The Bookshelf Saga: Part 2

Once the bookshelves were finished, I started loading them with books, beginning with the shelves we bought.  Those shelves are at the end of my new shelving system, and I alphabetize our books by author, so I started with Z and worked my way backward until I filled the shelves...

...and ran out of room.

So I got creative!

I found this set of retro mustard yellow suitcases at Goodwill earlier that week, and I still hadn't figured out exactly what I was going to do with them.  So I used the smaller one as a bookshelf at the east end of the lighted bookshelves!

(I filled the big one on the bottom with denim I'm saving to make quilts for my kids some day.  

Storage in plain sight; I love that!)

This is my Desert/Cowboy Corner:  a rubbing of a Native American petroglyph (my step-grandma made it along the Columbia River in the 60s for an art class, before the dam flooded the area), a paint-by-number my grandpa did, jars of jawbones my kids collected in Nevada, a too-small cowboy hat and too-big cowboy boots, and a desert-scape picture my brother-in-law took in South America (the frame belonged to my great-grandma and is made out of cactus).

On the wall facing that, at the west end of the lighted bookshelves, I stacked up a few old wooden crates from my mother-in-law and filled them with books (because I knew by the time I got to the M's that I was going to run out of room), and I used a horseshoe-shaped book holder turned on end to take part of my Louis L'Amour collection vertical.  To continue my cowboy theme, I filled some too-small cowboy boots with coins to use as bookends and added a red bandanna and my father-in-law's moose jawbones.

I'm happy with my little extra shelving solutions, and the bookshelves we bought and assembled are very nice, but my hands-down favorite are the lighted bookshelves!

I love how easy it is to read the titles, even on the oldest and most worn spines,

and really I love the soft glow that showcases my beloved friends books;

especially at night!

The Bookshelf Saga: Part 1

When we moved from Tennessee to Washington, we had 33 boxes of books, and by the time we moved into this log house, I had collected just a few more.

(Boxes?  Or books?  I'm not telling!  My husband's reading this!)

That collection has grown even more during the years we've lived here, but they're (mostly) for school, and I like to plan ahead, so...

We want to put in some really cool built-in shelves along these walls on the upstairs landing, but in the meantime, my shelves were cardboard boxes, stacked up on top of each other and reinforced with boards between layers.

The shelves along this adjacent wall were even worse:

and there was no improving them.  In the last configuration the box-shelves were five rows tall instead of the three in this picture, with no wooden bookcase and with less uniformly sized boxes.

And the top two rows were starting to lean forward away from the wall.

Scary.

To save our children's skulls and their mother's sanity, we bought some "temporary" bookshelves for the larger wall,

and my husband built "rustic" temporary bookshelves for me along the short wall.

But my husband doesn't do things half way.

He built "rustic" temporary bookshelves for me...

...with built-in lighting on each shelf!

The rest of the story (or at least more pictures) is coming soon!

Welcoming Fall In My Entryway

I bought this (cheap but sturdy) cabinet at Goodwill this summer so we could have a place next to the front door for sitting to pull on boots.  The doors hide grown-up work boots and off-season throw blankets.

For the summer months, I piled my Peruvian bright striped pillows in front.

 We call this the "boot basket", although it holds the kids' tennis shoes too.

I thought the basket looked summery enough on its own, so we left it bare.

The trees are finally starting to change colors around us, and the Fall weather has started,

so we started bringing Fall inside too.

My only rule for decorating as the seasons change:

"Use only what we already have around the house" ...

aka "Spend no money."

I wrapped the boot basket with a textured piece of fabric

and secured it with two pieces of twill tape tied together. 

I moved the bright striped pillows to the back and covered them with another piece of fabric, then piled the brown pillows in front with a green wool one that I borrowed from my bedroom.  My son helped me choose some branches off a tree in our front yard, and we stuck them in a bottle that we rescued from the recycle bin.

And my pumpkin pillow?

Why, yes, it is just an old orange cashmere sweater stuffed with a pillow!  

I tied the sleeves together at the top and stuffed the ends inside, then wrapped a brown washcloth around the knot for a stem.  Then I borrowed a scrap of felted green cashmere from my daughters' craft supplies, tucked it in next to the knot, and called it a leaf.

Fall has officially arrived in my entryway!

The Loft

Have I ever shown you the neat little loft we have in our bedroom?

It's small, but it's got great light from the skylight.

It was horribly dirty and dusty when we moved in, and the carpet reeked from a decade of dust and cigarette smoke, so I pulled up the carpet a few months ago and the kids helped me clean the floor and railings thoroughly.

We've been using the loft for storage, partly because it was so dirty, but mostly because the only way to get to it was through the pull-down ladder to the attic at the other end of the house.

See? There's a space for a ladder at one end,

but no ladder.

That's where my oh-so-handy husband came in. I showed him the Jefferson ladder I wanted, and he built it.

Now I can start working on transforming the loft from storage space into living space!

Laundry Room Make-Over

I finally couldn't take it any longer.

The clutter in the laundry room was getting to me.

So I decided to give the laundry room a make-over.

The only rule was that I had to use only what I had on hand around the house.

It almost...

...ALMOST...

...makes me want to do some laundry.

Mommy's Recipes

I like to eat. So does my family.

Naturally, I started collecting cookbooks. And cooking magazines. And recipes scribbled on 3x5 cards. And ideas printed off the internet or jotted down on scratch paper. I even have a recipe that I found tucked between the pages of one of my grandma's cookbooks. It's a newspaper clipping ... in Spanish.

By 2008, the collection took up an entire six feet of shelving. I was just a little bit overwhelmed.

So I started a blog to help keep track of our favorite recipes. It serves many purposes.

1. Our favorite recipes are preserved for posterity (or at least for as long as blogspot's server lasts) on the internet, where

2. I can access them even when I am not at home.

3. It makes it very easy to share my recipes with friends when they ask. (Hi Amy!) :)

4. And if anything ever happens to my recipe notebook (see below), I can very easily put together a new one.

The blog is handy, all right, but it wasn't helping any with the cookbook clutter. However, moving was a great excuse to purge the cookbook shelves. I recycled magazines, took some cookbooks to a used book store, tossed scraps of paper in the trash...and stuffed two folders full of recipes to try.

Once most of the boxes were unpacked and we felt kind of settled in here, I started another serious purge of the remaining recipes. I typed up and posted on the blog the ones that we've tried and liked, then went through the whole blog and printed out every recipe. I stuck those pages in a binder filled with page protectors and now my recipes are legible, organized, and protected from spills.

Unfortunately, I still have a whole box of cookbooks to unpack.

I have no idea where I'm going to put them.

Which is why they are still not unpacked.

But I can still cook my family's favorite meals, thanks to Mommy's Recipes!

(Does that sound like a cheesy infomercial, or what?!?)

Color-full Cans

Crayons never stay "nice and neat" in their boxes in this house, nor do they ever stay in one piece.  My solution is the Crayon Can, a huge old coffee can, washed and re-used for over 6 years now.  

Colored pencils used to at least make it INTO their box, but they were always getting broken in the process, until I introduced this cheap storage solution -- the Toddler Puffs can.  And I'm not admitting how long I've had THIS one!  :)

Behind Cupboard Doors

I have these wonderful sturdy shelves in my cupboards, but they are SO deep that any food that I store on them gets lost in the back of the cupboard.  So I spent about $7 on 6 ice cube storage bins at Walmart, labeled them with masking tape and a Sharpie, and now I have customized, easy to use organizers for my canned goods.  I keep my sushi supplies, canned soups, and my "I-don't-feel-like-cooking" staples in them, and I can tell at a glance if I am running low on anything.  More importantly, I can get to them easily without re-arranging the entire shelf!  It may not be pretty :), but that's why we have cupboard doors!

(Have you discovered Kitchen Tip Tuesdays hosted by TammysRecipes.com yet?!?  Go visit!)

Don't Fold That Towel!

We have quite a collection of hooded towels for the kids.  Instead of spending hours a week folding towels, I just stuff the clean kids' towels in this hamper.  I got the hamper for a dollar at a garage sale, cleaned it up, and lined it with a spare Army-issue laundry bag.  :)

Fill 'er Up!

With two adults and four kids in the house, I do a LOT of laundry.  If I stay caught up, (which rarely happens, of course) I do an average of 2-3 loads a day.  Which means that I go through a LOT of dryer sheets.  I save the used ones in an old gift bag hanging in my laundry room, and when it gets full, I transfer them to a bean bag cover.  This bean bag cover (pictured) is completely filled with them, which makes it pretty heavy to drag around, but it is SO comfortable, and it smells great too!

$153.83

I like to re-use things whenever I can, and these old peanut butter containers have worked really well as change jars!  They're plastic, so I don't have to worry about them breaking if they get dropped, and they don't get unmanageably heavy when they're filled with coins, either.  

These particular change jars came in very handy a few weeks ago when we began to run low on cash.  I took them in and converted all of our coins into "paper money" (as our kids call it), and we had $153.83 worth of coins!  I know people who throw away pennies instead of going to the trouble of storing them.  The coin counting machine told us that we had 1563 pennies -- which is well worth the trouble of storing them, if you ask me!