Houzz

I want to hug my fridge

Hey hey! How was your weekend? We had a wonderful time in southern Indiana in a cabin with my family – we had such a blast!! Indiana in the fall is my very favorite place to be! Well, it’s my favorite place to be any time of the year, but you get it. :)

Well, it’s been a month since our fridge died on us and caused water damage in the kitchen. We’ve since gotten the island installed and put back together, and a couple of weeks ago we got our new fridge.

And it’s beautiful. I mean it people:

Excuse the plywood. :)

Wait…hold on.

It’s more like this:

For reals. We had to wait two weeks for it, since it was out of stock, but it was worth the wait! I knew I wanted the French-door style refrigerator and it does not disappoint. When we went shopping, there were a ton to choose from, and at first I was looking at the counter-depth versions like we had before.

But then I saw this one. Hearts were fluttering out of it, even in the store. ;)

(Duh. I thought I had mentioned the brand! It’s a Kenmore Elite – you can find out the deets here.)

The basic measurements of this one are the same – but the space inside can’t be beat. It’s got 31 cubic feet of space inside. That means 31 cubic feet of AWESOMENESS:

And when you open the doors, there’s singing. I can’t pinpoint where it’s coming from, but it happens.

Wait, maybe coming from my head. Whatever.

It’s HUGE. Part of the reason it holds so much is that the ice maker is in the door:

It makes the cutest ice too. Really. Our old ice was long, these are square-shaped. It really doesn’t take much to make me happy.

It’s got the basics:

And some fun stuff like extra deep door storage:

The bottom drawer inside is my very favorite thing. It’s wide and huge and it is great for flat, wide stuff. And you can open one of the doors or both – which I think is brilliant. So often we’re just grabbing milk or whatever, and I like that we can still just open one door if needed.

The only difference in size is that it isn’t counter-depth, which means it comes out further than the counter. It sticks out about four more inches than the old fridge. We kept the old fridge in place and moved it out for a few days to make sure we wouldn’t mind it.

We didn’t. :)

And we have the same issue with this one that we had with the old one – the right door doesn’t open all the way:

There’s nothing we can do about that, so I’m not bothered by it. (We’re used to it anyway.) And actually, because this fridge sticks out a bit further than the old one, the door opens more than before.

I was pleasantly surprised to find that ALL of the drawers (even the long bottom one) still pull out completely, even when the doors don’t. SMART.

Our old fridge was a side by side, and it always drove me crazy. I felt like the older refrigerator we had long ago (like, eight years ago) was more spacious. We couldn’t fit much at all in our freezer in the old one, and it especially bugged me that we couldn’t buy frozen pizzas.

I know, my life is rough. ;)

But what really sold me on this one were the THREE drawers in the freezer:

Most French-door styles have two freezer drawers and this extra one totally sold me. Now our meat has it’s own drawer. Love that! And the meat is happy too. I’m guessing. ;)

You’ll notice the freezer and fridge aren’t full – it’s because we’re slowly refilling it all. I had no idea how much food we had in our fridge (that went bad) and how much it would cost to replace it all. It’s crazy! The insurance company will cover some of it, but not all, from what I understand.

The insurance claim did not cover the new refrigerator, which is about the only thing they aren’t covering.

Many of you have asked how I keep our stainless so clean, and I’ve tried just about everything. The best I’ve found is my Shaklee basic cleaner:

It’s all I use on the fridge anymore!

So far the only thing that has slightly bothered me about this new style is that there’s not much room for all that stuff we used to keep in the door – you have to keep it out in the open part of the fridge. This isn’t a big deal because there’s SO much space, but I like having that separate spot for all that little stuff. It’s the organizer in me. ;)

But it’s not a big deal all, at least to me. Overall, I’m LOVING it so far.

And I think we’ll finally see some progress on our floors this week – I’m meeting with the flooring guy to work on stains tomorrow. We’re going the finished on-site route, for reasons I’ll explain soon!

So, do you have this new style? Love your side by side? Traditional freezer on top? (I liked it more than the side by side!) It makes me wonder what they’ll come up with next – but I think this is the best design yet!

 

P.S. I need to get my fall mantel going, because our first fall linky party is this Tuesday over at Layla’s place! Get your fireplaces and mantels ready!!

Houzz

Houzz

Houzz

Candy Corn Love

Well HEY!

First of all, thank you for the lovely comments on our deck! You all are the sweetest!! We are just so pleased with how it turned out.

Sooo, last week I was trying to get some crafty mojo going up in here. (That would be up in hea if you’re hip. I’m not.) I had a GREAT Halloween craft in mind, and I got all the way to the end…and it was just, well.

Wrong. :)

Since I had all the supplies for it, I wanted to reuse them somehow. So I took it all apart and I have a plan in mind for all the parts. (And yes, I’ll show you the unfortunate craft soon.)

I had three Styrofoam cones to reuse, and after a few days, I finally came up with an idea. I got some yellow, orange and white yarn at Wally World and started wrapping, and wrapping:

(The black on the cone is part of the unfortunate craft. Please ignore. Not needed.)

I didn’t use any glue – just wrapped. And wrapped. ;)

You see where I’m going with the yellow, orange and white – especially if you read the title of this post. I’m not so good at the teasers.

I ended up with some big yarny candy (I almost wrote carny – that would be a whole different craft!) corns!:

They are too cauuuute! And WAY better than the original craft. Believe you me.

They were so easy it was just silly – just time consuming. But because I just wrapped (and wrapped) willy nilly, it was a great project to do while sitting in front of the tube watching the new fall shows.

I just tucked the end of each strand into the back of the cone. Easy peasy! I think they’d be a fun craft for kids – maybe with big chunky yarn?

So. cute.

Next up, working with the actual candy corn. I’ve seen candy corn wreaths for a while now and finally tried my own. Again, ridiculous easy.

I started with a dollar store wreath and a bag of candy corn:

I wanted to start small for my first time crafting with candy corn. ;)

I needed something black to wrap the wreath with, so I just used black crepe paper. Anything would do – fabric, ribbon, even tape:

For the first row, I laid the candies out to check spacing, and then glued them on with my glue gun:

But after that I just glued them on, without checking spacing first.

And I glued. Annnnnnd glued. :)

I did a three rows on the front and then realized I wasn’t crazy about so much black showing through, so I just kept gluing:

(I apologize for the awful photos – the dark is sneaking up on me lately and I’m losing my picture taking light much sooner than usual!!)

The front is a couple layers deep, the sides have one layer. The second layer of corns on top were just placed to cover the black that was peeking through. It went MUCH faster than I thought it would – you’d think it would take forever and it didn’t. You just put a line of hot glue on there, then plop them on in a row, over and over. And over. ;)

Lots of repeating on these crafts. Wrapping, gluing and plopping.

But this is another mindless one that is fun and goes really fast – the perfect craft in my eyes!!

I hung it with more crepe paper on the kitchen window, then added my Ball jars to the window sill filled with more candy corn:

Again with the LED lights plopped inside. You can find them just about anywhere, but I get mine super cheap at the Dollar Tree. I like to have a bunch on hand, especially this time of year!

I love decorating with candy corn – it is so FESTIVE! :) And there’s no danger of me eating them – I don’t care for the stuff. Crafting with it – love. Eating it – yuck. ;)

Now if I was crafting with Chunky Bars, we’d be in trouble.

The wreath was a whopping $4 to create. I have no idea if it will hold up, so the cheap aspect is a good thing. ;) I will spray it with a sealer of some kind and store it in a Ziploc bag and see how it turns out. We may have a fun science experiment come next fall. ;)

But for now, the kitchen window is ready for fall!:

I love that candy corn is a little bit fall, a lot Halloween – so it “works” for the next couple of months. So FUN!

Got any candy corn crafts? I just think they are the cutest! Do share! (And link to them in your comment if you’d like!) Have you started your fall decorating? I plan to work on it this weekend – can’t wait! :)

Houzz