My Kind of Sandbox

Kids love sandboxes. Sandboxes are big are big and messy (especially when there is no lid!) and they kill the grass they're sitting on top of.
When we first moved in to our house, we had a purple triceratops sandbox complete with sand, sand toys, and weird green stuff that the previous owners left behind. Our daughter liked it alot. All the other kids that visited liked it too. The lid was gone so it constantly got water in it- hence the green stuff. One day someone got so upset about water pooling in it when it rained (I guess we didn't get around to draining it quickly enough for their liking) that they dumped it completely upside down. Our backyard is open to the common area behind our house. The sand stayed around on the ground for a while and then eventually rejoined the earth, mixing with the dirt. The sand box ended up in a dumpster. Four years later, we now have two kids, the younger of which had never played in a real sand box. We visited the beach and she was in heaven. I kind of wanted to have a sandbox since she loved playing in sand so much. I didn't want another big sandbox taking up valuable real estate in our tiny backyard though.
Then it hit me! Make a small sandbox using a wide, shallow, lidded storage box! I already had a perfect storage box with lid. We already had some beach toys. All I needed was some sand. I bought two bags of play sand because I wasn't sure how much I'd need. If I had lifted it myself instead of letting the nice guy at the store do it, I would have known one was all it would take (I wanted the box to be portable!) For less than $4 I had a little sandbox. My husband, the smart guy he is, figured out that it would work well to put the sandbox on top of the little plastic outdoor table (another leftover from the previous owners) and have the girls sit on their little plastic Ikea chairs* (we've had them for a while, I don't remember how much they were, probably under $5 a piece). So it became a sand table. The girls love it!

*a quick search of Ikea's site and I couldn't find those chairs any more, maybe they will get some more (or similar) again later. You could probably find such chairs in a variety of stores actually.

DIY Color Wonder Pages

We like Crayola's Color Wonder coloring pages around here. We take them to church on Sundays to occupy the girls with their mess-free (almost always, if you're real talented you can get some of their color on you) coloring fun.
Right now we are limited to the coloring book options Crayola has for us. I wanted to try to make my own coloring pages using blank color wonder sheets. Here's what I did. I headed over to Michael's craft store with one of my 40% off coupons (you can sign up to get them on their website, they often print them out at the register with your receipt, or you can even bring in a competitor's coupon!) and I bought the pack of 30 blank color wonder pages.
I took the pages out of the book, found printable coloring pages online (ours came from lds.org for church coloring pages), and Bob helped me configure the printer to make them print out right. The CW pages are a little smaller than the standard 8.5X11" so we had to adjust for that and we also tried to optimize the picture size to fill the page as much as possible. Definitely print test copies first on scratch paper. We have a laser printer and it seemed to come out just fine. I'm not sure what a different type of printer/ink would do. The printing started to smear just a little bit today after a lot of repeated going over the lines with a marker but the lines were all still there. The pages were a hit with the girls though.

Redoing Cabinets

I wanted to redo our kitchen, but with falling home prices, I wanted to do as good of a job as possible for as little money as possible. The answer for us was to paint our existing cabinets. I found a lot of information online- a lot of it conflicting. Here's what we ended up doing and what I think I would do if I were to do it again.

We took off all the doors and washed them with tsp substitute. What I should have done was to dry them off with a towel immediately after washing and rinsing. I didn't and my 20+ year old cabinet doors started coming apart a bit at the seams. It just created an extra step of having to glue and clamp the doors. I also washed the hinges, since they were a bit gross too. I ended up painting the brass hinges black so they would match our new hardware and saved about $80 not buying new ones.

I stripped the finish off of the doors next. I'd skip that step if I did it again. We had to sand everything anyway and we were painting rather than refinishing, so I would just sand and skip the stripper. It also contributed to things coming apart that shouldn't have.

I removed the front panels off of eight of the doors (we made them plexiglass fronted). We had to remove a bit of the inside part of the doors to create a pictureframe-esque door to put the plexiglass into. We trimed it with a jigsaw and then sanded the edges down smooth.
Next we primed all the doors, then painted them with an oil based, white semi-gloss paint. A lot of things I read said that latex is getting better and better for this type of project, but we decided to stick with the oil based for it's durability. There was a lot of waiting for paint to dry between coats (and sides of doors).

Our cabinets doors didn't have handles or knobs, so we decided to add some. I bought black knobs from Home Depot for most of the doors. I ordered glass knobs from a place online for the cabinets that face the dining room. After figuring out where we wanted to put them on a test piece, we measured and drilled all the holes.

We washed, sanded, primed, and painted the faces of the cabinet boxes. I cleaned out the insides of the cabinets, but didn't paint them. Once the paint was completely dry, we put the hinges back on the doors and hung them back up on the boxes.

Here are the results.

Article on Outlet Malls

I thought I'd share this article from msn.com on outlet malls. I read part of the Consumer Reports article quoted in the article before and found it quite interesting. Some outlet "deals" aren't so great. I still love the Children's Place outlet store near us, but have been quite disappointed with some of the other stores at the outlet mall. Definitely be informed before you shop!
http://articles.moneycentral.msn.com/SmartSpending/ConsumerActionGuide/are-outlet-malls-for-suckers.aspx?GT1=33009

One Way to Save Money

I've found in my quest to save money on things I buy that my efforts sometimes back fire. Becoming too aware of great deals here and there some times cause me to buy more things than I might have in the first place. Some times a good strategy for saving money is just not spending any. Obviously that only works for a little while but sometimes you end up just not buying that thing you needed and that was such a good deal any way.

Winter Clothes for Cheap!

It's been hot and humid here lately, which makes one really feel like not looking at wintery type clothes, but there are sure a lot of great deals on them right now.
Yesterday I bought 5 pairs of The First Years fleece blanket sleepers for $1.88 each at Target. Each had two coordinating footed blanket sleepers- less than $1 for each cute footed sleeper.
Browsing online, I found many sweaters, jackets, and other cold weather wear items. Old Navy, Gap, and JCPennys had lots of really great deals online. I visited Kohl's yesterday as well and found racks and racks of winter items on clearance.
If you're headed to an actual Old Navy store, check out www.oldnavyweekly.com to find an in-store coupon to save even more. The site is updated each week with new coupons (look out for a $75 off of $100 purchase- I've yet to look when one has been available, but I keep hoping)

The Children's Place Outlet

I was at the Children's Place Outlet at the mall on Wednesday and got a huge bag full of colder weather clothes for 99cents a piece. There were mostly tops (holiday and plain) but I also saw (and bought some) pants, dresses, and sweaters. Warmer weather clothes were also on sale. On top of that, I also used my 15% off coupon the Children's Place sent me in the mail which is good through the 10th.