Pocketful of Joules

When we moved into our house 6 years ago, I was pretty excited to have an in-kitchen pantry. I organized it back in 2013 and it pretty much stayed exactly the same ever since. Which, I guess, means that the organizers I bought worked really well.

The problem is Costco.

I try to only go to Costco every 4 – 5 weeks or so. Each time I go I pick up a huge piece of salmon, which I then cut into 4 pieces and stick in the freezer. We eat salmon once a week (it’s part of my lowering cholesterol diet), so once it’s gone… I need to go back to Costco. I also like to buy a huge bag of mixed nuts (each bag lasts us one week of packing lunches), a huge jug of olive oil for refilling our regular bottle, bulk portions of goldfish and cheese-it’s, toilet paper, paper towels, etc.

This stuff does NOT fit in the pantry. So, instead I would just kind of pile it up on a table sitting in my laundry area. We don’t really have a laundry “room” because there is no door. Instead you can actually see the laundry area from the corner of the den. There is also a door to our backyard there, as well as a door to my garage.

I put a table across from the laundry machines as a way to have some nice hidden storage, but it wasn’t cutting it. I forgot to take a photo of the actual table, but here is our stash piled on top the washer/dryer after I removed it:

Here is the space where the table used to live… next to the door to my garage:

It’s a perfect little area that is hidden from the den, but still pretty accessible for easily grabbing and refilling stuff… like goldfish.

We took a fun family trip to Ikea (MEATBALLS!) and after wandering around the store in a stupor for an hour, I picked up a HINDO shelf unit. Specifically, a HINDO shelf unit and a HINDO cabinet unit which totaled $119.

My husband brought in the two flat pack boxes and then escaped to the garage while I put it together. I’m actually one of those weird people who really enjoys putting together furniture, so it worked out well for both of us.

Here’s the bottom part all assembled:

After putting the top shelving unit together, I grabbed some drywall anchors and secured the entire unit to the wall. This is super important to do if you have a kid in the house, because you don’t want a heavy unit to fall on them!

Here is a close up of one of the straps:

A strap wraps around the bar and then gets screwed right into the drywall anchor on both sides of the unit.

And here is my new overflow storage area:

{Swoon}

I LOVE it. I’m actually at that point where I will just randomly wander into the laundry area and stare at the storage unit. It does look close to my garage door, but it doesn’t get in the way when I open it. The cabinet area stores accessories for our vacuum cleaner and steam cleaner. The upper shelves hold all our bulk pantry stuff with room to grow. The cabinet and shelving area are both super sturdy and I’m really happy with how it all turned out!

Overall, I’d consider myself a pretty crafty person. Over the years I’ve done some cross-stitch projects, whipped up some pretty snazzy stained glass windows and even threw some porcelain on the pottery wheel. While I enjoy painting stuff like furniture and walls, I’ve never really been artistic in the way of being able to draw things. So, whenever I’d see someone post about a Paint Night event I’d think it was cool but knew that my painting would be the worst in the bunch.

Also, what would I even do with a terribly painted picture of a random flower or sunset? Probably just hang onto it until I decided to throw it in the fire pit…

A few weeks ago I saw that they were doing a Maryland-themed paint night event at the Columbia Arts Center.  So, I decided to suck it up and try it out for myself. The class was taught by Mark Russo from Mark Russo Creations and he provided the paper guide to our design, a reclaimed wood pallet, all the paint and measuring materials needed… and the moral support.

I was actually surprised that there were no stencils involved, just a sheet showing you how to divide up the sections of your design. Oh, and I could have done a few different designs such as a Maryland crab, Black Eyed Susan (the Maryland flower) or the Maryland Flag (with or without a crab added) and I decided to stick with just the flag design.

I started by sectioning out the pallet penciling on all the lines that I would need to make the design of the flag.

Then, I used the paints they gave me to mix up some custom colors and started on filling in the guides that I had drawn.

I did two coats of each color and finished up by adding on the black and then white to cover up some of my pencil lines.

And BOOM, I’m done! It took about 2 ½ hours but I did this 100% by myself and I’m thrilled at how awesome it turned out!

Now that I’ve successfully completed my first pallet painting, I’m thinking about doing another one. I have the guides for the Maryland flag, so I might try to do my own Maryland flag beer openers on some blocks of wood, like on Mark’s Instagram page. If I can figure them out, the will make awesome Christmas gifts for my siblings!

Have you done one of those Paint Night classes? What did you make?

I finally did the winter-to-summer clothes switch in my closet the other day and I came across a t-shirt that I had purchased but never wore.

I absolutely love South Parade t-shirts because they are super flattering on and also really insanely soft. True&Co carried their tee’s for a bit and I was able to use some referral credits to stock up. Unfortunately, I kind of hate white t-shirts. I much prefer colors or black, so this one just sat in my drawer until I packed it away last fall.

Lately nothing in my house is safe from purging and anything I don’t love gets either sold or donated, so I figured I might as well try dying this t-shirt to see if I like it better in a different color. I had some teal Rit dye sitting in my office, so I decided to put it to work.

By the way, my ugly green bathtub was the perfect fit for this DIY! I probably could have just filled it up with water and dye, but I grabbed a handy dollar store bin. I filled it with hot water and then dumped in the entire container of dye.

Then, I poked it with a stick.

I’ve learned NOT to put my hands in the dye, so I was careful to stir it with a random stick that was sitting in Jack’s bathroom (#boymomlife). I left it in there for an hour or so and then rinsed and rinsed and rinsed and rinsed until the water finally ran mostly clear. When it was mostly clean, I added it to the load of laundry that I had going in and gave it a nice wash and dry.

And I LOVE IT:

The color turned out so pretty and as soon as I pulled it out of the dryer I wore it that day AND wore it to bed that night. So yeah, I’m a regular Martha Stewart now.

Do you dye your clothes?

A few years ago when we first bought our house, I was going a little crazy with the DIY’s. I mean, that’s kind of the fun part when you buy a house… to rip everything apart and make it your own. Right?

Well, one of the first projects I did was to upgrade our kitchen. When we moved in, the island was in a super weird spot, the backsplash was bright white and the gold-colored hardware hurt my eyes.

In fact, back then I described it as looking like King Midas came over and molested them.

You can see the full post here — Kitchen Changes, Part 1 — where I decided to paint them with spray paint. It actually turned out really well, but after four years of using our cabinets every day they were looking a bit rough.

I decided to take an hour over the weekend and redo the whole project. I unscrewed any knob or pull that had a chip in the paint and shoved it through an old cardboard box.

I did a quick wipe-down with Windex, and then I spray painted the hell out of them.

I let them dry for about an hour and stuck them back on the cabinets.

I’m not even kidding when I say the entire job took me less than 60 minutes. However, the amount of times I moved the task on my calendar went on for literally MONTHS because I never felt like doing it. Now, hopefully we will be good for another 4 years…

Am I the only one who procrastinates a month for a project that literally takes less than an hour? Have you needed to redo a DIY?