A little terrarium makeover

I went to Mark's office last week and cast my eyes on this sad little terrarium. Or what was left of one. A few years ago Mark's company had a renovation and the designer put a terrarium at the front door as a nice detail when people came into the office. Only no one took care of it. I think they forgot it was there. Poor little terrarium.

I decided it was an injustice to let this nice container be treated this way so I took it home to fix it up. I've never made a terrarium before, but I thought if I kept it simple I could figure it out. I went to the local flower market and got two succulent looking things thinking they'd be tough to kill. Then I took the glass off the top and cleaned it up as much as I could (it's been sitting dry and water-stained for a while!). I pulled all the dead stuff off and found a sweet little bird. Hooray! Then I shoved the succulents in, replaced some of the moss that looked half decent and tucked the bird back in.

Et Voila! 

I'm quite happy with how it turned out. I'm not sure how long it will live but we'll see. I'll have to make more visits to the office I guess!

Have you made a terrarium? I'm going to make one for the house soon! Or maybe I'll just keep this one..... Don't want to make one? Find pretty terrariums on Etsy!

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Assessing the corners of the house

   

I was bored today so I took some random (fuzzy) photos of some corners of our house. The first four are from our living room, the fifth one is in our dining room, sixth is the back corner of my office, seventh is in my bedroom, eighth is the mudroom and the last is the crazy toy corner of our basement.

Here's what these photos tell me: 

1. I would like to get my shelving finished on the fireplace in the living room but over all I like the room.

2. I need some art for the walls or maybe some frames for my kids' paintings...

3. I really need to get rid of that yellow Bay bag in the second pic. It's full of random things from our street sale and has been there since May.

4. I need a proper kids' art station.

5. I would love to sand the kids' table and chairs (for some reason they think it's paper and write/paint all over it [and get it out of my office]).

6. We had to take some of the plants in from outside, one of which we put in our bedroom, and I love how it fills up the room. I will likely leave it there and get something else for outside next summer.

7. I need to swap out the summer stuff from the baskets in the mudroom (add it to the list...).

8. One would think I run a daycare from the toys in the basement however I do not. I need proper storage or a big garbage bin. :)

The End.

PS: the wall colour in the picture with the easel is pretty true to life. I recently won some paint from ParaPaints and need to let them know what colour I would like. What should I paint the living room and dining room?? The grey is nice, but I feel like I could go with something new after having this colour for five years... Thoughts?

PPS: I can't believe I'm showing these crazy corners of my house! Ahh!

sunroom office revamp: the desk

Would love to get rid of that big black screen but I need it for work!

You didn't think I would clean up one part of the office without touching the other side did you? It was a disaster as well. We took the big photo down and added some shelves. There are still a few things to do here like find some frames for those posters I taped up under the shelf, make a new pillow cover for the chair pillow, put up a bulletin board and clean up those f^&%ing cords under the table - blah! I hate cords. I also need a filing system of some sort for the desk. I had one here but moved it to the desk in the basement for paper for the kids and now I don't have an 'inbox' for bills etc.

Anyway it's way better than it was! Judge for yourself!

project reorg: kitchen cupboards

So my kitchen is driving me a batty. I need to reorganize it big time. It's being taken over by jars of bulk pantry items and they're starting to fall on my head when I open the doors. I'm in the kitchen all.the.time so I need to do this for my own sanity.

Also the placement of things just don't make sense. I was telling a friend of mine about people putting things away in different cupboards and had mentioned about how my measuring cup is in a different place all the time. She said "Yes I know - it goes with the other measuring things right?!" I said "Ya - right! Duh!" Except mine doesn't. The cups are in one place, while the spoons are in another. In my head it makes sense for some reason, but if someone were to go in my cupboards to look for them they'd be lost likely.

Which all leaves me on a quest to have it all make sense.

I was reading an article that Katie Bower wrote recently for Wayfair about organizing a pantry and the thing that stuck with me was to make stations for your things. So here are my stations (I will likely have to pare them down or bulk some together but this is basically what I need space for):

• bulk pantry items (all the jarred stuff!) and their leftovers
• baking/spices/oils station
• vitamins/hemp powders station
• cereals/snacks
• coffee/tea
• cleaning/paper towels/kitchen bags
• cookbooks
• potatoes/onions etc
• linens
• cat food
• recycling/garbage
• kids crap dishes/utensils/cups ;)
• misc glasses/plates/utensils
• canned goods/other boxed foods
• cooking/baking utensils/dishes
• pots, pans, storage/tupperware containers
• vases etc.

Did I miss anything?

mudroom touch-up

Hi folks! I wanted to share another quickie project that we managed to get done over the holidays and that's the window frame in the mudroom. It's been on the house list since 2011, so I was pretty happy to get it finished.

I have to admit that the pictures in this post are deceiving. Personally when I'm looking at the photo above I prefer it to my after shots and that's mainly because the before photo was taken when the room was empty (a rarity these days!) and the after shot is smack in the middle of Christmas chaos, so the room is pretty messy.

Anyway!

There's the before up there...

And the after!

 Now this window is pretty big for the size of the room and the frame makes it look even bigger, but we wanted to mimic the style of the bathroom door frame which is directly across from the window.

It makes such a big difference. Just cleans it up (when the room is clean of course!).

Next up is a nice roman blind. Who knows when I'll get to that!

fenced in

We decided to take advantage of the mild temperatures over the past couple of weeks to have a new fence and gate installed. It's something we weren't going to do originally, but to be honest, we wanted to clean up our yard a bit more and gate off the driveway so the kids could play in the yard without fear of them running onto the road. Plus we had a fence we loved and really miss at our old house and so we decided to use the same style for this one. Here are a few before/during shots.

View into our neighbour's yard who share our driveway

View on the other side of the yard

No offense to our neighbours (they're great people!) but we just didn't dig the chain fence

We had to get rid of a few branches to fit the fence right to the chain link. 

So, as you can see from the photo below, the only snag is that our neighbour to the north didn't want to change his fence so we're stuck with what we've got back there. When we stain everything, we're hoping this just blends in with everything else somehow. We're also planning on planting some grasses similar to what is on the deck (pic a few above) so hopefully that will help hide it as well. 

Not sure what colour we'll stain it but our last fence was black if you can believe it and we just loved it. It made the green garden pop (ugh I hate that word but it seemed appropriate for some reason).

So now that it's done, the snow can come... it's going to come in time for Christmas right? :)

long weekend in pictures

Wasn't this weekend fabulous!? The weather was perfect in every way and I really don't want it to end... here is our weekend in pictures during these amazing four days:

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1. fabric for the baby from fabricland || 2. love letter on the kiddie slide at the park || 3. trying to catch leo before he runs off || 4. dining al fresco all weekend || 5. clock project for the baby's room [ran out of sticks!] || 6. 29 weeks! || 7. leo's makeshift water table || 8. painting the garage! || 9. reading with my little guy in the back yard || 10. tractors! || 11. Q & A for Margarita at the TIFF Bell Lightbox [my friend's sister produced it and my sister was the line producer] || 12. my sister and leo at Sunnyside Park for my other sister's birthday picnic brunch. || 13. breakfast at Cora's [not my most favourite breakfast place, but it's kid-friendly and leo practically ate his whole breakfast! This is unheard of] || 14. veggies in the driveway [it's the only place that gets enough sun]. || 15. the flower box I made - hope the plants get bigger!

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Hope you had a great weekend!
Steph