After my post yesterday about how our veggie garden is actually pretty successful this year I had a big, fat massive FAIL. A series of them actually…

I thought I would be all Martha-y and make some homemade tomato soup with all the tomatoes we were able to harvest. (There were 10 ripe ones for us to pick yesterday. Yay!) I’d never made tomato soup, so I looked up a few recipes and altered them to work with what I had. I’ll give you the recipe in a minute, but first I have to warn you that it might be cursed.

After I simmered the soup for about an hour, I transferred it to the blender. That was a big disaster. I was holding down the lid, but still managed to have burning hot soup shoot out like a volcano everywhere. Cabinets, counter, sink, stove, dog, me…you name it, it was covered in soup.

I cleaned that up and transferred what was left of the soup into the refrigerator, where I proceeded to knock it over. It had been on the top shelf, so it spilled all over eveything yet again.

Then as I was doing all the dishes I created in the soup fiasco, I dropped a ceramic plate. Of course it smashed into 1,000 pieces. Of course I was barefoot and stepped in one of them and cut myself.

Basically, yesterday I picked 10 tomatoes, 2 green peppers, some basil, defrosted homemade chicken stock, cooked for a few hours, and all I got was one measly bowl of soup and a HUGE mess. The soup was pretty good, but a little too spicy for my taste. Next time I’d leave out the red pepper flakes.

If you would like to try your luck (I hope yours is better than mine), here is the recipe:

Spicy Tomato Soup:
3 cups of chicken stock
10 tomatoes, seeded and smashed (strain juice, discard seeds, keep juice)
1 tbs fresh basil, chopped
1 diced green pepper
2 tbs brown sugar
salt and pepper to taste
optional: red pepper flakes
optional: diced onion & celery (I didn’t used these, but would if I had them on hand)

Combine ingredients on stove top and simmer for 45 min-1 hour
CAREFULLY transfer ingredients to blender and blend until smooth
Cool and store in refrigerator or freeze

You Ugly, yeah, yeah, You UGLY! (cheer courtesy of My Brother And Me, via Nickelodeon circa 1994)

I’m talking about you, “family room.”

Meet my latest project, the family room.

It would be the family room anyway, if the space was remotely usable or pleasant to be in.

Right now it is just a junk room, and a REALLY ugly one at that. Brace yourselves. I’m about to air our very messy little secret.

It’s bad, you guys. Really, really, really, bad. Like humiliating. Like an episode of Diet Hoarders; People Who Aren’t Actually Hoarders, Just Have One Awful Space With Too Much Junk. (In my defense, albeit a weak one, the piles on the sofa aren’t normally there and no longer exist, I took this picture right after we moved all of my crafting and sewing supplies down here.)

It’s sad, really, because this room has so much potential. The fireplace, the extra square footage we could be using, the potential for a craft area not located in the middle of the dining room…not to mention that my poor husband actually works here on the days he is working from home.

Dark scary hallway to oblivion…

Super messy entryway off the garage, currently filled with construction stuff from our bathroom remodel (I was standing in the doorway of the bathroom to take this photo) plus a gigantic chalkboard that they were giving away for free at the church yard sale.

We have a split foyer house, so we pretty much spend all of our time upstairs where the kitchen, living room, and bedrooms are located, and completely ignore the fact that we have an entire additional floor.

Until now we’ve just been telling ourselves that we’ll get to it eventually when we can afford a complete overhaul, as in new drywall, new electrical, and everything. I can’t live with that plan any more if this needs to be my creative space because I cannot possibly create anything worthwhile in a space with this kind of negative energy. Plus, it will probably be 5 years or more before we get around to that remodel and who knows if we will even still want to live here at that point. We’d have to at least give this area a facelift to be able to sell the house for a decent price in the future. Might as well do it now so we can reap the benefits as well, right? That’s what the nesting side of me is saying.

It’s ok, though, I have a plan.

There really is a lot of potential here. It’s a little easier to tell in the photo that was in the mls listing when we bought this place, see?

Right now the plan involves a lot of purging, painting the paneling, ripping out the carpet, and installing super cheap laminate from Ollie’s or Ikea. I was at Ollie’s yesterday and they had brand name (Pergo & Mohawk) flooring for as low as 68 cents/square foot.

Eddie is not thrilled with the plan & I don’t really blame him because he already has TONS of projects to do around here, but I told him I am doing this 100% by myself. I’m pretty sure he won’t trust me to install the floor alone (although I am totally confident I could, especially if I buy extra flooring to make up for the learning curve 😉 but I can definitely paint and take up the carpet during nap times.

As a matter of fact, I started yesterday. Just me, a good quality low voc primer (If I wasn’t pregnant with two little ones in the house I would be using some hard core products to tackle this task, but the Olympic interior latex primer is working really well so far.) and an hour of sleeping children got one wall primed. One wall at a time and it will be done eventually, right?

It’s going to be a long, slow process. I hope you’ll stick with me on the journey because it’s a pretty huge undertaking and I’m going to need your moral support! I will keep you updated along the way.

In other news, I’m happy to report that the downstairs bathroom (just to the right of the wall in this photo) now has a new working toilet and will hopefully have a sink by the end of this weekend! That means the big reveal will be coming soon!! 🙂

And by that I mean I built a little desk while the kids were in the next room watching Up. (I even managed to not drill into the table this time.)

Eddie said he wanted a laptop desk to take into the office and I found these plans on Ana-white.com. It looked super easy to build, plus it’s on hidden wheels. What’s not to love?

It cost less than $30 for the lumber, casters, and some wood filler. Not bad when you consider that CB2’s version is $180. I had the guys at Lowes cut the wood for me, but I wound up having to re-cut some of the trim pieces, so I figured out how to use our jigsaw, which was surprisingly easy. I think I have a new favorite toy. It took me about an hour and a half, counting numerous mommy stops, a phone call, and the mystery about why the trim wouldn’t fit. (I bought the wrong size board. duh. oops.)

Seriously, if you own a few tools (I built my first 3 projects using only a drill) you can build anything in the beginners section of Ana’s website. It honestly is easier than using a glue gun. I do really dumb things like buy the wrong wood and drill into my dining room table, and I’ve still managed to build this desk, a kid-sized table and chairs, and an airplane shelf from her site. You should really give it a try!

I can’t finish it myself because I think Eddie and I would both prefer it stained and I’m not comfortable working with those kind of fumes while I’m pregnant.

So I guess it’s done for now.

I think our next Ana White project will be the open toy box.

What have you been up to today?