New Beginnings

Living room before I started

New Year's is of course about making resolutions. I'm not much for that, most of us will start off well and peter out before the end of the month. However I am taking advantage of the new year for a new beginning. There are so many things that I want to accomplish in my life over the next 5 years and to be able to do them I must be much more organized!

So here is what the living room was looking like the past week, leftovers from Christmas and things I brought home from cleaning out a store room at my moms. Yes, that is a drill press ;=0.

Living room after one 15 minute session.

So I did one 15 minute session and here is the result. Those little wall cabinets will eventually go in the studio to hold various small things. I think I will glue cork over the fronts so they can double as a bulletin board.

Living Room after a second 15 minute session

My second 15 minute session included transferring all of my seeds from a big plastic tub into the little storage table. Now I can get rid of the tub!

That space behind the storage table in this last picture is where my grow light set up will go. Since the living room is the warmest room in the house, this is where I start my seeds. When they are bigger then they go in the bedroom where it is a little cooler.

Make Do

The big crack around the back door

I have a great tendency to make do or do without. Sometimes of course I'm just procrastinating!

A long time back I got my new to me back door hung, but I never got back around to doing the rest of the work, like fixing the trim boards and putting in the doorstops and weather stripping.

I complained in my last post how cold my kitchen is, well a big part of that is the big draft from the crack around the door. So I finally decided to do something about it. I didn't really have what I needed to fix it properly so I scrounged around and thought about what i could fill up the crack with.

Big crack filled in

I just took some plastic grocery bags and stuff them in the crack around the door. That really helped stop the draft and it kept the kitchen at least 5 degrees warmer last night.

I know my younger daughter will call it "okie-fied" and it's ugly but it will do until I figure out what I need to do with it to fix it permanently. Took me less than five minutes! Why did I wait so long?

Gift Guides and Winter Weather

Snow in the garden, Dec 5, 2011

Well, it snowed the first weekend of Dec and even now a week later there is still some snow on the ground and ice on my front steps.

With winter weather comes new chores, like bringing in wood, making fires and cleaning out the stove.

I've not been keeping up with the house well at all because it's so cold. My kitchen has been 38-40 degrees at night. It's warmer inside my refrigerator!

I have been writing lots of new articles over on Squidoo, especially gift guides so if you are looking for gifts you might want to check these out:

Best Gifts for the Gardener-Cook has a lot of ideas for the folks on your list that grow their own food and preserve the harvest.

All Occasion Gifts for Artists has some different ideas for what the artists in your life might like since most people don't know what to get as far as art supplies go, this concentrates on other things artists could use.

 Gifts for Organic Gardeners has a lot of different gifts for the gardener in your life, not just seeds or tools!