Adding an Outdoor Sink

This crazy old house had two laundry rooms in the basement when we bought it and both were in bad condition. As a result, I ended up with two of these utility sinks sitting in the garage. In a spring cleaning frenzy, I loaded the sinks into the truck with the idea of hauling them to the Restore to see if they would take them.

Then the battery on the truck was dead. So, the truck has sat loaded with junk in the driveway for a couple of days.  I spotted one of my children filling a watering can at this outdoor faucet and he was making a giant muddy mess. It dawned on me that I could really use one of those laundry sinks!  Sure enough, it works perfectly. And when my kids miss the watering can or the water gun or are just washing their hands out there, the extra water goes into the bucket below and can be used for watering my plants later.

Re-purposing old Valentine's chocolate tins with craft paint. The kids loved this project!

Main floor bath update

Before/After

<><><> MINOR COSMETIC BATHROOM UPDATE <><><>

Hubby is away for a week. Since he works from home, any kind of re-modeling is very disruptive to him. This bathroom is in the worst spot for distraction- right across the hall from his home office. I thought this would be the perfect time to do a quick update.

I was expecting to do just a quick paint job, but this bathroom has some quirks. The kids' bathroom is right above it, resulting in a ceiling that has suffered an occasional flood from overflowing and splashing in the tub. And until I moved to this house, I had no idea there were so many kinds of "almond" colors for the bathroom. None of these almonds match: the sink is just off-white, the toilet is bone and tub surround is tan and the tub has a salmon-orange tone to its "almond."

The previous owner tried to address these problems by picking an almond-patterned linoleum (that is now all scratched and worn out) and painting the walls yellow. They obviously had splash damage from their kids too, and they addressed this with a wall border. There are a couple places where the top of the wall is so damaged that removing the wall border would have taken half the drywall with it.

Our house is a fixer-upper with a to do list about 5 years long. Seriously. We have plans to completely demolish this bathroom down to the wall studs and combine it with the not-functioning master bath next door for a large grand soaker tub, separate shower. It will basically be a complete replacement of the plumbing, electrical, drywall and fixtures. I'm also hoping to squeeze in a 1/4 bath in part of the space in a tiny closet off the mudroom with a sink in toilet combo like this. (Check out this awesome video of someone who made their own.)

That is all pipe-dreams and smoke and a very long time from now. This is our primary main floor bathroom for ourselves and guests and kids when they are on the main floor.  I found myself not wanting to clean this bathroom. It felt old and grungy, so why bother!

Once I got into it, I thought I might be in over my head, but I managed to keep
the entire project cosmetic:

• Patched water damaged ceiling & primed ceiling & walls with Kilz primer
• Added a splash guard in corner of tub 
• Painted over wall border, changing walls from yellow to grey & painted ceiling white.
• Replaced damaged & poorly cut glass shelves with black wooden shelves & stencilled on mirror.
• New fluorescent full spectrum light bulbs (although I might switch to LED as these have a slow warm-up time.)
• New floor tile in a marble pattern that has all the "almond" colors in it, grey and white
• New shower curtain
• Removed towel bar from shower wall

Still to do:

• touch-up trim paint
• better shelf organization
• maybe paint vanity cupboard
• paint fan cover & heater vent
• may want to do ceiling panels if this turns out to be a longer term solution.

If I do paint the base cabinet of the vanity, what is the best color? Grey like the walls? I actually held up a garbage sack to get an idea of what it would look like but maybe black would be too stark.

Halloween Pumpkins the easy way

The kids were pestering me like crazy to do the Halloween pumpkin carving, but there is no way that is going to happen this year. I told them to grab some permanent markers and have fun! I think they turned out great. But why am I so lazy and not carving them?

This summer, we demolished a rotten deck and replaced the deck with some temporary stairs to get us through the fall and winter. We plan on moving the door to a different wall and lowering the entrance to ground level next summer.


We did fine with these stairs for a month, but then Guess who tripped on her own purse strap and fell down the new stairs?!


So, no pumpkin carving for me. My kids are too small to do the carving still and having them clean out the insides is a nasty sticky mess that I'm always regretting for days after.

And hey, there is are perks-  the doctor told me no snow shoveling this winter! And I get to wear this totally awesomely decorated cast for a while!

Have you ever broken a bone? What kinds of things did you miss out on and did you find any "perks" to the situation?

[Spring update: The kids ACTUALLY did shovel all winter and they did a good job with out whining! May I never have to shovel again!]

Garbage Stand Attempt

Every winter, our neighbor takes his bobcat and clears the alley of snow by piling it high against our fence. I would have to dig a place to put the garbage each week. This fall, I quickly scrabbled together this garbage stand out of scrap pieces of wood and cinderblocks for a base. I put the tall vertical pieces so that the neighbor can see where it is even when there is tons of snow.

I still need to put something around the base, preferably not wood that will just rot in the snow. Maybe metal flashing? I haven't decided yet. Next year I hope to actually grow grass back there... or something.

Tree Table

Last year, a truck slid off the icy road into one of our trees. I thought the tree was going to be okay, but the first big wind of spring blew the top of the tree right over. After levelling off the top, I sat there wondering, do I dig up the stump? What do I do with this?

While I was distracted in mommy daydreams, my oldest son comes running to report the three of them had completely smashed their wooden toy box while pretending it was a bus. The only piece remaining intact was the blue sturdy wooden lid. Thus a silly table was born. The chairs were ones that the cushions wore off and I was saving them to make new cushions. They work way better as plant stands! And I plan on adding a few more birdhouses to the table!

Note: The We Go Bagless sign is from the City of Edmonton program to promote grass-cycling and reduce the amount of trash for the waste collectors. It is a great program and a lot less work than bagging up grass!

Pretty in Pink Polish

Not only do I like to save money, but I like the idea of recycling old things and saving them from the landfill. Why buy new when there are so many unique things you can do to reuse?!

I found an interesting wooden shelf in a thrift shop. At home, I sprayed it pink and now it holds my daughter's nail polishes. 

I  liked it the nail polish shelf so much and I remembered that the thrift shop had two so I went back for the other one. The other one I left natural for my son's toys.