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Houzz

Giveaway Weekend

Hey hey! I’m so excited about this weekend’s giveaway and I know you all will be too. Cause I know you all LOVE TO CLEAN!!

Whoohoo!!

Am I right?

I said, Am I right??

Crickets.

OK, I’m really excited about this giveaway because I really love this stuff. And I love giving away stuff I use and love. The love affair started a couple of years ago when I did my first Shaklee giveaway.

I was Hooked. (With a capital “H.”)

Other than an occasional cleaning wipe and toilet bowl cleaner, Shaklee is ALL I use anymore. I donated all of my other cleaning supplies a long time ago and haven’t missed them since.

 

I have a few Shaklee favorites, but the one I love to show off the most is the Scour Off:

This stuff ROCKS!

And it looks pretty (it’s PINK!) and smells amazing. I’ve told you before you’ll want to lick it. For real.

Just don’t.

(I think one of the main ingredients is cherry pits – hence the smell.)

Here’s where I show you how much I like you all, cause I’m going to show you my dirty oven:

That glass is the hardest spot to clean in my house, I swear. Am I right? I mean, am I right? ;)

Can I get a holla?

If you’ve been around for awhile, you’ve seen my dirty oven before. My apologies.

Every time we cook lately, the smoke alarm goes off, cause there’s so much junk in there:

I’m getting tired of waving the paper at the alarm every night, (or…every other night. Like I cook every night.) so I figured it was time to clean it.

Once I tried the self cleaning option on our oven and I thought the house was going to blow up. I didn’t feel comfortable staying with the fumes, and I didn’t feel comfortable leaving with the oven that dang hot. So I turned it off about 20 minutes in.

So now, I do it myself. Thankfully this stuff works darn good. :)

This stuff has a paste consistency, so I take a sponge (I just use dollar store sponges) and get a glob and start spreading:

Scrub it in good. It takes some muscle depending on what you’re cleaning. The oven = muscle.

A few minutes later, and you can tell the difference. The dirty is on the left, and the right is cleaned with Scour Off:

I love it!!

I used it on the inside as well, and didn’t get to the whole thing (we had to leave), but you can see the difference already:

You know I’m all about before and afters, so here you go:

• I used to use stinky, caustic stuff, and never felt quite right about using it where I cook our FOOD. The Scour Off is nontoxic and contains no phosphates or harsh chemicals. 
• I’ve tried almost every Shaklee cleaning product and love them all. I use the dish soap, hand soap and laundry detergent daily.
• But these three are my faves:

The Scour Off of course, the dish wash detergent and the Basic H cleaning solution.

You just need SO little of that concentrate for cleaning:

I’ve had the same bottle of Basic H concentrate for two years. It would appear that I don’t clean because I have so much left, but I DO. I swear. You just need so little it lasts forever.

One bottle is 16 ounces and it’s $12. I figure I’ve saved at least $100 on cleaning products because of it. I still have a bit left, but even two years in that’s $6 a year to clean all of our windows, counters, appliances, bathrooms, stainless steel…everything.

It’s hard to beat. ;)

And I love the dish wash detergent too. It takes a couple little scoops and the dishes come out clean and spot-free every time.

I keep the powder in a little bowl on the sink:

Gotta make it pretty you know. ;)

Shaklee has been around foreva – 50 years now. They also sell nutrition, weight management and beauty items. I’m trying out their face cream and so far I love it!

My friend Bonnie is my distributor and she has an AWESOME blog with all kinds of cleaning tips and tutes. She shows how to mix the Basic H and talks more about what a GREAT deal they are here. (She is so dang cute!!)

There are a whole buncha deals going on right now, and you can see more about those here and here.

This weekend, my girl Bonnie is giving away 20 Basic H samples! That is 2-0!  One sample mixed with water makes a whole all-purpose cleaner bottle and a window cleaner bottle.

Did I mention they’ll probably last you all year? Well, if you’re a better cleaner than me, maybe not that long. Let’s not talk about that. 

Here’s how to enter to win one of 20 Shaklee samples:

1. Leave a comment here.

2. Visit Bonnie’s Shaklee site here. Check out the products and let us know what you’d like to try out!

Remember if you comment anonymously or you have a private blog, please include your email address in each entry, and spell it out with “at” and “dot” to avoid any spammy emails coming your way.

This giveaway is only open to US residents! It will be open till this Monday, January 23rd at noon EST.

Have a lovely, WARM weekend! :)

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Restoration Hardware Baby & Child

Underground family room

Well thank you for the lovely comments about our sweet, sweet kitty. You all always make me feel like I have a few hundred extra friends around the world. :)

This post is about a space I’m kind of obsessed with –- the basement. I freakin’ LOVE basements. Something about them – they are just super cool spaces to me. I may have mentioned one or 800 times how excited I am about finishing ours…someday. It’s been eight years of saying “It’s going to happen this year!” and it never happens.

It’s certainly the biggest project we’ll ever do to this house. At first I thought it would be fairly straightforward – frame it up, add a few extra outlets, put up some walls and be done. Easy peasy – pushaw.

As we’ve used the space more over the years, we realize more and more that we’d like to do. (Read: stuff that costs more money.) Like is the key word. If they will happen or not, I have no idea.

Our basement is obviously still unfinished, but as I've mentioned before, we USE it. It’s just too much extra space not to! And although it’s not particularly pretty to look at, I love seeing seldom seen areas in other bloggers’ homes, so I like to share how we use this one. And how we see it working in the future.

I guess I’m saying, you probably won’t be pinning any of these photos. :) But I like to show how we use this typically unusable space.

The layout in our “family room” down there has changed more than any other rooms in our house put together. Because of our very open floor plan, I don’t move furniture around in our rooms…like, ever. They’re set up the way they work. And stay that way. Forever.

So the basement is my fix for when I want to change something up. ;)

Over Christmas break, we made a few changes to the basement family room space to make it even more usable:

This space used to be set up like this:

But we had a whole lotta shifting of furniture that happened when we got our new family room sectional. The old sofa went upstairs to the loft and the two recliners that were there came down here.

We got those recliners about six years ago, and I don’t care for the look of them anymore, but oh man, they are SO COMFY. Dang.

I’ve found three keys to making an unfinished space comfy – warmth (blankets and a space heater if needed), something soft for the tush (loveseat and recliners) and keeping the feet warm (lots and lots of rugs).

Oh, and no spiders. Spiders kind of ruin everything.

(Side note – I once had a serviceman tell me ours was the cleanest unfinished basement he’s ever seen. He couldn’t even find a spider web. I don’t know why we don’t get bugs down here, but we just don’t. Knock. on. wood.)

The TV cabinet is the old one from our family room, the side tables we’ve had for years and the Pottery Barn coffee table was a Craigslist find early last year. It was supposed to go upstairs but it didn’t work. 

The rugs are mostly the really cheapy utility rugs you can find at most hardware stores. We also have a huge one down there that was a remnant and I got it for a steal.

Now that it’s so warm and cozy down there, we find ourselves using this space ALL the time. We don’t really need an extra family room, but it’s there and we want to use it. Eventually it will be a movie room/family room space, and who says you need to have drywall to make it that way?

Not us!

I have a confession…every single night of Christmas break (two weeks people!), we sat our butts on these chairs and had movie nights:

The dog and the Bub usually cuddle up with one of us, or lay on the couch.

It was/is SO FUN.

Nothing matches, nothing is prettied up, but it has been one of our very favorite spots over the past few weeks. Isn’t that crazy?

I like to call it industrial chic:

Ha! That’s totally in, right? ;)

Although we like the way it’s set up now, it’s going to change, AGAIN.

I’ve been doing my workouts down here, (I put sliders on the bottom of the coffee table so I can move it easily – that thing is heavy!) and I keep banging into the chairs and table:

And when we DO finish the basement, we envision an electric fireplace in that alcove where the TV is. (I envision it built into that space so it looks like it’s always been there.)

So the room needs to be oriented the other way, facing the long wall.

That got my wheels turning. Because we are closer than we’ve ever been to actually moving forward with the framing, I want to set up the basement like we want it when it’s finished.

That means my craft space behind those chairs:

Will need to be moved to the back corner by our storage space, where the Bub’s toys are:

And his toys will go into that corner where my stuff currently resides. Got it? :)

My craft area really houses more than just that – it’s all the wrapping supplies, home decor stuff I can’t let go of, extra pantry items and all the seasonal serving dishes and baking stuff.

It will be great because the kiddo has WAY less toys than I do. ;) So there will be a lot less STUFF as soon as you walk down the stairs. My craft room will eventually be part of the storage/work out/laundry room.

That room will have to serve a TON of functions so I want to move everything around to see if my ideas will even work.

I put a little digital layout a few months ago, while daydreaming. :) Even though we haven’t started the work yet, I bide my time by planning. And planning. It helps me hold my horses and it’s something that needs to be done anyway.

Here’s an idea of the way I hope to make it work:

Just as a side note, this is the only part of our home you’ll see a floor plan for. :) I don’t feel comfortable sharing the layout for the other parts of the house, just for security reasons. (Crazy maybe, but I’d rather be crazier than the crazies. You know what I’m sayin’?)

But I know you’ll all be coming along for this ride with us, so this part I will share, because it’s below ground level. :)

Anyhoo, in this layout I still have my craft table off to the side of the family room space, and I now know I don’t want it there. So that space where the blue rug is will get smaller, as that wall will need to come out even further. I was trying to avoid that, but I want to be able to shut the door on all that STUFF.

And you eagle eyes will see where I’m planning on putting the washer and dryer. That’s a whole other post. (Yes, I’ve already done a ton of planning and thinking about that and it’s going to happen if I have anything to do with it. And I do.) ;)

So…there’s our underground family room in all it’s glory. And the start of the beginning of the initial kind of maybe finishing our basement. It has to start somewhere, right?

Do you love moving furniture around? Does you house let you? ;) Do you use floor plans for spaces like me, or do you get a work out and shove everything around till it works? Do you love basements like I do? And most importantly, are you as PYSCHED as I am for it to (maybe?) start soon??

Wahooo!

(And do not hold me to this, I may be saying this exact same thing next year.)

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Houzz

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Shelley Arminio

Office deets and show off yours!

Hello all! Welcome to the first Show Us Your House party! I can’t wait to see the rooms for this month – your craft spaces and offices!

I had intentions of getting this first house party up last night, but we had a bit of a family crisis that was my priority. Around ten last night we noticed one of our kitties was looking just…not right. Her sweet face didn’t look like her and right away I knew something was wrong. I picked her up and took her to her food and water and tried to get her to eat something, and that’s when I noticed she could barely stand up. She couldn’t eat, drink, or walk without struggling.

I kept an eye on her for a few minutes, then noticed blood around her mouth and we knew immediately that the night was not going to end well. We took her to the ER doc at midnight and as the minutes ticked by she got considerably worse – I’ve never seen anything like it. I still can’t believe how fast it happened.

We found out she was suffering from kidney failure and it was taking her incredibly fast. The night before she was her old self…cuddling up with my on our bed (the fact that she could still jump up on our tall bed at 18 years old was crazy), “talking” to me before bed like she always does.

She went from her old self to horrible health in 24 hours. We only had about an hour to wrap our heads around it and then there we were saying goodbye to her. When they brought her back into the room so we could hold her, she was pretty much comatose. Her beautiful bright eyes just were not there anymore.

We held her and said goodbye and cried and cried. It was heart wrenching. I’ve had this baby girl since the day she was born…our kitty gave birth to a litter and she was one of them.

I haven’t had time to find recent pics of her, but you can see she was a stunner. :)

I love this one because you can see her “smile”:

She was the sweetest, best girl in the world. I miss her terribly. We’ve been moping around the house all day today…still kind of in shock. This is the second cat in about six months that we’ve lost. We’ve gone from four animals to two in a very short time. Our last cat is so sad today…it’s just awful. My heart hurts. I’ve had that sweet girl for half of my life.

So, it’s been a sucky few days…hubby has been sick with pneumonia and now this. (He’s doing much better but still feeling yucky.)

Anyway, that’s my very long story for the reason I didn’t get this up last night. I couldn’t help but show off our sweet kitty to you all before we got going with the post. :) Thanks for letting me share her with you.

Sooo…it’s time to move on to some details on my office reveal from earlier this week. First of all, I just want to say THANK you for all of the wonderful comments. I truly appreciate them and appreciate that you take the time to comment. It makes my day!

There’s a lot I want to share, so bear with me!

First, more about the layout. This room was tough for me because it’s like every other room on our main floor…very few full walls. The space is only about 11 by 11 feet, two walls have windows (which I LOVE), and two are cut off a bit by the angled doorway. 

You might remember that for a long time, I had the desk and light on the left side of the room. First it was facing the doorway, then I changed it to face the wall.

It just felt weird to me though…awkward. So in the end, it was moved over by the windows:

For a while I had it angled in the corner facing out, but that was awkward too. In order to get around it to sit down, the table had to be too far out into the room.

One day recently I was cleaning the floors and moved the desk over a bit. I realized it worked great!:

I love it! And it only took forever to figure it out. :)

This way if I ever want a different view, I can just turn it the other way, and I’ve still got all that natural light!

Speaking of the desk, this was my third option for the room. It was EXACTLY what I wanted – a “real” vintage farmhouse table. I totally lucked out when a friend of a friend was selling it.

Unfortunately it was covered with lead paint. :) I had it professionally stripped down and then I painted it a very light blue. (Paint colors coming at the end of the post!):

I also changed the orientation of the desk so the legs went with the width. It is a HUGE surface and perfect for crafting or sorting mail.

Speaking of mail, I showed you how I figured out a process for controlling the paper that comes in the house here. All of my office supplies are organized in the Craigslist dresser (that I LOVE).

The mail and stuff that I need to go through goes in the box on top, then the papers that need to be filed in the basement go in the top drawer:

The binders hold everyday stuff I want close at hand – house stuff, inspiration files and manuals for games and toys. This way I don’t have to run to the basement for every day things I need.

The other drawers hold lots ‘o stuff. Before I put a drop of paint on the walls a long long time ago, I did a serious purge of my office supplies. Did I really need four rolls of tape? Did I need ten packs of post its? Did I have to have 45 random pens and pencils?

No. :)

One drawer holds what office supplies I do use in pretty holders from HomeGoods:

The drawers are REALLY wide but very shallow, so these work great! I can fit a ton of stuff in there!

The next drawer holds my Silhouette machine, and all the fun stuff that I use with that, as well as my “junk drawer in a drawer” –  it holds my go-to stuff like address labels, stamps, envelopes, my label maker and just STUFF:

When I sit down and go through mail, I pull this out and put it on the desk so I have stuff at hand.

The bottom drawer is dedicated to the kiddo – three more bins corral all of his goodies:

But most of his stuff is in the caddy to the left of the dresser:

And his sticker books, magazines, coloring books and Lego magazines have a spot in the book bin:

It was a Goodwill find years ago and used to sit in his nursery:

I put some castors on the bottom ($4 for four at Lowe’s) because it’s SUPER heavy and this makes it easier to move around the room.

The basket to the right of the cabinet used to house our little shredder and the cords:

We’ve since moved the shredder out to the garage, so now this holds bulky stuff like my tripod, camera case and laptop case:

Everything I need on a daily basis is organized in this room and I love it! I mentioned that I moved some of the bulky stuff to the basement (like the filing cabinet) and I’m so thrilled! (We already had one down filing cabinet down there so this way everything is in one spot.)

The printer/scanner is also in hubby’s basement office. This works great for us because he uses it WAY more than I do. It’s also wireless, so I can print from anywhere in the house, then file items right away.

At first I hid the modem and router under the dresser (you couldn’t even see them – YAHOO!), but when I moved the dresser I didn’t have access to the cable jack. So instead, I moved them to a spot in the house that has a free cable jack -- the guest room. :)

That room is hardly used, so it’s worked perfectly! (We have no problems accessing internet from anywhere in the house.)

OK, onto some pretties. :) The gallery walls around the room are probably my favorite part of the room, but they also took the longest. OH EM GEE.

If you can believe it, I already had every frame, but that’s because I had been collecting them at Goodwill for about a year. They were all different colored frames, which I liked initially, but it got to be too busy. And I wanted the art to shine!

So I sprayed them all white, which took FOREVER. I had to take the art/photos/glass out of each one, clean them off, prime them twice and then spray them satin white twice.

FOR.EV.ER.

And hate me, but I didn’t cut out paper the size of each frame (like I’ve seen in mags) to figure out where I wanted each one on the walls. I just piled the frames in the room, started at one end of each wall, then picked different sizes that worked here and there.

Yes, I had to move a few along the way, but it’s just holes people. Itty bitty holes. You can’t even see them, can you?:

;)

Most of the art is the Bub’s or my photos. Here’s the lowdown on the art and other stuff on this wall, left to right: 

Art by stepdaughter (of the Bub)
Angel by Bub
Circle art by Bub
Statue of Liberty shot
”S” from old sign – Midland Antiques Indy
Blue/yellow art by Bub
Bub by me
Bouquet art by Bub

Left to right:

Hubby and I photo
DIY printable
Photo of Bub and Daddy
Photo of Hubs and I on the first flight he took me on.
Sweet stepdaughter
Art by Bub (Christmas tree but it’s staying up – I love it)
Poster I cut up to fit into frame (You can see more of that art here.)
Target mirror I spray painted metallic color

(Still looking for something tall and skinny to put over to the left!)

Left to right:

My little pirate at Halloween (arrrgh)
Vintage sign from late father-in-laws business
Art from this post (LOVE)
Cherry blossom photography
Family photo
Photo of Skyscraper Lunch sculpture from Ground Zero, January 2002
School photo of my late brother-in-law (beautiful frame was from fil’s house)

Left to right:

Clock from Garden Ridge
Goodwill oval frame
DIY silhouette in GW frame
Sunflower photo that used to be here  
Photography from here (Gorgeous! Matches the room PERFECTLY.)
Butterfly photo
Photo of the kids in NYC
Flower photo

I wanted to have something on each wall that wasn’t art and wasn’t white, so that’s where the clock, industrial “S,” mirror and the Modern Bird art (absolutely LOVE it) come in.

I couldn’t be more thrilled with how it all came together. :)

That cutie little aqua table above started out as a table I found at my late father-in-law’s house. It was rickety and in bad shape – I took it apart, cleaned it up, tightened it up:

Because it was round, it stuck out into the room quite a bit:

So I used my jigsaw to cut it down, then reattached that piece with “L” brackets so it looks like a drop leaf table:

It saves us about six inches of space right there, and I’m all about that!

Whew!! Almost done!! :)

The drapes are a Waverly fabric I found from Joann’s forever ago. It is still there though. :) The striped fabric on the DIY memo board goes with it perfectly, and they were the very first picks for this room. The whole space was designed around them!

I made the drapes myself – lined and everything. ;) They aren’t sewn perfectly, but you can’t tell, right?:

Now I wish I would have picked a different fabric for the pendant light, but that was one of the first projects I finished, and I had planned on it hanging on the other side of the room away from the drapes. Oh well…I’m not touching anything in here for awhile, so it’s good. ;)

Here’s a rundown of a few ton more details…

Paint colors

Desk: True Value, Soft Hearted
Kid table: Valspar, Pond
Memo board frame: Dutch Boy, Purify
Walls:  Ralph Lauren, Sisal, lightened 25 percent
Ceiling: Dutch Boy, Purify

Sources:

Lamps, large basket: Target
Organizational items on and in dresser, chair and pillow: HomeGoods
Binders: Nakedbinder.com
Fabrics: Joann's
Dresser: Craigslist
Knobs on dresser: Hobby Lobby
Frames: Goodwill
Rug on chair back: IKEA

And here are links to the long list of projects that made this room happen!

Desk redo
Priming the formerly dark room
Painting the walls
Installing crown (I later chunked it up a bit by adding a piece of molding two inches down, then painting in between.)
DIY memo board (made from insulation board and a GW frame)
Board and batten how-to
Organizing the paper
Desk chair redo (from a pleather parson’s chair to a no-sew covered chair)
Spraying the board and batten
Pottery Barn art caddy redo
How to make your own printables tutorial

(Live Writer is hating me again, so those links are not highlighted right.)

And if you missed it, the full reveal is here!!

Dang, I’m tired!!!

So let’s see YOUR spaces! I still don’t have a button for this shindig, but I would appreciate it if you would link back here in your post! Thanks so much!