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Browsing tag archives: ingoodrepair

DIY: Hidden Storage Wall Cubby

A few months ago, I wrote a blog about my Paint Only Remodels of our Main Bathroom. Now I have talked about this about a million times before, but if you missed it– I am only allowed to remodel this house using paint. We plan on building a new house on this land in a few years, so my husband doesn’t want me to waste money on something we will eventually bulldoze. (You can read more about it on the blog above.)
Part of the issue with our bathroom is storage. We have three drawers and two cupboards…which are all a perfect height for a toddler to get into and unpack every day while getting ready. It’s very annoying. We have tried drawer hooks, but he still gets into them. I set out to create another storage unit on the wall, but we really didn’t  have room for another medicine cabinet, so I came up with this idea for Storage Wall Cubbies. A few months ago I created these fake paintings and wrote a little DIY Faking a Painting.
I thought they would be great to use as a cover to a wall cubby! A great way to hide the clutter and add some art to the wall. Here is my little DIY on how I created these Hidden Storage Wall Cubbies
To start you need to create two 10″x10″ Storage Wall Cubbies:
1’x4’x7′ Pine Boards
2′ square of 1/4″ plywood
Nailgun (or hammer and small nails)
Miter Saw
Table Saw
Wood Glue
4 small hinges
2 cabinet magnet catches
First cut your 1’x4’x6′ pine board into 8 pieces that are 10″ long with a 45 degree angle on each piece:
Each cubby will need 4 boards that look like below. I like to line them up to make sure they are all the exact same size.
With the boards above, you will assemble your wall cubby. I started with gluing the boards together to make a square.

You will end up with a square like below. (Use can use a L-square ruler to make sure it is square.)

Using an nail gun (or just a hammer and nails) reinforce the box in each corner.

Measure the outside of your cubby box and cut the 2′ square of 1/4″ plywood into two pieces to be the back of your cubby box. My cubbies are 10″x10″ so I cut the plywood to be a 10″x10″ square.
Attach the back using a nail gun (or hammer and nails) to create more support to the box. 

You now have a finished wall cubby (or two in my case!)

Now we need to sand and paint it to look professional 🙂 Most likely, you will have some sort of a little gap where the boards meet. Use some wood fill to fill this gap.

Let it dry overnight.

Then sand it with 60 grit, 100 grit, and then 200 grit.

Paint the box your desired color. My frames on my fake paintings are brown, so I matched the color for the cubbies. 

After two coats and a day of drying you should have two wall cubbies that look like this:

Next, install the hinges. Measure two inches from the top and bottom on the frame of your fake paintings.

Install the hinges and you will have a frame that looks like this:

Next, on the cubbies mark where the hinges of the fake painting will meet cubbie. Make sure you give them enough room to close and line up on the cubby straight.

Drill holes in the cubby for the hinges and then screw the hinges in place. 

Now to attach the magnetic catches. These will make sure the frame on the front will stay closed.

Measure two inches to the inside of the cubbies.

Install the magnetic catches. 
On the frame of the fake paintings, install the metal plate for the magnetic catches.

You should end up with some finished Hidden Storage Wall Cubbies that look like this.

Install them on the wall, preferable in a stud so they can handle weight of whatever you put in them. Once installed you have a couple of Hidden Storage Wall Cubbies that hide all your junk you don’t want people to see and 

add a little wall decoration to the bathroom at the same time!

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Cleaning Queen Tip #2: Cleaning Stains From White Carpets

This post is dedicated to our mother, the cleaning queen. As long as we can remember, our Mom has always had some crazy cleaning tips that work like magic! To this day, we still bring over our laundry to have her get a spot out or ask her for tips on those hard to clean items. She always has a recommendation that works 99% of the time. We thought it would be nice to share some of her genius cleaning tips periodically. Thanks Mom for all you have done for us over the years!

Today’s’ Tip:
Cleaning Stains From White Carpets

Back in April, I was working one morning and my son was playing so quietly beside me.

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 I should have known something was wrong, that is when I turned to see this:

Yep, that is maple syrup he is drinking out of the jug and that lovely maple syrup stain has been on my carpet forever! I have tried to scrub it out with various carpet cleaning chemicals, but it just has stayed there.

It’s a little lighter than the original, but still there.  
One day I was complaining to my Mom about how bad our carpet looks and that I can’t seem to get this stain out and another (where I spilled an entire cup of coffee.) She told me to try vinegar and baking soda. 
I thought, “What the heck!” At least we will have fun watching the chemicals react. So I sprinkled some baking soda on the stain. 
And poured some vinegar over the top.  

 We had a little floor volcano that was fun to watch. (My son loved watching it.)

And then I scrubbed it in with a brush. (I alternated with my son, who finds scrubbing stains out of carpet super fun.)

My Mom told me to put a white towel over the spot and let it dry. (White, so the color of your towel will not bleed onto your carpet.) 

After letting it dry, vacuum up the remaining baking soda. And the stain is MAGICALLY gone!!

The only bad part is now I have a white spot on the carpet where I cleaned it! It just shows you how bad these carpets need to be professionally cleaned. I am sure we will track on it enough to blend in with the rest soon enough! Also, not sure if this will work on colored carpet, so I am just giving you a warning to maybe stick with white carpet only. 

Do you have any awesome cleaning tips you would like to share? If so, comment below. We would love to hear any ideas to make cleaning easier!

Garage Sale Redo: The Ikea Trofast Shelf Part 1

It is sort of a heartbreaking day when you realize that your kids toys are taking over your house. When you finally move into a home, you dream of the perfect living room. In my old house, I had the perfect living room—organized, cozy, beautiful:
Of course this picture was before kids and we have moved since then. Our new house (which it is anything but new, try 1970s house) has a horrible layout. I have no place for toy storage, so the living room had to be sacrificed to be both the living room and the toy room. There goes my dream of the perfect living room! 
I decided a few months ago that rather than to fight this battle, I would try to combat it by providing some sort of storage option for the toys. Months ago I built this handy little open toy box  and it has been a lifesaver!
Unfortunately, due to a few awesome deals of Little People and Legos, we are running out of room in the toy box already. 
I have always had plans to add a top unit to this toy box when this time came, something much like this:
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However, I haven’t had the time or the energy (4 weeks till Baby 2.0 is here!)  One day I came across an Ikea Trofast storage unit at a garage sale for $5!
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I had an idea, let’s just throw this on top of the current toy box and use it for the extra storage I was going to build. 
However, when I got home and put it on top of the unit, it looked a little funny.
I think it looks funny because it doesn’t match the width of the toy box and the stair-stepped shelving makes it look strange. So I set off to correct the issues and hopefully end up with something that looks like it’s a one piece unit.  
I came across this photo on pinterest and thought it was a great idea to add to the sides to make the width match!
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Anyways, that is my plan. I can’t wait to show you the results, but first I will give a little DIY on how to build these side shelves…that you could add to your own Trofast shelf, dresser, or whatever else you can imagine!

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Baby 2.0: The Nursery Reveal

The big nursery reveal day is finally here!! It’s officially 6 weeks until we can expect to see the face of our little girl! In May, we found out our second child was going to be a girl and I started scheming ideas for the girl nursery (see post here). I believe, after months of work, I am finished with the nursery– minus any little items I might find after this post to help decorate the room. Also, as for baby 2.0 projects, this should be one of the last posts on the subject until she arrives…should be, but might not be. (To see more posts about Baby 2.0 you can click here.)
This room is located in the front of our house and our largest bedroom. Like the rest of our house, it was a very dated 1978 room. Complete with the swag window treatments, plastic blinds, and dated ceiling fan. We have used this room as our guest room and basically our overall storage room. 
I really wanted to keep a queen bed in the room for me to crash in on those nights when she is having trouble sleeping. I had a bed in the room with Aiden and LOVED it! Also, my husband appreciates the quiet when he is trying to sleep and the less disruption of me getting in and out of bed. 
I went for a pink and green color scheme to the room and wanted to add in some trees to the design. This is what it looked like when you walk into the room before: 

This is now what the room looks like:


I painted wide stripes on one wall to create a little depth to the space and I painted the trees on the wall for some nice contrast to the pink. The trees look black, but they are really brown. The day I took the pictures it was just really hard to get the lighting right, so sorry the trees look black.

A view of the other side of the room.

And the after.

A closer look at the crib, rocker and other side of the room. You can see half a clock, which was a clearance hobby lobby find for $5! Also, you can see the super cute and easy lamp shades I recovered.

The rug was also found on clearance at Kmart, but can’t remember the price. I think $13 or something like that.

Here is the room looking at the front door of the room. This is a better view of the fan, which I would have loved to switch out! 
Here is the after. I really wanted to change out the fan in this room to a chandelier of some sort, but I made my husband a promise that anything done to this house would be paint only since we plan on building a new one in a few years. I did, however, update the scones to look less dated than the previous tulips.
The changing table and dresser area.

My awesome garage sale find of a $2 shelf that I repainted. (See blog DIY: The $2 Shelf Redo)

This is the before view of our closet. I hated these closet doors! There was no bottom track, so they smash your fingers very easily and slide off their top track which is super annoying to get back on. 

Here is the after view of the closet. I sewed the curtains and hung curtain tie-backs, which I re-purposed from the previous window treatments in the room. (They were gold and holding the swag curtains in the middle.)

I also installed a closet organizer to help keep the closet looking cleaner. The hamper actually belonged to a relative of my husbands and use to be cream colored. I spray painted it green to add some more green to the room.

I am obviously in love with my Super Easy Basket Tags. They are just another way to keep the closet organized. 
If you can’t tell….I have hit quite a few garage sales, so I think she is set on the clothes!!! 

Well that is the final nursery! Here is the before and after:

I am happy to have it finished and really liked the way it turned out! I think at some point in the future I will need to devise some sort of book storage in the room, but I have a few years for that…and maybe might have another house at that point too. We will see….

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The Under Deck Sandbox and Playground

I am sure many of you have a raised deck, most likely from a walkout basement. Most people are normal and turn the underside of the deck into some type of great patio or grilling area. However for us, we have two walkouts (one on each side of the house) and this one is down a very inconvenient slope in our yard, so a nice patio area would not get much use. Here is the picture of the area I am talking about.

Also, not to mention that the deck is super unsafe– if you can’t tell by just looking at it. I shouldn’t say it’s super unsafe. I have walked on it and so has my husband. I just think if you would get a few people on it and some patio furniture I would question the structural support. Obviously the rails aren’t up to code either…well I guess they are code because we live in the country and anything goes! This deck comes off the master bedroom and we decided when we bought this house not to use the deck and we are not replacing it. (We are not replacing it because we plan to bulldoze this house in a few years, see this post for more details Our New House.)

Enough about the deck…the nice feature of this deck is the shade it provides and that the location is right next to the garden area. The previous owner of the house had a hot tub down here, which we don’t plan on buying. However, after watching my son play around the yard I thought the area would make a great place for a sandbox and playground AND use the deck to provide some shade. This probably isn’t an idea that most homeowners would be interested in, but I have seen a few other houses around my town where they have installed a swing set under their deck. If you have two decks like us, this might be a good option for you.

Here is an up close of the area under the deck. The rock area will stay rock, after removing some hostas, and the dirt area (the old hot tub area) will be where the sand box will go.

I decided to make the walls higher on two corners of the sandbox because on one side of the area there is a good drop off. The back and left side of the sandbox will have the higher walls. I don’t want any crazy toddlers (Aiden) jumping out the wrong side and falling down a hill. On the other two sides, I wanted some seating for my husband and I if we wanted to play in the sandbox with him.

My first task was to build up the sides of the wall on the sandbox. I used the deck supports to attach the sides of the sandbox. Now some of the deck supports aren’t very close together. To provide support for the walls I hammered wooden stakes into the ground and drilled the sides of the wall to them.

For the seat support, I made an angled support and positioned them every few feet,  which should be enough to support the average adult. 

Here’s a close-up of the support if you are wanting to build something like this. You will have to use your math skillz, which I am not ashamed to say my husband helped me out with–he was a math major after all. The embarrassing part is that it uses the very basic algebra equation…if I can’t remember algebra I wonder how bad my calculus is! To find the length of the angled board, we just used the pythagorean theorem a^2 + b^2 = c^2!,.

Here is the completed sandbox with the seat for sitting on the two sides. Once I had the sandbox built, I stained the boards with a stain that prevented chemicals from leaching out of the green treated lumber. Not all stains do this, so ask your hardware person which brands seal in the chemicals.

I filled the sandbox with some dirt to even out the area and then placed landscape fabric in it to prevent the weeds from coming up through the box. (Or in our case Sumac.)

I also installed some playground toys, a swing, and moved our small playground we had inside the house to  the outside. The playground area was complete!

He loves banging on these drums I installed and they were a great way to utilize the taller wall on the two sides. (Now you might notice the black fabric is showing. I need to add more sand to the sandbox, but waiting to see how much the husband needs for his firepit/patio he is building. All the leftover will fill the sand box a few more inches.)

Now he plays in the sandbox every time I am working in the garden, which seems like a lot! You should see my horrible tan lines!

On the size with the swing and slide, I had to remove the hostas, remove the rocks, lay new landscape fabric and then put the rocks back.

Even though the deck is an eyesore, I really like the playground area. It was a great way for us to use the useless deck as a large shaded area. As I said before, I can be in the garden and Aiden can play in the sand. As you can tell from the picture below, our garden is growing! The only thing that I don’t like is that it seems to be bath night every night now every time Aiden plays in that sandbox!

Also, another item checked off my Countdown of Summer Projects is complete!!

If you have great eyesight, you might have noticed the lumber sitting on the table in the photo above. That’s for the next outdoor project, our broken fishing bench! It’s a really funny story how it broke, but that will be for a later post. It use to look like this: 
Now it looks like this:

Thank goodness I found there other bench you see above there at a garage sale last year for cheap or we would have no seating down by the water. I honestly just plan on rebuilding the same one, just more structurally sound.

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DIY Painting A Dresser

If you have been following our blog, you probably read the post about me creating my son a Fire Truck Room.

I have slowly been redoing furniture to be a part of his room, such as the Toy Box

and the book shelf.

 The next furniture project was to repaint this old dresser of mine. Here is what the dresser looked like before:

Though the dresser may not look like it is in that bad of shape, it is made out of laminated wood and has scratches all over it. It still has stayed quite sturdy through the years and has managed to survive ten moves in the almost 8 years that I have owned it. My husband hates it and I was quite convinced that I could paint it and put it to good use in our son’s room. After all, kids like to destroy things and I feel a whole lot better if he ended up destroying this dresser over a new one.
Now, I have always had somewhat of a fear about painting over laminated wood. Some paint just won’t stick to it. After reading several websites, I found people overwhelmingly endorse Zinsser Cover Stain to paint over laminate. I decided to give it a try.
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First, when you decide to paint a dresser, you want to start out with removing all knobs and drawers. I tried to remove the top one, but it was stuck. Hubby couldn’t even get it to come out without breaking it, so we gave up on it.

Using a foam roller, I applied the cover stain to the dresser. I was very impressed with the way it blocked out the previous laminate color.

Also, the cover stain stuck to the laminate and was easy to apply. It created a great working surface to apply my color to. This product might be a new fav of mine! (I think I smell a sequel to  Handygirl’s Top 10 Essentials.)
I originally had this grand idea to paint the entire dresser Fire Engine Red. I set out to purchase a gallon of red paint and walked up to the counter at Lowes to have them mix it up. I always like to browse the “Ooops” paint containers for any colors worth buying when lo and behold, they had a Valspar Signature Paint gallon in Fire Engine Red for only $10!!  That never happens to me! I quickly yelled to the paint lady to stop with my paint, seconds before she opened the new can, and snatched the “Ooops” gallon up! What a steal, I saved $22 on this paint!
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So as I said, the idea was originally to paint the entire dresser red. After painting on the side of the dresser, I decided all red was going to be WAY too much for this room!
I decided instead to paint the main part of the dresser white. I used some leftover white paint I had from the Adirondack Chairs I painted last summer.

And painted the drawers with the Fire Engine Red paint.

While at Lowes I also picked up some white porcelain knobs for the dresser and replace the existing ones.
In the end, I ended up with the dresser looking like this and I honestly couldn’t be happier about how it turned out. I love the contrast between the drawers and the dresser.  In addition, the white knobs just tie the colors together.
Here is the snazzy before and after pic:
I think this might be final piece of furniture for Aiden’s firetruck room as the room is pretty small and I don’t think I could fit much more in there. I shouldn’t say I am completely done with furniture. I have grand ideas for a cool nightstand, but I am still on the hunt for the right object to make it work.

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The Fire Truck Room #1

I have said this a few times before on this blog, but I have decided to reveal my grand plans to make my little toddler a fire truck theme room and I thought I would share a few of my ideas with you!

First I should explain why a fire truck room– It probably all started almost nine years ago when I met my husband. Not that I was planning out our child’s room, but I saw a picture on his desk of him and his Dad in front of a fire truck. His Dad, my son’s Farfar, was a volunteer firefighter for a number of years. The picture has traveled with us through many moves and has always been on display. I think because his Dad chose such an important job of saving people, it sent a good message to his family and greatly impacted my husband’s life– as he too chose to go into a profession of saving people. The room is somewhat a tribute to my father-in-law’s former work and my husband’s memory of it. We have several items from Farfar’s days as a fire fighter that will be displayed in the room including his hat, coat, and captains sign that use to hang in the back of their vehicle.

Second, it’s just too dang cute! What’s not to love about a little boy in his fire truck room! Plus the resources for ideas for this room are endless. I am obviously not the first person to choose this theme!

Third, at some point my son will probably outgrow fire trucks. He will probably beg and say ‘that he is not a baby anymore’ and wants a more ‘manly’ room. At this point I hope to suggest to him a room entirely dedicated to my husband’s alma mater University of Nebraska. The red and white furniture can then be reused without an investment in new items.
The grand idea to start the room was to build this awesome fire truck loft I saw on Anawhite.com. Though, I decided this won’t work for us quite yet. My son is barely 17 months, and a loft bed with a small kid seems like a bad idea to me. Also, we plan on building a new house in a few years and I have a feeling this thing won’t disassemble and move very easily. So this awesome little project will have to wait until my son is older and we have our new house.

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Next, I looked online at these cute little fire truck toddler beds. At a price of $150 and up, I decided just to use the current toddler bed I own until my son outgrows it.

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This is our current toddler bed below as it was set up in the nursery in our old house. However, I have painted it white to match the red and white them.

And to go with the toddler bed I bought this nursery set. It turns out they don’t have really any cute toddler bed bedding sets for fire trucks. There are a few out there, but I wasn’t a real big fan of any of these. I like the red, white, and brown coloring of this one so I decided to purchase it. The quilt and the bottom sheet fit the toddler bed and I am going to take the crib bumper and refashion it into a nice pillow sham.
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Ideally, as bedding goes, I would have LOVED to purchase this set from Pottery Barn. However, Pottery Barn discontinued it and the ones on ebay are used and $300. No thank you!

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I also LOVED the painting in the picture above. I decided to create my own copy of it. With about 2 weeks of painting in my down time, I finished my own version of a painting that to him will be a mommy original.
I also like the idea of turning one wall into a fire station mural. The one below is wallpaper you can purchase, but I hate wallpaper so I plan to paint my own.

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I have sketched-up my outline for the fire station that will be on the wall. I probably will have to adjust the width of my art, but for now this is the plan:

And of course I have blogged about all the items I have already finished for this room already, such as the the bookshelf (Garage Sale Redo: The Bookshelf) and

the toy box (Garage Sale Redo: The Toy Box).

Next on the list is to finish the dresser in his room. This is the dresser before and my grand plans for the after are going to be so cute! (I know the dresser doesn’t look so bad, but up close it’s pretty beat up.)

Anyways, I hope to get the room entirely finished by May 11th– the day we find out if we are having a girl or a boy with this next one. Once we find that out, I will be planning the grand decor for the nursery!

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Garage Sale Redo: The Bookshelf

A few weeks ago, I wrote about my garage sale toy box transformation. I am on a quest to turn my son’s room into a firetruck theme room eventually, so I have been finding random furniture and painting them red and white to match the theme.

At the same garage sale that I bought the toy box, I found this awesome, homemade bookshelf. This thing is HEAVY and sturdy and it was only $3!! The only problem was the previous owner obviously was some teenage girl with angst and she decided to take it out on this bookshelf.
Don’t get me wrong, I love a teenage girl with angst…who doesn’t? I would rather she take it out on this bookshelf rather then her parents. It reminds me of myself at her age, a little, as I destroyed several pieces of furniture with paint in my day. (Ask Luci, she was horrified about me painting all over an antique phone bench.) However I used acrylic paint, which is easy to remove, not spray paint like this girl. I thought you had to be 18 to buy spray paint?
I do have to admire her use of keys glued to the bookshelf, as I think if she covered the whole thing in keys it would turn out pretty cool looking.
The one thing I can’t figure out is when this girl was a teenager. Below you see lyrics from the song Right Round by Flo Rida (2009).
But then on this side she has lyrics from Sir Mix-a-lot’s Baby Got Back (1988). Also, there are lyrics to Absolutely (Story of a Girl) by Nine Days (2000). I am just super confused when this girl was a teenager. Her music selection spans 20 years!
And lastly, I wonder if she still loves Jake. I am not sure if Jake is a boy from high school or she just jumped on Team Jacob… (The date on this side points to the clue the girl went to high school in 2009, but obsessed with old music like Live and Sir Mix-a-lot.)
Anyways, whatever this girl’s story, I had some left over paint from the toy box and decided to use it to redo this bookshelf for Aiden’s room. It took about 8 coats of white paint to cover up all the black spray paint. As you can tell from above, it took soooo long to paint over the scribbles that I spent a lot of the time thinking about the girl who did caused me all this trouble. Though it was time consuming, the results were great!
I really like the red shelves.
The bookshelf is at a perfect height for my son to get to all of his books.
And promptly remove them from the shelf as fast as he can so Mommy has to pick them up. He does this often!
I am really happy with the results of the bookshelf and it’s really amazing what you can do with just a little bit of paint.

Organizing The Garage Part 2

A few weeks ago, I wrote a post about Organizing The Garage for the Fall. It’s the perfect time of year to do it. As I said before, I can’t imagine spending the winter hunting for that screw driver or drill bit in below zero weather in the mess of a place we had, so I decided to organize it…well as much as I could.

I wish I could put up a picture like this:

or this
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However, the reality is we have a working garage. We use it almost each and every day. We both do some woodworking, I do lots of painting, and really we always have a bunch of household DIY projects we are working on. The white paint in the garage would last about 2 seconds. Also, we have 5 acres of land, so we have a garden tractor, a large sprayer, and a bunch of other lawn equipment. As I would LOVE to say that the above pics are my garage, it’s not and never will be. Also, we don’t plan on staying in this house very long, so we probably won’t be investing in an epoxy floor (however in the new place we will!)

Here is the before right side of the garage is full of yard equipment, fireworks (gotta love SD), random auction purchases, and other junk.
and the after
On the far right side, I made a sort of biking station. I like things off the ground so that I can sweep the garage easier. Under the shelves, I secured some nails and hung up all the power yard tools.
Next to the biking station is all of the yard tools. I know, it doesn’t look the prettiest, but they are all up there and have a spot.
I used just nails to hang them on the wall. It’s cheap and easy!
And this was the back wall of the garage before:
And the after:
I made a golfing area over to the left, a basket storage area in the middle, and a power tool station to the right. I love baskets! They look nice and hide miscellaneous junk!
This is the power tool station.
It has the saws, drills, and all the extension cords needed! (Notice our large red yard sprayer, just another large thing in the garage!)
This was the left side of the garage, which was littered with shoes, golfing stuff, screws, nails, multiple strollers, fishing gear, paint, and several ladders.
Here is the after:
Starting from the right side, I made a ladder station and covered up the existing cupboard with a curtain to hide some of the mess.
In the cupboard I put baskets to hold our work gloves, rags, and one for misc items. Also, I have a stacked storage bin that I call my safety station. It has earplugs, eye protection, and face masks.
I found a very cleaver idea to label a container of bird seed (thanks to Pinterest). Also, the tight seal lid is great for keeping mice out of it…which I have already seen one in our garage!
I love my pegboards. They were easy to make and hold so many things!

I bought some heavy duty hooks and this peg board also acts as a coat & hat rack.
I picked up this storage shelf at a garage sale. I am using it as a shoe bench though. It is heavy duty enough to hold the weight of a person sitting on it to take off their shoes.

Moving over to the left, I purchased a metal toolbox I from K-Mart that was clearance down to just $99.

Fall is the best time to buy a nice, heavy duty tool box.

If you have a lot of nails in boxes, just leave them in there. Having the easy to read labels view-able makes it fast to pick out the right screw or nail you need.

Below the nails and screws is the stroller station.
As I said before, I tried to put as many things off the ground as possible to make sweeping easier.

The far left is the painting and fishing corner.

We live on a pond so the fishing equipment is a must.
I installed some remaining pegboard so I could hang all the random fishing items we own.
The paint cupboard was a mess, but I organized it and added in some cupboard door shelves.
Stacking the paint cans in a pyramid shape allowed it easy to see each spray paint can color. Also, I LOVE keeping old coffee plastic containers. I used them to store my brushes in and while painting I like to used them to hold the paint for cutting in.
One thing I will need to change pretty quickly is the spray paint cans. I am pretty sure the garage will get too cold to store them outside, so I will be moving them into the basement storage room soon.

Well, that’s my somewhat organized garage. I hope you got a few ideas from the place. As I said, I would love to have a picture perfect garage, but I just don’t think it was stay clean very long with us. I like to organize the garage into “stations” so that you can easily find items and put them back in the correct place. Have you organized your garage this fall?? If so, I would love to see your ideas! Just comment with a link below!

~Beth

Cleaning Queen Tip #1: Cleaning Toilet Rings without Chemicals

This post is dedicated to our mother, the cleaning queen. As long as we can remember, our Mom has always had some crazy cleaning tips that work like magic! To this day, we still bring over our laundry to have her get a spot out or ask her for tips on those hard to clean items. She always has a recommendation that works 99% of the time. We thought it would be nice to share some of her genius cleaning tips periodically. Thanks Mom for all you have done for us over the years!

Today’s’ Tip:
Cleaning Hard Water Toilet Rings without Chemicals!

When we first moved into our new house, we had toilet rings in ALL of the toilets. The house was on the market for 2 years and completely empty, so no one took care of cleaning and flushing the toilets. With the hard rural water we have, we ended up with really bad toilet rings in all the toilets.

After multiple types of chemicals and scrubbing to no end, I still could not get remove the hard water ring. I was complaining to my Mom about it one day, and she suggested a pumice stone.You can use an old one you have had around the house (don’t use it on your feet after the toilet) or go buy a new one from Walmart for $0.80.

Just don your rubber gloves and lightly rub on the ring with the pumice stone. Don’t rub too hard, because you could scratch your toilet. It’s amazing and the ring will vanish before you eyes!

No chemicals, no smells, no mess….just a nice clean toilet with no hard water ring!

Do you have any awesome cleaning tips you would like to share? If so, comment below. We would love to hear any ideas to make cleaning easier!