Our pets: Birds! Birds!! (and more birds)

We aren't the typical dog or cat household. Don't get me wrong, I love dogs and cats and grew up with them as pets. But my husband grew up where having dogs in the house isn't done and is also slightly allergic to cats. So we have gone another direction in keeping pets.

Birds. So many birds...

I'll start off inside. Meet Bill and Sam, our canaries.

It's hard to get pictures of these guys because they move so darn fast! Sam and Bill live in our living room/dining room so they can see us and sing to us. And sing over us, trying to drown us out when we are on the phone or watching TV.

The backyard is the domain of our little flock of chickens. We live in suburbia, but we are technically within the city limits of a more rural town that allows backyard chickens. (We are also in the suburban area of Seattle, where backyard chickens, goats, and bees are the popular "green" thing to do.) And honestly, our chickens create the same amount of noise and waste as backyard dogs would, so I don't know why all towns don't allow chickens.

Meet Lola, Lulu, Coco, and newcomer Dot:

Lola and Lulu are Rhode Island Reds and are sisters from the same hatching. They are the most friendly of the flock: they will both eat from our hands and Lola will let me carry her around. Coco is a Cuckoo Marans, and is the top hen of the flock (a little aggressive and not very friendly with us). Dot is a Silver Laced Wyandotte. We just got her around three weeks ago and the other three are still acting like middle-school mean girls towards her, but she is slowly fitting in.

(And yes, you can laugh at the names I gave my chickens. That was the point... chickens are a little bit absurd anyway, so they need names to match.)

Unfortunately, that blurry iPhone picture is the only good picture we have of Dot at the moment. Her second day here, she jumped the fence and nearly got eaten by the neighbors' dog. Luckily she wasn't injured, but all her tail feathers were torn out. We are waiting until her feathers grow back (a few more weeks) to take some more pictures, because she just looks sad right now.

We built our chicken coop out of our neighbor's old play fort on stilts. They wanted to get rid of it and it seemed like a perfect base to start off our coop, so they just lowered it across the fence to us and we hacked the stilts off and did some other modifications to create a coop/nesting area with a secure outdoor run.

We just expanded the outdoor run area to give them another 16 square feet, along with some perches. We didn't get around to painting the new section, so the coop isn't quite as pretty as it was before, but it's much more functional now.

I would like to put some paving stones outside the door to the coop since we step there a lot and it gets super muddy (Ignore the snow... Today was our once yearly snowfall for this year). These spoiled chickens also have indoor and outdoor heat lights on timers, as well as an automatic coop door on a timer. (That's what happens when my engineer husband owns chickens... He's currently trying to invent an automatic treat dispenser so that they don't have to go without corn when we are gone for the day.) We also usually let them roam around our backyard during the winter and spring, but that has been changed to supervised roaming only since Dot nearly got herself eaten.

Here's a few more pictures:

Knock, knock...

Even though they are kind of unconventional pets, I love having chickens. Each of them has a different personality and they are fun to watch in the backyard. Not to mention, they make us breakfast every day.

Kitchen Organization Part 3: Glassware

One of the things that pushed me to start organizing was the fact that if I managed to wash every drinking glass and coffee mug in the house, I couldn't fit them all in the cabinet at the same time. We have a huge collection of coffee mugs, multiple types of little tea and coffee cups (normal sized glass tea cups, shot-sized arabic style tea, arabic/turkish style coffee - and little saucers for all of them!). Not to mention normal drinking glasses, large and small. That cabinet was over-stuffed.

Here's the result after $20 of wire shelving and some organizing time:

I bought a set of white wire stacking shelves for each shelf so that I could stack glasses without the danger of them falling over. I stacked the large glass tea mugs and short drinking glasses on one shelf on the bottom level. Then coffee mugs double stacked in the middle level. And then the top shelf has our less frequently used small tea glasses and turkish coffee cups, contained in plastic bins and stacked on wire shelves.

These wire shelves made it so I can fit all of my glassware in the cabinet all at the same time - neatly and without unstable stacking. These were a great purchase! I got one at Fred Meyer and two from Walmart and all of them were pretty reasonably priced.

Bathroom Organization Part 2: Guest Bath Linen Closet

I don't actually open the door to the linen closet very often. Part of the reason is that it's in the guest bathroom, awkwardly situated behind the bathroom door. The other part is that I usually just wash and replace the same set of towels and sheets in each of the bedrooms and bathrooms. The linen closet is just long term storage for extra towels, sheet sets I don't really like, extra toilet paper, tissues and the iron (which never gets used to iron clothes!).

I did open the door the the linen closet the other day and I was struck by how messy it was. Here, take a look:

The shelf support for the bottom shelf has been missing since we bought the house, so with one less shelf I just stuffed the extra towels in haphazardly. Organizing articles say that rolling towels is a space saving, attractive solution for linen storage, but obviously that's not the case here...

My husband nailed a leftover piece of wood to the wall as a new shelf support (I would have done it myself, but for some reason he gets nervous when I have a hammer... no idea why...) and I put the bottom shelf back on.

That gave me the chance to move the Clorox wipes and extra boxes of tissues to the newly replaced shelf. I leaned the mini ironing board behind everything on the shelf because I rarely (never) iron anything. I abandoned the idea of rolling towels and folded them all instead on the next shelf up. Then extra hand towels went in the lined basket I found around the house. Folded sheets went next to the basket, kept from toppling over with shelf dividers I had left-over from our closet. The top shelf has extra comforters, old purple bathroom rugs from our apartment (that I really should just donate), and a plastic bin with needle-point and cross stitch I inherited from my grandma that I don't have displayed.

It looks much nicer. It might look neater with some of the stuff corralled in pretty bins or baskets, but I kind of like to be able to see everything and just grab it off the shelf if I need it.

All of these little organizing projects are really just a way to psych myself up for the big, scary pit of doom garage. I think I might move back into the kitchen first, though. I need a little more psyching up!

Bathroom Organization Part 1: Guest Bath Vanity

I took a detour from the kitchen to clean out the guest bathroom vanity. (I'm still trying to devise a bakeware storage solution for the blind corner cabinet in our kitchen island. It will take a trip to Home Depot and some time with power tools before I can get that done...)

Here's how the bathroom vanity looked before I cleaned it out:

I went through the under-sink cabinet and threw out three grocery bags full of expired toiletries (I think I found sunscreen that I hadn't touched since we got married - that would be 8 years!). That freed up a whole bunch of space to move the cleaning supplies from the shelves into a newly emptied plastic bin under the sink. Then I corralled all of the guest and extra shampoos and conditioners in a dollar store basket. Here's the result:

It doesn't look radically different, but the shelves in the cabinet to the left are completely empty. I don't even know what I'm going to store in there, but it's nice to have empty shelves!

The drawers to the right are also now almost completely empty. I left the top drawer for guests toiletries. My mother-in-law comes from overseas for long visits, so this will give here a place to put her brush and toothbrush.

The middle drawer is my first aid station: with band-aids, sinus and allergy medication, and other health odds-and-ends corralled in the little plastic bin that I emptied out from the under-sink cabinet.

The bottom drawer is also nearly empty. Right now it has the five empty air freshener plug-ins that I found while cleaning out the other drawers. Five! I guess we don't need to buy the warmers anymore, just refills - and we can have one for practically each room of the house!

While we are in the bathroom, I think I'll mention that this guest room was the first room of the house that we got mostly decorated. Here's a before (more like during) and after:

I just realized we don't actually have any full room "before" pictures (say hi to the bottom half of my husband, changing the faucet), but this one gives a good idea of the horrible color the previous owners had painted the vanity - a peachy orange tan, almost perfectly blended in with the floor tiles and the vanity top. With chipped silver hardware centered in the middle of each cabinet door (same in the kitchen too, only wood, why?!) Ugly...

So I repainted the vanity with chocolate brown semigloss paint and changed out the cabinet hardware for oil rubbed bronze - and moved the cabinet pulls to the sides of each cabinet door. We replaced the chrome builders-grade faucet (low arc, crystal handle... blah...) with a higher arc oil rubbed bronze faucet. We got bronze light fixtures as well - ceiling and above the mirror, and bronze towel bars. I also spray painted the air vent grate and the recessed toilet paper with Rustoleum Universal Metallic in Oil Rubbed Bronze. Then we topped it all off with brown rugs and shower curtain from Target. Probably less than $250 for the entire re-do (most of that being the faucet).

Sometime this month, I think I'll get some wood trim from Home Depot, paint it the same color as the cabinets, and make a frame for the bare mirror.

Better, right? Some of the decorating decisions the previous owners made were suspect (You'll laugh if I show you the master bath. I imagine a picture will show up here eventually). We are slowly working through them.

Next up in need of organization in the guest bathroom is the linen closet.

Kitchen Organization Part 2: Junk Drawers and Plastic Containers

I spent an unreasonable amount of time last week digging through a pile of stuff in our junk drawer, trying to find a screwdriver and tape measure. Turns out they weren't actually in the junk drawer at that time, but I would have been able to figure that out a lot sooner if the drawer had been organized!

Here's what our junk drawer looked like before:

I dragged everything out of the drawer and grouped the items. Some went to different places in the house, like the sinus medication (to the medicine cabinet) and the stud finder (to the garage). Then I found three Amazon shipping boxes that we had lying around, cut them short enough to fit in the drawer and started taping them and pieces of the box flaps together into a sort of Frankenstein drawer organizer exactly the size of the drawer.

Not gorgeous, but much better. Here's the before and after:

I have seen some tutorials on Pinterest that show how to cover these sorts of cardboard organizers in wrapping paper (check out The Stonybrook House's tutorial here) and that might be something I would do later if I feel the need for my junk drawer to be pretty as well as functional.

The junk had also crept down into the two drawers below this one. I moved some of the overflow junk to other places in the house (a first aid kit to the bathroom, lightbulbs to the garage). What was left was a portion of our collection of plastic grocery store bags. We try not to bring too many of these home. I like to try to use re-usable bags whenever I can, but we still end up with a ton of these. We re-use all of them that make it into the house, though. My husband uses this stash to put his work lunches in.

I found a tutorial online (here, from Infarrantly Creative) on how to roll these bags up so that they will fit into and dispense from a Clorox/Lysol wipe container. Look at how much less space all these bags take up! And the container is only half full!

I used spray adhesive to glue some scrapbook paper and a label to the container, just to remind my husband where to look for his lunch bags.

With all of the room freed up, I moved some of our overflowing tupperware/food storage containers into this drawer. I put all of our favorites in here so they are easy to get to when we want to put leftovers in the fridge.

Next up is the undersink cabinet and roping my husband into helping me construct some sort of bakeware organizer for the useless blind corner cabinet in the kitchen island.

Paradise is on a mountain... Really!

I just had to share how incredibly beautiful Mount Rainier is in the winter time. As I mentioned in my Travel Tuesday post on Mount Rainier, it's kind of hit or miss on what sort of weather you will get when you visit in the winter. But after Christmas, we watched the weather report like a hawk and found a day that was forecasted to be sunny and clear.

And it was worth it!

We snowshoed around 2.5 miles and I think my hips still hurt because of it, but like I said... worth it.

Kitchen Organization Part 1: Pantry & Pots and Pans

As promised, here is an update on my attempts to organize my kitchen one cabinet and drawer at a time.

We have a storage problem in our kitchen. Actually, it's more accurate to say that we have a stuff problem in our kitchen. As in too much of it. Small appliances, gadgets, pots, pans... you name it and we have multiples. But we use just about everything in our kitchen, so I have to get creative to fit it all in our cabinets.

The biggest disaster zone in the kitchen was the pantry. Our pantry is just a tall, 2 foot wide, 2 1/2 foot deep kitchen cabinet with 6 shelves. I would really like to put sliding shelves in the bottom half, but the way the cabinet is constructed, I would lose too much width to fit the sliding hardware in. So I have pack things into the shelves by frequency of use, otherwise I would have to unpack half the pantry just to get to one item I need for dinner. I had to come up with a solution that made our most used items easy to get to, while still making everything else reasonably accessible, which is difficult with the deep shelves.

I don't have any before pictures, but just imagine something similar to this only with things falling out when you touched anything and the vinegar outside of the cabinet on the floor because it didn't fit...

First off, I bought stacking ventilated baskets from the Container Store for potatoes, onions, and garlic. The open shelves keep air flowing around the produce which keeps it fresh longer, and it also keeps it visible so that I can toss out any mushy onions or sprouty potatoes before they turn into a nasty soup (it's happened before when we kept them in the bags they come in - it was gross...)

I also bought plastic storage containers for flour and sugar, which serve the double purpose of keeping them dry and also minimizing the space they take up on the shelf. I pushed the flour and baking items to the back of the shelf because I only bake once a month or so.

I left the next shelf partly empty; since it is the easiest shelf to reach, I will keep snack items, cereal and food for upcoming dinners (sauces, pasta, etc) on it.

The next two shelves are almost entirely filled with spices. I got two wire stacking shelves so that I could have two layers of spice jars around the edges of the bottom shelf. The top shelf has extra canned goods that we don't use very often pushed to the back behind the spices.

The top shelf has canned goods towards the front and also a water filter pitcher and our pressure cooker that didn't fit in our other cabinets. Since we don't use them that often, the high shelf is a good, out of the way place to store them.

Whew! That was a lot of work for one little pantry! When we have the time to be able to tear our kitchen apart for a week to repaint all the cabinets, I'll repaint this inside of the pantry a nice color to make it a little prettier.

I also organized our pots and pans cabinet with a couple lid racks. But that's not interesting enough to take a picture of. It's just satisfying that we can open the cabinet door without lids sliding out on our feet.

Next up is my adventures with our junk drawer(s) and the dreaded tupperware cabinet.