EDIT – just discovered the fitness and food sections on Pinterest.  I might have to up my time limit from five minutes to fifteen.

I have been purposely avoiding Pinterest for quite some time.  From what I had heard, I knew that it could be the sort of site that could suck me in and turn into a major time waster, so I just avoiding going there in the first place.  I don’t remember what convinced me to finally go check it out a few weeks ago, but I did.  And sure enough, half an hour later I was still browsing around.  Damn you, Pinterest.

I loved looking at wide-open, clutter-free rooms and clean kitchen counters.  I got some good ideas for food storage, toy storage and garage organization.  And seeing all of those neat spaces inspired me to get up and clean my own kitchen.  So I did.  After half an hour on Pinterest, I spent the next half hour making my kitchen sparkle and (sort of) look like the immaculate, minimalist kitchens that I had been eyeballing online.

But the next time I went to Pinterest, I found myself looking at all sorts of other stuff – crafty things like altered t-shirt dresses and refinished furniture and handmade birthday wall hangings.  They all looked cute and crafty, but – yikes!  I was over-inspired.  If that’s not already a word, I’m coining it now.  Inspiration is a great thing – if we put it to use and it makes our life (or someone else’s) better.  But over-inspiration seems like it could just lead to… nothing at all except more browsing around online once our crafty DIY to-do list gets too long and becomes paralyzing.

Simplicity is awesome.  But sometimes we tackle a DIY project in the name of simplicity and it ends up being way more complicated, time-consuming, and expensive (and maybe not as enjoyable) as we had planned.  If it’s something you truly love doing, then by all means – do it.  But if you’re forcing yourself to do crafty things because you think you should or because your friends are doing it, or because (fill in the blank)… you might want to ask whether you’d be better off without it in the first place, or looking on Craigslist or at a thrift store to see if you can find a used version of whatever it is.  If you love quilting, make a quilt.  If you just think you want to love quilting but actually hate it, go buy a quilt at a garage sale – if you actually need a quilt (that post is worth reading no matter what you think about quilts – and it’s funny!).  Otherwise, carry on without a quilt.

I’ve been back to Pinterest a few times since then.  I set a five minute time limit for myself, which keeps me from browsing around for ages (Why is it that time goes by so fast when we’re online?  Why does it not go by that fast when we’re stuck in traffic?  Questions to ponder…).  And I focus on areas that can help me organize and simplify the life I already have/want.  For example, I’m looking for good ways to organize toys in our playroom.  We don’t have any furniture or shelving in there, so everything is on the floor.  There has to be a better way.  And of course, knowing me, it will have to be something I can buy used that won’t cost a lot of money.

But the problem with browsing around and looking at toy storage ideas is that it can easily lead to browsing around and looking at all sorts of other home improvements.  Which can lead to jealousy or a desire to upgrade things that really don’t need to be upgraded.  As an example – my kitchen is fine.  It’s clean and orderly (and no longer contains a yeast packet that expired 8 years ago).  My counters are clear (well, most of the time anyway) and I have ample space to work.  My counters are laminate and my cabinets are plain light-colored wood.  My stove has metal coil burners, and while I prefered the glass-top stove that we put in our old house, the one I have now works just fine.  Nothing in my kitchen is fancy, but I’m able to cook all sorts of awesome food there, and everything works just the way it should.  I could spend a ton of money making my kitchen look like something from a magazine.  Or I could spend a ton of hours replacing the fronts of my cabinet doors with old barn wood and painting our dining room table to give it a crafty “distressed” look.  But I’m not going to.  Because I would rather spend that money and time doing something else.

So while I think it’s awesome to see all the crafty, amazing things people have done on sites like Pinterest and BetterAfter, I think it’s just as important to remind ourselves to be grateful for what we have and to allow ourselves to stop improving when everything is fine the way it is.  So instead of browsing Craigslist to find a dresser that I can turn into a craft storage area, I’ll read this post and remind myself that my house feels much better with less furniture in it – even if it’s impossibly cute, crafty furniture.  And I’ll keep getting rid of clutter instead of trying to organize it. And I’ll find some second-hand shelves that will work just fine to store toys in the playroom.  They probably won’t be amazing or worthy of being featured on a home-improvement website, but they will get the toys up off the floor, and that’s really all that I’m looking for.

I know a lot of my readers are big DIYers and into crafty stuff.  So tell me.  Do sites like Pinterest inspire you?  Or do they just make you look around at your own stuff and feel like you need to change/upgrade everything in sight?

As an aside, I found this cookie recipe yesterday on Pinterest.  They are amazing.  They took five minutes.  And our son loved squishing them with a fork to make the lines on them.  I subbed walnuts instead of peanuts and used sunflower seed butter instead of peanut butter, because that’s what we had on hand.  They turned out fantastic.

Last week we got a sale flyer in the mail from Lowes.  The front page has a big picture of a beautiful wall that is made entirely of huge windows, with the words “never stop improving.”  As far as life lessons go, that’s a good reminder.  But context matters.  When it comes to ourselves, our empathy for others, our health, our relationships, etc., I can definitely get on board with the idea that we should never stop improving.  We can strive to be better people, to take better care of ourselves and the people we love, to be more patient, to learn new ideas and skills – there are always ways that we can improve ourselves and the world around us.  That’s what makes life so awesome.

But when “improving” is used in the context of “home improvement”, I think it’s perfectly ok – and probably preferable – to be content with what we have rather than constantly seek to improve.  I would also say that applies to any other physical possession (cars, clothing, toys, technology, etc.).  It’s very easy to get caught up in the idea that we should always be upgrading our physical surroundings.  Getting a nicer car, buying new clothes even if the ones we have are still perfectly good, or replacing counters and floors and sinks just because the ones we have no longer look like the ones in the current magazines and home improvement stores.

There’s nothing wrong with home improvement.  We’re currently in the middle of finishing our basement, which is definitely improving the usefulness of our home.  Instead of a big concrete cave downstairs, we’re going to have functional rooms.  We’re excited about that.  But the rest of our house will stay largely as it is until if and when something is no longer functional.  Maintenance on a house is of course an on-going project – there’s always something that needs to be repaired, however minor it might be.  But the idea of “never stop improving” in the context of home improvement was likely written with more in mind than just encouraging people to re-caulk their windows.

The problem with “never stop improving” when it comes to physical possessions is that it’s easy to get trapped in a cycle of constantly needing to buy the newest gadget, jacket, car, sink, etc.  Unlike personal improvement (say, for example, adding a walk around the neighborhood to your evening routine, or taking specific steps to be kinder in your interactions with other people), buying things rarely provides long-term improvement in our happiness

I say rarely because some purchases do indeed add to our overall satisfaction with life.  My VitaMix, the cordless drill we recently bought, our house… those are all examples of things that I’m really glad we have.  But things like that add to the value of our lives without having to be constantly upgraded or improved.  For each of us, there will be different items that fall into that category.  I’ve been using my VitaMix several times a day for more than three years now, and it’s hard to imagine my kitchen and food prep routines without it.  Yet other families might be entirely uninterested in having one and find very little use in it.  The key is to direct your purchasing power towards things that will actually provide benefit to you (in whatever way you define that, since we’re all different), rather than the things that are simply the newest style or current gizmo.

I’m not saying that we have to ignore marketing or shun buying things.  Just that we should be conscious of our thought processes when we feel like we want something new.  Do we really want it, or are we being convinced that we want it?  Will it really improve our lives, or will we be left with an empty feeling a few days/weeks/months down the road, and need to buy something else to get that same good feeling again?

As for home improvement, do what makes you happy (assuming you can afford it).  But please don’t feel like you should be constantly upgrading your home to look like the current magazines.  That’s a never-ending process, because they keep moving the goal.  Instead of constantly changing the structure of your home, you might find it more useful to focus on keeping it clean and clutter-free.  I’m looking around our kitchen right now and I see lots of stuff on the counters.  I know that I love the look of the kitchen when there’s nothing on the counters, so as soon as I finish typing this, I’m going to tackle the counters and clear them off.  I know from experience that it will make my kitchen look fresh and new, and it’s a lot less expensive than a new tile back splash.

On that note, here are a couple of blogs that I’ve recently discovered that can provide some motivation and inspiration if you want a clean, clutter-free space.  Declutter Daily and Minimalist Mommi.  Go check them out.  I promise you’ll want to clean your counters too.  And that part about not needing a new tile backs plash?  Totally true.  Clear off the junk, scrub the grout on the tiles that are already there (or whatever you have), and all will be well with the world.

For the past several weeks, my husband has been spending his weekends building stud walls in our basement.  He’s making great progress and should be finished in plenty of time for our framing inspection (it has to be completed by the end of the year).

Building stud walls means lots of 2×4 offcuts.  They were starting to stack up in the basement, and we had planned to give them to my parents to use as firewood.  Then one day our son was down there with us and started stacking them up to make a house.  He was having so much fun with them that we filled an old Rubbermaid storage container with offcuts and brought it upstairs.

For two weeks now, that bin has been sitting in our dining room.  And every day our son empties it out and builds all sorts of awesome stuff with the chunks of wood.  He makes houses, cities, castles, porches, roads… it’s pretty much endless fun.

These blocks are easy for him to pick up by himself at the end of the day and put back into the container.  They don’t end up under the couch or in our shoes like their miniature cousins.  And he absolutely loves playing with them.

If you have small children and a construction project going on, a box full of offcuts is a great free toy.  If you don’t have your own walls to build, check the free section on Craigslist.  There are always people giving away scrap lumber, and you could just chop it up into child sized pieces. 

My apologies for the dust on the blog lately.  Our baby is due in just over two weeks (and our son came ten days early…) and we’re in a mad dash to try to get all of the loose ends tied up on the various projects we have going on.  We’ve been spending every weekend and a lot of our evenings lately working on our backyard shed, which we have nearly finished transforming into an office.  In January, we had a 10 x 12 Tuff Shed installed.  Then we added additional studs inside so that we’d be able to finish it with drywall, and insulated the whole thing.  We drywalled the interior (including a vaulted ceiling with exposed rafters… it was slow going!), textured the walls and ceiling, and painted everything (we used the same wall color that we used in our bedroom at our old house, and used white for the ceiling and trim).  We went to a local used construction supply store and found used baseboard and wood to make windowsills, and also scored nearly a full roll of flooring underlay while we were there.  We put in laminate cherry wood flooring, and found some great deals at a thrift store and on Craigslist for a used futon, office chair, desk, and lamp.  All that’s left to do is paint the inside of the door, which we’re hoping to do tomorrow.  Whew!  Projects like that always seem to take longer than we think they will, but at least we’re nearly finished.  And now my husband will be able to go to work without having to spend his entire day in the basement, surrounded by concrete walls and no view.

The backyard office is completely solar powered, which we think is pretty awesome.  It’s quite a distance from our house, so running electricity out there from our breaker box would have been a major process anyway.   But we also really liked the idea of using solar power on a small scale, and figured this was the perfect opportunity to try it out.  My husband found all of the various components online, and put it all together with a marine battery to store the electricity.  The battery has to be stored in a sealed container that is vented to the outside (in order to prevent the buildup of hydrogen gas inside the storage container), and he also built a wooden cabinet around the battery/inverter area to keep everything protected and tidy.  He connected it all to a regular light switch, so you can just flip a switch on the wall when you walk in and that turns on the inverter.  The inverter we got is 400 watts, so we can’t run too much stuff out there, but it’s plenty for what we need: a laptop, a couple of lamps with CFLs, and a 250 watt heat light for cold days.  It all works perfectly, and we’re both excited to put the finishing touches on the office so that he can start working out there during the day.

In addition to the shed remodel, we’ve also been getting things going for this year’s garden.  We’ve got two beds of greens planted outside under our cold frames, and they’ve just started to sprout in the last couple days.  We’ve also go 50 tomato seedlings and 25 pepper seedlings started in the house, and they will be going into the hydroponic system within the next week or two.  We’ve been turning over the dirt in our garden beds, and will be adding compost to them soon so that they will be ready for seedlings in May.

Our basement has been on hold while we’ve been working on the shed and the garden, but we’re nearly ready to get back to working on that project too.

So that’s where I’ve been lately.  Combined with running our business and taking care of our son, we’ve been busy bees.  But everything is going well with my pregnancy, and we’re excited about all of our various projects… never a dull moment around here!

Last night, we measured our basement and drew out a rough sketch of how we want it to look once it’s finished.  I got all the information from our town regarding getting a permit, and we’ll be submitting our permit application this week.  We have to provide them with a drawing of the plans, so we’ll be finalizing that soon too.

A permit is going to cost us just over $1/square foot.  For our basement, that’s going to come in somewhere north of $1300.  Ouch.  I’ll admit that it did cross our minds to just proceed without a permit, but we knew that in the long run, it’s better to be on the up-and-up with projects like this.  We’ll make back some of the permit money when we buy supplies for the basement, as we won’t be charged city or county tax on them when we show our permit.  And in general, my husband and I are supporters of regulation and taxation.  We know that our town needs the money it gets from building permits, and although $1300 is a lot of money just to get a piece of paper and some inspections, we don’t really mind paying it.  Having to have each step of the process checked out by inspectors  will be a bit of a pain, but it will also provide peace of mind that everything is done the way it should be.  We’re looking at this sort of the way we looked at incorporation for our business five years ago (and the resulting additional work that comes around each year at tax time):  yes, it was expensive and a bit of a hassle, but it made everything feel much more legitimate, and that pays off in the long run.

Right now, our basement is just one huge room.  Eventually, we’re going to have a large office space, an unfinished pantry, a living room/playroom area, a bathroom, a guest room, and a large workout room.  The basement is currently used for storage of craft supplies, hydroponic/garden supplies, and baby stuff (which is slowly making its way upstairs in preparation for our new little one’s arrival), but mostly as an office for my husband and a place for us to exercise.  So it makes sense that those will be the two largest areas of the finished basement.  We’re planning to do most of the work ourselves, although we’ll likely hire out some things.

It feels good to get going on this project.  We knew when we bought the house that we wanted to finish the basement, but the time and money involved made us put it off for a while.  We’re in no real hurry, and we’ll be working on this project in around our jobs and taking care of our son (and the baby that will arriving soon).  In another few months, garden season will be here again, and we know from last summer’s experience that it will take up a good deal of our time.  In addition, we want to spread out the financial cost associated with finishing the basement.  But for now, we’re taking the first steps, and it feels good.

We’ve been in our home for more than a year and a half now, and have finally decided to tackle the basement.  We kept going back and forth on whether we wanted to put money into the basement now, or wait until we have the mortgage paid off.  Eventually we decided that it would be nice to have the finished space downstairs, even if it means our extra mortgage payments will be reduced for a while.  We’re still making extra mortgage payments, and at our current pace should have the house paid off in 2016.  Once we finish the basement, we should be able to bump up those payments again and hopefully pay off the mortgage in 2015 instead.

Three years ago, when we remodeled the kitchen in our old house, we opened a Home Depot credit card.  We used it to buy supplies for that project, and paid everything off within the no-interest time frame.  Since then, we haven’t used the card, and although we had kept the account open, we had long ago cut up the card.  But we noticed last week when we went to start looking at basement supplies that Home Depot was running another 12 month no interest program on their credit card.  Although we could have taken money out of savings to pay for everything up front, we decided we’d rather take 12 months to pay it off instead, and let our money continue to earn interest during that time instead.  We feel comfortable with no-interest financing deals as long as we do technically have the money on hand to pay off the entire balance  from the get-go.

In addition to all the supplies we were able to fit in our vehicle and trailer, we also ordered flooring for the entire basement, which we’ll be able to go back and pick up on the weekend.  We’re going with click-together laminate flooring again, as we really liked what we installed in our old house, and we’ve been very happy with the Pergo floor in our current dining/kitchen area.  We found a cherry laminate that we both really liked, and we’re really excited to transform our basement floors from concrete to something pretty.  Of course we’ve got a bit of work to do before we get to the floors…

Not only are we starting to work on the basement, we’re also installing a 10 x 12 outbuilding in the corner of our backyard, to give my husband another place to work, outside the house (away from the noise of our soon-to-be pair of children!).  We toyed with the idea of starting from scratch with it, but between running our business, me being seven months pregnant, taking care of a toddler, and beginning work on the basement, we decided to order a pre-fab shed and then just do the finish work ourselves.  We looked at a few places in town that would build us a shed, and found that our best deal was with Home Depot – a bonus, since we were able to put the cost on the HD credit card and can now spread that expense out over the whole year too.  The shed should be in place next Tuesday, and then we can paint it, put in insulation, drywall, interior paint, and the same flooring that we’re using for the basement.

So lots of projects going on around here right now!  When we renovated the kitchen in our old house, I was also seven months pregnant.  Maybe I’m just an extreme nester?  Stay tuned for updates… we’re planning a trip to the Habitat for Humanity Restore soon to look for doors, and we’ll see what other supplies we stumble upon while we’re there.

In addition to our awesome backyard, we also have a really big front yard.  We started getting rid of some of the grass last summer, putting down weed blocking fabric and using a wheelbarrow to spread out existing areas of gravel (happily, the former owners had ordered more than they needed when they put in gravel, and it was 18 inches deep in some areas).  This year, we planted a bunch of tiny trees out front, and we’re babying them along right now.  Hopefully one day we’ll just have a little forest out there, which will provide shade, wind protection, and minimize the amount of watering and mowing that needs to be done.

There is a vast amount of gravel in front of our house (don’t get me wrong, I’d rather have the gravel than grass, since it doesn’t need to be watered or mowed).  It doesn’t seem as vast until you start trying to pull all the weeds out of it.  Over the years, dust has blown into the gravel and made it a great spot for weeds to sprout, and the former owners were pretty much oblivious to them.  We have been pulling weeds all summer out there (our son knows that whenever we go out to get them mail, we have to pull 20 weeds first, and he says “weeds, first” whenever we go out front).  I spent two hours doing nothing but weeding a couple days ago, and I made it through about 1/10 of the gravel.

So I went searching for another solution.  I refuse to buy any sort of commercial herbicide – our property is strictly organic and staying that way.  But I found several articles about vinegar working as an herbicide.  I use vinegar to clean our whole house, so I buy it in gallon jugs at Costco and always have several on hand.  It’s inexpensive, but most importantly, I don’t have to worry about harmful effects – to us or the environment – from using it.  Our son went out with me to help me spray it, which definitely wouldn’t have been possible if we’d been using something created in a lab at Monsanto.

We started with a small patch to see how well it would work.  That was yesterday morning, and when I checked this morning, all the weeds in that area are completely dead.  The weather here has been really hot (nearly 100), sunny, and dry, which is supposed to be the best weather for using vinegar to kill weeds.  Obviously I’m very happy with the results, and will be spraying all the gravel with vinegar over the next few days.  I’ll pull out the bigger weeds that are easy to grab, and spray the small ones.  Hopefully my vinegar herbicide will continue to be successful!

Last weekend a good friend stopped by to visit us.  And she had fantastic shoes.  I wanted some too!  I knew that they would be expensive, but I figured that I could fit them into the budget and after a few months we wouldn’t even remember spending the money.  But then I thought about the furnace upgrade we’re in the middle of doing, and about how we’re working so hard to pay off our mortgage and live debt-free here on our mini farm.  And then I thought about clutter.  That was actually what convinced me that I don’t need those shoes after all.  I’ve recently pared my shoe collection down to a total of 10 pairs, plus winter boots, hiking boots, and snowshoe boots.  That’s down from about 20 pairs that I had before I started purging stuff.  And what I really like – more than a great new pair of shoes – is a nice clean closet without a lot of stuff in it.  I already have two pairs of flip flops and a couple other summer style shoes… I don’t need any more.  All of my current shoes (except running shoes) should easily last for another few years.  And since I don’t want to add to my shoe collection, I really have no reason to be thinking about shoes at all.  There.  See?  I talked myself out of spending $90 and adding something I don’t need to my closet.  Feels good!

Now about that furnace…  That is our big expense of the summer.  Well, that and central air conditioning.  We decided that we wanted to have air conditioning installed after spending a good part of last summer melting.  Our number one criteria for a new system was energy efficiency.  But we soon found out that the efficiency of the air conditioning would be limited by the efficiency of our current furnace, as the two systems are linked together.  Our furnace is only 11 years old – definitely not ancient – but it’s 80% efficient, and has a single stage fan (basically, it’s always blowing at 100% capacity).  So 20% of the energy from the natural gas the furnace burns is venting to the outside, and the fan is drawing more electricity than really needed to keep the house comfortable.  Replacing the furnace with a new 95% efficient, two-stage model would increase the SEER rating on our air conditioner from 13.7 to 16 (thus qualifying it for the federal tax credit).  It would also mean that only 5% of our natural gas consumption would be wasted, as opposed to 20% with our existing furnace.  And the new furnace will use about one fifth of the electricity of the old one for the fan.  We found this website to be very helpful while we were working on our pros/cons list regarding the furnace upgrade.

In addition, there are a boatload of rebates available to help pay for the high-efficiency furnace.  We’ll have to fork over almost $4000 for the furnace and $3000 for the air conditioner, but we’ll end up getting nearly $3000 in rebates from our state, the federal government, our electricity company, our gas company, and from the furnace manufacturer.  We’ll put the old furnace on Craigs List so that someone with an older, less efficient furnace can upgrade theirs too.

Because we’re going to have to pay upfront for everything and then wait for the rebates to come in, we’ll have to skip paying extra on our mortgage in August, and basically not spend money on anything other than food for a couple months.  But we’re ok with that.  The new furnace will make our air conditioner much more efficient, and our heating will be more efficient in the winter too.  Once the rebates and tax credits show up, we’ll only have spent about a thousand dollars more to have the air conditioner and the new furnace than we would have spent to just get the air conditioner.  And if our calculations are correct, the amount we’ll save in natural gas and electricity usage will be about $250/year.  So in four years, the furnace will have paid for itself.  After that, it will start paying us back.

Anybody else made the decision to put in a new, higher efficiency furnace, even when your current furnace was still working just fine?  It wasn’t an easy decision for us, but that’s what we came up with.

Sometime later this year we’d like to start finishing our basement.  For now, it’s just a huge storage area, but we have big plans for it.  Our first financial priority this year is our HSA and our IRAs, but after that, we’re planning to start putting some money into the basement.  We’d like to use as much recycled, reclaimed, and salvaged material as we can for the project.  There are two Habitat for Humanity ReStores in the area, as well as at least two other construction material yards that sell salvaged materials.  In addition, I’ve been watching the free section on Craigs List.

Tonight, I hit the jackpot.

One of our plans for the basement is a workout room.  For now, my husband and I both do our workouts in our bedroom, and our weights are stored under our bed.  It works, but since we have all that space downstairs, a workout room makes sense.  One of the things I wanted for it was big mirrors, as we both feel that mirrors help us maintain our form when we exercise.  But mirrors – especially big ones – are not cheap.  Tonight I found a free listing on Craigs List for two wall mirrors; each one is 3 feet by 8 feet.  I have no idea how much those would cost if we were to buy them new, but I’m sure the price tag would give me shivers.  Happily, all we have to do to get these is drive ten miles into town.  I was the first response the lady had, so they’re ours.

For the last few days, I’ve kept the local Craigs List free page open as a tab on my computer, and I just refresh it every few hours.  As long as you can resist a whole lot of stuff that you might like but don’t really need (since that equals clutter!), it’s a great way to find awesome deals as soon as they get listed.

I don’t particularly like cleaning.  I love to cook, do laundry, work in the garden… but cleaning is pretty far down on my list.  But I love living in a clean house, and having lots of wide open, clean space around me.  And therein lies the conundrum.  Lately I’ve been on a mission to purge stuff from our house, so that it’s easier to clean and less likely to get messed up ( if you don’t have it, you can’t mess it up, right?)  I’ve pretty much stopped going to thrift stores, as there really isn’t anything we need, and thrift stores tend to entice me to buy stuff just because it’s there and it’s a screamin’ deal.  So at least no new stuff is coming into the house.

In addition, I’ve been going through the house and really looking at our stuff.  Asking myself if we’ve used it lately, or if we could do without it.  The back of my car is full again with stuff to drop off at the thrift store next time I go to town, and it feels great.

Yesterday, I tackled a set of kitchen cabinets.  The cabinets where we store tea, coffee, some spices, baking stuff, random kitchen gadgets that rarely get used… sort of the catch-all cabinets.  I took everything out, and tossed the stuff that I never use.  There were spices that were more preservatives than spice – and that I knew I would never use again – but were somehow still lurking in the back of my cabinet.  There was a beautiful glass pitcher that we got as a wedding gift from friends of my in-laws and have used one time.  One time, and we’ve been married since 2003.  Regardless of how pretty the pitcher was, in our kitchen, it was taking up space.  Now it’s in my car to donate, and will hopefully end up in a home where it gets used often.  By the time I had finished, I had a large stack for the thrift store, and an equally large stack for the trash.  And my cabinet looks and feels SO much better.  I can find everything.  I know that everything in there is stuff that we regularly use.

A while ago, I started saving plain glass jars when they were empty, instead of putting them in the recycle bin.  Yesterday I cleaned off all of the labels, and transferred all of the stuff that was in plastic bags in my cabinet to the jars.  Cocoa, dried coconut, spices… all of the stuff that our health food store sells in bulk bags.  Now it’s all in pretty jars instead.  I made labels out of scrap paper and black ink and glued them to the jars.  I love how it looks with all the different jars, and it’s easy to tell if I’m running low on something.  And with the cabinet all cleaned out, I can see all of the jars at a glance.

Ah, kitchen decluttering.  Perfect activity for a cold, snowy weekend.  And it’s free, which is always a bonus in my book.