Operation "Make My Hutch Useful"

When D and I married, my parents gave us either $3,000 or $5,000 to cover expenses.

We were very frugal and ended up having enough left over to purchase a hutch/base, table, six chairs, and a washer/dryer.

I have always liked my hutch....until recently.

We have a very large dining room that we rarely use for eating.
I use the space for planning lessons or writing articles.
The boys use the space as a catch-all for their random toys and whatnot.

The walls of the room are travel pictures and paintings. I have always called it my travel room, and it gives me joy to look at the places we've been and to see things friends and family have brought to us from places I may never visit.

I decided that I want to make this room more of a sitting room/office space.

D has his office in the basement, but if he's working in there, I don't feel like I can use it to do my stuff (whether that be scrapbooking or writing or whatever).

So I've been thinking about what purpose I want my dining room to serve.

I managed to find a $15 Bassett chair that I'm going to have recovered in a few weeks, which gives us a place to read if kids are in the basement or living room, and we want to make ourselves scarce.

I have been looking for bookcases with drawer storage for the dining room, but I haven't found anything I really like.

Last night, it finally hit me: Get rid of all the unused pretty stuff in the hutch and use it for your books, binders, and crafting stuff. 

So at 8 pm, I began the purge.

I pulled out a set of dishes my mom made 30+ years ago in ceramics that I have used maybe once in the past 21 years.

(Dishes on the table; dishes on the floor, 

none of which ever get used.)

I told myself, "I love my mom, but I never use these dishes. The dishes are not my mom; they do not represent love or relationship or anything. They are plates; I can donate them and not feel guilty."

I am donating a ton of pretty things D and I got as wedding presents that have been sitting in that hutch used for 21 years. There is one item I am keeping because I remember exactly who gave it to me.

I threw away all the random wine corks we had been saving in a bowl (For what purpose? I have no idea.)

I am moving the kids' Santa banks and handprint plates to the Christmas stuff because I always forgot to put these out as decor at Christmas because they are in the hutch and not in with the Christmas stuff.

I have to wait until the kids go back to school before I can purge some of their stuff.
(I move junk to the basement, and when they don't say anything for 6 months/1-year, I know that I can get rid of it, but if they catch me moving it, they remember how valuable and precious it is.)



This is my 2019 project--a work in progress. 

Papaw's house (how we left it, and how it looks now)

Yesterday I saw my cousin's post on FB about Papaw's house, which my MIL and her brother sold in the spring.

Papaw had lived in it for something like 50 years, and to say it was dated is an understatement. But it was Papaw's house and we loved it, even if the carpet contained 80% of the dust on the planet and there were grease stains in every corner of the kitchen.

G requested that my MIL take photos of the rooms before it sold so we could remember it forever, and while I often roll my eyes at his insistence on documenting everything including the most mundane, I am glad now that we have photos of what it looked like just 6 months ago.

My cousin's post showed the house after renovations. It is now on the market, and it looks amazing! I almost can't believe it is the same house.

I showed the kids, and even G, who wants things to stay exactly the way they are until the end of time, was happily surprised by how wonderful it looks.

As we come up on the one year anniversary of Papaw's death, I have been thinking about him a lot and feeling a little down, but seeing these photos made me smile and feel excited. I even asked D if we could sell our house and buy Papaw's, but we'd be losing many square inches of sanity space.

Life is all about loss and rebirth, and Papaw's house is a good example of how life carries on.

This is Papaw's living room and eating area as we left it. 

This is how it looks after renovations and staged for sale.

This is Papaw's bathroom as we left it.

And after renovations.

Papaw's attic BEFORE.

Papaw's attic NOW

Papaw had a sunporch right outside the eating area.

Now it is an all-season sunroom with a pass-through to the kitchen area. 

Papaw's kitchen

The new and improved kitchen 

(you can see the pass-through in this top photo to the sunroom).

I think I need another savings account

I am financially conservative, but I intentionally violate a practice that I often hear suggested by other financially conservative people (like Dave Ramsey):

I use a credit card for as many of my purchases as possible except groceries.  

(But we pay off our credit card every month.  So far in my life, I've never carried a balance from one month to another).

I have a very good reason for using my credit card a lot.  Actually I have two.  

I. Putting it on credit card provides me a record of what I've spent, where I've spent it, and the date on which I spent it.  

I know myself, and I know that on the occasions that I spend cash, I end up having no idea what I spent money on.  The cash is gone, and I cannot remember where it went.  What did I buy?  Where did I buy it?  And I hate that feeling of having no idea where the $50 in my wallet went.  

If I put it on credit card, I save the receipt.  All credit card receipts go in a special "Credit Card" folder above my desk.

(I also use my debit card for expendables, like groceries or household cleaning items, for this same reason:  a paper trail for me to notate in my checkbook.)

II. Putting it on credit card provides me with cash back bonuses.

Every time we have a cash back bonus, I funnel the money into our Christmas savings account.  In the past year, I've put over $500 into that account from cash back.  That is $500 of essentially free money to me (and it is free to me because I don't carry a credit card balance from month-to-month and don't pay anything beyond 0% in interest.)

I feel like I'm violating a code of frugal people by admitting this.  I may be shunned.

Here is another financially conservative faux pas of mine:  I don't use the envelope system of saving.

The "envelope" system has never been appealing to me.  I tried to institute a virtual envelope system years and years ago.  I would earmark a certain amount of money in various categories each month.  Ultimately, at the end of the month, I would need to buy milk and give myself 40 kinds of guilt and grief because I didn't have any money left in my "grocery" virtual envelope, but we were totally out of milk and needed it.  I may have had $500 sitting in all of my other envelopes not being used for anything, but I felt terrible taking $3 to get milk.  D thought this was ludicrous.

Eventually, I did too, and I decided to come up with a better system for us.

That system is to squirrel a bunch of money into various savings accounts.  I think it is called something like the 80/20 rule.  We have the following:

Escrow--we pay our mortgage and homeowners/car insurance out of this
House-- for repairs/maintenance and improvements
Car-- for repairs/maintenance and, assuming we can ever save a sizable chunk, for the purchase of     other cars when ours conk out.
Fun-- for vacations, concerts, performances
Medical-- for medical costs.
Christmas-- for Christmas gifts/expenses

The money leftover is used to pay utilities and groceries.  Anything beyond that.....fair game.

I have been thinking lately that we might need to add another savings account category, which would be Clothing.  We definitely don't spend a lot of money on clothes, but inevitably, everything hits at once.  In June, N needed soccer cleats.  We also had two rounds of family photographs, so I needed to buy some things for those.  The boys had outgrown their summer pajamas, so I had to purchase some of those.  Even if you find sales or shop consignment (as I do), when you are purchasing for three kids, it adds up.

I do keep a budget using mint.com, and that allows me to see how much, on average, we spend in various categories.  The one thing I don't like about mint is that when we do spend a bunch of money on something (like the bathroom remodel for which we paid cash), it puts us in the red, which makes me feel like we've been horribly irresponsible people.  It doesn't matter if we had saved $16,000 for the past however long to be able to do that remodel and spend that money.  That part screws with my money psychology.

I guess there is no perfect system....you just have to find the system that allows you to save and spend in the most efficient and non-guilt- and stress-inducing way for your family

My new master bathroom (and here is my catalytic converter for your viewing pleasure)

I had written about our plans to remodel our master bathroom, and it is finished.  It was actually finished in May, but I was still subbing and teaching so was too busy to take photos.  Plus,  I was hoping to purchase some artwork for the walls before I called it really and truly "done."

But then my car needed 2 tires.
And then D's car had $1400 of work done.
And then his battery died and had to be replaced.
And then my car needed $1500 of work done.
And then my car needed a new catalytic converter and O2 sensor (to the tune of $1700).
In a month's time all this went down.

Our auto savings account has been bled dry.  I don't even think there is any marrow there.

Suffice it to say, I am not getting any art or decor for the bathroom or buying much of anything if it isn't food or sunscreen.

Here is what the bathroom looked like BEFORE.

The giganto tub and the little shower have been replaced by this:

 The bench is actually a hamper for soiled towels but has a soft top.

I have a place to store towels rather than walking into my closet.

I do not have a tub that I have to stand in to dust it.

An electric towel warmer. 

The shower feels MUCH bigger just from gaining a few inches here and there. 

The teak bench folds up when we don't need it and down when we do.

A piece of art work will go above the toilet 

once our saving spree to recoup car expenses is over.

I made this using card stock and fabric.  No sewing required.  

Got the fabric on clearance at Hancock.  

I had to purchase two yards.....

So I did this to the chair in the sitting room right outside 

the bathroom where D's closet and mine converge.  

I am very, very happy with how it turned out!  And it sure is a lot more fun to look at and enjoy than D's muffler, all our new fluids and my catalytic converter.  

When life is chaotic, just go ahead and tear apart your master bathroom

I have friends who have put their homes up for sale, to which I say, "Good luck, and ARE YOU INSANE?"

Because my house, although neat and generally kept up, is not "Open House Ready."  It will not be until the last of my children has left it for good.

D and I sold our first home after living in it 4 years.  The stress of getting it repaired and ready, finding another house we liked, and packing/moving/unpacking was overwhelming, and we did that without three kids to keep everything consistently disorganized, disheveled and dirty.

So we decided that we are here for good, where we've been for 15 years.  The goal is to be mortgage-free by the time N starts college.

As much trouble as I think moving would be, I failed to realize the pain-in-the-buttness of renovating.

Here is my master bathroom at the moment:

Actually, it looks worse than this because they are reworking the plumbing so like half the floor is missing.

We're not in the middle ages over here, but we are having to be more strategic and thoughtful about bathrooming.  I have to remember to take clothes with me to the downstairs bathroom to shower.....and a clean towel.  I have to remember that my toothbrush items are in the powder room.  I have to dig into laundry baskets to find my eyeglass cleaner and my hairbrush and my deodorant.

As much as I'm glad to have that stupid Las Vegas-style tub out of here, I miss my bathroom.  I miss it the way I miss electricity when the power goes out, and I keep turning on light switches because it is just such a habit.

A part of me wonders I opted to do this now.....when I'm teaching on Fridays at the cottage school and in the process of writing two articles and starting to sub 5 days a month and still managing the lives of the children in this house?  Why?

But, really.....there is never a good time, so you just do it and know that it will get better.  And if not better, you will, at least, eventually remember to take underpants to the basement bathroom.

The (hopefully) soon-to-happen master bathroom remodel

I have mixed feelings about remodeling our master bathroom.

I really dislike the room, its layout and so much of it being generally unusable space, but it always feel so first-worldy-spoilt to think about spending a big chunk of change on remaking a room, especially since we have 3 other rooms with toilets in them in our house.  I mean it rankles me to acknowledge that 4 rooms in our house have toilets and sinks in them; 3 have showers/baths.

Totally first-worldy-spoilt.

And I don't like spending money, in general or particular.

But when I can get myself past the guilt of remodeling our master bathroom, I start to get a little excited about the prospect.

Mostly because it will involve the getting rid of this baby right here:

The heart-shaped tub of love (HSToL) that has never, EVER been used for such purposes.  

It isn't even a normal-shaped, HSToL.  It is a caddywhompus HSToL.  The one time I tried to use it, sometime in 2001, it wasn't comfortable for me, and I didn't have company vying for space (which I assume is the point of a HSToL).

The HSToL has jets, but you use up all the hot water in the house if you try to fill up above the jets.  You cannot easily clean the tub because it is so deep and wide.

What bugs me most about the HSToL is that all of the space it uses could be used for storage.  I have to keep all of our bath towels in my closet.  All of our bandaids and extra deodorant and toilet paper is in the hall closet.

See how much space that danged HSToL takes up in the room?

And this is the funky shower.

The shower head is so low it doesn't hit D where a shower stream should hit.  Because he is so tall, the water that does hit bounces up onto the walls because the surround isn't tall enough.  Having a surround is supposed to keep walls from getting damp, but this surround was designed for someone who isn't 6'2" tall.

 The door whacks the person who is sitting on the toilet in the nose (or threatens to, anyway).

It isn't the worst bathroom in the world, but I am just tired of cleaning of tub we don't use, praying for a fire blower to get rid of soap scum from the too-short shower surround and having to walk into the hallway to retrieve bath items that could be housed in the bathroom.

Open houses, plumbing attempts, basement art, pottery=because I am trying to do it all

There was a time when the kids were small, when I felt like I would die, simply die, if I didn't get to leave the house.  Now, I long for days when I can get them on the bus (or even get up on the weekend) and not have to go anywhere.  

Being a SAHM, with a freelance writing gig and a 1-day-a-week teaching gig, with all 3 children in school full-time, is absolutely exhausting.  I appear to think, "Hey, I don't work full time, so I can clean my house AND work part-time AND volunteer a butt-load AND run errands AND still make time for me."  

I'm on my learning curve.

Here is what I've been up to.

I

The kids' open houses report:

N takes after me by referring to herself as "Awesome."  

G's contribution to a class poem.  

Same kid who said he was from "Mordor" when we played "Around the World" in piano class.  

M likes froyo. 

The STUPID powder room:

My two sons pulled the ring towel bar out of the wall twice, necessitating its removal and repair of the drywall.  I didn't have enough of the dark brown paint to recover the walls entirely, so I used the leftover yellow/tan paint from the basement and fauxed with brown, blue and a bit of lavendar.  

With it being so much lighter in there, I decided to repaint the light fixture bronze as well as the frame on the painting behind the toilet.  

And I bought new bronze towel holder and TP holder.  

AND got a new faucet.  

I was able to remove the old faucet and get the new one in, 

but I couldn't get the water lines run.  

Is there nothing standard?  

Well, crap.  

Local plumber to finish the job.

I was pretty proud I was even able to get the old one out at all. 

Home Decor:

I am trying to take advantage of having time to browse.  

I haven't browsed in stores for furnishings/decor in over a decade.  

Just as over 10 years ago, I am still very cheap.

I got this for $7.  

I don't love the colors, and I'm not 100% behind "loving with all you've got" simply because it doesn't sound like something I would do:  Carrie loves with all she's got.

Doesn't work.

But the other things in the plaque I can get behind.

And it was $7.

I bought some frames at a consignment shop and am going to do some art down the stairwell.  

I had these little boxes, but I don't want tchotchkes in them, so I wrapped fat quarter fabric on cardboard and glued them to the backs.  

I'm going to start working on a textile art thing on an old canvas. 

 I'm sure it will start out fun and quickly become torturous. 

Pottery class:

I'm taking a 6-week pottery class with a friend.  

Today I made 4 cups/bowls/thingies and meant to take a picture but forgot.  Only one looked like it was deformed, so I was pretty happy with my first go at ever sitting at a pottery wheel. 

  My parents and MIL gave me birthday money, and I decided to use it for this class.  

I hate clothes, and don't want to spend my money on crap for the house.  

Taking a class is just for me.  

A series of new projects

My first project should be finishing and filing our taxes, but that is some boring stuff.

(One of the ways I know I've calmed the heck down about a lot of things is that I used to file taxes in January.  Of course, maybe it isn't I've calmed down.  Maybe it is that taxes are now just one of 8 million things I have to remember to do.)

Anyway, I have been finding new more-fun-than-taxes projects, further adding to my "to-do" list.

The first project will be done by Spring Break (so help me).  I wanted to do it last fall, but teaching took up more time than I expected, and fall seems to be a very busy time of year anyway.

I am making little sit-upons for G's kindergarten class so they can go out to the Reading Garden at school and not get their bottoms damp or dirty.

A small project I just finished was to add small tiles to border the kids' bathroom mirror.  I had painted around it, but I never liked it.  I still had some grout left over from other tiling project, so I bought a $4.99 sheet of tiles at Home Depot and voila!

Also on my to-do list:  Clean the kids' mirror.  Ew.

My final indoor project is repainting the table and chairs that used to belong to my mom and dad.  They bought them used when I was little for $350 (this price included a hutch and sideboard, so I got the frugal gene TOTALLY honestly).  Mom and Dad still have the hutch and sideboard, but they bought a bigger dining set which matches the dark shade of wood.

We had had the set as our kitchen table, since we have a matching hutch and table/chair set in our dining room.  But the top of the table had completely lost the varnish, so everything was staining it, and I couldn't help but wonder how clean it was actually getting even when I took heavy-duty sanitizing products to it.  It was more disgusting than my bathroom mirror.

I decided to switch Mom & Dad's table/chair into the dining room and paint it, and to use what has always been our dining room table as our kitchen table.  (We didn't have a formal dining room in our first house so we bought a casual, informal set which looks fine in the kitchen, and even better than Mom & Dad's because it is a lighter wood.  Plus, the top is a veneer so we could almost blow-torch it, and it would be fine.)

This is what Mom & Dad's table/chair set is looking like:

I think it will end up looking nice and even matching the rug underneath(which can't be seen under the paint-splatter sheets.