100 pieces of crap

While I am not a Hoarder's level crap-keeper, I tend to keep stuff that I really don't want or need.  I think it is a combination of being cheap, broke, and having been a teacher.  Anyone who has even been a teacher knows you can find a use for just about anything, especially if that shit be free!

Yes, the teacher just used improper English.  While I can't stand it when people mix up the "your"s or write things like "breath" when they mean "breathe," I feel that it is perfectly appropriate to intentionally misuse words or play with language when you do it on purpose.  

Anyhoo, we live in 1500 square foot of crap avalanche potential.  I am sick of it.  

So I was reading one of my fave blogs and had a guest post regarding that blogger's 100 things challenge.  And I was all "Yay, I can do dat!" (Yes, again intentional.)

So we are, as a family, doing the 100 things challenge.  The idea is simple.  We have to find 100 things around the house that we do not want, need, like, or use.  Then we have to either get rid of it (trash or donation) or re-purpose it.  I can already anticipate that my cheap-teacher-hoarder tendencies will have issues with the re-purposing thing, because I can reuse anything.  Anything. I get twitchy thinking about throwing out potentially useful stuff. 

So knowing I needed to keep myself in check, and I have a thing for fancy forms and tables, I made this. 

I made a 100 Things chart for the house, and one for our backyard/shed because the shed is ready to pop.  Because I am a bit of a glitter-burping unicorn and am hopeful that 100 things will be easy in this house, I also made a "bonus" sheet, so we can document anything over 100 from either page.  

In addition, I'm a teensy bit OCD and love highlighters, so incorporated color coding: if you are re-purposing the item you write down it has to be highlighted yellow.  You must have an immediate purpose for it -- I am quite good at saying "I know I can use this someday."  I won't let that cut it.  Orange stuff is for donation, and it needs to be donated by the next weekend as things for donation tend to set up semi-permanent residence in my garage.  Trash stuff is trash, therefore it doesn't get highlighted because I don't want to waste highlighter ink on garbage.  Yes, I said I was cheap.  

But since I am inherently weak and have no self discipline to speak of, I am doing the color coding so that my husband can ride my ass.  Which he will.  Gladly.  Sigh.

I would gladly post a PDF of my charts were anyone to want them, but alas, when our computer got "fixed" the programs got erased.  This included our Microsoft Word, and we only have the "update" disk because the compute was originally Vista loaded when we got it.  When everything got erased we had nothing to "upgrade" and now I have some free word processing program, which works okay but I can't save as a PDF.  Anyone want to help a girl and give me Word or tell me how to save as PDF I'd love 'em for it! ;)

I will post an update once I break it to the troops we are doing this and that each of us has a 25 item minimum.  Mutiny surely will follow.  

lets try that again

Recall my post that was all back-patty goodness regarding my finally doing something that I found on Pinterest?  I was sooo happy with myself, until I realized that I had neither a place for the item in question, nor did I have the pen I needed to make it work.

Well crap.

It wouldn't be me if there wasn't some kind of face-plant-moment. Its not rocket surgery or brain science, but I have a tendency to go big go home/over think everything, so the end result is that I don't always know where I am going with my brilliant plans, but I am confident in their brilliance none the less.  That's optimism at its finest and most useless for ya folks!

While my "free" and "easy" project continued haunting my mind for a while I eventually realized that the only logical thing to do was to completely redo two walls in my house. This involved digging out frames I had stored for a day I would eventually need them (knew it would happen!), making a run to Hobby Lobby, and covertly asking the hubs via text where the level and drill where in the garage while he sat at work wondering if it was possible for me to put enough holes in the walls to impact the structural integrity of the house.  {Answer: Not yet dear!}

I also had to completely redo the "i love you because" picture I found on Pinterest because I needed it to hang vertically and it looked really stupid the way I had it.

The end result is that the "free" and "easy" project that was also so "quick" wound up taking a whole day, costing me about $30 and required the use of 7 different tools and my husband had no fewer than 5 panic attacks. This does diminish the bragging I was doing about how I had finally found and used a Pinterest idea so quickly.

Po-tay-toe, po-tah-toe.

Anywhoo, here is the new fangdangled "i love you because" picture in my completely re-done hallway, complete with our first lovey-dovey messages to each other.

Just beyond the Love You picture frame are my map pictures so the hallway certainly makes me look all sorts of crafty-clever-successful.  You'd almost believe I have my act together, but then you see the rest of the house ...

Pintercrack --er, I mean Pinterest.

I am not your typical bloggie. I have no earth shattering specialty knowledge or skills, don't homeschool, have no culinary skills to really speak of, have no mantle much less an OCD habit of decorating it and redecorating it every fifteen seconds to reflect the weather, upcoming holidays or my stage of PMS ... so really if someone were to ask me what this blog is about I'd probably have a real genius looking moment where I sound as intelligent as Homer Simpson ... uuuuuuhhhhhhh ...

But I try. Really I do. Between swear words, bottles of wine or beer, and continued therapy fodder for my children I do try. And like all mama's in the blog world I eventually had to cave and try crack.

Er, I mean Pinterest, I had to try Pinterest. Haven't actually tried crack, but I imagine its similar ... only illegal.

So I have like seventy gajillion pins already and not a lot to show for it. If I could become organized, cook well, or make cool shit via osmosis it would have happened already so I guess my virtual pin board is one part foolish hope and one part failure beacon. At anyrate, I have never in all my thousands of pins jumped up from the computer and said "ohmigowsh I am so doing that now." I have on the contrary said "ohmigowsh I so wanna do that ... someday ... eventually ... maybe ... better pin it JIC."

Then 20 minutes ago happened.

Yup, I pinned, did, then blogged. This has to be some sort of freaking productivity record for me.

I can't get a picture of the original on here, so you have to go to a content housewife's blog post in order to see it. Simple, yet all the cushy goodness that makes me keep up the pretenses! The original is adorable of course, and no, I don't have any flowers and the yet-to-be-posted-tutorial has zilch to do with their absence. They'd wind up looking like burlap poop in all likelihood if I tried, and with the boys and the dogs I can't help but develop nervous twitches at the thought of non-cloroxable-easy-to-dust-surfaces actually being present in my home. I only had an 11 x 14 frame on hand, so mine is bigger ... but so is my family, so I am up for pretending that was planned and intentional! Shhh ...

Yes, I even happened to have the same exact scrapbook paper on hand.

So, there it is, finished product. Except that in my zeal to finally do something on Pinterest so I could pretend I am cool like that I forgot that the non-hoarder I married made me get rid of all my teacher stuff when I became the stay-at-home-goddess so I have no vis-a-vis pens in the house.

Oh and I also have no idea where in the sam hick I am hanging this beast.

At least I have good intentions, right? Right?! {Sigh}

breaking the spacetime continuum ... in my kitchen

This is a two parter.  Part Two actually happened first but will happen second a-la-Star-Wars style, cuz I'm cool like that.  Confused yet?  Me too, but that's normal.

Anyhoo, I broke the space-time continuum.  Twice.  In my kitchen.

For realz, and I gots pictures to prove this!

Exhibit A

That is a drawer in my kitchen.  Now a word about my kitchen ... no, a few words: Its small as hell.  Actually, I imagine hell is a lot bigger, I haven't been there.  Yet.

You cannot simultaneously open more than one thing and still move through my kitchen.  Not possible, unless you can fly over everything because it does have a high ceiling.  I have a grand total of four drawers in the whole thing.  Exhibit A is one of them.  Not like we have lots of space, right?  Right.

So I was trying to get a chip bag clip out of this drawer and it was stuck.  Firmly lodged and pinned with other clips and  some other crap I could barely identify because I realized I couldn't actually open the drawer the whole way.  When I thought about it, I haven't been able to pull that drawer out more than a couple of inches in a long while ... please tell me I'm not the only loser who has epiphany moments like this?

I can't open a drawer because its full of too much shit.  

I haven't been able to open this drawer in ... um ... well ... its been a while. 

At the risk of fully humiliating myself (ha, you people don't actually know me!) it hasn't been truly, all the way opened since 2009 apparently.  I know this based on 2 of the contents I eventually removed from its depths.

Exhibit B

That was what was in this drawer.  Plus a tape measure.  I pulled the tape measure out because I wanted to measure this thing.  It is five inches wide, three inches deep, and sixteen-and-a-half inches long.  That is a grand total of 247.5 cubic inches (I can do math, as the blog points out its my domestic skills I suck at).  So Somehow we had fit the following in that narrow drawer:

• 3 Glade Plug-Ins plug in things
• 1 other Plug-In from Bath & Body Works (I think)
• 3 Plug-Ins from Target, but I don't remember the brand
• 1 LED nightlight
• 1 bottle 100 count Benadryl (for the dog)
• 2 bag "bottle" toppers
• 1 can-turns-into-bottle topper
• 1 huge strip of twist ties
• 1 pedometer
• 1 flip flop lighter
• 1 plastic bookmark
• 1 small pair scissors
• 1 strip of 3M sticky things ... not sure what for???
• 1 Scotch tape dispenser
• 1 pack of Trident gum
• 1/2 pack of Bubble Yum
• 3 business cards
• 1 glue stick
• 1 plastic thing that looks like it came out of a cereal box but I can't identify
• a shit ton of Post-It Notes in various sizes 
• 2 huge chip bag clips
• 6 small chip bag clips
• 2 small metal clips
• 1 broken mini-bag clip
• 1 dog tag
• 1 house key (?) still on packaging from store
• 1 how-to knot tying thing
• 1 really old tool that I can't identify
• 1 metal thingy I can't identify
• 1 ASU bottle opener that sings the Fight Song when used
• 1 AAA battery, probably dead
• 1 mint tin from a wedding (in 2009)
• 1 coupon for Clorox Anywhere Anti-Allergen spray (expired June 30, 2009)

That is 46 separate things plus "a shit ton" of Post-Its crammed into 247.5 cubic inches of space.

So I have managed to at least bend the space-time continuum all so that I could store a bunch of crap.

Part Two about my enormous scientific advances deals with my itty bitty pantry ...

a word on crafting & political borders

While I am trying my damnedest to fool others into thinking I possess some level of domestic skilliness (the Betty Factor) I am also trying to rock the Martha Factor too.  Since I am weak and submit to peer pressure with ease I have a Pinterest account and it makes me feel productive even though I have not really had anything to show for it yet.  I find myself seeing other people's pins and thinking "oooo that's some cool shit!" but then I notice that they pinned it via ME ... and I wonder if I can't remember the cool shit, I don't make the cool shit, then what is the point of this shit?  Alas, I have no answer, but Pinterest is like crack for this stay at home mother Martha/Betty wannabe.

Doing good until we hit Cali

Anyhoo, I have seen a bunch of pins like this and that one that have some kind of cute map art.  Being that I have the shortest hallway known to man and want to do something cool with it I decided that this would need to be something I actually did from Pinterest.  Yay me.  The husband is from Iowa, I am from Arizona and we got married in Hawaii so I had three states and I also happened to have 3 Ikea frames that needed usin'.  Feeling pretty thrifty, crafty, and thinking I was hot shit, I got started.

I went to this website and got blank outlines of each state because my OCDness was really freaked out by how I had to cut off names and stuff on the labeled maps on things near the border.  Hell, by the time I finished Hawaii would have been "Haw" and had no cities to speak of.  I took the blank outlines and flipped them over in Photoshop so I could cut along the lines and have solid white states at the end.  

Damn volcanic islands!

Thinking I was pretty rockstar still at this point I busted out my scissors and went to cut out Arizona on the cardstock first ... it was then I discovered my theoretical love for political boundaries.  You see, Arizona was cut up like a pizza, then the Colorado River screwed things up.  Lots of careful cutting later I had my 4 inch tall Arizona and an aversion to natural borders.  

Then I looked at Iowa.  

Then I looked at Hawaii.  

Well crap.

I figured drinking at 9 in the morning while using scissors and being responsible for the baby was a bad-mommy-idea, so I did it sober with lots of swearing.  

Long story short, I managed to get them cut out, didn't loose any islands (a monumental accomplishment, I assure you) and then spent like 30 minutes agonizing over what paper to glue them too.  I never said I was any good at this stuff, just that I want to try.

Here is the end result.  I added pics of my kiddos as newborns and one of the hubs and me to make it not be a wall of boring maps.  

advice, or something like it

James Young, please come find someone
who actually needs your help! ME!!!

I had a little rant yesterday and decided to share it here too ... it really is part of the driving force behind this blog ... me complaining.  But this time its about small houses.

Actually, its about "advising" people on how to utilize their space in small houses better ... when the houses you use to reference aren't small. Or at least aren't as small/built like mine.

This rant started when I sat down to feed the baby. Breastfeeding is a teeny bit boring when the baby isn't pretending to be a Cullen (I have a bitey baby), so I turned the boobtube (so much more aptly named now) on. It was on the DIY channel and a show called I Hate My Kitchen. Since I have uttered the show's title a few times I thought to myself:

Self, maybe I will figure out something useful on this show!

And with great hope I started to watch this episode. The home owners had little sound bites saying things like "Its so small," "Its so ugly" ... I eagerly nodded, agreeing and sympathizing with them. I hadn't seen the full kitchen shot yet, but they showed a picture of the cabinets and I thought to myself with sudden trepidation:

First World Problems:
I can't remember where I stashed the Pop Tarts!

Um, Self, they have more than two lower cabinets next to each other ... that suggests some length in their kitchen ... I don't have that.

Then they showed the whole kitchen. And my jaw dropped, blood boiled and the yelling commenced. The baby was much displeased with me.

These people are whining about their "small," "ugly," and "outdated" kitchen while they have at least three times the space I have, about 40 times the counter space, black (and not almond) colored appliances, shiny cabinets ... ugh, I could go on. Lets just say I would trade them their kitchen in a heart beat.

Reaching to turn the channel, I heard the guy gripe about how you can't walk out the entry way when the fridge door is opened because you get pinned between it and the island. I had a momentary lapse of logic where I thought to myself "okay, that would be annoying" ... then I realized that you can't open the door to my fridge and walk by at all, not because of an island, but because its basically galley style.

I changed the channel and moved on with my life hoping these people wind up spending $4,000 over budget because I'm spiteful like that.

Later I was reading one of my fave blogs* and there was a guest post titled 5 Tips For Living In a Small Space.

Yay, I thought, I love this blog, there is always practical stuffs here! I bet I can use this!

So I eagerly started reading. Tip One: Do not compare your home to other's homes. Ugh, yeah, that is probably reasonable, but, so not happening.

But lets give me something to do, not something to not do! I thought to myself.

Creative use of space: Kids don't need rooms!
My shoes do!

Tip Two: Embrace the space you have. Ooooooookaaaaay, I can hug my shoe-box-sized master bedroom closet but I fail to see how this is helping me!

Don't worry, it went down hill from there.  Fast.

Tip Three: Be creative with your space! Yippie! Reading on I hoped to hear something uber useful like a clever way to store kids toys, how to put an extra roll of toilet paper in the bathroom without it becoming a kid toy, or anything another human being/mom would like to know. What did I get? Ideas about how you can store things in bathroom vanities ... {insert sound of tires squealing to a halt here} wait hold up, people can use bathroom vanities to hold more than their hair drier? I don't even have towels in either bathroom because they are too small to hold them.  Seriously, no towles in the bathroom.  No room at the inn.  So I am not particularly receptive to shit like "you can store spare paper towel rolls in bathroom cupboards!" Next little helpful tidbit mentioned by the author involved mentioned that she has one whole side of her closet filled with stacked plastic totes. Allow me to just say that if you can fit even one of those (I assume) big assed 5 gallon muthas in your closet and still put clothes in it AND access any of that stuff I do not want to hear you whine about storage solutions.

Moving on, and slightly less happy I read into Tip Four a bit and saw that it dealt with organizing and keeping things clutter free, which I am all for and was okay with. Until I read this: "One of my nightly goals is to clear off the kitchen island" ... bitch, please. That is one of my lifetime goals -- to have a kitchen that has an island! It discussed organizing drawers and stuff, but seriously, when you only have 4 kitchen drawers total, and only 2 of them are full sized its not so much about organizing as it is about swearing and not owning much.

Tip Five dealt with managing your "stockpiles" and I think if you can store extras of anything anywhere I don't want to speak with you anymore, and certainly won't be reading your tips on organized living.

Oh now we are talking *practical* storage,
Mommy <3s this kitchen island!!!

So here is my goal: I want to either find an actually useful/applicable article that will give me tips I can use or I want to write one myself.  Problem being I gotta figure out how to make it work if its me doing the writing.  

So, if you have a home built in the 80s when storage was apparently very un-trendy, your backyard is bigger than your house, you have no laundry room but rather a section of your garage with a washer and drier crammed into it, and the biggest closet in your house is actually the shed in the backyard then I want to know your tips for storage and organization! Otherwise I'm going to mope in my 1500 sq feet of mess and work on a new blog series of my own!

*This is one of my fave mom/money/practical blogs, but I am not linking to the original article (you can search for it if you really wanna) because this isn't exactly a friendly commentary LOL  

So who is you anyway?

Here we are, the first post in the chronicles of how sucky I am at this. Lets get this out of the way, as the little blog description up there suggests, on the day the fairies were handing out skills that could be useful later in life I must have done something massively offensive to the Domestic Skills Fairy. Reason being? Bitch skipped me entirely.

I have zero BettyCrockerMarthaStewart skills to my name yet somehow I woke up to find myself the mother of two and a housewife. After years of education and working outside the home my family made the decision that I should be a stay at home mom. I like that part, the mom stuff is okay, I haven't managed to completely ruin either child thus far. Dinner? Ruined it many-a-time. Clothes I am attempting to wash? Iron? Remove stains from? Ah, yeah, that doesn't always work out so well either.

A little about me?  Well, I am a mom of two boys and a husband (yes, I am including myself as his mother too  -- you're either married and get it or not married and ignorant), former work-out-side-the-home-mom, current stay-at-home-mom, and over-user-of-hyphens.  I can't write in cursive to save my life but can mix some badass cocktails and talk craft beer.  I don't know how to cook, but I like to bake, it just doesn't always look good or taste quite right.  I am massively unorganized, a pack rat, but watched a segment of Hoarders and was traumatized so I am now trying to clean up and out.  I am cheap, but that is a new development because I actually have very expensive taste.  Love reading blogs, but I find that motherly blogs make me feel grossly inadequate because I am not a homeschooling, uber religious, crafty, make-it-all-look-so-easy in my pumps and apron kind of gal.  Quite the opposite.  Love my kids, husband, and life, but really am just trying to be better at it ... its a lofty goal I assure you. 

So here we will chronicle my failures, massive failures, and maybe every now and then successes too as I attempt to become June Clever, except in flip flops and much less coiffed hair.

~ The DomesticRocketSurgon