Moolie - Happy Thanksgiving :)

[moolie]

Hi Moolie!!!

Everything looks to be growing well!! I love the new hoop house. I tried something similar but had issues fitting the plasic. How are you going to do yours?

g

Thanks Gina!

We actually put the plastic on yesterday! We first attached the front and back sections, then the long section over the top. We just need to staple along the bottom edge and trim the excess.

We used the same vapour barrier plastic from Rona (like Lowes or Home Depot) that we used last year and attached it with PVC "U-Clamps" we got from Lee Valley that look like the lower picture here:

We didn't have time last night, and today it's been raining on and off (I darted outside during a sunny moment to take these photos with my mobile phone), but we plan to put in a door that we picked up at the Habitat for Humanity Re-Store:

(please excuse the messy garage)

Hubs had originally planned to just make wooden frames and cover them with the vapour barrier plastic, but wasn't sure how they would hold up, so we went shopping last night. We will get another door for the back when we can find something similar--the other doors they had with similar windows were all too wide.

 

[justusnak]

Hey Moolie.....looking GREAT!

 

[TanksHill]

Ahhh the "c" clamps seem to be what I was missing.

 

[moolie]

Yeah, we ran out last year (bought some more this year) and used clamps like this for the very bottom at the back:

 

[moolie]

So we've been doing a bit of spring cleaning and organizing around the house on the more rainy days, especially as we've had some really rainy weekends that didn't allow for garden work, and I thought I'd post a few photos (really giving the mobile phone camera a workout lately!) of what we've accomplished.

In addition to the outdoor projects I've already posted about, we've also really done some organizing in our food and canning closets.

Over the past few months hubs measured some cardboard jar boxes and made me some custom wooden crates for all the jars I've been collecting over the past couple of years via kijiji and freecycle, and has bought more wood to make more:

3 different sizes: half pint jam jars, pint/500ml, and quart/litre

Still a few more to build!

And here's our newly organized back door pantry closet, and what it looked like before hubs built the new shelves and crates:

What's left of last year's canning efforts, and what it looked like last fall:

and front door coat closet:

 

[moolie]

Well, my baby girl turned 15 today

They grow up so fast! We had pancakes (our menu plan lists waffles but really we make either pancakes or waffles on Sundays) and because everyone took their time getting up this morning she had the batter all mixed up and the pan heated before I got down to the kitchen! Nothing like making your own birthday breakfast!

She plans a sleepover with friends for next weekend, we were at a wedding yesterday afternoon/evening so we decided that this weekend wasn't the best timing for a birthday party, but we will have a special desert with dinner tonight and she wants to go see the Johnny Depp movie Dark Shadows tonight with her sister with some movie passes that they got from their grandparents for Christmas.

 

[hqueen13]

SO jealous of your canning jars and pantries!!!! Someday we'll have something nice like that....

 

[moolie]

Aw, thanks--it's taken a long time to get to this point!

Finding all the jars took daily searches on freecycle and kijiji for "canning jars" and "jars", often someone else had replied before me. But I did get a few good scores where the person was getting rid of a whole collection that had belonged to a mother or older aunt or someone like that.

The metal canning shelves are actually quite inexpensive--usually around $40, we got them half price. We got ours at Rona, but other home improvement stores and places like Wal-Mart also sell them. They are a real pain to assemble (they come in a flat box) but they hold a lot. Hubs screwed 2x4s to the wall and attached the shelves to those so they won't tip over.

The shelves in the hall closet (the "pantry" with all the wooden jar crates in it) are just the white-painted melamine shelf boards from Rona, held up by metal brackets that click into holders that you screw into a wall wherever there is a stud. We got the shelf brackets and holders from IKEA, they were mega on-sale because they won't be carrying them anymore--they look like this:

To make that pantry, we took all of our coats out of it and hubs put hooks on the nearby wall where we hang them now.

The jar crates are made out of 1x6, 1x8, and 1x10 pine boards with hardboard bottoms--the sides are screwed together and the 1/8" bottom hardboard piece slides into a groove that hubs cut in the sides. Some of the wood was left over from old projects that hubs has done over the years and we've purchased more recently to make more--it will take time to make enough for all of our jars, but then they'll all have homes and be more protected from breakage/chipage than just sitting on the shelves. Most of our jars didn't come with boxes because we got a lot of them second hand. Some I've had since I first got married and the boxes wore out.

 

[Wannabefree]

I am so organizationally retarded. My place is and stays a mess. I would destroy your place within a week moolie , but it looks GREAT!!!

 

[moolie]

Well, you haven't actually seen my house

A couple of closets that I've tidied a couple of times to photograph for my journal definitely don't show the reality of chez moolie. Our front room and dining room are usually tidy, because when we first had kids we decided that those rooms were "toy free", so they've stayed that way. The kids have always played in their rooms or the basement family room--and only had to put everything away about once a week or so, or if we had company coming to stay (our parent live in BC so when they come to visit, they stay over for a few days). But my kitchen is NOT tidy, nor is our family room--those rooms have the "lived in" look, I'm sure similar to your house. Our oldest is pretty tidy, but our youngest's bedroom always looks like a bomb has gone off. Our bedroom has nowhere to put anything down, because our dressers and bedside tables are covered with piles of books and papers--whenever someone comes over we move our "piles" of stuff (I'm a piler) to our room where no one will see our mess.