31 Days of Pinterest Projects - Day 18 - Laundry Hamper Switcheroo

Slight problem. Our hamper doesn't fit real great in our new bathroom. It is righinsidethedoor and if it gets bumped it can even block the door from moving. Grrr... Also, it sits right in front of Dave's towel when it is hanging on the towel bar. Annoying.

Essentially, this hamper is just another one of those things that worked great at our old house but didn't translate well to the new place.

 And it is rotting. Yes, rotting.

We bought this elite hamper to replace our basic plastic one that had worked for years and years for a whopping $49.99 from Tar-jay about one year ago and it is rotting. It is worthless. Really wish I had my $49.99 back. It doesn't breathe well and so all the moist towels and clothes inside just sit in there and rot out the press board bottom until laundry day. Every week. This is what it looks like currently underneath the cute lining.

Yuck. Ew. I don't really want my clothes touching that. Even if there is a cute lining in between.

So one day on Pinterest I saw this:

Amazon

And I thought, "I want that!" But I clicked over to Amazon and realized I'd have to fork over an entire Ben Franklin for it.

Then today in the checkout line at Wally World I saw this puppy for just $2.97.

And I thought, why don't I take this and the other pop up hamper we already own but aren't using, set them inside our large vanity cabinets and pretend they're pull-out or tilt-out hampers? It will be a great use of all the space inside those cabinets that we currently aren't even utilizing.

The best part was I can save myself the $97. Sure, pull-outs are fabulous. But so is having an extra Ben Franklin lying around.

Here's our latest solution in action:

The other plus is that now the laundry is already sorted by color as we put it in here - lights in one, darks in the other, as opposed to when I had to take the whole hamper to the laundry room and then sort out the clothes. Should make laundry days easier. And I'll be able to carry half our laundry at a time eliminating back strain from that heavy hamper that held it all!

So what do you guys think? Where do you keep your dirty clothes till laundry day? I know some people have a hamper in their bedroom or closet but we like keeping ours in the bathroom.

For the rest of the 31 Days of Pinterest Projects series, click here.

31 Days of Pinterest Projects - Day 11 (a bit late, on Day 12!) - Shoe Organizer

For the last three years I've had only two, maybe three, pairs of shoes at a time. So, when the opportunity came to help my mother organize her shoe cabinet, I was thrilled, because I came home with at least ten new pairs of shoes that she no longer wanted. Woohoo!!!!! But blessings do sometimes come at a price. And while the floor space on my side of the closet used to accommodate my one pair of tennis shoes and one pair of black heels quite nicely, now it looks like this. Ahhh!!!!

I hate it. It's a nightmare to find the matching shoes and this massive pile gets jumbled up everyday by my two year old who now thinks the most fun thing in the world is to put on my shoes and dash out the patio door, hoping I won't notice him escaping.

So we were at Big Lots and found a four tiered shoe rack for just $10 and I could not pass it up. I had considering getting one from the Container Store but I think the one I wanted there was at least $20. It was super easy to assemble and it will hold up to 12 pairs of shoes. 

Now check out my side of the closet! Does anyone else's blood pressure lower just scrolling down to this photo after seeing the above photo? There's something so relaxing about organization!

For more posts in this series, just click here.

Day 11 - Master Bedroom Closet

Can't believe it's the 11th already! In case you are new, we're making our way through the series, 31 Days to a Clutter Free Home.

Today we're addressing the Master Bedroom Closet. We've already talked about purging clothing back on Day 6 so I'm sure you've got that taken care of *wink wink,* so now we're going to chat about a few other things you can do to make your closets seem less cluttered.

• Use matching hangers, and space them evenly. Some people like to use those slim, no-slip velvet hangers to fit more in the closet without it looking too crammed. I personally don't like them that much. I'd rather have wooden hangers (and fewer clothes!). I first got this idea from The Nester last year. So this past winter I found white wooden hangers at Home Goods and I just HAD to buy them. I love wooden hangers. But I love white wooden hangers more.

• Install a couple hooks. Then you can hang things like a bath towel or a hoodie or pair of jeans that you intend to wear again tomorrow without having to use a hanger or something and then you don't even up wadding those items up on the floor at the end of the day.

• Use decorative, matching baskets for things like scarves, hats, shoes. People often think that it would be way too expensive to buy something like that. But I found these 2 baskets for $7 / piece at Home Goods. There are deals out there. Check the dollar section at Target or go to the Dollar Store. Seeing my two matching brown baskets gives me such joy.


• Use a jewelry organizer. My sister-in-law gave this to me and I honestly didn't even think I had enough jewelry to fill it. But I did. And I find that I'm much more apt to wear it since I can just pull this out of the closet and choose my jewelry while I'm choosing my outfits rather than dig through a jewelry box.

• Install a double level hanging system - you end up fitting twice as many clothes in your closet! (This photo was actually taken in the closet in Levi's room when we were sleeping in there during the remodel of our bedroom.)

• Get a shoe organizer.
• Keep the floor cleared off.

And if any of you are struggling with purging, you might check out my friend, Marla's blog. She's writing all about Purging this month. And she's sure to inspire you! I especially enjoyed her Day 4 post.

Master Bedroom Reveal and Roomspiration Link Up

I wanted to post this Master Bedroom Reveal for you earlier today but I had some technical difficulties and had to finish it tonight. I'm trying to cram it in before the "31 Days to a Clutter Free Home" series starts tomorrow. And I guess I'm sliding in right at the deadline with 56 minutes to spare....nothing like last minute!

Our Master Bedroom is always a work in progress. It has been collected over years and will most likely continue to evolve. Overall our goals are to create a neat and clean, peaceful sanctuary to rest in.

I purchased the oak headboard (frame and mattress) as well as two oak dressers when I was in the 8th grade. I am proud to say that as a 14 year old I had saved up enough cash on my own to buy these pieces. They are not really what I would choose today if I were to go buy bedroom furniture but I am thankful for them.

This is what our Master Bedroom used to look like. I chose this green color and painted it the year we moved in. I thought it would be a tranquil color but it was a lot darker than what I was going for and just was not the peaceful look I was going for. The curtains and hideous green carpet were inherited from the previous owners.

While repairing drywall and repainting our bedroom in 2010, we used our spare bedroom. I knew I wanted to go with a blue and brown color scheme so I went ahead and purchased the blue crinkle voile curtain panels from Lowe’s for $14.99 / each and hung them in that room. And the white sheer panel to go in between was also from Lowe’s for $9.99. I think the curtains are one of my favorite things about our bedroom now. Our old curtains were short and made the windows look so small. From reading other people's blogs I picked up on the idea of putting long panels on even short windows and I love it. It gives the room a much more luxurious feel.

We already owned the quilt shown below. I was determined not to spend money so I figured it would work well enough with my new color scheme. It was even reversible. In the end we realized it was not the look we were going for. Nor was the lack of bed skirt :)

So once we got settled back in our bedroom with our curtains put up in there, we decided to invest in some bedding. I found this blue and brown leafy comforter and matching shams and pillows for only $49.99 on clearance at Home Goods. It was meant to be!

The same day that I found the comforter set I also found the lamp on the nightstand. It was only $29 at Home Goods so of course I fell in love…and it fell into my cart…

I had already purchased the 2 blue silk pillows from Home Goods the year before for $25 and I had purchased the silky brown lumbar pillow from IKEA several years ago (no clue how much it was) and the brown one in the middle of the 3 from Garden Ridge for just $9.99.

We “shopped our house” and decided the bedroom would be a great place to display our Hayden Lambson print that we’d purchased years ago from…get this: a truck stop! Doesn’t everyone find their home decor near the ladies room while making a pit stop? It had an oak frame so it matched the furniture and the blue mat matched the bedding and didn’t really match any other rooms in our house anymore, so it was a fit!

I found this darling little green storage ottoman on clearance at Home Goods for just $35. I could hardly believe my eyes and the cashier was even surprised when she rang it up. To this day have found absolutely nothing wrong with it to indicate why it was on clearance. I wanted a chair in our bedroom but realized this ottoman is much better because I can throw random things in it that have no other home and no one’s the wiser.

At first when we moved back in the room, we had a little problem with furniture arrangement…and well, pillow arrangement, too…LOL. See the photo below.

We tried placing our dresser on the left side of the room when you walk in the door and having a somewhat large night stand on the right side. Something about the window placement on the right side of the room really made the space seem so off balance.

 

Also we don’t have a TON of space to work with since the room is only about 11’ x 11’ and the bathroom door and door out to the rest of the house are placed so that one entire wall can’t really be used for furnishings.

So one weekend I asked my mom and sister to help me with this furniture arranging nightmare and we moved things all around trying different scenarios. One of us came up with the idea of removing the mirror from the dresser so that it could be placed in front of the window and not look too odd.

Lo and behold, that made a huge difference!

 

Having the dresser on that side of the room makes it seem much more balanced when you look in. We also thought we should find a smaller night stand.

I shopped the house and found this antique end table from the living room. It is a smaller size and works better in the smaller bedroom. It belonged to my great grandmother and was always in my bedroom when I was a little girl.

 

After years of having a night stand with no storage, I am so glad to have these handy drawers to keep all my random junk handy….coaster, pens, hairbands, chapstick.  Sure, the drawer could use a little organizing in itself, but it works.

  

So what do you think of our Master Bedroom? There are times I look at it and wish it was a bit more flashy and colorful or that I had mixed in a few more fun patterns, but for now, with the small space we have I don’t want it to be too busy. I think that it works and keeps it feeling cozy and restful.

I’m linking this room up to the Roomspiration Blog Hop on Just a Touch of Gray. Have a great weekend!

Marble Heated Floor Tutorial

In case you are wondering how we went about installing a heated marble floor in our Master Bath, I thought I would share the process with you. (And for more on the rest of the bathroom renovation, check out this post.)

When it came time to tile the floor of our master bath, my husband insisted that we find a way to heat it. We feel there is NOTHING worse than stepping out of the warm shower onto a freezing cold tile floor. We love the look of tile and knew that's absolutely what we wanted in there but we didn't want to have to jump from rug to rug just to be able to stay warm.

So, we looked into heating the floor. There are several different options but we ended up choosing an electric heat system. It was the simplest of the options and most economical for our application.

We purchased a Warm Tiles Cable Kit and Thermostat from Menards for around $180 to do our 5 x 7 bathroom (less than 25 sq ft of that would actually be tiled).

Here are the steps we followed:

1. Lay down backer board (as we would have done for any floor tiling project) so that you're not tiling directly to wood that can expand/contract like crazy and result in cracking grout and tiles within a small window of time. Believe us, this advice comes from experience!

2. Lay out heated floor cables per spacing instructions on the Cable Kit packaging. You can see that we would have 4 rows at 1" spacing following by a 3" gap then another 4 rows, etc. We were careful to lay cables no closer than 2" to any fixtures such as the toilet, sink, tub or walls. (You can also purchase already laid out Warm Tiles mats that take care of the spacing for you, but I believe the cable kit is a bit cheaper.)

3. Install wiring connecting the floor cables to a thermostat on the wall. You can even purchase a fancy schmancy programmable thermostat that will turn on, say at 5 a.m. so the tiles are nice and warm for you when you wake up in the morning. We did not do this. And we ended up running our Warm Tiles system 24/7 last winter. It really did not raise our electric bill by that much.

4. Bury the cables in self leveling cement. Admittedly, this was probably the most nerve wracking of the steps since we'd already had carpet laid in the adjoining master bedroom and walk in closet and I was concerned the cement would get in our carpet! We used painters tape and scrap lumber to contain it, in our case.

5. Lay tiles on top of the dried/cured self leveling cement using tile mortar. Then grout and seal away as normal, per instructions on packages. We installed marble tiles (that we found on clearance at Lowe's for $1 / sq ft I believe). Gotta love a clearanced item!

As a side note, before we officially mortared our tiles down, since they are a natural stone that varies quite a bit and our clearanced tiles had a lot of chipped corners, etc. we took hours and hours to lay them out ahead of time and decide exactly which tile we would place where. We even numbered them on the back with a carpenter's pencil: 1 thru 30 or something like that and also placed numbers on a sketched out grid on the cement so we could take the tiles outside, cut them to fit their location on the tile saw and then know exactly where they went when we came back in. It really helped us out.

We used 1/8" tile spacers on our floor.

Here's Dave mixing up the tile mortar in a bucket. You can buy already mixed up mortar but it is more expensive and actually has an expiration date.

About 3/4 of the way done! I was driving David nuts throughout this project. He finished it just a week or so before Levi was born so I was pretty antsy to get done.

Even though we used the spacers we realized the tiles were not always perfectly square, nor were the walls. We live in a fallen world! So Dave would sight down the grout lines to make sure they were staying straight and when they looked perfect he would use painters tape to also hold the tiles in position overnight till the mortar dried. There are probably not a lot of people that would be as picky as us, but what can I say? We're detail oriented people around here.

A few days later we were ready to grout the tile. Woohoo!

We also tiled above our shower and bullnosed 3 x 12 cut down tiles for a frame around the shower and a baseboard. Like this:

All in all, heating our bathroom floor was a relatively small expense in the whole scheme of things, especially considering it was not all that much space to begin with, and the heating along with the marble tile just makes our master bath seem so much more luxurious! There is not a day in the winter that goes by that I'm not thankful for it. I even turned it on this morning on the chilliest morning around here since May.

I'm linking this up to Homemaker on a Dime's Creative Blogger Hop & Party today.

A "Cosmetic" update that turned into more...

When I was about 3 months pregnant for Levi, we decided to tackle our Master Bedroom/ Bath. We wanted this space to be finished before the baby was born so we thought we'd play it safe and begin it 6 months ahead of time. After all, we only planned to do a little cosmetic update to this bathroom. We had ended up gutting and redoing the entire hall bath to the tune of about $2,500 and we did not want to spend that much on this bath. We wanted to keep it as cheap as possible.

We planned to replace the shower with the same type of set up that was in there. We would have just kept the existing one but our water heater had been corroding for a few years and dumping a ton of iron into our water resulting in anything that was subjected to hot water to take on an orange cast.

It was nothing to really get excited about but it worked and, like I said, I didn't want to spend much.

We also planned to paint / refinish our sink base, medicine cabinet. And put in new flooring.

But our friends Nick, Seth and Justin came over to help Dave one Friday night. And that's when we unearthed the nightmare....After they pulled up the bathroom linoleum we found this water damage.

The shower had been leaking. When we got into the crawlspace we saw why. When we had the home inspected before buying it, the inspector stated that the shower drain was leaking. We asked the previous owners to fix that before we bought it. They said they did. Apparently all they did was spray a GIANT puff of "Great Stuff Expanding Foam" all around the drain. Being naive 20 year olds who had no idea how to repair plumbing, we didn't even think to check their work. So 7 whole years later, there was some damage. The leaking drain had caused a bit of water damage on the surrounding floor joists and subfloor and had wicked up the walls and damaged the studs and drywall. We determined we would have to gut this entire area and start from scratch to be sure that we were eradicating all the water damage. So we tore out the walls and subfloor, sister up the damaged floor joists with new joists and then put in a new subfloor and walls.

So much for the budget friendly cosmetic upgrade!

Look at this bad boy surrounded by expanding foam.

And the wet floor joists.

In the photo below you can see the doubled up floor joists:

After a day of demolition, here's half of our house in a trailer in the driveway!

Since we basically had to rebuild this entire section of the house anyways, I set to work on determining a better layout for this area...

Here are some floorplans for you to see what I will attempt to describe.

We never liked how the bathroom was basically a hallway between the laundry room and master bedroom. Who likes bathrooms with more than 1 door anyways? Especially when they don't lock? It's always a bit nerve wracking to try to go to the bathroom in that scenario. So, we decided to close off the doorway to the laundry room and make this bath strictly a "master bath" off the "master bedroom" creating a lot more privacy.

We would eliminate the closet in the laundry room (on the right side) and use that space to make a larger Walk In Closet off the Master Bath. We considering creating access to the WIC from the bedroom but liked the idea of more wall space in the bedroom for furniture, etc.

We would then build a closet on the other end of the laundry room to enclose the water softener and put the plumbing that was coming out of the floor (the big black blob in the top left corner of the Before drawing) back inside the walls. This would also give us a place to tuck our coats, purses, etc.

We also wanted to determine a way to have a larger shower, possibly a shower/tub combination in this bathroom. We determined that a standard unit would be 60" long. And our bathroom was only 58" long. So we moved the wall between the bath and laundry room 1" into the laundry room (2" would have ran into the exterior doorway) and then framed the wall with 2 x 3's instead of 2 x 4's to get our extra 2" so we could fit a tub in.

This is what we ended up with in the bathroom after about 6 LOOOONG months of work (and I have no idea how much money....I stopped counting!):

It was finished about 1 week before the little guy in the picture above was born.

And please check back tomorrow morning for a step-by-step tutorial on how we heated our marble tile floor.