How to Make and Hang Wood Fruit Crate Shelves

The new floor plan and stuff switcheroo for the guest room/craft room leaves me with two vintage wooden fruit crates that won't fit in the room with the new plan.

Yay!

I want a new place to stash this stuff and allow my linen closet to hold linens again. Crazy town, I know.

I have a big boring wall above the toilet in the guest bathroom...

I have two crates and three 2013 DIY Goals: create storage, use what I have first before buying materials, and add personality to the guest bathroom...

Easy Blog Conference T Shirt

Summer is blog conference season. Yippie for meeting on line friends in person and networking and learning how to be a better blogger!

Not so yippie in trying to find your on line friends in the crowd and making sure they can find you. Last year at Blogher12 Laura from Pet Scribbles and I kept missing each other all day every day of the conference although Margaret from Nanny Goats and Panties and I always seem to find each other each year. Do you know why? Because Margaret is as smart as she is funny. Margaret wears a shirt with her blog name on it.

My new Condo Blues t shirt! I'll get to the kooky color hair in a minute.

While I'm a DIYer all the way, most of the DIY t shirt options are not as professional looking as I want when I'm advertising my blogs.

House Tour: The Ohio State House

Follow my blog with Bloglovin Husband and I took a tour of the Ohio Statehouse with visiting German friends. While the ornament style isn't something I consider my personal decorating style and architecture but it is impressive. Especially when you consider they build the Ohio Statehouse before the Civil War. In fact, Abraham Lincoln visited the Ohio Statehouse when he campaigned for President! (which they mention eleventy billion times on the tour.)

Let's get inspired!

There is a surprising amount of natural light in the statehouse via skylights. You can tell the architect and designer took pride in their work and wanted to build a grand building for the ages. This domed painted ceiling and windows are one example.

That is gold gilding paint around the windows. All of the lighting is original to the building. 

While I think the gold damask is a little busy for a typical home, it is an excellent example of paint on architecture. They beefed up the look of these otherwise plain windows with a stencil and paint instead of framing the windows with costly molding.

This is the Ohio Senate Chamber. Again, the lighting is original but updated from gas to electric. The carpeting is the same pattern as the original. They have it on file and the company that made the original is still in business.

How to Compost Paper

The clay soil in my garden is so bad,

"How bad is it?!" you say.

That I was so frustrated, tired, and sore from a week jumping on the shovel with my whole body to dig into the dirt and turn it I named my blog Condo Blues.

It took a good long while to amend our soil and get it healthy enough to grow something that didn't die the following year. What is the secret to our now thriving landscape?

Compost.

This is what the compost in my compost bin I built from a storage tub looked like when I checked the bin in last spring.