Planning to go Veg

Now that I'm home more (like, a lot more) and I have more energy (again- a lot more) and more time to think about things that matter to me (broken record much?) Marco and I have finally been able to make a few changes that we've be wanting to, but haven't had the time or energy to make.

One of those changes is committing to eating more vegetarian meals.  We wanted to start doing this for a couple of reasons.

First, it is was cheaper to leave out the meat a few times during the week.  We still love the occasional steak or chicken breast, but by cutting out meat 3 times a week, we are really saving on our grocery budget.

And second it encourages new foods and recipes.  Turns out, I really like cooking, but I have been hesitant because I don't know what the heck I'm doing half the time.  So by taking a few minutes in the evenings or on the weekends, I google around for new or exciting recipes with ingredients we have in the fridge.  I can also search on Pinterest from my phone, so when I see that cauliflower is on sale, I can make a decision whether or not I think I can make something new.

This is how I organize our recipes.

It's just a binder with page protectors to protect the pages from whatever I'm making.  I have tabs in there for main dishes, sides, desserts, drinks, and etc.  The etc section is mostly pickle recipes, dog treats, relishes, and gift type foods.  Each section has lots of empty page protectors in the back so whenever I find a fun recipe in a magazine or online, I just rip/tear/copy it out and slide it in place to keep for later.  I printed all of my "Food Stuffs" board from pinterest also- so if I ever search for "cauliflower" and I have something already pinned, I know that I already have the recipe close as hand too.  I think Future Stacey will appreciate that.

PLUS, deciding to go veg 3 or 4 nights a week has helped us start planning our summer garden.  I know I want to grow beans to dry and freeze.  Marco wants more peppers and eggplants.  There will be corn this year because we found a special hybrid that can be grown in planters.Of course we'll have our regular things like tomatoes,  cucumbers, zucchini,  lettuces and herbs but we're adding soybeans, peas and a few fruit plants.

Now excuse me, I have some dried beans to go soak for tonight's cabbage and bean recipe that Marco's mom emailed me earlier.

Family bonding and cheap eats?  Sign me up!

Gifts for Girls

I have the pleasure of being friends with some very nice ladies around town.  Some of them have children, some of them are children, but they are all very nice just the same.  This means that Marco and I are invited to a lot of birthday parties- which we are not complaining about.

But that means that sometimes we have to get really creative with gifts.  Add that to the fact that we're on a strict budget and things can often get a little fuzzy.  Let me set the scene shall I?

Marco and I had a birthday party for a very special 4 year old in less than 24 hours.  I had been bidding, and being out bid on a few dolls on eBay.  We had searched the local thrift shops for cool, unusual gifts.  We had voted down the bird feeder, the chocolate fountain, the cool sandals and the one dinosaur book we had been able to find...  And then I saw it, for a low price of $1.99.

I love this game.  I loved it as a child, I love it today, heck, there is a set in my living room looking at me right now.  I knew I could make it work, but I wanted it to be special.

By 10:00 the next morning, I ready to dig in to my special gift for my special girl.  Step one was to find 24 people that the birthday girl and her sisters knew by sight.  For this I stalked Facebook for a good hour, copying and pasting pictures into a word document, cropping them down and sizing them.  I made two small copies and one large copy of each picture.  Then I cut out all the copies- this part took forever.  Like, two hours to find all of the pictures, size them, print them, resize them, print them again twice and then cut them all out.

Then I took out all of the cards from the game.  I removed the cards from both boards and the cards that the players draw from.  I did panic a little as I counted cards, but I thought that if one had been missing I could have just scanned a card and made a new one.  Thankfully, all the cards and all of the pieces were there.  Whew.

I put the cards in stacks, big cards, red board cards, and blue board cards.  I put the cut out pictures into stacks, big, small, small.  Then I got to taping.

Using regular old packing tape, I just attached the big pictures over the faces on the cards.  Then I used the same method to attach the smaller pictures to the cards that go in the little windows.  Then I load all of the new pictures back into the windows and loaded the windows back into the boards.

Oh, and before I started cutting pictures, I took the boards outside for a quick spray paint to make them classier- I hate the bright red and blue plasticy looking boards.

And with exactly 75 minutes before we were due at the party, I had a custom, one of a kind gift for my favorite 4 year old.

What about you?  Customize anything lately?

Winter Workings: Phase 1

I have been pretty quiet over on Oxford Handmade the last few weeks- you know Christmas, parties, whatnot.  But honestly, most of the silence is because Marco and I have been working on a little side project we like to call  Living Room Makeover 2013.

(Technically, it started in 2012, but just go with it ok?)

This is where our living room was sitting at the beginning of December:

Charming right?  That MDF bookcase on its side acting like a sideboard.  The 31 decorative pieces on the mantle.  The 6 mini tables in the living room.  That second picture is actually a during picture, but it shows some good before-ness too.  Continue to just go with it.

Well like I mentioned here, we had some winter plans that we needed to get started, so when Marco's office closed for the holidays, get started we did.  Suddenly our fireplace wall looked like this:

Blank except for the Instagram photos and the Trevi fountain canvas.  That's also why that picture of the couch is so cluttered, most of the stuff just got moved across the room.  Then suddenly through the power of the internets, the room started to look like this:

Turns out that phase one of Living Room Makeover 2013 involved 60 feet of bookshelves plus 12 feet of table height surface space.  We added trim, filled in the holes, painted, painted again with a different white, and we when we finally sat down on the couch four days later, we were looking at this:

I waited a whole 72 hours before putting our books and collections on the shelves to make sure they cured nicely, but I gotta tell you, it was a little painful waiting that long.  Having these shelves makes the room feel so much more balanced.  That weird corner, to the left of the diningroom opening (you can see it in the picture right above), is suddenly useful.  Plus the trim along the bottom of the shelves makes them look like they've been there forever.

And the best part?  This bookshelf project really started the ball rolling with other living room projects. But you'll have to check back to see those.  In fact, I should probably be working on them now...

Winter Projects vs Summer Projects

I know its been slow around the ol' blog lately.  I've been working on OxfordHandmade and doing a lot of deep thinking about my future, oh and a lot of watching the entire series of How I Met Your Mother, but I digress...

The truth is, this warm winter weather has really upset our winter project schedule.  When Marco and I first moved into this house we had a lot of projects that we knew we needed/wanted to accomplish.  But to not be so overwhelmed and to help budget them out we put them in order of preference (or logic) and then ordered them again for each season. Until our list looked like this:

Summer projects:
Raised bed garden
French Drains
Deck
Workshop
Fence
Paint front door
Stain and seal porch/new deck
Flowerbeds
Update big bathroom

Winter projects:
Painting the living room, dining room, bed room, guest room, hallway, bathroom, kitchen
Remodel kitchen and laundry room/guest bathroom
Install built in bookshelves
Update light fixtures in dining room and hallway
Add ceiling fan in living room and/or update light
Add insulation to attic and winterize other areas in need
Have an energy audit
Install organization to kitchen cabinets


Now why would we want to separate the list into two parts for winter and summer?  That's easy.  No one wants to dig post holes for a fence when the ground is frozen and why would you want to be working inside on bookshelves when it's so nice and pretty outside?  Plus, this helps us prioritize and buy supplies bits at a time so we're not always storing loads of wood and materials.

Ok, that last part was a lie.  I'd take a picture of my backyard to prove we're still hoarding materials, but I'm too embarrassed, so you'll just have to trust me.

Anyhoo- the warm weather during winter working time is really messing up our schedule.  We're trying to accomplish more "summer" projects like working on our flower beds or finishing projects floating in our back yard instead of focusing on our built in bookshelves which are next on the list.  But the time has come the walrus said!  So here is an official before picture:

I just snapped it and uploaded it- no lighting, no care to clean up or move the cat out of the mirror.  That's a legit picture.  My best?  Nope.  But isn't that how before/afters work?  You take a really bad before and then a really, really nice after.

Here's hoping we can finish before it turns warm again- I have a lot of books that need new homes and a tv that needs to move out of the bedroom.  Who's up for painting 300 feet of shelving??

The Bandwagon

Alright.  I can admit it.  I jumped on the bandwagon and made my own laundry detergent.

And you know what?  It's not too bad.

I used a basic formula that is featured in several "green your home" type books and I washed two test loads- one general (socks, towels, t shirts) and one dirty (gardening socks, work pants, blue jeans).  I used WAY less than the suggested amount (because I feel like a cup of anything is a lot) and I gotta say I don't hate the results.

There are no strong perfumes from the type of detergent I made.  I did use Ivory soap which smelled very strong when I first chopped it up, but the clothes are virtually smell free.  But they are both good and bad smell free.  This was especially surprising with the dirty load since it smelled like sweat and compost going in.  I guess all of that baking soda worked.

I also decided early on to make a powdered soap, since I read that the "liquid" actually turns into more of a weird jelly substance and can actually mold if you don't use it fast enough.  No thank you.  The powder was easy to pour, mix, and contain.  The entire process took me maybe five minutes since I was extra careful pouring my powder into my recycled container.

Do I love it yet?  No.  I kind of miss that clean laundry smell.  Maybe I will add another bar of soap, or some essential oils... or maybe I just need to give it time and see if I change my mind.

Here is the super simple recipe I used.

4 parts baking soda- not washing soda (I'm planning to use washing soda in the next batch for a comparison)
3 parts Borax
2 parts Ivory soap grated (but if you just cut it with a knife, it tends to grate itself pretty easily.  Also, you can put it into a food processor and achieve the same results as well.)

Mix and use.  I used 1/4 cup for the regular load and 1/2 for the dirty stuff.

It obviously made 9 cups worth of detergent (4+3+2=9) so I will be trying it out for a while.  Hopefully by then I'll have a full report and a final verdict.

Who else is trying new things with laundry?  Anyone else still whipping out the clothes line in this 75* weather?  We are!  Let's gush!

Bottles: Phase Two

Slowly but surely we are inching towards finally finishing our first bottle boarder flower bed around the house- and you know what that means!  Almost time to start the second one...

But first things first.  When I last shared our bottle boarder update it looked like this:

Bottles a plenty, yes, but top soil, prettiness, weed control??  Not so much.  Well it was about time I did something about that.  So on top of adding another 18 bottles to the end of the line (still about 4 dozen short, just need to get out there and do that already!) I also installed some free weed control.

I had a bunch of newspaper left over from a recon I did for the neighborhood (you can read about that here at OxfordHandmade), so I unfolded it and laid it out over my flower bed.  I tore holes/left space so that my plants could peak through, but I covered the weeds with two solid layers.  I went back every few minutes and sprayed everything with water to help hold it down.  Soon, my flowerbeds looked like this:

Classy right?  Well I didn't intend for it to stay that way.  I've actually read about this process several times online and several people swear by it.  The newspaper is supposed to suppress the weeds, then break down and just become one with the earth.  I'm so tired of weeds choking up my flowers I'd try just about anything, and this idea was free and easy- I figured it was worth a shot.

Well I added my newspapers, sprayed them with water, and then waited around for Marco.  He had spent all morning going back and forth from our house to the "free mulch place."  This place is for real here in Oxford- and most towns and cities have similar set ups.  Basically, when the city cuts down branches or trees, either from storm damage or power line maintenance, they mulch them up and pile it high.  The mulch is free to get, it just takes a little muscle power and you have to bring your own containers.  Well we had plenty of containers, so six trips later, we had plenty of mulch.  One of those trips went straight onto my newspapers until the entire bed looked like this:

Huzza.  We buried just about everything in mulch. Most things had died for winter anyway, but if it was still kicking, we went back and unearthed it a little.  There was plenty of great topsoil already composted in there, and it will settle with rain and time.  Now we just have to wait for spring when we can pour on a few bags of garden soil, toss in some of our own worm compost and watch it grow!  

Who else is excited for spring planting already??

Winter Yard Work

I spent the first weekend of December in the traditional fashion- outside in a t shirt doing yard work.

In fact, we had one of the most productive yard work weekends of the year except for that time we dug up a 100 square foot raised garden bed, poured in a ton of soil, tilled it and planted our 75 baby plants... so we are felling really good about this one.

Our to do list looked like such:

1. Clean garden beds (which means remove all of the old plants that were still hanging around, clean out the netting that was holding them up, hoe the rows and level)
2. Stir compost (especially important after adding a ton of new material, like all of the stuff we got out of the garden)
3. Clean out potted plants (mostly on the front porch and in the front flower beds)
4. Clean up trash near the deck/air conditioner/pallet storage
5. Clean up the second dresser we found on the street (more about the dressers on OxfordHandmade)
6. Fix the second dresser we found on the street
7. Paint the second dresser we found on the street
8. Fix the stairs that lead to the deck (there was a weird mini step at the top and the bottom, we needed to fix that ASAP)
9. Mulch the flower beds in the front
10. Split and divide all of the mint/spearmint/peppermint that had outgrown their containers
11. Transplant thyme plants from their beginner planters to new big plant planters
12. Paint the newspaper stand that has been hanging around out backyard for months
13. Relocate newspaper stand to be better used by the community 
14. Work on bottle boarder in the front of the house (hopefully this project will be D-O-N-E soon!)
15. Take a nap

Well I can assure you all has been done except paint the dresser- which needs to be done soon because it's supposed to rain this afternoon.  So I'll be back all this week showing off sharing pictures  and taking about dirt.

And p.s. we also did this on Saturday:

Congratulations Marco and Audi on a wonderful race at the Santa Run in Tupelo!!