After completing all of the steps in Part 1 we are ready for day 2!

Day 2 steps:

1. Caulk all of the cracks with paintable caulk. It’s true what they say. This stuff really does hide a multitude of sins! To caulk just squirt the caulk into the crack, wipe off the excess with your finger, and then go back over the surface with a damp rag.

2. After the caulk dries, sand all of the edges again.

3. Put on another coat of paint.

Ok…now we’re going to start on the art rail. I used a 1×3 because we already had one cut to the size I wanted, but you can have Lowes or Home Depot cut the extra piece of furring strip from the frame to whatever length you want yours to be.

4. Sand and paint your long strip of wood. This will be the clip rail.

If you want your pieces to have a painted look then all you have to do is attach clothes pins with glue, let everything dry for another day and then hang it with picture hangers. They are surprisingly light weight pieces.

I made things a little more complicated for myself. Originally, I was just going to antique the cream color with a little stain, but the more I did the more I decided I liked it darker.

To stain:

You will need a rag, gloves, a small paint brush, and the stain. I used Minwax stain & poly all-in-one in Bombay Mahogany.

I like to rub the stain into the surface with a rag and use the brush for smaller areas, like the sides.

Ta-da.

Now do the same thing to the clip rail.

I also decided that I wanted to stain the clothes pins to match. This is way easier than it sounds. Just take the little metal things out, stain one side, and after it dies stain the other side. I used the paint brush for this. When both sides are dry, put the metal piece back in.

Ok, when the clothes pins are finally dry, the last thing you need to do today is use the paint brush to brush some wood glue onto the back of each clothes pin and stick the clothespins into the clip rail.

Stay tuned for the big reveal. 🙂

Eddie left this morning for his 3-month-long business trip. 🙁

In the mean time I’ll be trying to catch up on stuff I’ve been meaning to get done.

So far today I have:

• taken Nick to play therapy
• taken Abby to Lowes (during Nick’s appointment)
• painted the pantry door with chalkboard paint
• started building a separate chalkboard. (The man at Lowes cut the wood for me)
• put chalkboard labels on some of my apothecary jars
• made a new header for my blog (How obvious is it that I don’t know what I’m doing?)

(I also fed and clothed my kids and got them to take naps. Just thought I’d clarify.)

And now I’m taking the kids to work with me this evening. If I can be this productive every day the remodel will be finished before Eddie gets back. Yeah right.

In a few days my husband is leaving on a very long business trip.(This is the kind of business trip where you need to buy bear spray and convince federal personnel that 3am is the time of day that your team is least likely to be hit by oncoming traffic.) He’ll be gone a total of about 3 months, although thankfully he’ll be able to come home on and off for a few days throughout. He wanted to go on a family vacation before he left, so we spent the past few days in Ocean City. MD on the same beaches where our families vacationed when we were children.

We are lucky that my parents both own beachfront condos (the view above is from one of the balconies) and Eddie’s parents were able to stay with us and help with the kids. Sometimes we take the beach for granted because we grew up with it, but going with our own children makes us appreciate the traditions much more.

and especially fun times with their daddy

We’ll miss you! Stay safe.

Beach Party at Someday Crafts

My 3-year-old recently figured out how to open our pantry door, which led to a scary incident where I found him carrying a bottle of maple syrup around the living room and a bunch of plastic grocery store bags on the kitchen floor where my 1-year-old could get them. That could have been a disaster! Also, now that I am starting to work a few more hours there are other family members here with the kiddos more often and I wanted to make it easier for them to find what they needed for snacks & dinner time.

I search blogland for some ideas for getting the pantry organized, but most of them involved glass jars, baskets that couldn’t easily been seen into or sanitized, and other ideas that just didn’t seem all that practical for my everyday life with two toddlers, so I fell back on the way that I used to organize areas in my elementary school classroom.

And now our pantry looks like this (Sorry, I forgot to take a before picture, but it was a big ol’ mess)

I already had these plastic bins because I just about bought out Target when they had them on sale for $2 each.

I took inventory of what we had in the pantry, threw out anything that was expired, and divided everything into these groups:

• Paper & Plastic Ware
• Snacks
• Pasta & Sauces
• Drinks
• Cans & Jars
• Baking Supplies
• Breakfast Foods
• Miscellaneous

I put the paper & plastic ware on the top shelf because we don’t use it that often. I divided it into three separate bins: Napkins & Straws, Utensils (which I grouped into plastic bags according to type & the mount I would need for a small party), and Plates, Bowls, & Cups (which have a large bin)

I chose to put the snacks out of reach so that my little ones can’t reach in and grab a cookie whenever they want one, but for older children I would put it on the bottom shelf for easier access.

You could also add pictures to the bins to make it easier for kids to find what they need.

Boxes of pasta & jars of sauce have their own bin and next to that I left an open space for drink mixes or bottles of unopened soda or juice.

There is an area for cans & jars-syrup in the back!- and a large plastic bin for my baking supplies. I like the idea of the plastic bins to deter little critters (we sometimes have ant issues) from climbing into open packages of flour, etc.

The bottom shelf is for Breakfast foods so that my kids can see their choices in the morning and I left a space for miscellaneous items that didn’t seem to fit in my other categories or were too tall for the shelf where they would otherwise belong.

There are labels on the bins and also on the shelf itself to identify each section. My husband was thrilled that he could find what he wanted and even commented that it would be so much easier to put away groceries. I think it’s important to label both the bin and the shelf so that if someone takes a few bins out to make dinner then they can be sure to put them back in the correct spot.

I plan to use chalkboard paint to create a chalkboard on the back of my pantry door (which is one of the cool ideas I found on blogland) but if you are renting or if you are more practical then you can just mount a clipboard on a nail inside the pantry with some paper for jotting down your store list. (That way you don’t have to re-write your list from the chalkboard.) Personally, I think the chalkboard will be a fun way to teach the kids how to write their letters and a cute and unexpected surprise for people who open the pantry.

Happy organizing!

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