Just Hanging Out

I HAVE A PROJECT TO SHARE!  I know sorry about the yelling but I know what you are all thinking..."Its about time!"  This project is actually a pin-spiration from a while back that I have been staring at but have kept putting off.  I mean its not even really that hard to do but I was waiting to get pretty measuring cups.  Dont judge I use my measuring cups all the time!  I was in Sur La Table the other day and they have these really cool fun colored measuring cups.  Well they had them in green and thats all she wrote, I had to have them.

 (buy it here)

Arent they cute with the fun colors?!  I bought the cups and the tablespoons to replace my old mismatched ugly white plastic ones.  Back to the pin which you can see a picture of below. Truth be told this was one of the first pins so I never visited the site I just saw the picture and knew I could do it, but she has a good tutorial on her site which is a little different from how I did it.  Oh her site there is a link to buy the vinyl labels you see and a conversion chart so if your interested in that check out her site for the details on that.

 (source)

On to the project.  Here is my cabinet door before...make sure you measure your cabinet door because Im not sure cabinets are universally the same.

You can see here that the cabinet door is thicker on the outside than on the inside and this really is a good thing because you dont want the screw coming through the cabinet door that would be ugly.  For the wood pieces use whatever you have around the house and cut it to make it fit.  We had scrap thin ply-wood sitting around that was perfect for this.

Here are both of the wood pieces with the hooks in them.  The hooks are so easy to install, just measure where you want them to be placed (remembering that the measuring cups are larger as they go so make sure your spacing is wide enough to compensate for that) mark your spot and screw the hooks into the board.  Easy peasy.  To make for easier hanging joe bent the hooks so there was a wider opening.

Above is the back shot of the wood piece (messy paint on the back is no problem since you wont see it yay).  You can see here tha Joe made the indention so that the wood would sit flat on the whole door and not have a gab where the cabinet door was thinner from the cabinet door frame.  Such a smart man.  You can skip this step if you want but it wasnt too hard to do and a flush fit is always better to a gap fit.

Before you screw the boards in make sure they are level and mark your spots on the cabinet and the wood piece.  Make holes in the wood piece before you start screwing into the door because then you take the risk of pushing too hard to get through the door and wood and going all the way through the door so be careful.

Wood pieces in place, measuring cups in place...but something is missing...THATS RIGHT I have cool printables (link here) that I laminated!!

Ahh much better.  This printable is a conversion chart that I love because it has all the weird measurements that I have googled in the past.  Oh and if you notice there are only 4 teaspoon/tablespoon measurers so that means I dont have the 1/2 tbsp which I use all the time.  Well this conversion chart tells you how many teaspoons are in 1/2 tablespoon, pretty cool huh.  If you want to buy a print you can or they have the graphic large enough to print and again you can find that here.

Thats another thing off the to-do list!!  Now if we could just get that yard sign finished Im dying to see that go in the front yard!  What projects are you dying to finish but are having a hard time finding the motivation?

Project Housewife Out!

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Get Organized

As most of you know today is Valentine's Day.  My husband and I recently decided that we didnt want to celebrate Valentine's day because we feel that our anniversary is much more important than a random day on the calendar.  Ever since I was young I never really got into Valentine's day so it just makes sense to me to not celebrate a holiday that isnt very important to me.  I have to say it is a little weird but celebrating something just because its expected its really for me, especially since I dont really love the holiday anyway.  Isnt it ironic that I have no love for a holiday all about love?  Dont think Im not a romantic, I love the romance but I would much rather have a spontaneous show of romance than the planned one every year.  But to all of you who do celebrate this holiday and look forward to it every year I hope you have a great day and that it was everything you hoped it would be, and enjoy some chocolate cake and a great glass of wine (thats really the best part of eating out!).

Alright, so now I want to share with you what my husband installed for me over the weekend.  You may not know this but I do like to cook, I stink at coming up with unique recipes but I sure can cook from a recipe.  And as any good cook does I have pretty much any spice you can think of.  It got a little out of control really, taking up a whole drawer and 2 shelves in my cabinets so I decided that I wanted to move my spices to the back of the pantry door.  We went to target and bought a shelve system.  You can get the product here. Here is the unit on my door with all the cooking stuff in place.

This has been up since Saturday and I keep forgetting that this is on the door and have almost run into it 4 times.  So remember that you have it on the back of your door otherwise you might smack yourself :)

The unit was very easy to install, and it only took about 15 minutes, its easy to screw into the door, easy to add the shelves but a little harder to add the spices.  Adding the spices was the most time consuming because Im a little OCD and want like things with like things but to me that makes it easier to find things.  Ok and by time consuming I mean like 10 minutes so the whole thing will take less than 30 minutes and gave me a lot more space in my cabinets.  What do you think, could you use something like this in your home?

Project Housewife Out!

Chalk it Up

I was working on 2 really awesome easy projects this weekend but right when I was about to finish I realized I was missing some final touches so those are going to have to wait...but today I have the super awesome chalk board paint to talk about!  No I dont know how to make the paint myself (but if you want to know check out this link), my neighbor had a whole quart left from her project and let me use it.  We have all seen the chalk board paint menu boards on pinterest, but they are so pretty how can you do it yourself?!  Well I decided to try my hand at the chalk board paint menu board and you can see below (along with a sampling of our menu, arent I making you hungry lol) how it turned out.  Yes I know its red/green/white, but sometimes its hard for me to give up Christmas, I cant help it!

This was really easy because I didnt do one step I will have to recommend to you.  We have textured walls (and I am going to assume so does pretty much the rest of America) so that presents a challenge when you write on the board.  People will tell you to smooth out the wall before you put the paint on and I will have to agree with them.  I didnt because I have engrained in me that you want to remember the re-sale value of the house and not doing anything to crazy to alter it.  I think if someone came to buy our house they would find it a little weird that one wall had no texture and the rest of the house didnt so I left it textured.  I put painters tape up against the cabinets and around the edge of where I wanted to stop painting, then busted out the paint brush and paint.  I used a brush because I didnt want to pour the paint out into a tray to use the roller but you can use a roller if you want, it didnt really take me that long to paint this whole area.  After I had the first coat I thought that would be enough, but after writing on it once I realized that yes I did need 2 coats.  After the second coat went on Im happy with it now. 

Ok this is where the "you want to smooth out the walls" comes into play.  I bought chalk board paint (which is so much more fun and easier to write with than real chalk) and wrote on the walls.  Well the texture #1 makes it a little harder to write on the wall and #2 makes it harder to get it off.  The chalk paint gets in the crevices of the wall and makes it hard to wipe it off, it comes off eventually but patience is required.  If you are ok with those 2 things then by all means skip the smoothing out of the wall!

I love my menu board, my husband has stopped asking "What's for dinner" and will even start cooking sometimes when its easy and he knows how to do it.  I also love that I had this one random wall that you cant see from the living room but it totally visable throughout the kitchen.

I hope you have fun with chalk and let me know where you used the chalk board paint and for what, I would love to hear your crafty ideas!!

Project Housewife Out!