If I insisted on keeping tons of ridiculous pillows tossed all over the couch and chairs, these would be those ridiculous pillows. Luckily Star Provisions is a four-hour drive away, so it’s too late to change my mind and go pick them up.
Archive for the ‘Home’ Category
Extreme downsizing
Posted in Home, tagged china, downsizing, Extreme Couponing, grandmother, plates, postaday2011, pottery, TLC on April 10, 2011| 4 Comments »
I was going to write about my weariness over owning three sets of plates (everyday set I bought in college, pottery from my wedding registry and my grandmother’s china), but then the husband turned on “Extreme Couponing” and I’m simply appalled by the vast amounts of food and household goods that these people are stockpiling in their homes.
How many bottles of mustard could one family possibly need? And, seriously, shelves of crackers and cereal in the bedroom? Not very relaxing.
I understand trying to save money, but I don’t get stockpiling way more items than you can possibly use. Which brings me back to plates. My goal is to one day move into a smaller place more suitable for two people. Owning three sets of plates is not suitable for two people. Really, owning three sets of plates is not suitable for most families with more than two people.
What to do? If I get the chance to downsize, at least one set of plates is going down. Maybe two. I don’t want to be tied down by things. And I certainly won’t be tied down by a bedroom filled with mustard.
Vacation find: better produce packaging
Posted in Home, Travel, tagged Earth Fare, flip & tumble, food, Manhattan, MoMA, New York City, postaday2011, produce, SoHo, washable produce bags on March 27, 2011| 3 Comments »
So I’m in the kitchen section of the MoMA Store in SoHo when I see flip & tumble’s 24-7 reusable shopping bags on display. I turn to my husband and tell him that I really wish I could find reusable produce bags without having to order them online. I turn to another display, and what do I see but a set of five reusable produce bags for $11. Shopping magic.
I’ve learned that when I spot something awesome and affordable while out of town, I should go ahead and buy it so I don’t have to order it later. These were a little more expensive than similar bags that I had seen online, but there was no shipping fee for me to pop them into my carry-on and tote them back to Alabama.
So far, I’ve taken them to Publix twice and Earth Fare once. The only problem I’ve found is that if the produce is extremely wet, the mesh allows the moisture to escape onto surrounding items on the way home. Not a huge tradeoff, overall, for leaving the grocery store with no flimsy plastic bags in tow.
The audacity of cloth napkins
Posted in Home, tagged cloth napkins, home, paper napkins, postaday2011, Target on March 21, 2011| 3 Comments »
When we moved to Huntsville several years ago, one of the items I sent to the thrift store was a tabletop napkin holder. The reason? We hadn’t used paper napkins for years.
I was perusing a clearance area in Target one day in the late-’90s (old habits die hard) when I spotted a stack of cloth napkins. At the time, I associated cloth napkins with weddings and expensive dinners; my grandmother had a stack of them that I can only recall seeing neatly folded in her china cabinet, despite her penchant for spreading out white, hard-to-clean tablecloths for Sunday dinners.
Serendipitously, my shopping list included napkins that day, and a four-pack of marked-down cloth napkins cost just about exactly what a package of paper napkins would have cost. I tossed them in my cart, skipped the paper goods aisle and never bought paper napkins again. Those faded, solid blue napkins you see in the picture above? The original Haggerty cloth napkins, circa 1997.
Some argue that laundering cloth napkins actually makes them less environmentally friendly than paper napkins, which often can be composted or recycled. While this may be true for restaurants or other institutions that have entire laundry loads dedicated to cloth napkins, I would argue that most smaller families can simply toss a few cloth napkins in with an existing load of laundry, leading to little or no extra water use.
Also, cloth napkins last forever. I mean, not literally forever, but I’ve got a few that are going on 14 years. They’d probably last even longer if I line-dried them instead of tossing them in the dryer.
I imagine some people will complain about how difficult it is to remove other kinds of stains from cloth napkins; I certainly remember my grandmother spending untold amounts of time laboring to remove gravy stains from her white tablecloths. My answer to that argument: Don’t buy light-colored cloth napkins, and calm down about stains. If you’ve washed your cloth napkins, they’re clean enough to use again. A lingering stain doesn’t equal lingering germs. Just keep a special, extra-clean stack on hand to impress your guests.
Lessons in bad customer service
Posted in Home, tagged curtain hangers, postaday2011, seamstress, sewing, wall hanging on March 13, 2011| Leave a Comment »
I completely forgot to complain about my seamstress experience in Friday’s post on my second-floor wall hanging.
Several weeks ago, I took the hanging to a local seamstress to see if she had any recommendations for the hanging process. I was thinking I should get the fraying sides hemmed and have the top sewn into a loop that I could slide a dowel through.
I’ve always been terrible at sewing projects, despite having a mother with mad sewing skills. I was willing to pay good money for help.
The seamstress for hire? Not helpful at all. And not very nicely unhelpful, either. She was so unpleasant that I determined there would be NO professional seamstresses involved in this project, even if I had to drag the hanging to Biloxi and get my mom to sew it for me.
At some point, however, the Internet reminded me that clip-on curtain hangers existed, and I determined that the hanging’s frayed edges would be safe in their relatively static position on the wall. No sewing, no dowels.
The lesson: Unpleasant customer service isn’t always going to work out for business, large or small, especially when alternatives are everywhere.
Do One Thing: Second-floor decor
Posted in Do One Thing, Home, tagged brother, do one, duvet, duvet cover, family, garage, garage organization, guest bedroom, home, husband, kitchen organization, mother-in-law, Nashville, pantry, postaday2011, Target, Volkswagen Vanagon on March 11, 2011| 1 Comment »
The “Do One Thing” series chronicles my yearlong effort to tackle one project every day to organize my life and home.
Day 65: Finally hung up the curtain rod for the long-suffering wall hanging that we’ve owned for years. It came into our possession when my husband bought a Volkswagen Vanagon back in the late 1990s. (Apparently, it’s traditional to include a gift when you sell a Vanagon — the husband left a waterbed mattress in one that he sold before we were married.)
Anyway, it doesn’t really go with anything, but it doesn’t really NOT go with anything, either. It’s handmade and unique, and I love the stylized creatures that now brighten the upstairs hallway.
Also this week:
Day 63: Made an epic find at Target. I was planning to buy a duvet and duvet cover for the guest bedroom, since I’ve found that combination imminently easier to care for than a comforter, bedspread or quilt. With the mother-in-law set to arrive later this month, it was finally time to ditch the cat-hair-laden comforter.
Anyway, I found the EXACT items I was looking for in the clearance section for half price. Woot!
Day 64: Attempted, yet again, to move the garage shelf, only to find that there was a HUGE, unwieldy pile of green wire for the robotic mower blocking the way. I spent a good 30 minutes untangling the wire and wrapping it around an empty paper towel tube.
Can it be unwrapped easily without retangling itself? I don’t care.
Day 66: Finally managed to move the garage shelf into its new place without getting hit in the head with the surfboard again or finding another tragic tangle of green wire.
Day 67: Cleared a few things out of the kitchen pantry, including a canister of breadcrumbs that expired in April 2010. It’s rather amazing how things accumulate so quickly in there.
Days 68 and 69: I spent these two days driving to Nashville, hanging out with my brother at work and then hanging out while he had knee surgery, and then driving back. Family trumps home improvement, every time.
Do One Thing: Accessorizing
Posted in Do One Thing, Home, tagged bathroom, Do One Thing, liquid soap, postaday2011, redecorating, soap dispenser, Target on March 5, 2011| 3 Comments »
The “Do One Thing” series chronicles my yearlong effort to tackle one project every day to organize my life and home.
Day 63: I feel weird that purchasing a soap dispenser at Target makes me so happy, but I’m also sort of glad that something so simple and inexpensive can make my day. It’s complicated.
Do One Thing: Conversion of the junk conversion
Posted in Do One Thing, Home, tagged barking dog, bathroom, Do One Thing, garage, garage organization, glass pebbles, husband, postaday2011, recipes, redecorating, remodeling, vase, wall hanging on March 4, 2011| Leave a Comment »
The “Do One Thing” series chronicles my yearlong effort to tackle one project every day to organize my life and home.
Day 62: I think we all saw this coming. I decided that, indeed, I hated the vase/glass pebble look I put together recently. The brown pebbles seemed to be the biggest part of the problem, so I ditched them (hopefully, some lucky shopper at the New Leash on Life Market Place has more love for brown than I do) and replaced most of them with some clear pebbles that were hanging out in the garage. It’s still not one of My Favorite Things, but it’s definitely making me happier.
Previously:
Day 56: Planned to move a small shelving unit to a more effective place in the garage. Got hit in the head with an errant surfboard. Yes, a surfboard.
Day 57: Got the husband to help me pick a spot for the wall hanging, since he’s the one who brought it home as part of a package deal when he bought a Volkswagen bus. We didn’t get to hang it, however, since the neighbor’s dog barked from literally 7 a.m. until we fled the house at around 2 to seek peace and quiet in the movie theater.
Day 58: Hung the toilet paper roller AND the towel holder in the downstairs bathroom. Epic.
Day 59: Tossed a pile of recipes that I had cut out from newspapers and magazines. It seems like all people who like to cook have one of these piles of recipes that they go through a couple of times a year, yet never manage to pull anything out and actually make it. Not anymore. They’re in the recycling guy’s hands now.
Day 60: Swept out the garage, or at least the parts I could get to with a broom.
Day 61: Nada. I did schoolwork and worried about my mom and her sick dog.
Do One Thing: Pipes, piano benches and art
Posted in Do One Thing, Home, tagged art, bathroom, Canvas on Demand, cats, Christmas, Do One Thing, Groupon, husband, paperwork, piano bench, plumbing, postaday2011, remodeling, storage on February 24, 2011| 1 Comment »
The “Do One Thing” series chronicles my yearlong effort to tackle one project every day to organize my life and home.
Day 51: Still recovering, but I did manage to help the husband a little as he hooked up the drain pipe in the downstairs bathroom.
Day 52: The problem with hidden, built-in storage is that you store stuff in it and then forget all about it. Sometime before Christmas, I had stashed some paperwork in the piano bench while doing a quick pre-guest pickup in the living room. I remembered the paperwork only last week, when I went crazy trying to find a form that, oddly, I hadn’t seen since before Christmas. Today, I got most of the stash out of the bench and filed it away upstairs.
Day 53: I have a unique wall hanging that I’ll write more about later, but today I did an epic amount of research on the best way to hang it, since right now it’s just a folded piece of fabric in the closet. I’ve come to a final decision, and it doesn’t involve going back to the seamstress that made me feel bad for not knowing what kind of seam allowance I wanted.
Day 54: Admittedly, I spent what little organizational time I had today coloring paper balloon cutouts for a failed cat photo shoot.
Day 55: I finally redeemed a Groupon I purchased in December for a 16-by-20-inch gallery wrap from Canvas on Demand. I had narrowed my choices down to two photographs when I discovered that the site offered personalized customer service interaction that helped me choose the winner. Now I’ve got two weeks to decide where to hang it.
Do One Thing: Making head colds more awesome
Posted in Do One Thing, Home, Photographs, tagged bathroom cabinets, cabinet pulls, challenge, do one, garage, New Year's resolution, postaday2011, resolutions, screwdriver, Target, tissue box cover on February 16, 2011| Leave a Comment »
The “Do One Thing” series chronicles my yearlong effort to tackle one project every day to organize my life and home.
Day 47: This is going to sound totally lame, but I’ve wanted a groovy tissue cover box for a while. I mean, if you’re going to have to keep a box of tissues around, it may as well look good. Bless their hearts, tissue makers try, but their box designs just scream “Go get grandma her tissues.”
Target has been slowly marking down tissue cover boxes for a few months And by “slowly,” I mean they’ve been marking down $19.99 boxes to $16.49. Not exactly what I call a clearance.
Today’s Target journey, however, turned up the beauty pictured above for $4.99. It was the only one that I could find, and it was perfect. It’s groovy without being flashy, because a flashy tissue cover box would just be gauche, no?
Previously:
Day 46: Tightened a couple of cabinet pulls in the master bathroom with the handle on a pair of nail clippers. Because sometimes rattling cabinet pulls compel you to fix them RIGHT NOW without having to wander into the freezing garage to search for a proper screwdriver.
-
Join 67 other subscribers
Join the discussion
-
-
Categories
Archives
Entirely Adequate 