You know you want to make these. No, they’re not healthy for you. Actually, they’re probably incredibly unhealthy for you. Especially since, if you’re anything like me, you’ll eat about 6 before you’re done getting all of them out of the oven (okay, I have a bit of a sweet tooth). But you know what, an occasional unhealthy treat is still healthy. Everything in moderation, right?

I also know that this isn’t a cooking blog, but I’ve been reading a lot of The Pioneer Woman Cooks and watching a lot of Good Eats lately and it’s giving me an urge to share on the blog. Also, I’m attempting to make Wednesdays (in a trying to post Monday, Wednesday, and Friday as a general schedule, though other days may be added at times) my off-topic days. It makes me feel less guilty about talking about things that have nothing to do with lactation and parenting. Though I suppose that I could make an argument that eating cookies helps me make milk (maybe a bit of a stretch). Probably extra sweet milk.

I wish I could tell you where I found this recipe. If someone recognizes it, let me know so I can give some credit. I know it was on a box or bag of something from the store about 6 years ago. I’ve been making them since and, have I mentioned yet that they’re delicious? Man, I really want some more. I knew I shouldn’t have shared them! Speaking of sharing them, they’re a hit at any sort of get together.

First off, you start with your lovely ingredients. Yes, that’s a box of chocolate pudding in there. Pumpkin, banana, coffee maker, and 3 year old wearing a babydoll on her back (or the baby on your own back, for that matter) not required.

Take the wet ingredients (butter, sugars, eggs, and vanilla) and cream them.

Attempt not to eat the delicious buttery egg sugar cream. Mmm…

Add the dry ingredients (flour, baking powder, chocolate pudding mix). Make sure to sift that flour so you don’t end up with stiff cookies.

Mix it around with a spoon until it’s thoroughly mixed. If you have crazy people in your family *cough*my husband*cough* who don’t like white chocolate, now is a good time to spoon off a sheet of chip-free cookies and stick them in the oven.

Add white chocolate chips and mix them around faster than the 3 year old can take them out. I use 1/2 bag because of taking some dough out for the white chocolate hater, as well as my dislike for too many chips.

Give the 3 year old the wooden spoon to keep her occupied so she stops trying to steal cookie dough. Yeah, I’m that mom. I’m okay with it.

Spoon them onto an ungreased cookie sheet (or in my case, grease it because it’s in need of replacement and likes to steal chips out of cookies) about the size of a small spoon and cook them at 350 for 8-10 minutes. I start checking them at the lower time (or even lower, if your oven runs high) and if they still look wet on top, go for another minute and then check again. You want to get them out before they really start browning on the edges (there might be a very slight amount, but significant browning will end up with a not-so-perfect cookie). They should be crunchy on the outside and cakey on the inside. Mmm…

Here’s the recipe without pictures:

1 cup butter, softened
1/4 cup white sugar
3/4 cup brown sugar
1 tsp vanilla
2 eggs
2 1/4 cups flour
1 tsp baking powder
1 box chocolate pudding mix
1 bag white chocolate chips

Preheat the oven to 350. Cream butter and wet ingredients. Mix in dry ingredients. Add chips. Spoon onto ungreased cookie sheet and bake for 8-10 minutes.

Now go make some cookies! And enjoy them without guilt! I think I’ll go make some more too. Mmm…

I’m talking wool dryer balls.

Have you heard of them? They’re great! As I mentioned in this previous post, prefolds take a lot of time to dry. I read about wool dryer balls from Hobo Mama on That Mama Gretchen’s Wool Week, but everywhere I found them wanted to charge what seemed like a lot of money for a few balls. So when Anktangle wrote this tutorial on how to make wool dryer balls, I decided to try it out! It’s a great way to use scrap yarn from wool diaper covers.

And I’m here today to tell you they are fantastic!

I can’t testify as to how they soften clothes (many people use them as an alternative to fabric softener) because we don’t use fabric softener. I wasn’t horribly attached to it and it makes my husband’s eczema flare up. As for drying though, they work miracles! Or at least decrease drying time, thereby saving time and money. That counts as a miracle, right?

So here is my testimony with evidence, albiet pretty non-scientific evidence.

Here is my very plain dryer’s dial. I pretty much only use the “auto dry regular fabrics” side, so that’s what I’m focusing on today. As you can see, the dial goes from “more dry” to “less dry” and has lines between. For prefolds, I used to have to dry them twice on more dry for them to be dry and occasionally they were slightly damp. By adding the 3 small wool balls pictured above, I only need to dry them once on more dry and they’re fully dry every time. It halved the time to get them dry!

With the regular laundry (which includes all of our laundry except shirts and pants, which we hang dry), I used to dry them once on more dry. I’m not sure if I was over-drying them or not though. Now that I’m using the wool dryer balls, they’re dry on the line above less dry (pictured above).

There are a few minor downsides.

1. They can unravel. I’ve had one unravel completely and one that’s just starting to. This can be solved by knitting or crocheting a cover around them, but I’ve been too lazy to do this. Eventually I’ll get around to it.
2. You have to search for them through your clothes when you take them out of the dryer. As I said, it’s a minor downside. I just go through the clothes and throw the balls back in the dryer (where they hang out until the next load) as I find them. This can be more annoying when they get stuck in fitted sheets, but still not that big of a deal.

Even with these small problems, wool dryer balls are still very much worth it. Try them out and you’ll see the difference.

Twig in our Music Class.

This is the last day of the Simplify For Fall challenge. Technically Mandi added another day because she forgot living rooms when she first wrote it out, but luckily my living rooms are in great shape. We don’t keep a whole lot in those areas because they’re company areas. Just furniture and a few toys for the girls. Here’s the first day, second day, third day, fourth day, and fifth day of the challenge.

Today’s task is schedules and routines. We’re pretty lucky in that our schedules are purposely kept as empty as possible. I’ve always over-scheduled myself, but I’m making an effort to counteract that. My biggest thing I try to do is to keep to one big event a day and as few days a week as possible (though it ends up that we have something scheduled more days than not). As an example, here’s what last week was like for us:

• Sunday Lunch at my in-laws’ at 1PM, which happens every week. We tend to spend Sundays just hanging out over there or, if my parents are off work, then we go there for dinner. We are so luckily to have grandparents who want to see our children and are willing to watch them while I do homework and go take tests, which is also something I try to accomplish a lot of on Sundays.
• Monday This is a big due date for my homework. This is the last day that I can take my weekly physiology quiz, chemistry quiz, and turn in my chemistry lab. It’s pretty difficult to get homework done with the girls, so I try to get as much as I can of this done during the night after they go to bed and on the weekends when we’re over at the grandparents. I need to get better about this though. Last Monday I also donated plasma, which I plan on doing on a regular basis now. I did chemistry reading while I was donating. We also went to lunch with my mom.
• Tuesday We have Peanut’s dance class. We’re trying out a new one and have to stick with it for at least 2 months, via the contract. I’m not 100% happy with it, but I’ve given up on being happy with anything besides their music classes. Pretty much any class we’ve tried out for Peanut bribes and expects things that I don’t think are 3 year-old appropriate (like sit on this circle or you can’t participate). I have a blog on that I should review and post. Anyway, I try to avoid doing much besides the dance class. This Tuesday, I also had to take a chemistry exam, during which my mom watched the girls while I finished studying and then my in-laws watched the girls while I went in and took it. 93%!
• Wednesday We try to go to story time at the library by our house on Wednesdays, but this Wednesday we had a play date scheduled, so we skipped it. Our play date ended up being cancelled because her little sister was sick, but we did get a bike trailer from a friend for free (yay bike riding!) and then we went grocery shopping. We also went into the Humane Society and played with the kitties, which Peanut loved. Hopefully I’ll be starting to donate plasma on Wednesday mornings. Yay money!
• Thursday Thursdays have been stressful days in the past, but luckily that should be over! My husband has been working on a big project at work and for the past four months, Thursdays have been his late nights. Meaning he doesn’t get home from work until the girls are in bed. And that’s on top of his working 10 hours a day! Ugh! Hopefully, unless there’s a ton of bugs with the program or something, the long hours should be over. This past Thursday we went to the park with friends and then lunch with daddy before he went back to work. We also went shopping for stuff for our Halloween costumes.
• Friday Fridays don’t have much planned, but it’s the first day I can take my physiology quiz and I have my physiology lab due the next day, so I try to do as much homework as possible. We sometimes have friends over in the evening to play board games.
• Saturday Saturdays are pretty stressful at times, but fun! We try to do the fun things that are available near our house, since there’s generally a lot going on. We also have the girls’ Music Together class, which is in Salt Lake City, about a 45 minute drive. My husband comes with us (which is why we have it scheduled for Saturday) and then we usually go to lunch somewhere in the city afterwards. Somehow we always end up getting home later than I anticipate. Then my husband’s friends come over to play Magic: The Gathering until the wee hours of the night. I try to accomplish as much homework as possible during this time too.

So, as you can see, we don’t really have a lot of mandatory attendance things throughout our week, but we do end up doing a lot in a week. My goal continues to be the same one in that I want to avoid putting too much on our plates. We have a great time with play dates so I’ve been trying to get in more of those. The girls are just so much more happy (as am I) when we’ve been around people we enjoy.

My second goal is to accomplish more homework during the week. I tend to do a bunch on Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and Monday, then not do any at all for Tuesday, Wednesday, or Thursday. If I could keep it spread out throughout the week, it wouldn’t be so much at once.

Lastly, my third goal is to be more present when I’m playing with the girls. Especially when school is in, I feel so hard pressed for time that I feel the need to always been multitasking. Either I’m folding laundry while we’re playing on their floor or I’m writing a blog post in my head while I color or I’m messing on my phone while I’m pushing Peanut on the swing. The reason that we decided that I should stay at home with the girls is that we wanted a parent present in their day-to-day lives. It’s not fair to them if I’m only half there. And if I’m more present the majority of the time, it’ll be easier for them to give me some space when I really need it.

Thanks for joining me as I went through the Simplifying for Fall Challenge. It’s been nice to get things in order as fall is starting. Have any of you followed the challenge or simplified on your own? 

This is a continuation of my very late participation in the Simplify for Fall Challenge. Here’s the first day, second day, third day, and fourth day of the challenge.

I don’t really have a whole lot to do today! Woohoo!

When it comes to paper clutter, I’m pretty nominal. I used to keep everything because I wasn’t sure what we’d need in the future. Now that I’ve figured that out (what an adult I am!) and do our bills online (automatic payment rocks!), I don’t really have a whole lot to keep. I could probably go through these and get rid of some stuff, but it’s really not more than 30 minutes of work.

I do like to keep all the manuals to my appliances. And I have a soft spot for the girl’s growth charts, though I should probably move those to my cedar chest. Really though, I go through this fairly regularly and just don’t hold onto things that don’t matter, so it doesn’t need the purge.

A few things that can’t fit in our filing cabinet. Just papers from buying our house and a couple of manuals.

I also have been working on our budget pretty continuously for the last 4 months. This is where we started when I decided to finally get going with the cash envelope system and I’m happy to say that I still love it. We’ve moved to keeping track of our Dave Ramsey sheets on Google Docs (which is now Google Drive, in case you didn’t know). I just made a simple sheet for our Monthly Cash Flow Plan and Allocated Spending Plan that have only the categories that pertain to our situation. Way easier than doing it by hand on paper every month. Does the math for me and deleting is way more simple than crossing out!

I’ve also added some folders. We now have one for blow, one for pets, and most recently we added one for gas. Blow was a category that I didn’t really believe in at first, but now I realize that sometimes there are things you want to buy that just don’t fit into any category. You need to have that little bit of money that you can spend on a whim. With the pets, I originally had their necessities as part of the grocery budget (I combine toiletries, make up, and other such things into the grocery budget), but when one of our cats needed to go to the vet (which sadly ended last week in putting him down, which is another post for another day), I was at a loss as to where we should take the money from. So I decided to have the pets be their own separate folder. Lastly, I was doing gas on our debit card because that’s what Costco takes, but I was tired of always overspending on gas and not knowing exactly where we stood on it. I decided to give up on Costco, which is further away than many gas stations so I was avoiding going and it ended in me running out of gas one day, and just take the car to the cheapest gas station near our house. There are some around our house that even give you a cheaper price if you use cash! Score!

We did end up using our credit card a bit over the last few months with our flooring. It was a planned use though with a planned payoff, so I feel a bit better about it. Originally it started with getting a crazy good deal on laminate flooring off of KSL (it’s basically Craigs List for those of you who aren’t in Utah). Such a good deal that we decided we couldn’t pass it up. As for installing it, we were planning on waiting until my husband was done with his big project (and therefore we had the bonuses), but schedules collided and we ended up doing it earlier. And it cost more than we planned, of course. Regardless, when my husband gets his final bonus of his project, our credit card will be 100% paid off and our emergency fund will be back in place.

Lastly, we had a couple of difficult weeks last month. It was the first time where it was really hard to live on cash-only, and it was entirely my fault.

That post I did on all the awesome unschooling summer things we did between my school semesters? Well, those things cost money. Lots of money. Money that I ended up taking from other folders. That, along with registering the van and other money shuffling, meant that we literally didn’t have any money to move around for a bit over a week before my husband got paid again. Oops. Luckily I kept the money that we really needed in certain folders (like music, which we were about to start paying) where it needed to be and we didn’t resort to using the credit card or debit card. Of course we still had food in our cupboards, we just kept it to money-free activities for that time.

Overall it’s still going great. We’re saving up money where we need to and we haven’t overspent once since starting on our cash envelope system. Even more than that, we’ve continued to put our extra on our debt snowball and we’re doing all the things we want to, without the guilt of whether or not we can afford it.

Here’s the first day, second day, and third day of the challenge. Today’s challenge is bathrooms. Luckily, I really only have one to clean, as the half bath just holds my hair straightener (for getting my hair ready while my husband is in the shower). Really, we don’t even have real cabinets in there, just an almost entirely empty shelf unit. The other bathroom though, that one needed some work. Majorly.

My husband and I had been discussing altering our bathroom drawers now that Twig is more mobile. As it is currently, we had our medicines on the bottom, which obviously isn’t the best thing with kids around. Luckily, Peanut has never really been the kid to wander around trying to find bottles of pills to down. Still probably wasn’t the smartest thing to have them on the bottom, but it’s where they happened to end up when we moved and we haven’t changed it since. Twig though, she’s super oral. I seriously found her scrounging around for her sister’s crumbs below her chair this morning. Yeah, she’ll totally eat all the pills. Time to move those to a better place.

Also, things were just getting out of hand. I have a habit of going through drawers every year or so and getting rid of stuff. When I do that, I tend to give everything it’s pretty little place (see after photo) and it’s all fine and dandy. Then, of course, things get added to the mix, standing up things fall over, or we just don’t put things back exactly where I’ve designated in the drawer, so our drawers end up with just piles of stuff in them. Need the teething tablets? Let’s break out the flashlight! Want a pony tail for my hair? Better set aside five minutes to search! I have no idea how to break this habit, but I can remedy the current problem.

We also had a lot of things that I just don’t feel like keeping. Samples of toothpaste that I’m never going to use, fever reducers from when Peanut had the flu back before I found out that fevers are good for you, and the list goes on. Some of these things needed to go. Some of it, like the diaper lanolizing supplies, needed to be moved. All in all, this is one room I really wanted to tackle and the challenge gave me just the reason to go ahead and get it over with.

We started off with the pictures going cabinet, husband’s drawer, my drawer, girls’ drawer, medicine. We ended with cabinet (my hair stuff and some other random things that are nice to have up top), medicine, husband’s drawer, my drawer, girls’ drawer (with the leftover supplies from homebirthing in the back because I occasionally use the big pads they put under you for when Peanut falls asleep and I’m in the middle of washing diapers).

I can already tell you after living with this new set up for about a week that it’s awesome! Having a bathroom that you can actually find things is nice. Who would have thought?

Sorry again for the awful quality of pictures. I really need to take my camera in to get fixed. 

On we go! Here’s the first day and second day of the challenge. Day 3 of the challenge is “Toys and School Supplies,” which I don’t feel the need to simplify. We’ve had a few different purging sessions with toys and we have a rule of one in, one out. At the moment, we need to put that into effect and get rid of a handful of toys, but donating half a dozen toys is hardly worth a blog post. Plus Peanut is having a hard time at the moment (more on that later), so I don’t really feel like adding something that could be potentially upsetting (though it isn’t under normal circumstances) into the mix. See (not included are a few random toy spots around the house for Twig and a small basket each girl gets for car toys):

The white storage unit, caterpillar, and elephant chest (dress-up) are toys.

Stroller, easel, and coloring station.

So, I decided to pare down the holiday decorations.

When I made this decision I told my husband “You can tell I’m taking this minimalism thing seriously because I’m going after the decorations next!” It’s one thing that I’ve neglected to do in all of my getting rid of excess. I think it’s partially because of the whole “out of sight, out of mind” idea, but also partially because my feelings of hesitancy. You see, I think that my mind equates being an adult with having decorations. I’m not quite sure why, but every time I get a new ornament for the tree or find a cute heart for valentines, I feel a bit more grown up. Maybe it’s because, in the past in our small apartment and shared living spaces, there wasn’t really much place to put decorations. The holiday proceeding moving into our house, I remember feeling excited that I could finally buy decorations and hang them everywhere. I held myself back from getting that many, but I did have way too many. Especially for certain holidays.

I started feeling the urge to purge (see what I did there?) last year. The Christmas season was ending and I actually felt relieved to take down the decorations and put them away until next year. Sure, it was in large part the fact that I was concerned that Twig would come before I got them put away and we’d have a Christmas tree up until March, but it was also just having all of this extra clutter in my space. Really, should decorations be so abundant that they’re stressing me out? I think not. 

So, here’s what I started with:

I had so many decorations that I had extras overflowing. I had so many decorations that some of them were in old boxes. I had so many decorations that I was choosing to leave some put away when a holiday rolled around. Hi, I’m Claire and I’m a holidayaholic. 

It also turns out that I hold more sentimental value to Peanut’s past Halloween costumes than I did my wedding dress. In my defense, I didn’t make my wedding dress. It was hard, but I took the parts that were logical to keep for Peanut’s dress-up bin and put the rest in the trash/freecycle pile. Speaking of, here it is:

And, last but not least, here are my keeps:

Left bin is Christmas stuff, including tree ornaments (of which I got rid of all of the generic ones). Middle is Easter baskets with eggs, disposable dishes (mostly left over from postpartum let’s-not-do-dishes days and at least some of which I’m about to donate to a newly postpartum friend), and giftbags. Yeah, I’m one of those people who keeps the giftbags for things that I have been given to me to reuse them. Now that they’re all in one place, hopefully I’ll actually reuse them. Last bin is Halloween stuff (with a few autumn things thrown in), including just my husband’s and my LoTR costumes, since they’re quick and awesome for years were I don’t have the energy to put together costumes myself. I think I’m going to move the Halloween stuff to a smaller bin since it doesn’t need that much space, but other than that I’m done!

Just because I have a house doesn’t mean I need to decorate for every holiday. Decorations should not stress me out. I am still an adult if I don’t own 10 puffy hearts to put on my couch for the whole month of February. If I keep repeating these things, I’ll eventually believe them.

Here’s the first day of my adventure in this challenge. Look there for more explanation as to what it is and join me! Just because we’re late doesn’t mean we can’t enjoy the party! My kitchen had it coming. Oh goodness did it have it coming! When we did redid our flooring, not only did it cause all of the remodeling mess to be all up in my kitchen’s business, but I insisted on moving a large  cabinet that wasn’t strictly necessary downstairs (I wanted it out of the house, but the compromise was for it to be in the back room). We really didn’t need the extra space, but moving the last few things out of it did require some shifting of organization. And, quite frankly, a little bit of piling things on top of one another. Which resulted in this:

Which, thankfully, I’ve turned into this:

Sorry about the shadow. I plan on using the canned goods up as much as possible, especially the ones that I’m not particularly interested in eating (canned salmon is simply meh), freeing up even more room in the pantry.

The second thing I did was start with this jumbled mess:

And I turned it into this:

I didn’t get rid of much (just the things that were expired), but I did rearrange it in a way that’s more accessible. All of the things on the top of the left cabinet are snacks. In the right cabinet, the left top is extras, then sauces, then sweets. Bottom shelf is noodles, then boxed dinner things, then crackers. I’m going to work on using these up too.

Lastly, I did our random stuff area:

Turning it into this:

This is the area of the house where everything and anything goes. When it doesn’t have a place. When it’s waiting for further action. When come in the door and just set something down. I’m sure all of you have this area too. It gets pretty full of random clutter at times. We were also having an issue with Peanut grabbing stuff out of my husband’s basket (we each have our own little random area within the random area!), including his wedding ring, so I moved it over. There’s still the bottom of the dishwasher on there, as well as a picture frame that Peanut painted and needs a picture, but for the most part, it’s clean.

This is far from our full kitchen, but those were the real trouble areas. I do still want to go through my baking cabinet. I never got around to getting rid of all of the specialty teas that I never drink, so I’d like to go through those. I’m saving it for another time though because it’s not really that bad.

I’m late to the party on this one and it took me longer than 6 days to do all the tasks (though I plan on posting them in six days), but I decided that simplifying for fall sounds like a great idea. Here’s the challenge, for those of you who haven’t heard of it yet. The idea is that fall is a great time to get the home back in order. Summer has been lovely, but I’m definitely ready for fall. We’ve spent this summer running around doing as many fun things as we can, the girls have been going to bed at 10pm, and we’ve just generally spent a lot of time outside of our house. The disorder of summer is a blessing and a curse. I’m ready for the weather to cool and our routines to get back in order. I’m also ready to get our house back in order.

The first day of the challenge is clothes and laundry rooms. Luckily, my laundry room is pretty dang simple. It’s all the way in the basement and the walls aren’t finished, so it’s not like there’s a lot of room to accumulate stuff. Plus, it’s where the kitty litter boxes are, so not my favorite place to hang out. The clothes part took me two separate sessions to figure out though. I could have continued, but the girls were begging for my attention by the time I finished their clothes.

The biggest helper to me was this list that Mandi made for her girls’ clothes. I actually used it for the girls and for myself! Really, why do we need more than 10 days worth of clothes? Is there anyone who actually does laundry less than once a week? If that’s you, can we trade lives? Just for a minute. Please? Like Mandi, I’ve tried to rotate the girls’ clothes in the past twice a year, but if you only rotate twice it’s really hard to decide when to do it. It’s September, which could mean about 5 different weather patterns in Utah. With her list, It’s easy to account for the drastic changes in weather from day to day during fall and spring.

So, following a tailored version of her list, here are our fall wardrobes:

Peanut’s Fall Wardrobe

Here’s a detailed list (starting at the top left and going down): 2 pairs of pajamas, raincoat/sweater/cardigan, 5 dresses (one more that’s not shown), undies, few pairs of socks, 3 pairs of leggings, 3 long sleeved shirts with 2 pairs of pants, 4 short sleeved shirts with 2 pairs of shorts and 1 pair of capris (one skirt that’s not shown).

This includes her two emergency outfits, one that goes in her backpack and one that goes in the car. I’ve already replaced her jeans (they were too short) with some awesomely cute ones we got for $5 at Kid to Kid (with adjustable waist!). That place is great. She got extra dresses because, if she had her way, that’s all she’d wear. Really, it just mostly ended up being pulling out the cool weather stuff we had and taking out the warm weather stuff. At first I was convinced that we wouldn’t have enough, but we definitely did! I think it’ll still be plenty when I take out the shorts and short sleeved shirts as it gets colder.

Twig’s Fall Wardrobe

Twig’s detailed list (top left down): 3 sweaters (could probably stand to take out one or two of those still, but they’re so cute!), 2 short sleeved shirts with pants that match (one shirt is missing), warm weather dress and cool weather dress, 2 pairs of pajamas, 3 long sleeve shirt outfits with pants, 5 onesies/shirts with short sleeves.

Are you wondering why she doesn’t have any shorts? That’s because she doesn’t wear them! Why would I cover up the super cute wool covers I’ve made? Honestly, I may even knit longies for winter and get rid of the pants. They’re so cute!

My Fall Wardrobe

My fall clothes (top down left to right): coat and sweater (probably don’t need the coat out yet, but I never really put it away so I figured I’d include it), 2 dresses, 3 cardigans (my go-to), one pair of capris and one pair of jeans, 7 short-sleeved shirts. Not included in this list are my underthings and house clothes. I also have a couple of scarves.

I think that my wardrobe may have ended up the smallest, but I love it! By going through this, it was really easy to pick out the things that I was happy to wear every day and get rid of the rest. If I’m constantly passing it up in my closet, why is it there? Why do I waste my time either thinking about whether I should wear it or looking not-my-best by wearing it? I also didn’t include any long-sleeved shirts because I’ve realized that they just don’t work for me. My style is a short-sleeved shirt with a cardigan, no matter the weather (though generally not the cardigan during summer, though I do have a short sleeved cardigan that makes appearances). Why am I trying to get myself to wear long sleeved shirts when they are never my favorite thing on me? Nuff said.

I didn’t touch my husband’s wardrobe because he doesn’t like it when I try to get him to get rid of things. Silly boys. He did let me help him get rid of things a while back, so we’ll call that progress. For now, he’s taking up about 3/4 of our closet.

Are you pairing down for fall? Do you live with a small wardrobe? Would you like to live with a smaller one? Join me in getting rid of some clothes! 

While our house it’s really what I’d call “new” anymore, we still continue to do new things to it. This project took 3 weeks and I’m excited to say it’s finally done. 

We had blue carpet in our kitchen. 

That’s where this all started. I’m not sure who decided that blue carpet in a kitchen was a good idea (the brilliant person who also thought it would be great in the bathroom… with padding) (side note: I forgot to ever post on our bathroom renovation! It shall be done soon), but trust me, it wasn’t. Carpet in the kitchen is awful. Not only does it look awful, but, especially with kids, it is so, so, so gross. Peanut went through a phase where she decided to take the milk out of the fridge, multiple times, and pour it on the floor. That phase was promptly ended by getting a lock for the refrigerator door. Even without that though, it was gross. Children spill. Klutzy wives spill. Animals have accidents. Their water bowl is fun. All in all, we needed hard floors in our kitchen.

There was a long-time debate on wood (or in our case, laminate, as this is our starter home) versus tile in the kitchen. There was also a long-time debate as to whether or not we should keep the carpet in our living room. When I say debate, I really mean that my husband and I disagreed, but I didn’t care as much as he did, so I gave in. Turns out I got my way in the end on both counts.

So we were keeping an eye out for some “used” (meaning not directly used, but purchased from a person who bought too much or something of that matter) laminate that we’d like in our kitchen when my husband found a whammy of a deal. 480 square feet of laminate for $280! Yeah, it’s Home Crappo’s in-store brand, but this is our not-forever home. We wanted to improve, but be reasonable. Cork flooring shall be saved for our next home.

480 square feet just happened to be the right amount to do our kitchen and living room, with the tile entryway that we were already planning on. Win for me! So that became our plan, and we started to rip out carpet. Besides the surprise of our kitchen carpet being glued down by approximately one bucket of glue per square foot, we found another surprise:

Surprise! Wood floors!

What to do. What to do. In the end, we decided to commit flooring blasphemy (I’m sure you figured that out given the title of this post) and cover the wood flooring with laminate.

Before you bite my head off, let me explain. This wood flooring, while beautiful, needed a lot of work.

That with the fact that we already had the laminate in our possession and the fact that laminate is not damaging to the flooring below it, we decided to continue with an altered version of the original plan. Skip the tile entryway, as to preserve the wood flooring. Tile the kitchen instead, since it was not wood flooring and we didn’t have enough laminate to cover the whole area. Lastly, do the upstairs hallway, which was covered in the same carpet as the living room and has the same wood flooring beneath, in the laminate also.

Fast forward a month. Yes, it literally took us almost a month to do this. I was without a kitchen for almost 3 weeks. It wasn’t fun. We haven’t finished the stairs or the hallway, but we’re to a stopping point for now.

Add some rugs and new lighting (though the living room lighting still needs to be installed) and the rooms are finished! Yay! Functioning house!

Well, it didn’t take us long to messy up the new flooring.