The Tale of Our Bedroom Vanity

Our new house, while nearly double the amount of living space of our old place, is still quite small for our family of six. Other than the bathrooms, the smallest room in the house is my bedroom. We did design the layout of the apartment, putting the walls and doors where we wanted, more or less, since we bought the place before internal walls were built, and we could have possibly made our bedroom bigger. However, any additional space we added to our bedroom would either make our kitchen/living room/dining room smaller, which we didn't want to do, or getting rid of our second bathroom, not either something we were keen to do. We made the choice to sacrifice bedroom space for the sake of the rest of the house.

Out bedroom is 8.5 feet by 10.3 feet, or 2.6 meters by 3.1 meters. 87.5 square feet or 8 square meters to be exact. Add to this the fact that there are two doors in the room (one from the hallway, and one to the bathroom) and no built in closet space, we needed to figure out how to store everything two people need in the bedroom. This was not an easy thing to do by a long shot.

But we figured it out, by building our own beds and night stands, used some Ikea "hacks" and repurposed some furniture from our old apartment, and we mostly figured it out...

Other than a place to store my makeup, jewelry, hair things, etc... I needed a vanity...

Getting Air Conditioners and Making a Cardboard Playhouse

Yesterday, for the first time in our married lives, we got air conditioners for our home. Growing up, we actually never had air conditioners, but just used fans, and were totally fine. A year or two before we moved away from Northeast Ohio, my parents installed central air conditioning in our house to increase its market value.
Then we moved abroad, and again, no air conditioning.

This September, we'll have been married 11 years, and we've never had "real" air conditioning in our house. We started off using fans when necessary, and trying to avoid using fans when those weren't necessary, to keep down our electric bills. One summer we were just so miserably hot that we bought a portable second hand air conditioner for our bedroom (we were co-sleeping at the time, so it was for the entire family). It stood up on the floor, connected to one of the windows with a pipe, and worked... sort of. During times when the fan blowing on you simply felt like a car exhaust blowing on you, this portable air conditioning unit was a welcome relief even if it didn't actually make you comfortable, but it did a terrible job of actually cooling down the room. It just made it marginally better. And we didn't have any air conditioning in the living room/dining room/kitchen. The portable unit we had was barely strong enough for our small bedroom, let alone the bigger living room/dining room/kitchen. And the children's room was built in such a way that we couldn't put any air conditioning there.
So essentially, no AC in our place.
In the winter, we used blow heaters and radiators and halogen heaters...

Yesterday we finally bought real air conditioning units that double as heaters (I think they are called split system heat pumps). The same unit warms the place in the winter as cools it in the summer. It is supposed to be the most cost efficient way to heat your home here. When we designed the layout of our new home, we had them build it with preparations already there for the air conditioning units, so we wouldn't have a large expense to install them (places for pipes and electricity).
But we spent most of the winter here without those units, since I didn't get around to ordering and installing them.

Finally on a price comparison website I found some decent pricing for these AC units. One large one for the living room/dining room/kitchen, and one small one for my bedroom. The kids' room is right near the living room/dining room and should be able to be cooled or heated from the adjacent room, but if not, we may also put the portable AC unit in there. We also put an air conditioning unit in our rental unit's living room. (They brought and installed AC units from their old home into two of the bedrooms.)

Homemade Pallet Spice Rack- DIY Makeover

I wrote in a previous post how many spices I use, and how the little bitty spice racks I see them selling all over doesn't hold nearly enough spices for me, and the few I've seen that seem somewhat large enough are extremely over priced. I was overjoyed when my husband made me a homemade spice rack made entirely out of pallet wood. It was beautiful and rustic and perfect and held so many spices....

Our New Upcycled Guest Bed -- Completely Free and Very Easy!

When we were first married we lived in a two bedroom apartment, one room for us and one for guests. Then we had our first child and while he started off in our room, by a certain point he ended up getting the second bedroom, and we lost our guest bedroom.
When we moved to our smaller apartment nearly 6 years ago, we still had two bedrooms, but one was teeny tiny, and it got filled with two children, my two boys, while my daughters slept in our room.
I enjoy having guests, and one of the hardest things for me about our extra small space was our inability to host anyone - at first we didn't even have a couch in our very small living room/dining room/kitchen.
We managed to find a couch that fit our extra small dimensions and bought an Ikea Solsta couch that opened up into a bed! We could have guests at last, even if it meant them sleeping in our living room. Only the bed that opened up was extremely uncomfortable- two thirds of it was padded but the last third was just wood covered in fabric, not something I'd offer to a guest. We had children over (nephew and niece) who were short enough to fit on the soft 2/3 of the couch bed, but no sleep over adult guests.

One of the things that excited me most about our new and much more spacious house was that it had three bedrooms, one which became my office, but also is intended to double as a guest room. However. while I wanted a guest room for so long, with so many expenses involved in moving and setting up a bigger household and all the new furniture we needed, a guest bedroom just wasn't a priority from a financial perspective. And so, despite our larger home, we still didn't have accommodations for guests.
We do have a spare mattress that was fitting under the triple bunk bed in my kids room, for when my daughters want to sleep in separate beds, and when my little sister Lizzy asked to spend the weekend, I set up that mattress in the guest bedroom, which was OK to sleep on, but honestly, wasn't the nicest accommodations so I wouldn't feel comfortable inviting anyone else to sleep over with the room looking like that.

Homemade Pallet Trash Can

My husband loves building out of pallet wood. I've already shown a couple of projects my husband made out of pallet wood (sometimes with my help, but more often than not without). He likes building out of pallet wood because it's free, easy to find, and you end up with a nice rustic look, of which my husband is fond.
Quite a few times in the past I came home and found my husband with a ready made project built from pallets, waiting for me.

The other day, I came home from teaching a foraging class and saw my husband's latest project- a trash can, or as my South African husband would say, rubbish bin, made from pallet wood. I hadn't known this, but for a long time our garbage can was irritating my husband, as he finds the standard plastic one to be quite ugly, and not space efficient at all. The fact that trash cans are generally either round or trapezoidal makes them leave empty space at the sides, so you can fill up the trash bags less and need to take the garbage out more often.
The covers for most garbage cans tend to be swinging ones, which often get dirtied when you throw in the trash, since even once you pick them up they swing back into place. And at least with our previous one, the hole in which you need to place the garage sometimes isn't big enough, which meant that often when trying to empty the dust pan into the trash can, it didn't fit, and some stuff spilled out onto the floor.

And so, this pallet trash can.

Upcycling, Reupholstering, and Plastic Covering Our Chairs- A Tutorial

All our newly reupholstered and upcycled chairs

Chairs have been the bane of my existence since we've been married practically...

When we were furnishing our home from scratch ten years ago, our budget was really tight. We ended up buying a set of 4 matching chairs second hand, and another chair from a second hand shop and dumpster dove 1 chair, so we started out with 6 chairs, only 4 of them matching. After about 5 years, the four matching chairs got really yucky looking, so I reupholstered them very easily.
As our family grew we dumpster dove a few more chairs (and tossed one of the original four that ended up breaking entirely), and then bought some second hand Ikea chairs as well (that I ended up hating because they aren't stable...).
By the time we moved into our new home, we had 10 regular chairs and a few folding chairs (plus some stackable outside chairs) which were functional, but they were not only mismatched, but they had really gross seats. It was embarassing. We'd have guests over, and we'd offer them a seat and they'd avoid sitting down since the seats were gross (and make comments about how they heard its healthier to stand). We really wanted to buy new chairs, because in our house with a new, polished, and put together look, these chairs were a big eyesore. And it didn't help that people kept telling us to throw out our chairs.
I looked into pricing for chairs, and each set I saw being sold second hand only had 4 or 6 chairs, so it still wasn't enough chairs to be a matching set to give the place a uniform look, and they weren't in the colors I wanted. I looked into pricing of new chairs, and the cheapest half decent chair (not even in a color that I wanted) was $75 each. I really struggled with this, because my chairs bothered me immensely, but I didn't want to spend a fortune on replacing them. The thought originally crossed my mind to reupholster them, but I didn't take that idea seriously because the chairs were all different colors- some light wood, some dark wood (veneer), some black, some white, not to mention most with different shapes and designs. However, I spoke with a friend who suggested painting them as well as reupholstering them, and I was sold.

Our New DIY Pallet Shoe Rack and Tiny Useful Mudroom

We have a lot of shoes in our family. Six people, each at least with a few pairs of shoes... It adds up quite quickly.
Before we moved to our current home I tried to declutter as much as possible, and in doing so, got rid of all the pairs of shoes that people refused to wear or no longer fit, because we had so many shoes in the old house that we needed a huge amount of space to store them all. And when space is at a premium, it is silly to allot so much of your limited space to shoes.
But even after going through the shoes and getting rid of what no one wore, we still needed a place to store our shoes. We don't have an official mudroom or similar in our current place, but right next to our front door there is a narrow area that is dead space, because it is too small to put any regular furniture there, but it seemed too big to not be used.
Pinterest showed me many ideas of compact and useful mudrooms and I decided to use that as inspiration to design our entrance as a good storage space for shoes, coats, gloves and hats and umbrellas and all other seasonal weather gear that we'd need right near the front door.

I love how this came out so far.
It is still a work in progress, but thus far it is loads better than how it was before.

Our Kids' Free Upcycled Quadruple Bunk Bed

I had all sorts of plans for beds for my kids in our new home. We specifically designed the outlets and doors in the bedroom with the plan that we'd have a set type of beds that would be able to sleep all four of our kids. We were going to have 4 beds, in the shape of an L, with the ends overlapping each other- a four tiered bunk bed with two beds along each wall. 

We got to the new home, and for a few days, my kids slept on mattresses on the floor while we brought over the furniture and slowly got it put together. However, when we went to put it together, my kids didn't want what we'd planned, and I wasn't sure it would work so well either.

Instead, we ended up making beds for four (or even five if you want to get technical) all on top of each other, which saved even more room. The kids are loving it, and I'm loving how space efficient it is, but the biggest perk was the cost.

We spent nothing.

Homemade DIY Pallet Nightstand or End Table

I went to Ikea today to pick up some more things for our home and to place an order for the kitchen, and when I got home, I saw that Mike had started working on another DIY project out of pallets we collected- a nightstand for me. I had mentioned that in our room I didn't yet have a place to put down books or my glasses or phone, so Mike decided to build me one.

Since he was just at the very beginning of the project, I helped him build the rest, and gave design input, and held the wood while he sawed and drilled and sanded.

Almost All Moved In!

I want to apologize for my long absence from my blog! We got our keys to the brand new apartment that we bought while in the building stages on Monday morning, and by Monday evening we started moving in... Yes, started...
I was hoping to have a great post to share with you about how we frugally moved, but we ended up paying too much for movers, and they ended up doing a terrible job, and not even finishing the job. I'm not interested in getting into all the reasons of the whys and the hows, but lets just say on Sunday my mom and I brought over two car loads worth of things and put them in the yard, on Monday she and I brought over another load or two, on Monday night movers brought over much of our stuff but not all, on Tuesday relatives helped bring two more car loads of things, Tuesday night movers brought over most of the rest of our things and most of the rest of our furniture but refused to do any more, Wednesday we brought another car load or two over, Thursday another car load, and finally Friday, with two last car loads we brought the last of the stuff to the apartment.
It was horrible to do it like that, having the move spread over so long, but it wasn't by choice, and we specifically paid movers to move things so that we could get it all done at once instead of bit by bit and even so it didn't work out... but at the same time, in a way it was good because I ended up being able to put things away a bit at a time, so by the time we got the last things on Friday, most of the other things were already put away, so we were able to do it in smaller chunks. I certainly wouldn't recommend what we did, but... we aren't moving for a long long time again, if not ever, so at least we don't have to worry about this again!

Making a Potty Seat Out of Pallets

I mentioned in a previous post that I suspect that my littlest one, Rose, has high functioning autism like her big brother Ike. Part of what makes me suspect that is her dedication to certain routines, and her refusal to change them.

Rose has been potty trained for at least a year, if not more, but she has this way that she insists on doing things. She usually refuses to use the toilet and insists on using the potty, with a whole routine to go along with it.

She's had her potty for a long time, a pink Hello Kitty one with an insert.

And then she cracked the leg of it, but since I had no interest in buying a new one when she's already potty trained and there's no little ones after her who will be using it in the next little while... so Mike repaired it by adding a wooden leg to it out of scrap wood. But then it broke all the way- another leg completely came off of it, and I figured- why keep on repairing something that is so broken, lets just make her a new one.

Out of pallet wood.

Homemade Wooden Pallet Spice Rack DIY

I grew up in a home that used a large variety of spices. I get surprised when I am in people's homes, and go to cook something and realize that they're missing what I consider to be basic spices. I have to remind myself, though, that everyone's cooking style is different, and I use so many more spices than the average person, so even my "basics" are not something most people have.

Since I've been running my own household, I've never been satisfied with where I've been keeping my spices. In our first apartment, they were on two small shelves in an upper cupboard, and it was hard to see what I needed and hard to access it. Since we moved to our current home, my spices have been stored in a deep drawer, and there isn't enough room for all my spices. its hard to tell what is where, and it's just one royal mess. Some spices came in plastic containers- when they finished, I refilled them, and sometimes filled them with different spices or homemade mixes, and it is all a jumble, with no way to really tell what spice is what, other than by taste and smell...
I decided that in our new apartment, I didn't want to use up a drawer for my spices, nor did I want them in a cabinet. And I definitely didn't want to be using recycled plastic spice bottles.
Growing up, all my mom's spices were kept easily accessible in glass screw top jars on a wooden spice rack on our counter, and I've wanted something like that for a long time, and figured our new house would be the perfect place to switch my spice storage to that system.

Apartment Composting With No Yard, No Porch, and No Worms

Our fresh new compost! See how black it is?

It started a few months ago when our local government passed a measure that was supposed to be environmentally beneficial, but I felt would just hurt the finances of people already struggling financially, without actually benefiting the environment as it was supposed to. As a protest, I wrote an article about more effective ways the government could actually help the environment without hurting the poor.
On that list was the suggestion that there be community wide composting programs, so that people's organic waste didn't go into landfills.

Growing up, we never would dream of throwing decomposable material into the trash. We kept a little trash can under the sink which we filled with this kitchen trash, and when that filled up, we dumped it into our compost heap in the back corner of our garden. The compost there would then be used in our garden where we grew all sorts of delicious things (of which the snow peas, fresh tomatoes, and asparagus were my favorite... though can't forget about the wineberries.)

When I moved abroad and got married, it took convincing to get my husband to be willing to have a compost in our yard, but when he got on board, he saw how cool it was, how we were able to get such rich soil that way, which we then used in our small garden (tomatoes, swiss chard, and potatoes are what we successfully grew).

Then about 5 years ago we moved into our current small apartment, where we have no yard and even no real porch, so that curtailed our gardening abilities. (The few things I tried to grow didn't turn  out to be so successful.) One of the things that bugged me most was throwing out my decomposable waste since we no longer had a compost heap. I'd thought about making a guerrilla compost pile in a public place but then never had the guts to do so. (Eventually a neighbor did exactly that not far from my home.)

Giving Our Homemade Couch a Makeover To Suit My Tastes- For Free!

Ever have an idea that in theory was great but in practice didn't work out as planned?

That's what happened with our couch. Two years ago, sick of having no couch in our home, Mike turned a wooden shoe box he'd built into a couch, by first turning it into a bench, then I added cushioning and a cover to make it be a couch. 

The problem with it was that the shoe box was built as that, not planning to be a couch, and so, the seat wasn't wide enough. As a bench it was fine, but when we put the cushions on the bench and the back, it used up much of the available sitting space, leaving you without enough room to sit comfortably, making it feel like you were constantly falling off.

It worked, in a pinch, but when we found enough money and the space to put in a small couch a year ago, the shoe box couch fell out of use, and other than being a place to store our shoes, it became the place of choice to pile on clutter and mess... since no one sat on it anyhow.

Making Homemade Super Frugal Tab Top Curtains From Imperfect Fabric and Scraps

One of the things I hated most in how my house looked before our super frugal home makeover was our blinds on our window in the living room part of our main room. They were given to us by friends who no longer wanted there, they were a color I hated, and they were half broken. I knew that one thing that absolutely needed to be done in our makeover was getting curtains for this window, pretty curtains that matched our color scheme.

However, I didn't want grey curtains since it would be right above our grey couch, and I thought that that was a bit much. And as much as I like orange, I felt orange curtains would be a little garish and a little too "retro" for my taste. So that left me with blue.

I didn't want the curtains to feel to heavy- I wanted something fresh and lively and light, so when I spotted this light blue fabric at the fabric store, I knew it was perfect. I loved that it was patterned yet not, so a little more interesting than just plain blue fabric, but not too busy looking either. And it was light enough to allow light through, yet thick enough to give us a little bit of privacy. The fabric was discounted- which was a plus, but the reason it was discounted, less so; it was just one yard long, which I thought would be enough... but was not. I mean, when I took it home and measured it, it was the right size to cover my window, but not to reach to the curtain rod a few inches above. On top of that, it also was cut unevenly, so it would need to be hemmed a good few inches shorter to hide the jagged edges.

Testing out the fabric to see... Nope. not long enough.

I had a problem. I could either scratch the idea of making curtains with this fabric, something I really didn't want to do also because I didn't want to have wasted money on this fabric, and also because I really loved it, and it was so perfect, other than its imperfections, that is... or I could try to figure out a solution to use the fabric somehow, so that it would cover the window entirely.

My Eight Year Old Sewed New Pillows, And You Can Too

Lee, super proud of the two pillows he just sewed!

Today was a busy, busy, busy day in my house- the Penniless full home makeover on a budget is well underway and today most of the work and transformation was done. As I was sewing things for the house, my 8 year old, Lee, asked me what I was doing, and why I was doing those, and I explained to him the various steps involved. He wanted to know how a sewing machine works, what the different parts were called, why we needed thread on the top and the bottom, etc...

He saw me pinning down hems, and then ironing, and asked me if he could do those, so I guided him how to do that and he loved it- "Mommy, can I iron things all the time? This is fun!" Haha, I hate ironing.

When the ironing was finished, he wanted to know if he could sew. He'd never sewn before on a machine, and I'm not sure I ever taught him to sew by hand either, but he has good hand eye coordination and a good eye for detail and he's very responsible, so I figured- why not teach him how to use the sewing machine.

One of the simplest projects to make on a sewing machine is a pillow, and just our luck- pillows were some of the things I anyhow wanted to get made today. I tested out Lee to see how he managed to sew on a piece of scrap fabric, if he managed to go at a reasonable pace (and not push down the pedal to the metal) and go in a straight line, and when I saw that he was able to do that very well, I decided to entrust the fabric that I bought to make our new pillows, to him. It was a gamble, letting my son make them, but I was hoping it would pay off. Worst comes to worst, I would just have to buy new fabric if he managed to botch it up really badly.

Ways To Reuse Those Little Boxes

I know many people like myself have lots of empty boxes lying around their house, whether from cereal boxes, contact lens boxes, etc... I hope you enjoy this guest post filled with these creative upcycling ideas as much as I did. 

If you are lucky enough to get daily disposable contact lenses, like the popular Dailies AquaComfort Plus contact lenses, then you have only one problem. Should you throw the box in the garbage and add to the paper waste in this country or find a creative way to upcycle it? Paper waste accounts for 25 percent of the garbage in landfills.

Why not look for an environmentally-friendly way to dispose of those little boxes that hold your contacts? At the same time, you find things the kids can do that doesn’t involve sitting in front of their computer or video game console. It is a win-win solution for moms that wear contact lenses.

Ways to Recycle Old Eyeglasses

I've been a glasses wearer since I was 9 years old, and I've gone through many pairs of glasses since then. Whenever I get new glasses, I always wonder what I should do with my old glasses. This guest post, with some ideas of how to recycle your old glasses hit the spot and gave me some ideas I'd never even considered before.

Have you ever felt you are not likely to continue using your eyeglasses anymore? Have you ever wanted to replace your old spectacles with new Porsche Design eyewear but didn’t know what to do with the ones that are becoming boring? Not everyone can afford buying eyeglasses. There is a chance for you to get rid of your eyeglasses and help a person in need by donating your old pair to him/her. To recycle your eyeglasses in such a way is a good idea because a person will be wearing them and they will get a second life.

Moreover, there are creative people who use old eyeglasses for an absolutely different aim and give them a completely new life! Thus, the main function of eyeglasses is transformed into an advanced one. We would like to share with you some of these fresh ideas that could be done even at home without any special technologies. You can use either the whole pair of eyeglasses or sometimes one or a few parts.

Homemade "I Spy in a Bottle" Toy

I am a big fan of do it yourself, especially when it comes to toys and other fun games. In addition to that, I also enjoy finding uses for things that would otherwise be thrown out.

Therefore, when I was at my friend Z's house, and saw what she called an "I Spy in a Bottle" game, I thought it was a super cool idea and decided to make one for our family as well.

So, to do this, what you first need to do is get a large plastic bottle with a wide mouth, or a large plastic jar, made from clear plastic. Yes, I said plastic, because this will be a game for kids, and as much as I'd like to think my kids wouldn't break a toy made from glass, I know its inevitable.

Alright- who am I kidding? I'd be the one to break it, since I break all the glass things in my house. Erm...

So, either way- start by getting your plastic jars/bottles. Since most of the things in my house actually don't come in plastic containers- they usually come in glass jars or plastic bags or whatnot, since we're not buying lots of processed foods/condiments, this was actually the part that was the hardest for me to do. I actually got my jar from my friend- it used to contain cookies.

Spring is in the Air: How to Get Your Home Ready for Spring this Year

This post was written by Kelly Martin, stay at home mother of two. When Kelly is not tending to her family, she can be found curled up on the couch with her nose in a good book.

Spring is always welcome after cold nights and wintry weather. The icy temperatures can be rough on your lawn as well as your plants and flowers, making the start of spring a time to spruce things up and welcome warmer days. Even if you can’t work on the outside of your home right away, you can start preparing the interior as the seasons change.