Entry Closet? Pantry? Mudroom? Command Central? Yes!

A few months ago, I started looking into options for redoing our entryway closet. This closet is right by our front door which is also right by our kitchen. It was not being very well utilized in it's original configuration (big wire shelf across the length of closet, some stuff hanging from wire shelf, and lots of junk tossed in where it stayed until it fell down). We had coats, out of season storage, overflow kitchen items, a stroller, recycling bin, and various other papers and stuff. We still have most of that stuff in it now but it looks way, way better now! And you're much less likely to have stuff fall on your head when you open the closet.









Before, yikes!




I decided on the Antonius system from Ikea. Using a piece of graph paper, a tape measurer, and the info sheet of Antonius components from Ikea, I devised a plan. Then months went by, then our Ikea actually got the white colored parts in stock (the originals are all silver, the new ones are white) and I purchased the parts. With Bob's help, I took down the old rails, patched the walls, painted the walls (they sure were scuffy!) and put up the new system. (I must confess, Bob did most of the wall drilling into parts) We decided to get one more shelf and we bought some cute storage containers to get things organized. I did the organizing part.


After






Now everything has a place. Office supplies, mailing supplies, art supplies, and more can be found on the desk. The storage bin labeled "plastic" has plastic storage containers. The one labeled "paper" has paper towels, paper plates, and bowls.
Out of season storage (one side says winter, the other summer) is tucked up on a high shelf in the corner.

That's where you'll also find extra warehouse food boxes, our Sunday bags, and the kids sidewalk chalk (they ended up with an awful lot of sidewalk chalk this year!) Right now hats and bike helmets live in this basket. In the winter, it will be home to boots, hats, and gloves. The bin below has emergency gear.





Sources:


IKEA- Antonius Storage System in white (to make it fit in our closet and using various width components, I used five 35 3/8" wall uprights. Also used- desk top with legs, one wire shelf with bracket, two 11" shelves with brackets, one 14 3/8" shelf and brackets, and clothing rod.
Emu set of two silver storage boxes with lids (2 sets)
Kardemumma pot plant (the pen holder)


Walmart.com-Sterilite Jumbo Ultra Baskets set of 6 (three used here)


Goodwill- candleholders


Michaels- Sticky Alpha Stax letter stickers for labels (I also used the waxed paper letter shapes that came off the backs for the labels with white letters)


The large bin on the floor is also a sterilite bin I got at Target a few years ago. The lid was green, but I painted it white.
The three drawer plastic storage on the desk is also sterilite possibly from Walmart

*update* We had a slight problem with the center piece coming out of the wall. Bob got some new anchors that reach out behind the wall board and grab a hold. We also moved a couple of the heavier things down to the bottom. Attaching stuff to studs is always best, but as this is a shared wall with our neighbors, there aren't any wooden studs in it (just metal). It seems to be holding up great now!

linked to Thrifty Decor Chick's Before and After Party

Super Cheap Button Bracelet

Going through the small bag of recycled buttons I bought at Michael's last year, I found these pretty black buttons. I thought they'd make a pretty bracelet. But I'd have to buy some elastic string or something. Then I remembered, I'd just bought the girls some flip flops on clearance for next year from Target. They had that stretchy stringlike elastic stuff tying them together (seems like nearly every shoe at Target has that keeping them together). I strung the buttons on randomly (there were larger and smaller ones), tied the elastic, cut off the excess and ta-da! I think it took me longer to sort all of these buttons from the rest than it did to make this bracelet.

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.