After putting the job off as long as humanly possible, it is time to clean and reorganize my craft room. Every craft supply and tool found an organized storage space with the exception of my embroidery hoops. I kept moving them place to place during the decluttering project. It didn’t help matters that I added several big and hard to store machine embroidery hoops to the mix when I got a sewing and embroidery machine for my birthday.
Her name is Bernadette. She can sew everything from chiffon to leather and has so many settings and features it is like flying a rocket ship. Cool, I always wanted to be an astronaut!
I sat and looked around the room trying to find a place for more storage. After quite a bit of time (I may have also been streaming Netflix) I found it – blank wall space under a shelf. Great!
One of the things I like about cleaning, decluttering, and organizing a creative space is rediscovering supplies (fancy talk for I forgot I had that!) I almost always end up using the found objects to make storage and organizers for the item I uncovered that don’t have a good store bought solution including this one.
I recently upgraded our single tumbling compost bin to this exact double tumbling compost bin hoping to correct some mistakes we made when we started our first compost pile. (Disclosure: I am including affiliate links for your convenience.)
The mistakes we made weren’t horrible and we did create usable compost that turned our practically all clay tan colored garden beds to earthworm rich dark black soil. But the compost coming out of the bin has always been soggy. It was also full of plastic bits we thought would compost but didn’t break down.
How did this happen? Well for one, since we don’t have access to grass clippings or leaves we used shredded paper and cardboard for brown matter (and any sawdust I made in the garage) and we simply didn’t add enough. The fix for wet or smelly compost is to always have more dry brown matter in your compost pile than green matter (vegetable and fruit peels, coffee grounds, etc.) As for the plastic bits, we’d just empty the entire contents of our home office paper shredder into the compost bin and all of those window envelopes I shredded thinking they would break down because they are made from cellulose where actually some sort of plastic.
There was finished compost in the bottom of the single compost bin but because it stopped turning and we couldn’t mix it very well with one of those compost turner things that look like this. Our compost was a big wet clump full of unwanted bits that I could easily save by sifting the almost finished compost and chucking a ton of this exact wood chip pet bedding into one side of the new compost bin and let it break down. Adding more shredded paper and cardboard boxes would also do the trick but I didn’t have enough of either in the quantity I needed at the time.
When someone asks why we started composting, my husband and I say it’s because we had to because all we had for garden was clay and zero topsoil. We sang the condo blues over how very little would grow in that pretending to be soil, researched how to amend it, and experimented with composting in a DIY compost bin.
I made our first compost bin by drilling a bazillion holes in a black plastic trash can. We loaded it up with food scraps and paper from our paper shredder and in about a year we had compost! We added the homemade compost to our soil and after awhile our tan clay soil started to turn black with nutrients. I practically dance the first time I dug a hole and found an earthworm – it is another indicator that the soil is improving!
We take our composting very seriously. Why do you ask?
And we’ve been composting ever since.
One of my small 2020 victories was actually starting/finishing a ton of UFPs (Unfinished Projects) and fabric stash bust projects. I didn't realize exactly how much fabric I used until I started reorganizing my craft room. The fabric storage box I built was so full it barely fit under the bed.
After The Year of Sewing All the Things three quarters of this storage box that is as long as a double bed is wide is EMPTY and I'm doing my happy dance.
Time to link up your favorite projects, recipes, and posts!
Six years ago I made a set of aluminum can coasters that looked like this:
After years of abuse with a constant stream of hot coffee cups and cold beverages all day every day the coasters on our desks now look like this:
Choosing a difference adhesive may have helped as well as adding a protective coating to the top. Cutting down on coffee and ice water is not going to happen - ever.
"A blog about green living, crafts, decor, and dogs by self-described “Frugal Green DIY Diva” Lisa Nelsen-Woods, Condo Blues is filled with quirky humor and style that’s sure to make you smile. From DIY home renovation, and crafts to countless painless frugal life hacks and healthy, delicious cooking recipes, Condo Blues is a great all-around blog for anyone interested in living differently."
Time to link up your favorite projects, recipes, and posts!
Columbus has many visit this type of business, stamp a passport, and collect a prize trails. We have a local coffee trail, craft brewery trail, a local small business trail, and a delicious donut trail among others. I recently learned about a cool one in Dublin, Ohio – The Fairy Door Trail. Dublin goes completely nuts for all things Irish, Celtic, and St. Patrick’s Day. So it makes sense that they start a new trail by putting new fairy doors in their local small businesses in March for St Patrick’s Day just in case a leprechaun would like to use it. Which is mighty thoughtful.
I fell into an Internet fairy door rabbit hole after that and wanted to add another fairy door to my house just in case a fairy, gnome, leprechaun, or hopefully - a Borrower - would use it. I loved the Borrower books and movies as a kid and I often think a Borrow probably borrowed that thing I can’t find (which is way more fun than acknowledging I misplaced it.) If you don’t know what I’m talking about you can read The Complete Adventures of the Borrowers series here. (Disclosure: I am including affiliate links for your convenience)
It’s National Craft Month so why not make an indoor fairy door (or the mythical sprite of your choice) to celebrate?
Let’s make stuff!
Our dog Lacey lives life at 90 miles an hour. She runs. She jumps. She barks. She barks some more.
So. Much. Barking.
When Lacey practically flipped a switch from her normal bouncing off of satellites self to barely and cautiously walking it meant a quick trip to the vet for x rays.
Lacey has two slipped discs in her back which is common for dachshunds. We left the vet with meds for the pain and inflammation, bed rest for two weeks (good luck with that!) and to eliminate jumping situations as much as possible so her back doesn’t get any worse.
I bought these light weight dog stairs with a washable cover for the living room furniture Lacey is allowed to sit on. (Disclosure: I am including affiliate links for your convenience.) They aren’t the prettiest but they were cheap enough to buy a few more to add to what we have so that every chair/sofa in the living room has stairs leading up to it. We think jumping up on a chair that didn't have dog steps is how she hurt herself.
Sitting next to my people is my favorite place to be!
I also scored this exact folding dog ramp on Marketplace for a song because OMG folding dog ramps for cars are spendy! Hopefully we can get Lacey to use the ramp to get in and out of the car. No matter how many times we tell her to wait until we pick her up Lacey will catapult herself into the back seat of the car because waiting is for sissies – apparently.
One of my favorite things about St Patrick’s Day is that it is the one day of the year that even mainstream places will play Celtic music. Listening to a good jig or reel always puts in a good mood no matter what.
The only thing I like better than listening to Scottish and Irish music is dancing to it. I performed as a Scottish Country Dancer and even had Scottish Country Dances at my wedding reception.
Scottish Country Dance is social dancing somewhat like American Square Dancing. Competitive Irish and Scottish dance is a completely different thing.
Since I like the music so much, why not decorate our door for Saint Patrick’s Day with a quick and easy shamrock featuring The Swallowtail Jig sheet music? The Swallowtail Jig is one of my favorite jigs because of the lyrical flute part that I’m still trying to nail down because I'm out of practice playing the flute.
Save this decorating and craft idea to your Pinterest boards for later! Share it with your friends!
Disposable kitchen pot scrubber sponges are one thing I was happy to kick to the curb after trying washable and reusable Paperless Kitchen sponge scour pads (you can learn about them here.) Finally I had a plastic free dish scrubbie that I could pop in the top rack of the dishwasher to clean on the regular! (Disclosure: I am including affiliate links for your convenience.)
Until the garbage disposable tried to eat one.
RIP pot scrubber.
So much for zero waste :(
Fortunately More than one reusable dish scouring pads came in the package so it wasn’t a total loss. I also used it as the motivation I needed to try an idea I have been mulling around for awhile: crochet a plastic free pot scrubber from jute twine.
Well, that and Cabin Fever.
But you know what? It worked!
Removing and replacing the entire master bathroom subfloor is a job that I haven’t been looking forward to and is the reason why we put the renovation off for so long. Everything hinges on the subflooring is cut perfectly to size and level. Once I removed the old moldy subfloor, I realized that there wasn’t anything to screw the new flooring to around the edges of the room. I can’t leave it this way or the new floor could slope over time and we’d have to start the process all over again. Trust me, once is more than enough!
I nicked a couple of joists when I was cut the floor to remove it with my circular saw by accident. This might create a weak spot where the flooring could squeak, crack, or sag or it might not because the cuts are not too deep.
Some of the things they don’t tell you about trying to reduce your household trash with zero waste living is that it depends a lot on where and how you want to live. Most of the year’s worth of garbage in jar folks have access to big fill your own container stores, year round farm markets, or huge gardens where they can grow almost everything they need. Not all of us are that lucky, would rather not drive all over the place, or crunched the numbers and found some the prices in those shops sky high. *raises hand*
But’s not to say that zero waste is impossible! Instead try the more realistic goal of concentrating on reducing your household waste than making it absolute zero. By focusing on reusing, the Rule of Half, recycling, reducing, and composting (when the bin isn’t frozen shut) my family has reduced our weekly household waste to approximately one grocery store size shopping bag (ish. We reuse any packaging, dog food, etc. bags for garbage which means the size varies) a week. We average a 3/4 full recycling bin every two weeks. We also give ourselves a break if our output is more than that because we have seasons and that can determine what we can do and how we do it.
To give you some realistic ways to reduce your household waste (and possibly save some money doing it) I made a list of the zero waste practices, tips, and tricks I do in a normal week to give you some ideas and jump start your thinking machines to find a zero waste solution that works for you!
On Master Bathroom Demo Day I found black mold on a chunk of the wall and on several areas of the subfloor.
