getting off to a good start.  I just hope it doesn't decide to be winter again until about mid-December.

Here's to Sunshine! :)

Looking Ahead Update: Getting Started

What do a day planner,  a batch of mini muffins and a vintage bowl have in common?  They are all things related to my goal of being more on top of my family's budget in 2013. 

 In my last post, I wrote about hoping to get back on track with budgeting and clear up some debt.  My husband got a me a spiffy little day planner for Christmas that I absolutely love.  It is the perfect size and has plenty of room to write in work schedules and appointments, plus my dinner menu and my weekly bill pay plan.  So, starting the last week in December, I got my checkbook in order and organized all our bills into the day planner so that each week I can sit down and pay what needs paying.  I also write in a meal plan for each day's evening meal.  This helps with grocery shopping on a budget and is a huge time saver for me.  It saves time in that I don't sit and try to come up with a meal for supper on my way home from work and also then am not tempted to "swing by" the grocery store on my way home, for a "few" things which never fails to turn into a half hour and $30 because I always get sidetracked.

Love this planner!  Isn't it pretty?

Wednesday before work our mission was to fill up our stash of snacks for lunches.  I did not go to the store that day, but Joey and I were home in the morning and he helped me fill up little baggies with mini muffins (from an 89 cent just add water mix) graham crackers and a pan of granola bars.   I have never made granola bars before but thought it looked kind of cool on Pinterest, so I figured I'd give it a whirl. We also did celery sticks and baby carrots. Making lunches should be a breeze for the rest of the week.  I know that using little baggies seems wasteful and not as cost effective as small reusable containers.  Here's the thing.  I bought the little reusable bowls to put snacks in, but they don't fit very well in her Hello Kitty head-shaped lunch box.  So, I went back to snack baggies. I don't reuse them either. Sorry.

Our week's worth of  snacks: Pan of granola (waiting to be cut into bars), celery & baby carrots, mini muffins, mini graham crackers, mozzarella cheese sticks

There you have it.  My big plans to budget and get all our bills paid on time every month and eat too.  It's not overly complicated or scientific, but it gets the job done.  Besides, I like to make lists. ;)

My cute vintage bowl

Still wondering how the vintage bowl figures into this?  Well, its like this.  Everybody needs a little fun money.  I figure a small amount of play money into the budget for the sake of my own sanity.  Not as much as I'd like, but a little bit anyway.  And with that money this week, I went to Goodwill and bought a cute bowl that I probably didn't need, but liked enough to spend 99 cents on it.  Oh and some more jelly jars.  I always need jelly jars for something or other.  Man I love Goodwill.

Labor Day Weekend

This past weekend was Labor Day.  Official last weekend of summer vacation for many.  Last chance to travel, camp and bask in summer.  In keeping with our theme of the summer, we stayed home.  We relaxed. Matt worked on his vehicle.

Natalie and I went to the Farmer's Market and Goodwill on Saturday morning and made a good haul.  

A pair of little milk glass flower pots from Goodwill 99 cents each and some of the sunflowers we picked up at the market.

The sweet afghan I picked up for 3.99, easily big enough to cover a twin size bed, and a sliver of the gingham check napkins I got the set of 4 for 99 cents.

A cute little picture that says "tea time" for 49 cents.

The kids got to play with their friends from next door.

Our big girls racing down the road.  Full speed ahead.

The little neighbor girl (she's Joey's age) trying her best to catch up to the big girls.

The kids made up a new game with the baby swing that I'm not entirely sure about.

We went to church on Sunday morning then to my dad's for some burgers and fixings with my brother and his family.  Joey and I made an impromptu pizza with our yummy fresh tomatoes and basil from the market while Matt and Natalie sneaked away for a little fishing trip.

The weather was beautiful.  Definitely more summer than fall.  But its coming.  See the leaves on the ground in the picture above?  There are more today and lots more to come.

Bunk Bed Sheets

We got a set of bunk beds for our kids last summer.  We love them because they save space in their tiny bedroom.  The kids love them because it is a combination pirate ship, deer stand, tree fort and bed all in one.    So they are all around a winner.  


However, I just have one little problem with the bunkbeds.  I can't reach to make the top bunk. While the beds were in process (we got them off of Freecycle sanded and repainted them), I sewed  a basic bedspread for each bed.  The blankets are just big enough to cover the tops of the mattresses. So I don't have to wrestle with the blankets, but the sheets are still an issue.  Tucking in sheets is really hard for me. I'm just not tall enough for it.  

While in Goodwill a week or so ago, I found a couple really cool old twin size sheets for $1.99 each.  But they were both fitted sheets.  Then inspiration struck!  These sheets are the kind where the elastic is at the narrow ends, not all the way around, so I thought I'd cut the elastic off the top end, hem it up and have a perfect bunkbed sheet.  And, it worked beautifully.  Here's how I did it.

My nifty sheet before it was forever altered.  I unfolded it and carefully cut the elastic binding off.  Then I had big piece  of fabric with two notches missing out of the corners.  So, I cut the middle part out from between the notches to make the top a straight(ish) line.  Following me so far?  Sorry, I forgot to take a picture of that part.

Then, I took that hunk of fabric that I chopped off the top, folded it in half the long way and cut along my fold, so that I had two strips of fabric.  Then I sewed them together along one of the short sides, so I had one long strip.

Then, I folded it in half again and pressed in the seam.  Next, I folded the edges under to make a nice even finished edge.

Now I had my binding to attach to the top part that I had hacked apart.  I ran 3 lines of stitches along the binding to attach it to the rest of the sheet.  The first to hold the two pieces together, the second for decoration and the third because I missed a spot and my fold came undone.  When I was finished, this is what I wound up with.

A nicely hemmed flat sheet that does not require any tucking.  It just slides over the foot end of the mattress and lays flat at the top.

I'm sure I'm not the first person who ever thought of this, but I feel rather proud to have found a way to solve my bunkbed sheet problem.

Oh and I had a little piece of that binding left, so I made it into a fancy little iron cord cuff thing that I saw on Pinterest.  Theirs had a button closure.  I'm not even going to pretend that I know how to work the button hole setting on my sewing machine, so I used velcro.  The button is purely decorative.  Sorry for the sideways picture here.  It was turned the right way in my photo file, but seems to have flipped back over during the upload process.