Heather's Handmade Life

Rain gutter bookshelves for just $12

Posted on January 20, 2014 by Heather Laura Clarke

Remember when I talked about how D’s room needed a refresh? Not a total re-do, because we were keeping the beds, the bedding, the curtains, some of the art, etc. But basically a “fix” because I totally hated the original light grey paint colour. Light paint colours just aren’t me. I need some DRAMA on those walls, you know?

Well, over the past two-ish weeks, we’ve been working hard in D’s room, and I’m happy to say it’s done — except for the wall art. (That’s a work in progress)

But Darling Husband installed some super-awesome board-and-batten (thanks as always to Young House Love for the inspiration). I primed it (using leftover pale grey primer) and painted it white (two coats of off-the-shelf white in eggshell). And then we painted the top half of his room navy (Benjamin Moore’s Straffordshire Blue). I was overjoyed to see a nice, deep colour replacing that sickly old pale grey!

But the change we’re probably the most pleased with — well, at least from D’s perspective — is our awesome plastic rain gutter bookshelves!

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I’d pinned lots of inspiration, and Darling Husband was planning to use wood to build some slot-type shelves — like those IKEA spice racks everyone uses in places where they have IKEA (a.k.a. Not Nova Scotia). But I really wanted to take a peek at the rain gutters at Kent (Canadian Home Depot?) before we bought the wood, just in case.

When I saw that we could get a hugggge length of white plastic gutter for $5 — enough for three shelves! — I was sold. I wouldn’t need to paint it! It would be glossy and white. It would only cost about $12 for six shelves. AND it wouldn’t eat up all of Darling Husband’s limited free time to build something.

He was very sceptical, but he agreed to it (of course he did), and used his knock-off Dremel to saw each gutter into three pieces. Don’t ask me for measurements, because I don’t fly that way. Then he pre-drilled holes in the end of each one, drilled matching (?) holes in the wall, put in a yellow devil (for added support), and screwed the gutter pieces into the wall.

Of course we had to do six, for our boy born on 6/6/10.

I’m in love!

The shelves hold a TON of books, and yes they wiggle outward a little bit if you yank on them, but they’re very secure. They’re a nice, shiny, clean white — NO PAINTING HOLLA! — and they look especially awesome against his dark blue walls.

A huge improvement from his cheap old faux-wood bookshelf (uh, no offence to the person buying it from us today!) that was always a mess because he would just shove his books into random piles. And we could never find anything, which sucked when I was looking for a particular Berenstein Bear book!

Smell ya later, crappy shelves!

So that’s our rain gutter bookshelf adventure! Now want to see the rest of D’s “new-ish” room?

Big development: moving his dresser into the closet to make room for a new (hand-me-down) desk!

He is thrilled to have his very own desk (“Just wike Mama”) but we still need to buy a chair for the poor kid. We were also able to bring back his blue lamp (Walmart) since he seems more responsible now (i.e. please don’t light the house on fire with it)

I bought him this cute Debbie Travis basket for $7 (!) at Canadian Tire. It holds his “quiet time” activities to do when C is napping (and Mommy’s working), like his Melissa & Doug sticker books, Magnadoodle, and a giant farm puzzle Auntie Lesley gave him for Christmas).

There’s his dresser! It’s perfect in there. We removed the second closet rod, because he barely has any “hang-up” clothes at this point, and it just wasn’t being used. I also bought these two red canvas baskets (insanely good price of $3.99 at Canadian Tire) to store his socks and undies. The grey plastic bins on the top shelf hold his summer clothes (or what I suppose *may* fit him this summer) and his “keepsake” clothes (because I’m a mushpot).

His two beds are the same, and his bedding is the same, but everything looks nicer against the fresh board-and-batten and navy walls. Artwork to come!

Bare, bare walls. For now!

My mom bought D this airplane shelf secondhand, and we love it. It looks way better against the darker wall colour.

D’s new room! (Minus any art)

So have I convinced you to toss out all of your crappy bookshelves and buy some plastic rain gutters? If you need any more motivation, here’s the set we did in Miss C’s bedroom. #lovethem

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When your baby jumps out of their crib (but is really too young for a toddler bed)

Posted on January 10, 2014 by Heather Laura Clarke

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Sometimes when you’re on the second child, you’re able to feel like you really know something. You take what happened with your first child (test baby) and are able to apply it to the second child in a way that makes everything better/easier/more awesome.

For example, I’m now a total friggin’ WIZARD when it comes to preparing/plating meals in a way that allows their food time to cool down, be chopped into a thousand pieces, etc. while not allowing our adult portions to scorch/dry/out/generally taste worse. I think I starved a lot when D was a baby, really — and ate a lot of cold food — and now I’ve got my priorities straight and know how we can ALL sit down to dinner at the exact same moment with temperature-appropriate food. It’s an art.

But then there are times when you make EXACTLY the same mistakes with the second child, and have obviously learned nothing.

You may remember that D was an extremely climb-y baby who got into trouble making lots of destructive messes. By the time he was 18 months old, he was going so many acrobatics in/out of his crib that we had to take it down. It wasn’t safe to have him falling/jumping from such a high place (the top of the crib). So we took it down and set up a single bed (since soon-to-be-born C needed the crib).

It was kind of a disaster.

He liked it for a second. And then he didn’t. He slept underneath it, like a cave. He slept in his bookshelf. He slept behind the bedroom door. He slept in the closet. He tried to sleep in his drawer. He got wedged behind the bedframe. We had to take the frame down temporarily because he was jamming so many stuffed animals (and himself) under there at night that we worried about him.

Not to mention the destruction! He removed the hardware from his closet doors. He ripped everything off the hangers so many times that we installed a lock. He yanked every item of clothing from his dresser drawers. He took every book off the shelves (and ripped the pages out of some). He attacked stuffed animals. He overturned furniture (which, uh, is now bolted to the walls).

Eventually — like month and months later — D calmed down and began sleeping in his bed like a normal child. It was great. It still is! He goes to sleep with no issues, and loves his bed. It just, uh, took a while to get to this point.

Now let’s talk about C …

Little C just turned 20 months, and literally the night before — which was Christmas Eve — she flipped herself out of the playard in the guest room at my mom’s house. We didn’t even realize until my mom swore she heard footsteps running around upstairs, and went up to check … and there was C, at the top of the stairs, looking surprised.

She made a lot of escapes that night (on Christmas EVE, of all times!) and it was stressful, to say the least. Mostly because she was sharing a room with D over Christmas, and kept running over to his side of the room to wake him up. Also because if we closed the door, D would freak out, but if we left it open, we had to worry about C falling down the stairs. (We opted to close it, and D had to deal with it)

We came home a few days later, and weren’t sure what would happen once C was back in her crib. She was fine for a couple of days, and we hoped she would leave it alone. No more monkeys climbing out of beds!

But then one day at naptime — while I was working in my office in the basement — something sinister happened. D had come downstairs about 30 minutes before naptime is officially “over” and I had finished my work earlier, so we were baking. I heard C start to cry upstairs, but it was a sleepy half-asleep cry so I left her alone.

I came upstairs to get C up a little later, and as I was walking up the stairs, her voice sounded MUCH closer to the door than usual. Like *right there.* D had come upstairs with me, and I said “I think Sissy might have gotten out of her crib. Doesn’t it sound like she’s right at the door?” and he solemnly said “Yes, I fink so.”

Sure enough, she had hopped the crib and trashed her room. She’d even gone so far as to smear her entire container of greasy prescription steroid cream all over the carpet and her own hair. Oh, C.

We cleaned it all up, and later that evening, her crib had been converted in into this lovely toddler bed …

Of course, she doesn’t sleep in it. OF COURSE SHE DOESN’T!

The very first night, we were hopeful she would. I went in to check on her 30 minutes after I’d put her down, and she was lying on the floor by the door with dried blood on her face! She’d crawled under the crib, and some bolts had scratched her (we assume). So we electrical-taped those suckers up, and tried again.

She did actually sleep in the bed that very first night — maybe out of exhaustion? maybe it was a test run? — but she hasn’t sleep it in since then, as far as we know. She seems to be sleeping directly next to the door, judging from when I try to check on her and the door doesn’t budge.

We know we’re probably in for a long road of floor-sleeping and maybe closet-sleeping — just like with D — but at least now we’ve been there, done that. I know she’s probably seeking cozy spots because her new bed doesn’t feel cozy — at least that’s what I assumed D was doing — so it will just be a matter of time before she feels comfortable there.

Even though we’re 0 for 0 in the big-kid bed department, I suppose we have learned a lesson or two when it comes to toddler-proofing a room.

All of the baskets of hair clips, socks, tights, etc. — the Easily Scatterables — have been stuck on a high shelf in her closet. The changing table has been removed (too climby!) and the other furniture has already been bolted to the walls. Her glider and ottman have been removed (there have been close calls of them squooshing their fingers in the rocking hardware).

She can still rip clothes out of her drawers and her hamper (and she does), but it’s not so bad. She helps me clean it up, at least.

We’ve taken flack from people for taking down the cribs too early — 18 months for D, 20 months for C — but honestly, I don’t regret it. Sure, I *wish* they had let us leave them up longer. I wish they were still contained, trust me!

But when it’s a choice between your child repeatedly smashing down onto the floor from a crib rail, or giving them a bed they need to get used to, I’ll take the bed.

Parents of monkey-children, unite!

xoxo

Who would pin this?!?! I clearly know nothing.

Potty-training the littlest

Posted on January 9, 2014 by Heather Laura Clarke

Strengthening passwords, setting up automatic transfers, and other techie resolutions

Posted on January 6, 2014 by Heather Laura Clarke

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In the spirit of new-year-ishness, I made a couple of housekeeping decisions this week to keep things running smoothly in 2014. (I almost said “tickety-boo,” but then I realized I’m not eighty … yet)

Since we’re very digital people — you don’t even want to KNOW how many gadgets we own, seriously — we do all of our banking online. A lot of our bills are automatic taken out of our accounts or our credit card, but a few still have to be paid online manually.

Our system has always been that everytime someone opens a bill (whether it’s emailed or dropped into our mailbox), that person immediately goes to our shared Google calendar called “Bills” and enters the amount. We put it in for a few days before it’s actually due, to account for delays.

Then every day, we glance at the calendar — if something needs to be manually paid, the person who pays it marks “PAID” in the entry. So “Pay Telus bill ($100)” gets edited to read “PAID — Telus bill ($100).” This, uh, was the result of BOTH OF US paying the same bill on the same day. More than once. Ahem.

Sounds like a pretty good system, right? Well, no. It wasn’t perfect. Sometimes we’d look at the bill but forget to enter it into the calendar. Sometimes we’d forget to pay it completely, because neither of us looked at the system. And we have a few payments (like Netflix and Freshbooks — the accounting software I use for my business) coming automatically off our credit card, and then I’d never remember to go in and pay them off.

So! Onward and upward. Here are the few things I’ve recently tweaked as we roll into 2014 …

I set up more automatic transfers. If the credit card is getting dinged $25 on the 11th of every month, then I set up an automatic payment of $25 to the credit card on the 11th of every month. It’s things like this that will hopefully keep me from, uh, forgetting to pay it?
I added an additional automatic savings transfer. All of our “long-term” savings (RRSPs, RESPs, etc.) are already automatically coming out of our accounts at various points each month, but I always had a note in my calendar to transfer money to my “Gift” account a few times a month. I started off strong, and then I’d get into the old “Oh, well, I just bought so-and-so a gift and used my debit card, so I just won’t bother transferring money to that account and then it’s even.” Well, that wasn’t a good idea, because then I stopped transferring it entirely. So I just set up an automatic $50/week payment to go into my special (and barely used) “Gifts” account. Then the *idea* is that whenever I need to buy a birthday gift for someone, I’ll buy it using my debit card/credit card and then go home and transfer that exact amount from the gift account. It also means that when Christmas shopping time rolls around (for me, that’s August/September), I’ll have a pile of money to roll around in and use. And $50/week equals $2,600 a year, which is surely (probably? definitely?) more than we’d spend on gifts in a year, but I’ve never been good about keeping track of that, so we’ll see.
I re-colour-coded the “Bills” calendar. All of our entries for bills used to be in red, so we’d NOTICE THEM and stuff. But I went back through and changed all of the automatic payments/transfers to blue. We can still see that they’re happening, but we can also tell that blue = don’t have to do anything. Red still means HEY, YOU, DO SOMETHING!
I beefed up our passwords. I’m pretty good about passwords in the sense that I never use the same password for any two things — unlike my dear sister, who probably uses one password for every possible thing ever. I like using a password schema, so part of it is the same and part of it reflects the thing you’re trying to access. But I’d been using my old system for a couple of years now, so I changed it completely and went through the TEDIOUS process of changing it in every account. Now I’m (hopefully?) less of a target for having my identity/money/emails stolen? If anyone were to care enough to do that?

How’s that for techie resolutions? Have I inspired any of you to “nerd up” and digitalize your lifey this year? Or am I just WAY too obsessed with Google calendars? (I really, really am)

The boy who got the worst room in the house

Posted on January 3, 2014 by Heather Laura Clarke

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In the grand scheme of our House of Dreams, I always feel like poor D got a little bit screwed.

It was all quite by accident, of course. And his room isn’t terrible, it’s just that his sister’s room is so much better? At least I think so? But maybe that’s because there’s pink involved?

Anyway, here’s the story. We moved into this house when he was just 16 months old, and I was obsessed with the idea of making him feel at home right away (I was also preggers and ~~probably~~ definitely crazy).

To make sure he could sleep in his room from Day 1, we (well, Darling Husband) painted his room within like an hour of closing on the house.

We chose a pale grey, but in hindsight it was too, too pale. I had chosen a lighter colour than I wanted, because I knew we were doing deep blue curtains, bedding, etc. and I didn’t want his room to feel too dark.

Well, that was a mistake.

I’ve hated the colour of his walls since the first second I saw it, but at the time, I decided it was more important to get D settled immediately into his new room. I thought maybe once the room was fully decorated, I’d be OK with the colour.

I wasn’t. I’m still not.

While I decorated the rest of the house, I always kept thinking of D’s room and how it wasn’t how I wanted it to be. I love the striped/plaid red, white, and blue bedding (from Homesense), and I still love the grey/white, red, and blue colour scheme. But the walls have ruined everything for me.

(Plus the fact that when Darling Husband painted over the two-toned walls — top half red, bottom half beige?!?! — from the previous homeowners, he didn’t sand where the two colours met, leaving a really ugly raised line all around the room. Um, just saying.)

So here is basically how D’s room looks now …

D’s current bedroom

… and here are a few of the tweaks I hope to make to it …

Ideas courtesy of my Pinterest board for D’s room

Basically, this is the plan:

Remove the wooden letters from the canvases they are currently glued to (they’re hung on the wall to look like a train at the moment), repaint them, and put them vertically on the wall like this
Get my handy husband to do some board-and-batten all around the room (and paint it white)
Repaint the top half of the room a deep, navy blue — but NOT royal blue
Keep the existing bedding (pictured here) but make a couple of new jazzy pillows or something
Rearrange wall art and figure out what stays and what goes (hint: the huge Montreal Canadiens banner’s days may be numbered)

Any ideas for me? I’d love to hear them!