solution – A Smith of All Trades

We’ve had amazingly beautiful weather this weekend and while I wanted to get outside and start on a few projects I’ve been planning, I had to do a little bit of spring cleaning first. I think we are going to have a yard sale this spring, so I spent my weekend going through clothes, shoes and stuff in general to start setting aside some goodies to get rid of.

I tackled my kitchen this morning, scrubbing it from head to toe. I also brought all of our cookbooks out of their home in the highest cabinet of our kitchen and found an easier-to-reach spot for yours truly. My hubby is 6’2″, but I’m only 5’5″ and can’t reach the tops of our cabinets too easily.

While I was tidying up our kitchen, I kept stumbling upon chip clips. Seriously, I think they are reproducing in our cabinets when we go to bed at night. We have a few that are magnets, but they fall off the fridge on a daily basis. We also have two sets of novelty clips — birds and moustaches 🙂 They are adorable, but they are ALWAYS in the way. So I took 10 minutes to create a creative solution to this ongoing problem that I am sure a lot of you have, too.

First of all, measure your cabinets from top to bottom.

Mine were about 27.5 inches tall. I wanted to make a a strip of fabric to clips the clips to, but I had to be careful to make it the right length — if it was too short, I’d drill through the thin part of the cabinet. That wouldn’t be good.

After measuring, I popped into my craft room to find a fabric to use. I chose a navy fabric with hints of the green in our kitchen.

I cut the fabric a few inches longer than I needed, then ironed out all of the creases.

Next, I folded each side into the middle, creasing the two edges I planned to “hem.”

Once my creases were good and firmly in the fabric, I used hem tape to secure booth flaps of fabric down.

I ironed the finished strip and headed back upstairs.

Next up — drilling holes! I was a little nervous about this since they are cabinets and would SUCK to mess up… but it worked great. I found four short screws and predrilled four holes in my cabinets.

Then I added the screws. I started at the top and when I got to the bottom I had a few inches of extra fabric.

I cut the fabric so it was about a half an inch from the edge of the cabinet. Then I secured it to the cabinet door with two screws.

Time to add our ever-growing stash of clips!

All in all, this took a whole ten minutes to do and will keep our cabinets shelves and drawers clear of clutter!

Right before the Christmas holiday we had a radon mitigation system installed in our basement. Turns out Columbia has a lot of this cancer-causing gas just hanging around. Lame-o. Basically how it works is the radon guys come and drill into your foundation (we have two) and create a well for the gas to collect. Since gas takes the path of least resistance, the gas will pretty much all pool here instead of seeping into our house in other ways. Then they install a pipe that connects the hole in the foundation(s) to a hole they cut to the outside of your house. They seal it up nice and tight so no gas can eek out, then put in a fan that runs 24/7 to keep the gas flowing outside of the house. And with that, we are radon free! Woot!

The whole thing took about two hours. Not too bad!

Gee, I sound so knowledgeable about radon.

I was really happy to have this completed because our radon levels were a little bit higher than normal and I’d like to avoid cancer if at all possible. Crazy, I know. I was also happy to have it done because it inspired me to paint our laundry room/basement area! I bet you thought there was nothing left to paint… that’s what the hubby thought, too.

There was nothing wrong with the color of our laundry room as it was.

A boring neutral was just fine for the space. But I spend a fair amount of time down there, especially at those cabinets in the back. The cabinets in my craft room are a great sitting height, but the cabinets in the laundry room are great for projects you want to do standing. I wanted to brighten up the space a bit.

I set out to paint the whole space white. Yes, white. I never want to paint anything even close to white, but I didn’t want another blue room and I didn’t want to paint the space anything crazy. So white it is.

I went with Behr’s Waterfall Mist. It was a nice contrast between the white of our door frames, so that was a win.

Well, it turns out Waterfall Mist is blue. Even though I tried to paint my laundry room white, I ended up painting it blue! I think there is something wrong with me.

Look…. even in the Behr virtual paint chip wall, Waterfall Mist is categorized as white.

But it’s not. *Sigh*

So I painted the whole room and stood back to admire my work… then realized I had inadvertently painted another room in the house blue. Oops.

At least it’s brighter!! And I love blue…

The other mistake I made, aside from painting it a completely wrong color, was I painted our stairs (which were orange before) the same color as the walls. That just looked weird. Really weird.

So the day after Christmas I ran to the store to pick out some dark brown paint to match the floor you can see peeking in from under the door.

Ahhhh…. much better.

All in all, the basement looks nice. It’s not some crazy huge improvement to what it was before, and let’s keep it real, I’ll probably want to paint it again in the future. At least for now it satisfied my itch to paint something. Now I just need to make some cutesy decorations for the laundry room and I can let it be for a while.

Maybe.

Tag: solution

Chip Clip Storage Solution

The itch to paint

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