A New Year, A New Blog

The Road to Ragged Mountain
Originally uploaded by Chris Seufert

Please come on over to SevenWaysSimple.

And a Happy New Year to you, too.

Messy No More

Oooh. I really appreciate this post over at Unclutterer. Simple tips for keeping your home looking good.

Sewing Closet Update

Another good thing about having my sewing machine in a closet is that I can hang things from the built-in racks. It's nice to have a place for strips of fabrics just after they have been pressed.

Refrigerator Storage

I found these flat-bottomed glass bowls at an estate sale years ago, and they are some of my favorite possessions. I put leftovers into them with a plate for a lid, so they are easily stacked. In the background is another clear storage container, which I purchased new. I am a big advocate of clear storage for the refrigerator. If I can easily see what is on hand, I might eat it. If I can't see it, it will probably never get used up.

A Sewing Closet

Three things intersected in the last few weeks that changed my life in a very happy way. The result is, I made a quilt, and I am working on a second one, and having lots of fun at it. First of all, I started on some new medication, which I think has connected some wires in my brain to counteract one aspect of ADD, which was my inability to finish projects. Secondly, I found Amy's blog, which features, among other wonderful things, pictures of her quilts, which have inspired me, like no other quilts, with their simplicity and beauty. And thirdly, I now have this sewing closet. It is messy, and not nice to look at, I know, but that is just the point. When I am done sewing, I just put the chair back across the room, curl up the extension cord, and close the doors.

This is a luxury I have dreamed of for a long, long time. Thank you to Middle Son for vacating the closet, and to Doodook for giving me Grandma's little drop-leaf table. And thank you, God, for orchestrating it all. I am quite thrilled with the outcome.

Inexpensive Storage Boxes

To organize many of our belongings before we moved, I bought these storage boxes from an office supply store for about a dollar apiece. They were not pretty enough for me, so I tried painting them (see box on the right), but that didn't work well, as the paint didn't cover the generic black labeling of the boxes. So one evening I took my stack of mail-order catalogs and cut pictures out of them, sorting the pictures into groups of clippings with similar themes or appealing color combinations. From these collections of harmonious clippings, I then created rectangular collages and stuck them to the ends of each box with clear adhesive paper. Now much prettier, I have these sorts of boxes tucked away in many closets in my new home.

Lighted Shelves

I think it was on the television program called Neat that the host suggested adding pretty lights as a way to keep shelves in order. She said that when shelves are prettily lit, we are less likely to allow clutter to gather. I added some Christmas lights to my shelves. The picture doesn't begin to capture it, but they really do look festive in person, and I really have kept my shelves more orderly since putting the strings of lights up. (It also makes the pantry a kind of beautiful wonderland for little children.)

Combatting Kitchen Messiness

I don't seem to be able to overcome my inherent messiness, so I try to keep things as organized as possible to combat it. One thing which has been helpful is to keep my ingredients for cooking in these canisters. In the ones with baking ingredients, which are all stored in a designated baking cupboard, I also keep measuring spoons or cups, which suit the recipes I most frequently use. The sugar canister, for instance, has a 1/3 cup measure in it, because I use sugar the most frequently for making muffins, and that recipe calls for 1/3 cup. Most of my measuring cups and spoons are from estate sales, where I paid very little for them. The salt container, however, has an adjustable measuring spoon, since the amount of salt required varies so much from recipe to recipe.

I find I like to prepare food much more when I don't have to add hunting to the required activities.

Can Storage

FarmBoy and I had lots of fun designing (mostly me) and building (mostly him) this system for storing our canned foods. We needed some inexpensive way to provide storage in the skinny place behind the two doors of our pantry. (The door you see in the photo below leads to the garage, and the door into the house is opposite.) I stewed for some time on what to do, until one day I jumped up, grabbed a can of beans, and set them, sideways, on the drapery rod above the kitchen sliding glass door. I realized then that what I needed was sort of a wall of parallel drapery rods. FarmBoy and I headed off to the hardware store without really knowing what we would ultimately use for the project. What we ended up with were conduit rods, which are ten feet long (he sawed them to fit) and these large hooks that you see , which he screwed into the wall studs, a couple of inches deep.

The wall holds over a hundred cans now, and the project cost less than fifty dollars to make. It's been up for a couple of years and so far, so good.