Educated Guessing

About a month and a half ago, I did a craft with some kids and used toilet paper cardboard rolls. I gathered all the ones I had saved up in our house at the time and brought them to be used. The kids had a lot of fun with our project and I had no more toilet paper cardboard rolls at our house. I always save them because we use them for various purposes around the house.

• DIY firestarters by filling them with dryer lint
• trash can tampers
• plant seedling starters
• craft uses

After the craft I did with the kids, we started over from zero. This week out of curiosity, I counted how many we had - 5. 

There's one more in a different bathroom.

 
Now in the last approximately 45 days, I didn't make any DIY firestarters, I didn't make any plant seedling starters, and I haven't done any more crafts. If I used any as trash can tampers, I wouldn't know anymore because they get trashed after pushing the trash down. My guess is we used at least 1-2 to tamp down the bathroom trash.

Using my best educated guessing, I'd guess in the last month and a half, we used the 5 rolls of toilet paper which I have cardboard rolls from, 2 rolls for tamping trash, and maybe another 2 rolls for margin of error.  That would put our toilet paper usage at approximately 9 rolls of toilet paper in the last 45 days. 

I don't think most people know how fast their toilet paper gets used. I really didn't until I did some math just now. The only other way people know how fast their toilet paper gets used is if they realize they're buying it very quickly. This happened to me in college when my roommate and I seemed to be going through a roll of toiler paper per day. It wasn't me...

Something that's always been in the back of my mind has been how much daily living essentials cost us. Food is food and calculating it is kind of irrelevant because when we're hungry, we're going to need to eat. Whether that comes from our refrigerator, freezer, pantry, or in the form of takeout, I'm not going to deny hunger requests. Food and groceries are rather easy to calculate because we buy them frequently.

I'm talking about the daily living essentials like toiler paper,  toothpaste, shampoo, conditioner, body wash, face cleanser. How long do these actually last us and how much are we spending on them? 

I used to see the price of an expensive face cream and scoff a bit because it cost so much. Now that I'm older, Ive begun justifying buying these because I know they last a long time. I was gifted a face moisturizer for my birthday a few years back and I used it for at least six months if I remember correctly. Sure, the upfront cost seems steep, but when you calculate it out for how long it lasts, you end up at around a quarter per day. I can justify that. 

Anyone else out there actually think about these things?  

The Blue Paste

I wanted to take a break from posting food this week to talk about something else just as important: cleaning! With the amount of cooking that happens, even if just 1-2 days a week, the kitchen sure gets pretty grimy. 

This is probably worse than normal from a batch cooking last December, but on any given week, our stove resembles this grease-splattered mess at least once. Stove messes are a catalyst for other messes because anything left on the stove will transfer to the bottom of my pans the next time I cook without wiping it down. 

I recently saw a cleaning paste made with three ingredients which I already had at home: hydrogen peroxide, dish soap, and baking soda. The recipe is written in a 2:1:1 ratio so I used:

1/2 cup hydrogen peroxide

1/4 cup dish soap

1/4 cup baking soda

Our dish soap is the blue Dawn dish soap, but if you wanted an all-natural alternative, I'm sure it could work just as well. 

This paste is my go-to for everything non-porous now. I use it on our stove top. I use it to clean our kitchen sink. I've even cleaned bathroom sinks with it. I should try cleaning the shower with it, too, but I haven't gotten that far. I love baking soda as a natural no-scratch abrasive. Our stove looks brand new after I use this cleaner on it.

There was a house for sale on our street a few years ago, and we went to the open house. Her stove was pristine. I want our stove to look like that whenever the time comes for us to move (or die). 

Our kitchen sink is another super gross spot which needs a deep clean about once every 1-2 months. I try my best to always rinse the food into the strainer so it doesn't sit in parts of the sink, but alas, the sink always manages to get dirty. This cleaning solution has made it much faster and easier than ever to clean my sink and the wire grate.

Would you believe me if I said it took less than 10 minutes to clean my sink?

Do you know what tool I like best to clean the sink with? A bottle brush! It's the only tool that's both flexible and strong enough to clean between all those little grates in my wire stand. I love having one of these so my dishes don't have to sit on the bottom of the sink with all the food gunk, but cleaning it sure can be a hassle. You'll still find me in the baby aisle at Walmart to buy the occasional bottle brush replacement....to clean my kitchen sink! 

If you're ever at our house and you see a jar of blue stuff sitting on the ledge above our sink with a pair of disposable chopsticks lying across the lid, that's the magical jar of paste that cleans all my non-porous surfaces and restores them to like-new. 😄

Two Decades of Grey: CVS

I still remember the first time I dyed my hair. I had gotten a temporary one to start because the chemicals are less strong and I wanted to get my feet wet in the art of hair color. I remember getting out of the shower and wringing my hair out in my towel. Bits of color came off onto the towel as I dried my hair, but that was to be expected as it was temporary color. Also, who knows how well I actually rinsed off my hair. I tried. Later, I learned this happens after any kind of coloring. I learned to have designated black t-shirts to dry my hair that first wash. 

When I looked in the mirror, I saw a sea of black hair again, a uniform color with no imperfections. It felt normal. It looked normal. It looked good. And I knew from that moment, I wanted to see my hair colored for as long as I could help it. 

**

I need to insert a caveat here. Had I been 18 years old with the amount of grey hair I had, my opinions may have been different. Had I been 21 years old with the amount of grey hair I had, I may have felt differently. Had I been 25+ years old with the amount of grey hair I had, perhaps I would have done things differently. But I wasn't 25, 21, or even 18. I was 15, in the heart of high school, surrounded by a false impression of the way things "should" have been. And I had already endured at least two years of knowing the extent of what I had and how "abrnomal" it felt. After all, someone actually thought it was more likely for me to have bow hair in my hair at a grocery store...

**

So when I saw my hair colored dark and black, I felt like the teenager I wished I could be. I felt like a person I wanted to be but could not by nature. So I kept it up for the next 16 years. For the first 10 or so, I was dyeing my hair every five weeks to cover the roots, and I always did it myself. I can count the number of times I paid for hair color at the salon on one hand. 

In college, my roommates never knew I dyed my hair for the first two years. My freshman roommate was hardly ever in our room. She'd come back late after I had already fallen asleep most nights and left in the mornings before I awoke. It was easy to color my hair without her knowing and I never had a reason to tell her. During my sophomore year, I'd wake up early on Saturday mornings to dye my hair. My roommate would be asleep, and not many people were awake so I'd have the community bathroom to myself for the most part. It wasn't until my third and final year of college when I moved into an apartment and shared a bathroom with my roommate when I finally shared about my hair dye.  

During those college years, CVS was the place I bought my hair color. I was just using cheap drugstore ammonia-free hair color. Probably not the best thing in the world for my hair, but it was easily accessible and matched my frugal student budget. I could walk across campus, cross the street, and get to CVS. I even looked up the weekly sales online so I knew when the hair color was on sale. 2 boxes for $5. The same hair color is now $3.97 online and the days of 2 for $5 are long gone.

Good ol' CVS.

I have a memory at CVS during one of these shopping trips which I'll never forget. I ran into a boy I'd met through a friend from back home. We hadn't spoken to each other in at least a year. He was just an acquaintance, but he recognized me in the checkout line. As my items were being rang up, he asked me, "Wow, you dye your hair?" I was horrified. Not only had I run into someone I knew, but it was in one of my more vulnerable moments with a secret I had only verbalized to a select few people. 

It was in that moment when the cashier saved me. I was too stunned to speak and my face probably showed everything racing through my mind. But I'll never forget her response. 

You should never ask a girl if she dyes her hair.

At the time, I quickly paid for my things and left the CVS. I don't remember saying anything after hearing that boy ask me such a penetrating question. I don't remember what the cashier at CVS looks like. I only remember feeling like I had to get out of there as fast as I possibly could. 

The older I got, the more I realized how protective her statement was. I so wish I could have remembered the name on her tag or her face, or even the color of her hair. But I don't. I only remember her words, and they will stay with me forever.

This was the first of a few select moments in which I felt supported, protected, and affirmed. As unfortunate as the start of this was from my dad's response that very first conversation we had, there've been many moments which have helped to bring me to the place I am today. Perhaps this was all orchestrated from the beginning to play out in this very way. 

I just never knew it until I lived through it. 

Another Cabinet

We started the year with a project again. It's no surprise, we did the same thing last year. Although this year's project didn't involve any cleaning out, it was motivated by organization and storage.

Since we remodeled our bathroom in 2017, we've had a little niche in the bathroom. Originally, we had a massive storage cabinet and a tiny shower. When we remodeled, we enlarged the shower and stole some space from the original cabinet. We did not put a cabinet back, and instead, were left with this niche. 

It had strange dimensions. 96 inches tall. 24 inches deep. 20 inches wide. For the last six and a half years, we put a shelf in the space, but it didn't fit well, left a lot of unused space on top, and a lot of unused space on the sides. I would always go on random rabbit trails online looking for shelves or cabinets we could use to fill the space. Last winter, we finally committed.

We found a tall, narrow pantry cabinet which had the closest dimensions to our space: 96 x 24 x 18.

Moving this box into our bathroom took some skill.

The actual installation of the cabinet itself was rather quick. The problem was the details. We had a six inch gap at the top and a two inch gap on the sides. The goal was to make this cabinet look built-in, like it belonged perfectly in the space. 

Test-fitting the cabinet. 

As a result, we needed to fill the side, cover it in trim, and somehow figure out a way to fill the gap at the top of the cabinet. We brainstormed ideas to "crown" the top in trim, build an insert to fill the space, or somehow extending the top of the cabinet. In the end, we ended up using a genius trick to fill the space: raise the cabinet up from the bottom. 

We had some existing wood in our garage which hadn't been thrown out during last year's purge for the lift. My husband built a box for the cabinet to sit on and secured the entire cabinet on top of the box.

Much smaller gap, and I painted. We added three extra shelves because the unit
originally came with two. We can now maximize that space in storage.

My husband really detests painting. I've done all our DIY painting projects we've ever done. The only thing he painted was our master bathroom vanity cabinets. I was pregnant at the time so he primed and painted those. The rest? All me, now including this cabinet and three additional shelves we added. 

We added some hardware, reattached the doors, and voila! A built-in cabinet in an awkward space. You'd never know it wasn't planned to be there in the first place. The best (and most ironic) part was about a day after this cabinet was installed, I'd already "forgotten" about it. It blends in seamlessly into the rest of our bathroom and stores a ton of our extra towels and toiletries.

Child Logic

I didn't get to enjoy my daughter when she was three years old. Unfortunately (or fortunately) I had a one year old also, so life was very busy. I don't remember if she did cute, quirky things. She probably did. She probably also had the unreasonable toddler logic which all parents experience at some point or another. 

Now that my youngest is three, I've had the time and energy to pay attention to him and notice all of his quirks and complications, both cute and annoying. I do enjoy the time when I get to take him around with me by himself and although it's not intentional one on one time, I do enjoy it differently than taking both my children out. 

Last week, we had finished our homework time in the car and big sister was in school. He and I went to get gas for the car and then I asked him where he wanted to go. His choices were Lowe's or Walmart. He giggled from the backseat and mumbled something, but he didn't really give me an answer. So I kept driving. Both locations were pretty close to each other. When I was nearing a fork in the directions, I asked him again where he wanted to go. Again, he giggled and mumbled something I couldn't make out. I told him I would decide and made the executive decision to go to Lowe's.

Now, it's January. It's not planting season. We didn't need anything from Lowe's. But I chose Lowe's anyway because it had been a while since I'd gone. Also, their restrooms are cleaner and the stalls are larger. One of the things we do while waiting to pick up his sister is find a place for both of us to use the restroom. Small perk and hassle of being potty trained, but I'll take it. So Lowe's it was. 

I pulled into the parking lot, parked the car, and opened his door. Immediately, I saw he was about to lose it:frowny mouth, sad eyes, with that I'm-about-to-burst-out-crying face. I asked him what was wrong, and asked him if he didn't want to go to Lowe's. He shook his head. I sighed and told him we'd go to Walmart. It was not worth a fit over literally nothing. So I got back in the car, left the Lowe's parking lot, and was on my way to Walmart. 

About halfway there, a couple minutes after we'd left Lowe's, I saw he had calmed down and was in a better mood. I asked him, "Why didn't you want to go to Lowe's?"

You know what he told me? He didn't want to see the spooky. The. Spooky. That wasn't even at Lowe's anymore because it was January and Halloween was long over. 

The spooky at Lowe's when they actually had it set up.
One of my children loves the spooky and the other doesn't care for it. 

I was relieved he had given me a reason why he didn't want to go to Lowe's, but I was also internally face-palming at his logic. After we'd parked at Walmart, I told him that the spooky was no longer at Lowe's and they'd put it away. I asked him if we could go to Lowe's next time. He nodded his head. Then we headed into Walmart for our normal routine of hitting up the potty and the clearance aisle together. 

Storage 101: Drawer Tetris

This is part 3 in my organization series Storage 101. If this is your first time reading, you can catch up on the other parts here: 1 2 

We organized drawers in two areas of our house: the kitchen and our master bathroom. 

As mentioned in a the previous blog of this series, my goal was never to have Instagram-worthy photos of beautifully color-coordinated drawers with neatly organized items. I don't believe that is real life. Sometimes, by coincidence, it happens in small quantities. My goal is to create an organized space that is easy to use where none of the items catch when opening or closing the drawer. 

We also did not organize every single drawer in either of these spaces. That was never the goal either. I wanted to organize the drawers which were used the most and with which I was most dissatisfied. This being said, we still have drawers full of random "stuff." I don't have a problem with that because those drawers are not used as frequently and therefore, do not dissatisfy me nearly as much. 

So here's what we did: 

Kitchen:

We organized four drawers in our kitchen. Two of the drawers are for kitchen utensils. One is for eating utensils and the other is for prepping and cooking utensils. The other two drawers are for office supplies. 

Once again, one of the first things I did was measure. I measured drawers. I measured utensils. I measured measuring tapes. There was a lot of measuring. One of the things that organizing companies can do is they buy all sorts of storage sizes and see what works best with the space during the actual install. I...don't exactly have this luxury, so I have to do a lot of pre-work beforehand or risk making multiple trips to the store which is not something I can afford to do right now. 

Then I played around with the storage organizers and looked at what items fit best in each container and basically played tetris. Our original utensil organizer moved to our bathroom and became a drawer organizer there when we moved to the house. We bought a larger utensil organizer for the house. With this reorganization, the larger utensil organizer became the kitchen gadget utensil organizer and the original utensil organizer came back to the kitchen and was reinstated as the utensil organizer.

This utensil organizer was my bathroom drawer organizer for a while
until it came back as the utensil organizer

The utensil holder we bought for the house when we moved in
has now become the gadget utensil drawer.

That spool of string is....22-24 years old. That pencil box is also about 25 years old.
My NASA ruler is at least 20 years old. Who says old stuff has to be replaced?

In our office supply drawer, I am still using small cardboard boxes as drawer organizers because they don't all have to be fancy or match if you don't want them to or can't afford it. The smaller purple one is one half of an old card box. I find that size and depth is great for organizing knickknacks.

Bathroom: 

This drawer was originally organized
using the utensil organizer. I think it looks
much better this way. 

The bathroom was more or less the same process. My original drawer which used the utensil organizer was replaced with rectangular organizers of various sizes. I was able to organize a second drawer as well which used to have no organization and has now turned into my favorite bathroom drawer. One advantage to using smaller containers rather than putting lots of items in a larger container is the items stay put rather than slosh around as you open and close the drawer.

It’s so fulfilling to be able to open a drawer, get exactly what you need, and close it again without displacing the other contents by laws of physics. 

If bathroom drawers had favorites,
this would be mine.

If Clea and Joanna saw the way I organized my nail polish, they’d probably cringe and die a little on the inside. But here’s why I chose to do it this way:

1. It saves space  

2. I don’t have that many so I know all my colors by the tops of the bottles.

They would probably recommend storing them in a way where you can view the bottle from the front instead of from the top. Aesthetically, it looks better, and you can create their quintessential color-coordinated look. However, that wasn’t conducive to my space because I wanted efficient, convenient storage. As mentioned before, this works for me because I only have 13 bottles of nail polish. 

I bought these containers from Amazon and reused some other ones in various drawers because that was the cheapest way to do it. However, buying from Amazon always involves a bit of risk because you can’t see what the actual product is like until it arrives at your house. And although they have a pretty good return policy, it is time consuming and does involve dropping it off and waiting for your refund. 

One thing I discovered is the containers I bought are not straight down the sides. They taper inwards so the bottom dimensions are smaller than the top dimensions. This made storing some things slightly frustrating because despite measuring, I didn’t account for tapering. 

These are the small details on why one container can cost $1 a unit and the very same size and material will cost you $6 a unit elsewhere. Some of the drawer organizers I bought came with metal feet which gave the container a more weighted, sturdy feel. Others felt like I could snap them in half if I handled them improperly. 

All containers are not created equal. Shop smart. 

Stay tuned for next time: The Master Closet