I Can't Believe This Took ALL Day!

Hi there! Happy Friday to you!

I decided to tackle my "pantry" today. I thought for sure it would be relatively quick and easy given its small size. Um....nope. I decided to get brave and show you what it looked like before and after. Hopefully you won't think less of me after you see the before shots. LOL

This space is in our big room (the converted two car garage portion of our house). The previous owners created this little space, probably for storage. It's kind of an L shape and it also houses the water heater. The door goes out to our back yard, but we never use it. After we moved in, we added the wire shelving. Oh and Steve added texture to the walls and ceiling. What a joy that was to try to clean (not).

So here's what it looked like as you look into the space.

Turning to your left is more shelving with who knows what stashed here and there. Oh there's Steve's jimson weed plant. He brought it inside, I think to try to preserve the seeds in case it doesn't grow next year. The silver vent tube is Steve's jerry-rigged "pipe" to get the heat to go into the big room and not just warm up the pantry.

Oh my gosh...what all is up there?!!!

And what is down here??

Brace yourself. Here's what what actually IN that space!

Can you believe it? I think I said holy cr*p, I can't believe that all came out of that little space!

At 9:05am this morning I had everything pulled out of the space and the cleaning began. First, I vacuumed off the spider webs. Then I started washing down the walls. That door took some effort. Then I started washing the baseboards and the floor. E-gads, THAT took forever! I think I finally got done about 1:00 and I took a break to eat lunch and take a shower. I started putting the shelves back into place. And adjusting them because I forgot where they originally were. LOL I had to fight some of the braces to get them in place. By then it was time to head out to get the girls from school. And I STILL had to go through all the items before I could put them back. Sigh...

I started that about 3:00. And at 5:00 I had finished vacuuming the big room and took the last garbage bag out to the trash. At 5:05 or so, Steve walked up the driveway from work. I had a bag for Goodwill and oh about 3 large bags full of expired food. Ugh. I definitely won't let THAT happen again.

Here's what it looks like now...

Look, there's open space!! I plan on cleaning out cupboards in the kitchen and putting things I don't use very often up there.

I discovered that the mice we had earlier found the Top Ramen soup packages and ate into a couple of them....ewwwww. But I'm pretty confident that they are all gone now because I didn't see any "evidence" of them yesterday when I was moving couches to finish up the cleaning of the big room. (whew)

I have to say I'm absolutely pooped right now. My whole body is sore, actually. But I'm SO glad to have this done!

Thanks for visiting and hope you enjoyed this little "tour" of my pantry. Just a couple more rooms to go and I'll be done with this major part of my deep clean. Then I'll move on to the stuff behind closed doors (oh my).

Thanks to Barb for This *Ü*

My sweet friend, Barb, awarded me this last week and I really appreciate her thinking of me.

The Rules are:
1. You can only use ONE word!!!
2. Pass this along to 5 of your favorite bloggers!
3. Alert them that you have given them this award!
4. HAVE FUN!!!
***************
Just ONE word, huh? That may prove to be difficult! We'll see...

1. Where is your cell phone?purse
2. Your hair? short
3. Your mother? remembered with love
4. Your father? generous
5. Your fave food? popcorn
6. Your dream last night? dunno
7. Your fave drink? diet coke
8. Your dream/goal? happy
9. What room are you in? living room
10. Your hobby? handwork
11. Your fear? earthquake
12. Where do you want to be in 6 years? here
13. Where you were last night? home
14. Something that you aren't? thin
15. Muffins? maybe
16. Wish List Item? laptop
17. Where did you grow up? California
18. Last thing you did? crochet
19. What are you wearing? clothes?
20. Your TV? on
21. Your Pets? one
22. Friends? special
23. Your Life? happy
24. Your Mood? good
25. Missing Someone? yes
26. Vehicle? van
27. Something your not wearing? make-up
28. Your fave store? Archiver's
29. Your fave color? green
30. Last time you laughed? today
31. Last time you cried? Sept 21
32. Your best friend? special
33. One place that I go to over and over? kitchen
34. One person who emails regularly? Dad
35. Fave place to eat? Chili's
36. Facebook? sometimes

I'm supposed to give this to five bloggers. However, I've seen it around quite a bit (my choices would be repeats) so I will leave it open to any of you who visit and would like to participate.

Thanks again, Barb! This was fun.

I got the rest of the big room (converted two car sized garage) done today (vacuumed the ceiling since it's a popcorn ceiling). After the leaf job the other day and holding up the mini vac today...I can safely say my arms are tired. But it's a satisfying tired.

Hope you have a great Friday!

Too Cute To Spook!

This layout has nothing to do with the class I signed up for. It's just one I've been working on for the past few days. The previous layout I tried wasn't doing it for me, so I scratched it and started over. Then PSE locked up before I could save so I had to start all over again. But it's done now and I'm pretty happy with it, so thought I'd share (and get it off my brain).

Template is by Kay Miller (Collection 12) and the page kit is called Can I Be Frank? by Nitwitcollections. The word art is also a Nitwit product, only it's the Little Bits add-on.

Font is Pea Missy

Thanks so much for stopping by!

(in case you didn't notice, the little ghost has been transformed to look more ghostly by changing the opacity of that element. I thought it looked neat)

Blogging for Scrapbookers

Hi there!

Happy Wednesday to you. I hope it's a good one. *Ü*

As I was reading blogs yesterday morning, I came across one from my friend April (Capture the Memories), a gal I've "known" from my CTMH days. She's also taken Library of Memories and other projects. She hasn't posted all that much lately, but she's been busy, like all of us. Plus, I think she moved too! Anyway, she posted about a new class she signed up for called Blogging for Scrapbookers. I was instantly intrigued.

After all, I've pretty much completed the tagging of my digital scrapbook supplies and I've pretty much finished getting my photos all centrally located (by month and year) on my computer. I'm itching to scrapbook and you all know how I love my bloggin'. *Ü* The class is $15, which is affordable. But I'm also trying to be frugal. What to do? What to do?

I did some leaf clean up outside and thought about it some more. I found I couldn't stop thinking about the class and how intriguing it sounded. It took about 2-3 hours (including breaks) to get the whole leaf situation taken care of and I felt like I sort of "earned" the perk (or reward if you will) of taking this class.

And so, early this morning, I signed up! For the next three weeks, I'll be involved in this class and because of that you might see more blog posts from me.

I thought this photo would be a cute one to share with you

about what I'm going to be working on. Wish me luck.

And if you happen to have found my blog because of my posting the address in the class forum, welcome and thanks for stopping by. I hope you'll visit often!

I even played hooky from housework today so I could get myself familiar with the class information....shhhhhhhh.....LOL

See you soon, I hope!

A Happy Halloween Was Had...

Happy Day After Halloween!

Hope you had a fun holiday and are well rested now that you've had an extra hour of sleep.

I might have enjoyed an extra hour, only I was kept awake last night by the neighbors behind us who had a party. The party wasn't too loud, but the fireworks they lit off between 2 - 3 am sure were! So any extra sleep was discounted by the time I was awake for that. It all evens out, I guess. LOL I did get my grocery shopping done an hour earlier than normal, which was nice.

The girls had a great day. Amy finally got to carve her pumpkin. We had to wait until the last minute to carve as the altitude seems to make carved pumpkins dry out and start looking like shrunken jack-o-lanterns rather quickly.

Look how proud she is!

She did ALL the work herself, with the exception of cutting the top off.

To think she grew this one herself from a seed made for a very happy camper. (and the pumpkin had a satisfying number of seeds to roast, too, which was great)

The girls had a Halloween party to go through that was organized by a troop in the unit. The girls had fun doing some crafts, checking out creepy containers and playing some games. There was also a gal there doing face painting and Jessica wanted to have it done.

It is fairly simple. She originally wanted a butterfly face (be still my heart), but didn't want the gal to have to paint onto her bandage, so she decided on this design. Still very cute, no? And did you notice on her ears?? Yep, I quick made up her pair of earrings and she's been wearing them pretty much ever since.

Here they are, ready to head out trick or treating. Never mind that I had thought Jess would wear pink under her dress and Amy a white shirt and jeans. They dress themselves and we have no arguments about it, which is nice.

Aside from needing a face wash, they are the cutest spooks around in my book. LOL

Hope you have a great Sunday. Thanks for visiting and your wonderful comments on the gingerbread house I made. They sure put a big grin on my face. You all are the best.

Big hugs to you!

Crochet Projects...

Hello There!

Let the great melt off begin! I think we got somewhere around 15-16 inches of snow all totaled. Our average for October is something like 4. The largest snowfall amount they've recorded is 31 inches back in 1969, so it could have been worse. LOL The sun is shining this afternoon and the temps rebounded to the upper 40s. This weekend we'll be in the 50s, so this storm will soon be a memory. Yay! Kathi commented that our snows don't stick around and she's right. That's probably why big storms don't bother me too much. *Ü*

Anyway...while I've not been papercrafting lately, I have been crafting with yarn and I just finished a project today that I wanted to share.

A couple of weeks ago, I got a newsletter from Gourmet Crochet (where I got the Gwendolyn doll pattern). In the newsletter Carolyn shared that she had a project featured in the newest issue of Crochet Today magazine.

When I saw a picture of the project featured, I immediately went on the hunt for the issue. I found it at Joann's and used a 40% off coupon. So for around $3 and use of my personal stash of yarn, I created this...

Gingerbread House!

Isn't this absolutely adorable (if I do say so myself)?!

Seriously, this was NOT difficult to stitch as it's mostly the single crochet stitch, with double crochet stitches used for the "gumballs."

And for reference, I made about 80 of those little puppies. LOL

There are several chains as well, just twisted together to make the sticks and for the window frames and panes.

Oh and lots of hot glue gun sticks were used. *Ü*

You stitch the pieces and make a cardboard frame for the house. You hot glue the pieces to the cardboard base and that's pretty much it.

Doesn't the tree look like something from Dr. Suess' Whoville? LOL

Anyway, I started working on this about a week ago and only sporadically. I just finished gluing it all together this afternoon. It was a fun project, but I probably wouldn't make another one.

Also in this issue was a pattern for crocheted earrings. Actually two patterns. One was a tiny doily and the other a leaf. The sample projects were shown as dangly earrings and I thought it was a neat gift idea, so I tried the pattern. Well, Miss Amy saw what I was making and declared she really wanted a pair of "real" earrings (for pierced ears~which she doesn't have and won't get until she's much older). Oh she was SO dramatic! I told her maybe I could look for clip on earring backs. She was like a dog with a bone then bugging me about it. LOL

So yesterday afternoon, after the snow stopped and the roads weren't so icy, we trekked over to Hobby Lobby for clip on earring backs (which were one sale 50% off...whew).

And this is what I ended up with...

Amy was THRILLED and wore them to school today. She was tired of wearing them after school, so I got Miss Jessica to model one for you.

(by the way, Miss Jessica was all kinds of mad at me last night because she wanted a pair...

right now.)

I was hoping to get a pair made for her while she was at school, but the finishing touches on the gingerbread house took longer than I thought and I received a phone call from a dear friend and we chatted for over an hour (which was really nice as we haven't chatted in a long time).

Thanks so much for stopping by! I sure appreciate your visits.

I hope you have a wonderful weekend.

Do I Really Have To?

This is my second post for today.

Sorry, couldn't resist this!

Do I really have to go out in that???

Oh, okaaaaay...

This is SO not fair!

LOL

Yep, it keeps comin' down!

And it's supposed to do this ALL day long!

Sigh...