"Made me think of you" gifts are the best gifts

My favorite gifts to give and receive are the ones that are not forced. When I see an item that makes me think of someone in particular, it's hard not to pick up. Bonus = when the item is on sale.
I was recently on the receiving end of an after-Christmas sale item that perfectly captured one part of my identity!

This is the new gift

This is also a gift, but one I've had for 6+ years

I immediately put it out to display, but it didn't seem quite right in that spot. While I was thinking about alternative locations, I also thought about what I wasn't getting to do this week as "dog mom." My mom, aka dog grandma, is watching him this week. [Sidenote - my house is lonely and I miss him.] One of the things I try to do regularly is take him for walks and jogs with his appropriately coordinated red leashes....💡💡💡💡 ←Brilliant idea forming here!

Hrmmmmm... a few hooks and thumbtacks would make my new gift a great decoration for an empty wall AND functional as a leash holder. Previously, his leashes lived on the floor next to the door or in a bag in the closet. A few screw hooks in the bottom, 2 thumbtacks in my wall, and a little help from my dremel resulted in this amazing addition to my living room. A thoughtful gift became a creative project for me. Wins all around!

Closet makeover

In one room, I removed the whole closet. Meanwhile, in the other room, I decided to use the space more efficiently by making it a mini walk-in closet. The original layout had a single rod stretching 5 feet across the back of the closet and one shelf above that (see picture below).

I was in town over labor day weekend and had an extra rod after demolishing the other closet, so I spent one day adding an extra foot of hanging storage and special storage spots for my hats and my luggage. It only took 1 trip to home depot! I had to get a labor day present for myself (that's a thing, right?). I got a large set of spade bits. All of the ones I already owned were too small. These were on sale though!

My carpenter friend gave me some scrap boards that I could use to add trim to the front of the closet. I cut it to size, drilled holes, cut the rods, and installed the pieces all together. I realize that I could have bought brackets for the rods instead, but drilling holes directly in the trim seemed to be the most secure option. Besides, it gave me an excuse to get more tools that will come in handy later. :) Here are pictures of the new rods... well, technically old rods, but newly cut.

Next up, was hanging my ball caps. They had been hanging on a hook that was much too small for 4 hats. I used the space above the rod on the right side of the closest and a few small nails from my hardware stash to put a spot to hang each hat. [Go Nats!]

Up next... and my greatest success... was using the space above the rod on the left for my carry-on luggage. Previously my luggage sat on the floor, but it's light-weight and I'd rather use that floor space for my hiking, rain, snow, black, and brown boots. I used more of the scrap wood to make this little bracket. I installed a small wood piece above the original trim in the closet with drywall screws and screws. Then, I cut 2 triangle pieces that I fit over some nails that I secured into the small piece. In case you were wondering, yes, I did use another spade bit to drill the holes into the triangle pieces. :) To finish up the bracket, I secured the bottom to the original trim.

Even though it only took a day, my closet feels much more open and organized now. I still want to find some cool hooks to hang my belts, so I'm hoping Habitat Restore will have some in stock.

Repurposing ugly chandelier parts to make a new light fixture

Saturday was one of those unique days where I got to be creative AND handy.

My chandelier had been held up with painter's tape for almost 7 years so people wouldn't run into it in my tiny dining room. The chandelier was ugly and dated. I wanted to replace it for quite a while and recently took a stroll through the light section of Home Depot. I didn't see anything I liked. I knew I didn't want another chandelier because having a light hang low in such a small room didn't make much sense to me. The flush mount light fixtures were ok, but kind of boring. I figured I would keep working on other projects and eventually would make it over to Lowes to check their light stock. Until then, the ugly chandelier stays. However... as is often the case... my plans changed. One of my great friends, Kelli, was visiting me and suggested we take a trip to Habitat Restore to check for light fixtures. I had not been to the Restore since it moved 2 miles from my house, so I was long overdue to check it out. Plus I had some stuff to donate. It would be a win no matter what we found there. Well, I found inspiration!!!

On the left - ugly chandelier. On the right - you'll see the new light fixture that I created. I found the brown lamp shade for $5 at restore and thought, "I'm going to find a way to make this work." So, Kelli and I made a trip to Home Depot for the other supplies. I was hoping to find something already put together (ceiling mount, connectors, light bulb socket, wires), but that would be too easy. Instead, I came across the lamp-making section. I found a ceiling mount that I liked and from there it was like a puzzle to figure out what else I needed. I grabbed a package of zinc plated nipples (no, I'm not making that name up) and some sockets... and suspected I'd need to make at least one more trip to HD for this project (spoiler alert - I didn't!).

When I got home, I turned off the breaker to the dining room electricity and got started by removing the chandelier. I realized that this ugly chandelier may actually be useful... in pieces.

talk about a puzzle...

I disassembled the whole thing and realized that it had a nipple that wasn't entirely threaded (in other words, one that would look better). It also had some other pieces I could use... and I could save some $ by returning the unused ones pieces to HD. I took the wires out of the chandelier, scavenged some of the connectors, and began reassembling.

I attached the socket to the nipple that I got from the chandelier and threaded the wires though both. Using wire cutters, I stripped the ends of the wire to reveal fresh copper and I twisted ends. I attached the exposed copper pieces to the socket screws and slid the lamp shade over it all. Then I had to attach it to the ceiling mount. I ended up taking the bracket on and off a couple of times because after I put it up, I realized it would be easier to attach the nipple to the bracket before screwing the bracket into the electrical box, but eventually got everything situated.

I'd like to say it that was the end of the installation, but this morning Kelli and I both realized it would look better if it were slightly lower. I pretty much took it all apart, added more connectors from the old chandelier, and reassembled. Now it spreads out the light more and gives a better view of the ceiling mount... but it is not too low to knock most people in the head. My unusually tall brother may graze the bottom because it's now 6'7 from the floor, but he's used to ducking lights, so I'm not worried.

I may get a brighter light bulb for it at some point, but for now it's great!
I suppose I will have to take another trip to HD to return the unused nipples and extra socket, but I don't count that as an extra trip for this project because the returns aren't necessary for completing the project. Especially because I'll be back over there soon enough for my next project, I'm sure. Once I return the items, this project will have only cost me around $16!

Sidenote... at Restore I found some "retrofit recessed lights" that came with LED bulbs. I ended up getting 5 LED bulbs for $14 and I may be able to used the recessed light pieces in my basement eventually. SCORE!

Here's some inspiration... Love this!

Such a cool kid.
Sassy too:
"I'm not here to give you shoutouts." 
hahahaha

Installing Baseboards

I had a dilemma... Do I leave my furniture in the middle of the room or move it all back to reasonable locations? I have baseboards!!! They look great and it's a shame that they are so hidden. Yes, that means I decided to move my furniture back.

I used the long weekend to tackle baseboard installation on the main level of my house and they are all installed! For many, many months they had all been painted, but taking up space in my dining and living room. I installed them in my bedroom earlier in the year and forgot I hadn't blogged about it, so here it goes. My bedroom was a good starter room. The baseboards in my bedroom consisted of one baseboard per wall with inner corner cuts. Four walls. Regular corners (no odd angles). Two doorways. Not too difficult.

Then, there's my downstairs where the living room, dining room, and kitchen all connect without doors, lots of inner and outer corners, and one length of wall that would need 2 pieces of baseboard and 3 pieces of shoe moulding. Let's not forget the flooring transition between the dining room and kitchen because the flooring is not level. This is a picture of the transition (and my cat) and the baseboard with a sketch of the porton that needed to be removed in order for the baseboard to fit around the transition.

 

I don't have a jigsaw so I used a hacksaw, dremel, and my miter saw to make the cut at the bottom of the baseboard so it would fit around the transition. It wasn't perfect, but the imperfect cut would be hidden by the shoe moulding. However, the angles for the shoe moulding were also fairly impossible. My tool that measures the angles doesn't work well with small segments, so I had to recreate the angle with two pieces of paper and then could line up the tool with the paper edges to figure out the angle. For instance, the angle for one transition was around 165 so each piece needed to be at a 82.5 degree angle. I set the miter saw at 7.5 degrees and had to figure out the directions to cut each of those little pieces. Plus, one side needed to have an outer angle cut to fit around the wall (45 degree angle with the moulding positioned a different way). And the other piece needed some sort of angle to fit with the shoe moulding along the dining room floor... but the floor transition doesn't angle all the way to the floor. Of course, there's a slight lip to make it just a little more difficult. 

I didn't stress about it too much though. I did the best I could and used some spackle to make it smooth. I'm pretty pleased with the results. I did fill in the nail holes with spackle, but eventually I'll need to add some caulk and do touch-up paint.

Even though I did my baseboards on my own this weekend. I have to thank Kelli who helped me measure, cut, and install baseboards in my bedroom. She was WAY more helpful than the cat, who was particularly good at photo-bombing. The cat wanted to be in my picture of some of the tools I used for this process. That's a lot of tools. My dining room was the staging room and there were tight quarters, but I made it work.

 

Warning- the air compressor can get really HOT. I accidentally bumped it with my shoulder and have a little burn mark. Otherwise, I was careful with my power tools and was unscathed.(The yardwork I did this morning was another matter, but that's off topic).

This picture should also have included the tissue box that I used to keep the baseboards level with the miter saw while making the cuts. It served dual purposes because the saw dust also made me sneeze some. :)

Don't they look good?

Removing Baseboards

I've had a draft of this post written for a very long time. Now that I'm finally installing new baseboards, I figured I should let you know how I removed the old ones.

I'm pretty sure that the baseboards were original to the house and were pretty beat up. I was convinces they had to go... plus it helped with the floor refinishing process. I bought myself a pry bar and a good hammer and started at it. It was also good that I did this before I painted so I wouldn't mess up a new paint job. The quick and dirty description of how to remove a baseboard is: put edge of pry bar at the top of the baseboard, hammer pry bar behind baseboard, gently pry baseboard away from wall slightly (can be less than 1/2 inch), move pry bar further along the baseboard, and repeat until full baseboard is slightly away from wall, then work your way back to get it even further away from wall until you can pull whole thing out with out damaging the wall. If you try to remove the whole nail before prying the full baseboard slightly away from the wall, you risk damaging the wall behind it.

I ended up some nails left in the walls that I am having to remove now that I'm installing the new baseboards. Some of those need a little engineering ingenuity (in fact, I was told I should have been an engineer when someone saw my methods, but I'll stick with my current profession). Sometimes I've had to use a block for leverage with the hammer or pry bar (I'm pretty certain I learned that trick from Dad). I've also used interesting configurations of the hammer and pry bar to get nails out. Occasionally I've been able to use needle nose pliers to pull the nail out. If all else fails I hammer it all the way into the wall or saw it off with a small hacksaw right at the wall because it's just going to get covered by a new baseboard. I just have to be careful not to shoot a new nail into the old one. Before I install more baseboards, I'll make sure to survey old nail holes and will put a piece of painter's tape on the wall right above the nail to be careful around that spot.

Expanded compost bin!

I finished moving my compost into the new bin and even had a whole wheelbarrow load to add to front yard where I planted more tomato and pepper plants! Because I still had wood supports, mesh, and a large pallet, I added a second section to my compost bin. I figured I should share pictures.











I found some old plastic plant pots that fit in the tops of the pallets (see empty ones in picture to right), so I added compost and some small flower seeds to them. If they bloom in the shady section of my yard I'll post pictures of those. It could be a nice addition to this practical/functional part of my yard.

Pallet compost bin

My brother and I had put together an amazing compost bin in 2010 from salvaged trash in the industrial park near my house. Three and a half years of storing decomposing matter later, it was SPENT! Last year I flipped it over and used the top as the new bottom by attaching a new piece of plywood, but it was in very sad shape this year. This picture is after I pulled off one side of it in order to more easily move the compost. The decayed sides you can see used to be part of the bottom. I can't complain because its contents filled my gardens, which provided me with lots of food. But it was time to upgrade the bin.

Conveniently just in time, a neighbor had some leftover pallets from a materials delivery for a project he was doing. I used them and some mesh that another neighbor had put out for trash to make a new compost bin. The pallets had the wood supports (front and back of bin in the picture below on the right), so instead of removing them, I just left them to be part of the bin. The mesh keeps the compost inside the bin at the back. The best part is that I also have another discarded pallet and extra wood supports so eventually it will become a double-bin, which will make flipping the compost much easier. I may even extend it to a triple-bin with another two pallets, because that will be extremely helpful in the fall when there are a ton of leaves to compost.

I moved a lot of the compost into the new bin, but that stuff is heavy and I had enough of a workout putting everything together. I'll move the rest later and it will be ready for my garden next year!

Here's a descriptive source with more information to make your own.

Washing machine repair

A washing machine bellow (also known as washing machine boot) is the rubber part that connects a front load washer tub to the front of the washer to keep the water inside the tub. Mine was ripped and had started to leak. I decided to take a stab at replacing it, so I ordered a replacement part online. It came the very next day I recommend using this site if you need a good parts place. I ended up using a manual and a youtube video for instructions. However, I only have 2 hands and the retainer spring that keeps the bellow in place was a tight fit so the point of this blog is to show how I did it. A Binder Clip! See it at the top of the door opening? Worked like a charm.

"Need to trust my instincts" or "Opportunity for ingenuity."

Yesterday's conversation while in Lowes:

Me: "I'm going to get another box of nails, just in case. I'll bring it back if I don't need it... unless you are sure we won't need them."
Dad: "Let's just check out."
Me: "Ok. If you say so. But you're going to get more if we need them."

Today:

Me: "How's it going out there?" (They worked on hanging the rest of the joists while I did some work.) 

Mom (cracking up): "We're going to need more nails."

Turns out she was laughing so hard because Dad had said "The little b***h was right." I prefer his normal nickname for me which starts the same way, but is more endearing - Bitty.

We didn't end up going to the store though. We used some of the decking screws I already had. Luckily they hadn't used all of the nails on the inner boards because we needed to use them on the outside joists. Some of the nails were too long to go into the outside boards and I don't have a pair of heavy-duty pliers to cut the nail in one fell swoop. Here's what we did:

On the left: Dad took a pair of electrical pliers and made a notch in the nail where he wanted it shortened.

On the right: We took other pliers - one to hold the nail steady and one to bend at the notch - and bent it up and down until it broke.

Rosie (one of my parent's dogs)
is hiding

What we've got so far.

Up next? Inspection... or at least questions for the inspector.

And I'm back... with ART!

I haven't blogged for the mere fact that I haven't actually done much work on the house. I have done more garden maintenance and started patching some holes/cracks in drywall, but nothing worth blogging about. And I've been out of town a lot attending weddings and helping out family. Besides, a single girl deserves a break from breaking nails sometimes!

One of my great friends gave me a book that had instructions about how to use CD jewel cases to make wall art. The short of it is you use the jewel cases as a frame to have cool textured art. The long of it is:

1. Find a picture you want to use (mine is from a trip I took to Scotland)
2. Use this program to divide the picture into the sizes you want. I did it differently and learned about this potentially better way afterward (see trials below)
3. Print the pdf doc from the program
4. Cut out pictures
5. Insert pictures into CD cases
6. Use velcro to attach cases to the wall

My Woes - I decided to pay for a custom-size poster of the picture to then cut up into the appropriate size for the CD cases. I got the poster from the online company and it was not, in fact, the size I ordered. I wasn't going to waste it though, so I made a smaller, non-rectangular piece of art.
If you think you may try this with some of your old CD jewel cases, here's a good resource.

How I saved $150

My uncle had some mini blinds that he intended to install in his old house, but never got around to it before he moved. He remembered he had them when I was discussing window treatments for my new windows with my family and suggested that I wait until he checked the size of them before I bought blinds. Conveniently he had 5 sets of blinds and I had 5 windows of identical size in the bedrooms of my house.

Inconveniently...
The opening size of my windows = 34 inches. The size of his blinds = 33 inches.

Seriously? An inch too small?

Well...Where's the fun in having things work out perfectly? I thought about it and decided that saving 30 bucks a pop was worth exploring other options to make the 33 inchers work. Besides, the new vinyl windows have a good inch border around the glass, so having 1/2 inch gap on either side of the blinds wouldn't inhibit privacy. I started the search for 1/2 inch wood blocks that would fill the space where the blinds would attach, but couldn't find any smaller than 3/4 inch.
My M.O. for house projects has been to have a couple small ones going on at a time so I was also in the process of removing trim from the doors. The wood trim was very plain about 1 1/2 inches wide and the length of the door. It also turned out to be about 1/2 inch thick so when I was cutting the trim down to manageable sizes with my miter saw. I got to thinking that if I cut pieces the width of the inside of the window frame and painted the wood white, then I might just have a solution. I ended up having to get longer screws in order to ensure the blinds were secure through the block and into the frame, but it worked and isn't noticeable. Once I put up curtains they won't even be visible.

A lil' ingenuity saved me a nice chunk of change.