A No Spend January Update and an Organization Project

It is hard to believe that it is already February.  I had intended on giving you an update on how my No Spend January went, but I ran out of time before I even realized it.  So a quick update on how the month went.

At the beginning of January, I really didn't take the no spend challenge seriously.  Now that's not to say I spent lavishly on things we didn't need, but I also did little to reel my spending in.  That was not the case for the second half of the month.  I looked at our budget and our bills and realized that the spending had to be shut down for the rest of the month in order to get the bills paid.  January is always a difficult month for us with it being right after Christmas and taxes.  There was absolutely NO spending for the last two weeks of the month.  I started making things from scratch.  We started eating out of our freezers and pantry and made do with what we had.  We made it through the end of the month and we were able to pay all of our bills.

As for February, I plan on keeping my spending down and I also plan on buying as little groceries as possible.  Our freezers are packed to the brim with food and so is our pantry so I really don't think that we will starve.  I need new tires and I have to get them this month, so our extra money will be going to that purchase.

The other project that we started in January was to clean, organize, and declutter.  We started off great, but it soon got derailed as we decided (during a no spend month, mind you), to enlarge our master closet.  We are still in the process of working on it drywall soon to come, so I started cleaning out cabinets to keep up with our decluttering process.

If you remember we had cleaned our entry closet and our pantry.  Well, I have a corner cabinet in my kitchen that needed major decluttering, so I decided to tackle that this weekend.

My "baking" cabinet

It may not look like it, but I did take items out and throw out old stuff.  This is my go to cabinet when I cook.  With this cabinet I now know what I have, and where it is.  No more rummaging around looking for things.  It feels so much better to be able to have this organized and will help to cut down on my cooking time.  I do have a separate spice cabinet on the other side of my stove that is just spices.  That cabinet will be next.  I know I have some spices that are outdated that need to be thrown away.  It feels so good to get these little things done.

As for February, I will continue to curb my spending and I will be sharing with you some of our favorite meals that like to make.  I look forward to sharing a Cheeseburger Salad recipe with you on Thursday!

2 comments budget, cleaning, house repairs, January, no spend, organization, simple living

Building Shutters!

Our house, not only has new siding (check out the video here), but now new shutters!  The place looks so much better and we are so excited with how things are working out.  The weather has been cooperating and we have actually had time to be able to work on our place.

The next stop is inside to update some things in the house during the cold days of winter.  I know we will share all of those projects with you, but first I wanted to share our video on how Steve built the shutters for us.  (I love that the thumbnail is of our sweet little Abby!)

Here are some pictures of the finished project.

Seeing what it will look like.

We of course had to see what it would look like before actually attaching them to the house.  I think it looks pretty good.

All done!

Here is a picture with the shutters done.  I love how it makes the place look!  A far cry from our old siding and shutters!

Close-up

This is my favorite picture.  A close up of the shutters, with the Christmas tree in the background.  We are so happy with how it turned out!

So check out our video above and see how we made these shutters.  And let me know in the comments below what you think.

Leave a Comment diy, house repairs, Our Videos, shutters, sustainable living, windows

DIY Porch Railing

We have moved on to our next project in our steps to beautify our home.  We have purchased siding and now we are waiting for it to come in and be delivered.  In the mean time, Steve decided to update our front porch railings.

Our front porch and back decks are a real sore spot with me.  In fact they are a sore spot with Steve as well.  When we had our mobile home moved onto our land, it just so happened that our insurance company decided to make a surprise inspection.  When they saw that we had no porches or decks in front of the doors...well you can imagine.  We were given one month to rectify the situation.  

This seems like a long time, but when we both have full time jobs, and two small children to take care of, it's not as easy as you think.  We decided to go the easy route and buy deck kits for all three entrances.  Before that decision was made and before the insurance gave us an ultimatum, we had actually been drawing up plans, and dreaming of the deck that we wanted to build, but at this time we knew we had to put our dream deck on hold.  

We had to build our decks during some of the hottest days of July.  I'll never forget trying to dig for footings for the deck.  There actually was no digging.  We kept hitting rock.  It was almost impossible, it was extremely hot, and the deck kit ended up being a lot uglier than I thought it would. We did our best and we got three decks built in just a little under 4 weeks.

The porch railing before.  Steve started dismantling it before taking a picture.

The biggest issue with me and those decks are the railings.  You can see in the picture above, just how ugly the railings are.  In preparation for our new siding, the railings on the front porch had to be removed.  I have asked Steve for a couple of years to change out the railings in front.  There was another issue with those railings that I hated besides the way they looked.  If we ever sat on our front porch, those railings were right at my eye level!  I couldn't see anything except ugly railing! So they had to go, and while Steve was more than happy to do that, something had always come up that was more important.  Now that the railings are removed, Steve decided to take the time to build new ones.

In this process we also decided to move the stairs to the middle of the porch rather than against the house. Weeds would grow between the house and the stairs and it was almost impossible to keep them cleared out!  The picture above shows the new placement of the stairs.

Determining railing height so I could actually see over them!

Since we are planning on painting the deck and railings white, we was able to use scrap lumber that he already had.  He knew (and got my okay) that he wanted to make X's along the front, but he wasn't sure how he was going to do it.

Close up of the X's we both liked!

He said that he tried laying the boards different ways in order to make one big X  in each of the sections, but when it didn't look good, he decided to make a couple of X's in each section.  If you look closely below, you can see that he actually made two V's.  An upward V on the frontside of the railing and a downward V on the backside of the railing. 

Close up of inside of railing and you can see how he constructed it.

When I saw the picture, I fell in love.  It looked so good and I am so happy with it.  It is not completely put together, as you can see above, he will wait until the siding is up and then put the porch back together and secure all the X's back in, plus he wanted to make sure I was 100% happy with it before making it permanent.  Smart man!

Front view of porch railing, and view of how desperately we need siding!

I can hardly wait for the siding to go up and to share that with you, but also for the new porch railing as well. I love that this project cost us ZERO DOLLARS because we were able to use lumber from an old deck that we dismantled.  It is great that we can use what we already have on hand to help make our place more beautiful.

Let me know below what you think of the porch railings!

Leave a Comment decks, diy, house repairs, porch railings, porches, sustainable living

Our Kitchen's New Window Trim

We are on a mission to update our place.  We had really wanted to build a house and had even gone as far as talking to a builder.  But where we are right now in our lives, we decided that the best thing to do would be to postpone that idea and work on our home.

We currently live in a mobile home, and square footage-wise it is bigger than the bungalow that we moved from.  However our bungalow had a ton of built in storage that I miss.  A lot!  Steve has promised to build me some built-in book shelves this winter and I can hardly wait!  But in the mean time, we have set out to beautify the place a little bit.

I showed you pictures of our front door that I painted and our french door in the back that had to be completely taken out due to rotting headers and footers.  It looks so much better!  We will also be putting new siding on due to our present siding being rotten in more places than what we originally thought.  We also hope to take out the underpinning and put in a rock or a decorative cement block foundation.  And Steve has already built one shutter to see if we would like it.  We did!  It should look a lot better when all of that happens!  I can't wait to share those projects with you!

Our latest beautification project was made possible by Pinterest.  I can just imagine what Steve does whenever he gets a notification that I have sent him a pin.  9 times out of 10 it means more work for him.  What is so wonderful is that I don't ever hear him complain about it.  He may tell me why it wouldn't work, or wouldn't be possible for us, but he is always open to new ideas and will at least give them serious thought.  Thanks honey!

This specific pin was for trim work around windows. We had new windows installed early this year and it was a very good decision!  Our utility bill went down, in the first month by $100.00!  It has stayed down every month since, so they will eventually pay for themselves in the long run.  So with new windows, we really needed new trim.  The trim that we had around some of the windows was just the wood corner round. On our kitchen window it was the plastic corner round.  Needless to say, it did not look good.  We took it down and for months, our kitchen window has been trim-less.

No trim, messy kitchen, and picture taken at night equals one ugly mess!

 I sent Steve several pictures of trims that I liked and we agreed and what we wanted.  We didn't follow one pin over another, we just took ideas and measurements and went with what we liked and what would work for our window.

Now comes the simple living, self-reliant part...we used lumber we already had on hand.  That's what I love about this!  It didn't cost us a dime.  Now if we want to do more windows, which we do, we will have to buy some lumber.  But for this first window, we didn't have to.

You may notice in the picture that the drywall below the window is bowed up.  The people that installed the window was supposed to fix that, but they didn't.  We weren't real happy with that and Steve was toying with the idea of removing the window, fixing the frame and then reinstalling it.  Neither of us really wanted to do that.  Well with the trim that we choose, we were able to hide the fact that it was not level.

Clean kitchen, pretty trim, picture still at night equals much prettier site!

I love the trim work that he did.  The best part is that it has a ledge!  It is not a big ledge, but just big enough I could put a small plant on it.  Steve is planning on tackling the other windows on the days that he can't work on the outside of our house.  Slowly but surely, our place will become beautiful once again.

Let me know in the comments below what you think about the trim.

 

9 comments diy, house repairs, sustainable living, window trim, windows

We Put the Labor in Labor Day!

I hope you all had a wonderful Labor Day weekend!  We had quite the weekend and with all the projects we tackled, we put the labor in Labor Day!  I thought I would share some of the projects that we did.

After the doors came out.  There's a lot of work ahead for Steve!

Our first (and biggest) project we tackled was pulling our french doors at the back of the house, replacing both the header and footer, building a new door frame and reinstalling the doors.  It took the entire holiday weekend to get this project done and for two nights we had a gaping hole in the back of our house.  Luckily Steve was able to put a tarp up to half-way keep the critters out (that will be another story for another time).

Still need to paint and put up trim, but at least we have a back door!

While I did help Steve with this project there were times that he didn't need my help.  So that left me free to tackle a couple of other things that needed to be done.

The first and the only thing that I did this weekend that was not a necessity, was to paint our front door.  The door itself is solid wood and a beautiful door.  However the sun had damaged the outside of the door over the years.  Last year I tried to sand it and stain it, but because of the damage the stain did not go on even and so we had a two-tone door.  It was not pretty.

Our two-tone door. 

I finally talked Steve into letting me paint it.  But more than that, I was able to paint it red!  I love the color that I ended up with.  I purchased Valspar Posh Red.  It is not a bright cherry red, neither one of us wanted to go down that road.  It is more of a brick red and looks great with our tan house color...otherwise known as Canyon Ridge. :-)

Our beautiful red door!

I'm not sure if the picture does it justice, but I painted it in a way where you can still see the browns from the door stain coming through.  You can also see the grain of the wood which Steve loved.  All-in-all I thought it turned out great!

Another fast project I did was spray paint our back outdoor light, sorry no pic. :-(  It was originally black, but was extremely faded.  I had some metallic oil rubbed bronze spray paint that I had used for another project.  It was perfect and took less than five minutes to spruce it up!  Before I did that I had been ready to buy a new one!

The third project that we started but didn't get to finish was replacing our rotted trim boards around the house.  While Steve was working on installing the back door, I primed and painted the trim boards so that our last day before going back to work we could put them up.  Well, as I was removing our rotted trim boards, I realized that there were several places where our siding was also rotted.  So guess what?  The trim boards did not get put up, and now we have to purchase siding and replace what we need to.

Not a pretty site...bad trim boards and lots of weeds!

After tackling the door this weekend, another big project was not what either of us wanted.  We were ready to throw in the towel and just call some one to put vinyl siding on it, but money-wise it is cheaper (although more labor on our part) to replace the rotted pieces, so we will be doing that as soon as we can.

While I was taking off the bad trim, I was also trying to weed, which was just ridiculously out of control!  We really let our place go this spring and summer, but we had good reasons.  Now, we just have to get it back in shape before winter comes!

So our next projects (besides the siding and trim of course) will be to move the stairs on our front and back decks and to replace the railing on our decks.  I also bought some cool fabric which I will be making curtains, recovering a footstool, and recovering some bar stools.  I can't wait!  I will keep you updated on how that all goes.

Can't wait to use this fabric!

Keep an eye out for my homemade Christmas Gift series.  I will start posting that very soon.  I am getting so excited about it as I get everything together and start working on it.  I know you guys will love it!

Let me know in the comments below, what did you do for Labor Day?  Rest or labor?

Leave a Comment crafts, holidays, house repairs, Labor Day