Winter Pinterest Challenge: Ombre Drawers

It's time again for the Pinterest Challenge. This time it is being hosted by Katie, Sherry, Megan & Michelle

The idea of the challenge is to stop pinning and start doing, the perfect challenge for me! This is my second one. For the first we did some very simple cress heads, so this time I was a little more ambitious.

Between their bedroom and their play room the girls have a decent amount of space to hang up their clothes. But some things just can't be hung and so a set of drawers was in order.

My inspiration pin was this adorable set of ombre drawers originally posted here. I envisioned finding the perfect set of second hand drawers and sprucing it up. Unfortunately it was not to be.

Luckily for me, when scouring the Aldi catalogue for bargains one day I came across this set of drawers for $80. Being from Aldi they came in a flatpack and with zero assistance from staff (and some chuckling from an elderly woman standing nearby) I managed to lift these into a trolley and get them home. 

I'm so proud that I managed to put these together all by myself! I then did what pinterest suggested and got myself a sample pot of each colour on a paint swatch. The pots were only $5 each and this project barely touched the sides. 

The trip to Masters was rather enlightening and I learnt many things like: You can't just paint directly onto laminate! Who knew? Well apparently everyone other than me :o)

The girl there was lovely and explained each product that I needed. This is me examining the primer that I used. You spray it on, leave it, then wipe off with a cloth. The result, perfectly primed laminate! No sanding required.

I lay the drawers outside and primed them. I then frog taped around the edges and set to painting. It was an extremely hot day and my paint keep drying too quickly. This meant lots of brush marks. I ended up sanding them back and doing a final coat with a mini roller which seemed to give a nicer finish.

The final product, Ombre Drawers. I'm really happy with how they turned out and they tie in perfectly with the rest f the room. I'll be showing off more of their room soon so stay tuned.

You can see my inspiration board for the girls' bedroom here

Ava & Em's Bedroom

I'm off now to check out some of the other amazing projects that have been tackled. Hopefully I'll also find some awesome new blogs to follow!

Liebster Award

Imagine my delight when I opened my emails and found out that Liz from My Life in Projects had nominated my little blog for a Liebester Award!

Liebster, in German, means endearing, valued, lovely, etc.  This award is presented as a way to acknowledge up and coming bloggers and to help them be recognized for their outstanding accomplishments within design that is presented on their blog. 

I was super excited to get this award. I didn't actually think anyone outside my family read my blog. And if my FeedBurner stats are anything to go by I may not be far off :o)

Here are the rules for receiving this award:

1. Each blogger should post 11 random facts about

themselves.

2. Answer the questions the tagger has set for you, and then

create 11 new questions for the bloggers you pass the award to.

3. Choose 11 new bloggers (with less than 200 followers) to pass the award to and link them in your post.

4. Go back to their page and tell them about the award.

5. No tag backs.

11 Random Facts About Me

1. I dream of one day having my own little self sufficient hobby farm
2. My sister is my best friend in the entire world
3. Chocolate is my favourite food
4. I have a zombie apocalypse survival plan
5. I was a vegetarian for 7 years
6. For most of my childhood I wanted to be a psychiatrist when I grew up
7. Current dream careers include; author, crafter and underwriter
8. I lost 25kgs by switching to Primal eating
9. Exercise and I are not on speaking terms
10. 90% of things I start, I never finish

11 Questions For Me

1.  What magazines, if any, do you subscribe to?

Other than the weekly grocery fliers that come to my email, none. I’m not much of a magazine person.      

2.  What made you decide to start a blog?

I had a sewing blog years ago but let it fall by the wayside. I started again because my sister was  bugging me incessantly. 

3.  When you aren't blogging, what's your favorite thing to do?

Probably pottering around outside

4.  What's your favorite room in your home?

My bedroom,  I get to sleep there!

5.  Where is the one place you'd love to travel?

It's a cliche but I'd love to go to Paris

6.  What blog inspires you the most?

Three Ring Circus. I'm always in awe of how Tiff keeps on going through the most difficult times.

7.  When you go shopping for yourself, what's the first thing you buy?

Chocolate

8.  What's your favorite t.v. show?
The Walking Dead or maybe Game of Thrones

9.  If/when you go to Target, what area of the store do you spend the most time?

Toy section, I love looking at toys

10.  What is the best book you have read?

Gone With the Wind

11.  What is one food you could eat every day?

Chocolate!

11 Blogs to Nominate

Gosh I'm not sure I know 11 new blogs with less than 200 followers? I'm going to pick some of my favourites that have less than 200 followers according to Google Reader. Not very scientific I know :o)

Sophie At Home

Renters in Love

Create

And that is unfortunately all I've got. I have a huge blog roll but most of those have been on there for years. It may be time to expand my horizons.

My Questions

1. If you could have any job, what would it be?

2. Favourite song?

3. What is your favourite way to wind down?

4. Do you prefer sweet or savoury food?

5. Do you prefer to dress up or dress down?

6. Favourite place to go shopping?

7. Coffee, Tea or neither?

8. What is the best movie ever made?

9. Do you believe in Aliens?

10. If we had one united world, who would our leader be?

11. Have you ever caught a fish?

Gosh that took a long time, especially with Emily's "help". Thanks so much to Liz for nominating me!

Basil Pesto

My mother has always told me not to let my basil flower. She says it will lose all it's flavour. I tend to believe her when she gives me gardening advice because a) she's my mum and b) things actually grow in her garden.

My little basil plant is somewhat of a miracle plant. It's been in my garden about 6 months now. It didn't have the best start to life. I bought it from the supermarket, left it inside for about a week and then when it was just about dead I thought I had better plant it. So I dug a shallow hole (in my 10cm of top soil) and stuck it in. It didn't really do anything for the longest time, but all of a sudden it took off and actually grew into a healthy plant.

For about a month now it has been trying to flower and I have been dutifully picking off the tips. But since I've planted new basil in my vege garden I decided to strip this one back and then let it go to flower so I could harvest the seed. I read that seed from a plant used to your garden is good seed.

Post harvesting it's looking a little bare. You can see my pile of leaves that weren't considered nice enough to keep.

I got about 1.5 cups of leaves which is the perfect amount to make this delicious basil pesto.

Basil Pesto

• 1.5 cups fresh basil leaves
• 1/4 cup pine nuts
• 3/4 cup parmesan
• 1/2 cup oil
• 2 cloves of garlic

Traditionally you use olive oil for pesto but today I decided to use cold pressed extra virgin macadamia oil instead. It gave a lovely nutty flavour and is definitely something to consider if you find olive oil too bitey!

Quickly toast off your pine nuts in a pan. If the pan is really hot it will only take about 30 seconds. They burn really easily so be careful!

You can use a food processor, handheld blender, magic bullet or whatever other whizzy, choppy thingy you have on hand to mix it all together. I used my Magic Bullet knock off from Aldi today. Put all the ingredients in and turn it on. It looks like a lot...

But it really processes down!

Put it in a sterile jar (my definition of sterile is I ran it through the dishwasher) and keep it in the fridge. I'm not sure how long it keeps for because ours is always gone long before it goes off!

Ava doesn't like pesto but Em and I love it. We use it on our meat, eggs and as a salad dressing. We also eat it off the spoon when no one is looking :o) This amount would last us about a week.

Since I stripped my basil plant this morning I've read mixed things about whether flowers effect the flavour of basil leaves. I guess we'll see soon enough!

Square Foot Gardening - Here we go!

I really do enjoy getting out in my garden. I don't mind the physical labour and I love to eat what we grow. I've never really has much success with it before though. I think in part it's because I never put the effort/money into prepping for planting.

When I first moved here I went in whole hog and planted a bunch of herbs, tomatoes and some gardenias. I didn't do anything other than dig a hole and stick the plants in. Now that might work if you have nice soil but I have a layer of mulch, 5 cm of top soil and then rock hard clay!

The cherry tomatoes gave us about three fruit (they'd already flowered before we bought them) before promptly dying. The gardenia's flowered but have never really grown. The herbs have mixed success. Some things like the basil are huge and flourishing, while my oregano and thyme are about a week away from death.

Ever one to learn from my mistakes I asked around and found out I needed to break up the clay for any chance of success. So this time I dug deep holes, spread around a bunch of gypsum and then filled them with compost mix. Better but still not great. If it rains the plants still get water logged because the excess can't drain off through the clay. Plus my capsicums look like this:

I couldn't for the life of me figure out what was going on! New shoots are constantly forming and there are no leaves on the ground. What was eating my capsicum? There are no bugs around and besides bugs tend to eat parts of leaves not chew off whole stems. I ended up blaming the birds. That is until I saw a random cat chasing a random bunny through the yard this morning. Mystery solved. It's time to rabbit proof the fence!

Still I thought there must be a better solution. I remembered reading Square Foot Gardening a couple of years ago. It made sense at the time but I couldn't afford the outlay to set it up.

I did my maths and worked out what I needed. I couldn't find any affordable 1.2 x 1.2m raised beds, but I did find these .97 x. 97 ones instead. At two for $19 they were the most cost effective solution I could find.

When it came to making Mel's mix it wasn't just as easy as popping down to my local Masters/Bunnings and picking up some giant bags of vermiculite and peat moss. They only had tiny bags and it would have cost a fortune. I found a 100l bag of vermiculite on eBay. I couldn't find an economical way to buy peat moss and it's a non-renewable product. Subsequently I decided to substitute with coir instead which people say gives just as good results (finger's crossed).

It ended up being about 300l that I was trying to mix together on my tarp. Thank goodness the girls' father came over and saved the day by hauling my tarp all around to mix it up. By my calculations I had enough mix to fill up my two raised beds. I built them, lay fresh mulch all around (we lost a lot in the recent deluge). And then I waited. The photo above was taken at 9.30am and my two beds had just hit full sun. It was officially too hot to be outside.

About midday I had a sudden thought that I should check the depth of my beds. The depth of soil was only 10cm. So I spent about 5 minutes shovelling mix from one bed to the other. It was hot, I managed to get sunburnt from 5 minutes sun exposure.

At 3.30pm the last of the sun was leaving the garden and I had one full garden bed and one half full bed. So much for my maths! It was ok really though as I didn't really have anything to put in the second one yet anyway. I filled up a few pots with left over mix and transplanted some seedlings that had been growing in jiffy pellets.

Three cherry tomato bushes and a coriander plant. I really hope they keep growing. I've been lovingly raising them for a couple of weeks now.

I made the most of my forced inside time by planning out my little garden. The spacings in the picture aren't quite right but it's a handy guide for me to know what I planted where.

About 4.30pm it was cool enough to head out again. As you can see from the picture it's light out but no direct sun on the garden. With some help from Em planted all my seeds and watered them in. I think I might just cry if nothing grows!

The Macklemore Thrift Shop Challenge

Young House Love were holding this awesome little challenge around the Thrift Shop Song. I'd never heard it before but as soon as I did I was hooked!

As I nice way to end out January my sister (check out hers here) and I got our $20 and went Op Shopping wild. :o)

Step #1. Go to a thrift shop with – just as the chorus of the song says – “$20 in your pocket”and take a picture.

Step #2 was to spend your $20 any way you’d like and photograph your spoils.

1. Awesome Beach Bag - $2

2.  Burda Toddler and Baby Magazines

3. Heart Shape Ice cube mould 

4. Simplicity Toddler Patterns

5. My Lock Overlocker magazines

The lovely server was feeling generous and only charged me $2 for the above. I tried to give her more money but she wouldn't take it!

Grand total - $4

The magazines are old and dated but hold some great little treasures like this cute sailing boat and fish

I gave Ava $5 too and she managed to spend hers on a few play item that she tells me are for her Moshi Monster toys.

Step #3. Find one item (or more) referenced in the song and snap a pic.

Tam in an all pink outfit

Me in a Big A$$ Coat (yes it smelt!)

I'd never been Op Shopping with Tam before so it was a fun outing. I hope we get it to do it again sometime, just not in February.

Frugal February

I can't believe that January is gone already. Ava is now back at school and the year is flying by!

My goal for February is to bunker down and save some cash. Bring on Frugal February.

Frugal February is about only spending money on essential things. For us this will be mean no discretionary spending on:

• clothes 
• take-aways
• stuff

I'm going to try and cut my spending in other areas too:

• Halve petrol bill
• Cut grocery bill by $50 a fortnight

There are of course some exceptions and caveats!

• I will still pay all my bills when they fall due
• I will follow through with items I've already committed to buy - like Ava's new violin
• I can spend any gift cards that I have/earn during Feb 
• I can spend money on my vegetable garden as it gives us food but this month the money has to come from my grocery fund instead of play money

The combination of money saving and my intended eBaying blitz should see with my a nice wad of cash at the end of the month which will go straight on the credit card.

While I'm here I might do a quick wrap up of my resolutions went in January.

1. Organise our home -  I started well with this one but typically got less enthused as the month went on. I have got rid of a lot of rubbish I just have to keep on going
2. Build up my garden - My garden continues to be less than average. I've decided to give square foot gardening a go and I've got all the supplies I need.
3. Become Debt Free - I paid off one credit card and destroyed it in January. I didn't get as far ahead as I'd like with the second. This is a long and painful process to undo years of bad decisions. It really motivates me not to let this happen again though.
4. Become healthy - The drugs have kicked in and the migraines have stopped. I feel normal again! Now I just have to figure out how to get off them :o) I've gained 3kg lately so in February I plan on getting back to basics with my diet. It's easier to lose 3kg rather than 30!
5. Finish things I start - I finished several projects in January, I just need to blog about them
6. Sew at least one item a month - I waited all month for overlocker to come back from the shop but they are still waiting on parts to come back. In the end I borrowed my Sister's and achieved my goal by making some underwear for Emily.

February is going to be tough but hopefully some things will stick and become habits. Will you join me?