We are trying something to get rid of the weeds somewhat naturally.  The idea is, after clearing by hand and trimming down to the dirt, to cover the area with cardboard and then pile up the remaining summer grass clippings and the fall grass and leaves on top of the cardboard.  The cardboard will block most light from reaching the weed-bed, and the trimmings, clippings, mulched leaves, etc will break down the cardboard over the course of the winter.  When spring comes, we'll be able to add some topsoil and plant the grass seed.  It will be a good, fertile bed, without many weeds to compete with, and should result in a nice, new grassy area next to our home.

We had given the kids a large playroom in the main part of our mostly-finished basement.  We installed nice white built-in shelves and cabinets, including their own entertainment center.  There was plenty of room for romping and burning off extra energy.  And, I thought, it would be easy for them to put their toys away when they were done playing.

The result was a complete disaster area that I was embarrassed for even the exterminator to see (I imagine him saying, duh lady clean your house if you want to get rid of pests).  Kids (and the dog) all ran wild in there, letting popsicles melt in gooey puddles you didn't find for weeks, mingled with spilled chocolate milk buried under a layer of scattered blocks, puzzle pieces, chewed up stuffed animals, story books, broken crayons, and electronic games...and much much more.

I have learned a few things since my first playroom attempt.  This past weekend the playroom was moved into a smaller, more enclosed space in the basement.  The big room with the TV in it is now my deluxe exercise room (including a punching bag - much needed).  The kids can still run around and blow off steam in the big room but they are not allowed to leave toys in there.

The new, organized playroom in a smaller space:

If you are looking into how to organize your kids' playroom, here are a few suggestions from hard-learned experience:

• Playroom organization begins with purging.  You have to get the kids out of the house for this one, trust me, you don't want them "helping" you decide what to keep.  That said, before you do this take note of what your kids are currently enjoying playing with, and also remember things they used to love playing with until they lost all the pieces.  You want to get rid of clutter and excess, but there is no need to get rid of honestly fun toys they like if they're still in good shape.  Things to trash: kids meal toys, broken toys, puzzles with missing pieces, toys the dog chewed up.  
  
  
• A bigger playroom is not better.  The more space there is to scatter things, the more mixed up everything will get, and the harder it will be to restore order to the chaos.  It will be hard for kids to find their toys, let alone enjoy playing with them.
  
  
• Use mid-sized containers for grouping toys together. Use plastic bins and baskets big enough to hold chunky toys, but not so big as to hold a LOT of toys.  If the bin is too large, the kids will feel they need to dump the whole thing out to find the toy they want to play with.  Too small and you won't be able to group enough things together, you'll just have a clutter of bins.
  
  
• Label your bins in a child-friendly way.  Use big lettering as well as pictures to show what belongs in the bin.  I was not a perfectionist about the pictures.  I just found photos online (Amazon was useful for this) of things that were representative of the toys I was storing.  I put the labels inside plastic sheet protectors or just covered them with tape and slapped them onto the containers directly. 
  
  
• Be creative in grouping toys together.  There are obvious things, like Duplos, or wooden blocks that obviously go together with their own kind.  But what about a bin full of everything Elmo, or a collection of anything that could be called a small animal?  Give things their own special group to belong to and it will help kids remember where to put it back. Here were my catergories:
  
  Duplos
  Mega Bloks
  Thomas the Tank Engine
  Magnet Toys
  Balls
  Trucks/Cars (also included some flying vehicles)
  Star Wars Action Figures
  Costumes (big bin also doubles as a table with four small chairs around)
  Dora Toys
  Wooden Blocks
  Mr. Potato Head
  Other Action Figures
  Doll Clothes
  Barbie
  Toddler Toys
  Dolls
  Stuffies (stuffed animals)
  Kitchen Dishes
  Kitchen Food (toy food that is)
  Nerf Laser Gun and Darts
  Penguins and Puffles
  Elmo Toys
  Little People
  Boobahs and Teletubbies
  Coin Toys (a toy piggy bank and a cash register)
  Trio and Castle Set
  Star Wars Practice Blades (a narrow drawer for my son to keep two old vacuum cleaner crevice tools he likes to pretend are his practice lightsabers)
  Baby Toys
  Puppets
  Peek-a-Bloks
  
  
• Avoid catch-all toy bins as much as possible.  If you have a big pile of toys that don't seem to belong to any one set, comb through them once more and see if you can't find enough to form a category like "Dora Toys" or "Magnet Toys".  In the end, you might end up with an amorphous group of stuff that you have to resort to calling "Toddler Toys" but keep that sort of thing to a minimum, to avoid the large bin of mystery toys problem.
  
  
• Set the rules for long-term playroom organization success.   Our rules are simple:

1. No food or drinks allowed in the basement (including the playroom).
2. All toys need to put away when you are done with them.
3. Before bed, every single toy in the whole house has to be put back in the playroom (with exceptions for stuffies to sleep with, and my son's Lego collection which lives in his room).  

This weekend we couldn't keep the kids away for ever... when the purging was done, they were around for the organizational part, and they really wanted to help.  They enjoyed taping the signs onto the bins and putting items in their new homes.  Today the cousins came over and once again threw toys all over the room (much to my kids' dismay!), but they had been forewarned that they were expected to put things away in the places as I had labeled them.  And lo and behold, before their mom came to get them, they had everything put back as if they had never been there.

And yes, it is more fun for the kids to play in an organized playroom, especially for my 2.5 year old who thinks it's like Christmas, all these "new" toys to play with.  I'll have to keep reminding them all to clean up after themselves, but kids like knowing what's expected of them.  They didn't want to have a messy playroom before, they just didn't know how to handle it.  Now they have an easy-to-understand system of organization to help them quickly put toys where they are supposed to go. 

Maybe I won't need that punching bag quite so badly as I did before.  

 The tank goes on next.  It's a simple concept, but the bolts are sometimes hard to get at.  The kit we bought came with a nifty metal pipe that was used to gain some leverage.  Again, be careful about the bolts being too tight.

We're almost done!  Connect the supply line and check for leaks.  The tank will say how much it should be filled and there should be something like the black adjustable screw that I've shown to make the water level what it should be.  Then, grab a good book and enjoy the newly installed throne!

The first thing that occurred to us is that no one has looked inside this thing in23 years.  To my surprise, it wasn't in that bad of shape.  Yes, it was old, yes, it was dirty, but it was functional and not horrible.

Removing a toilet is a pretty simple job.  The first step, of course, is to turn off the water.  As long as the water source is shut off, you only have to deal with the water in the tank and bowl.  After flushing a few times, you'll be left with water in the tank.  There's simply no good way to get rid of all of it without soaking it up with rags and towels.  Yes, it's dirty, but you just have to deal with it.  

 For the bowl, a rag stuffed down the toilet will soak up the water.  You'll have to ring it out and repeat a number of times, but in the end, you'll end up with a dry tank and bowl.  Simply undo the bolts holding it down and haul it away.  Separating tank and bowl is an optional step that may make removal easier.  When finished, you'll be left with the wax seal around a hole in the floor.

The rag in this picture is stopping up the hole during a break for lunch.  This is important because you are basically looking at your sewer line.  You don't want those gasses in the house, trust me.  So, plug the hole and then you can leave the project for errands, lunch, etc., without fear of hurting something.  As long as the water is off, there's nothing to be afraid of at this point.

When you are ready to continue,  you have to remove the wax seal and clean up.  You can use a putty knife to remove the seal, but be careful of the flange over the hole.  It's likely to be as old as your house and you don't want to break it.  The replacement of a toilet flange is frustrating, annoying, and will involve colorful language, trust me. 

Once the wax is gone,  you can clean around the toilet area.  It's a good idea to complete any flooring fixes at this time.  One suggestion is to check and re-caulk the seal at the bottom of the tub where it meets the floor and also to run a bead along the baseboard behind where the toilet will sit. 

Another idea is to replace the supply line with a new, steel mesh supply.  It's a bit of insurance knowing the nice new toilet is connected to a new line with new seals and fittings.  At this point, we are cleaned up and ready for the new toilet to be installed.  We'll show you how we tackled that in the next article.

For our project, we are in the kid's bathroom.  This is one room we haven't done much with yet, and in fact, to our knowledge, no one has ever replaced or upgraded the toilet since the house was built 22 years ago.  That's because, for some inexplicable reason, the countertop extends across the toilet.  That means, no one has opened it, cleaned the inside, or upgraded any of the internal systems in 20+ years.

I honestly have no idea why anyone would want to install a countertop and toilet in this manner.  It's impossible to service the toilet.  In fact, in order to replace the thing, we had to make the decision to either replace the entire counter or else cut off the piece that extended over the toilet.  We elected to cut the counter, since the rest of it was working just fine and there was no need to make this into a bigger project than what it was. 

In the engineering world, we call the tendency for projects to grow and grow "requirements creep".  Slowly, a project starts small and then creeps forward, a requirement at a time, until it's huge.  Luckily, we avoided that this time around and just did what was required to get the toilet installed.  

The project began with a straight line marking the countertop edge we wanted to cut off.  Armed with my handy reciprocating saw, I cut down the line until I was close to the wall.  Due to the design of the saw,  I wasn't able to get right up to the wall and needed to use the hand saw to finish the job.

It turned out that I was a little too ambitious with the reciprocating saw.  I ended up a bit too close to the wall when tilting the saw and hit the wall on the underside.  It can be patched, but it's a lesson learned.

In the next post, I'll go through the remaining cleanup and prep steps before the toilet is installed.

It turns out that the months of abuse leading to the failure of the door had scrapped off a significant portion of the circular plastic roller, making it basically flat on one side.  Obviously, this is not going to roll very well.  This can happen because we can overpower the door and force it to slide and scrape rather than roll in the track.  Too many repetitions of that exercise and the roller is basically toast. 

Luckily, the fix is pretty simple.  These rollers are replaceable, being held to the door by just one screw.  So, for $2 each, you can buy new metal rollers.  Install these puppies and then you can reinstall the door.  We found immediate improvement in the door movement and were able to use the screen again.  The only trick is to use the adjustment screws to carefully re-center the door in the frame.  It can take some doing and fine-tuning, but in the end, you have a decent working door.  Remember to lubricate the track while you are at it.  WD-40 will work wonders.  

But as time marches on we are getting closer to that day when we'll need to replace our HVAC.  With that in mind, we've from time to time looked into geothermal heating and cooling systems.  They are efficient and provide a "green" alternative to traditional HVAC systems.  But like many green products, it can be more expensive.  So if you are thinking of installing one, you ought to weigh the expenses against the return.

Geothermal systems work by using the heat stored in the surface of the earth to heat the home in cold weather, or to pull heat out of the home to cool it in warm weather. Polyethylene piping is installed under the ground or under water, and water (or antifreeze) is circulated through these pipes to either be warmed by the ground temperature (about 50 degrees) or to transfer heat from the house to the ground.  A small unit in the house uses electricity to concentrate the heat and to circulate the air.  More info on the operation of the geothermal heat pump is here.

As home improvements go, the geothermal HVAC system is one of your very high ticket items.  Depending on what type of installation you get it may be more or less expenses.  Installation types include:

Horizontal Loop - piping runs back and forth underneath your driveway or yard

Pond Loop - piping is installed under water

Vertical Loop - if you don't have the square footage available for horizontal, the alternative is to have a well driller drill a shaft into the earth for the piping to run down into

Open Loop - also involves drilling, as it uses ground water for heating and cooling

According to the Consumer Energy Center, geothermal heat pumps cost (for an "average" home) about $7500, plus the cost of installation which varies depending on the need for drilling (anywhere from $10,000 - $30,000).   To reap a savings of 30-60% on your heating and cooling bill, is it worth it?  

If you are planning to stay in your home for at least 5-10 years, the geothermal HVAC will probably pay for itself in energy savings.  In our situation, where we are still paying off credit card bills from our kitchen remodel, it would not be cost effective to put money into a geothermal heat pump rather than paying off high-interest debts.  But we are keeping our fingers crossed that the traditional HVAC we have will keep on trucking until we are able to justify the expense of a high priced heating and cooling system, and have saved up the cash to buy it.

Yet, freshly painted woodwork can really improve and update the look of your home's interior.  Typically, new model homes have white woodwork.  So if your home was built, say, circa 1985, it may have all oak or oak-looking woodwork, and thus it is dated.  A fresh coat of white paint (following a nice coat of primer of course) takes at least 20 years of the look of the house.  

After remodeling a few years ago, we made the choice to go with white woodwork in the newly re-done rooms.  It took a while before we addressed the adjoining areas, including a hallway that leads from the front door to our new dining room.   But the walls were looking worse than dingy (decorated by toddlers with Crayolas and a the dog wiping her face in the wall, don't ask) so when I finally made the leap to paint the walls, I knew it was time to address the woodwork as well. 

Here are some tips for painting ceiling, walls and woodwork:

1. Prime everything that needs priming first, from stains on the walls or a dark/bright paint color, to never-before-painted woodwork.  For priming, you don't have to mask anything that will eventually be painted.
2. When painting ceiling, walls and woodwork in the same room, start with the ceiling.  A flat white ("ceiling white") paint is the best choice. Do two coats.
3. Paint the walls.  You might use a low-tack tape to mask the just-painted ceiling for cutting in the edges, but it is better if you can just be careful.  The trick to painting edges without masking is to load your brush with paint (but not so it's dripping all over the place), place it on the wall 1-2" below the place where the wall and ceiling meet, then holding it at a 45, allow the brush to fan out, so the edge of the fanned-out bristles just brush the joint between walls and ceiling.  The other trick: have a wet rag handy for oopsies.  Do two coats of wall paint.
4. Paint the woodwork.  You did do a coat of primer first, right?  You may have to mask the walls around the edges of door and window frames to protect your new paint job.  Now, start from the inside and work your way out.  If you're painting a window, start with the mullions, and the interior of the window frame.  Also, work top down.  This is to help you catch any drips.   Use a brush well-loaded with paint, hold it at a 45 degree angle, and use long, smooth strokes.  "Paint on, paint off Daniel-son."  Well, paint-on, anyway.  You may need to do three coats of paint for woodwork that was never painted before. 
5. When removing masking tape, use a utility knife to score areas that have a lot of paint on them, and pull the tape of at an angle to the surface to prevent pulling off the new paint with it.
   

Needless to say, this is a time-consuming project, and if you buy good-quality paint which I believe is worth it (we like Sherwin Williams) it can cost $100-$200.  Because you need to let the coats of paint dry between re-coats, you're looking at 2-3 days most likely.  But the end result will be worth it!  Here is a picture of my newly painted hallway.  Believe me, it looks 1000% better than it did before I painted it, ceiling, walls, and woodwork.

Here is a view of the shower.  It is a basic tub/shower combo as found in the typical "kids bathroom" in many a home, but with an upgraded look.  The slate-tile surround and contrasting shower curtain look rich together:

The shower curtain has kind of a "Christmas-y" look to it... I wonder if they switch them out for the seasons.

The ever-popular rain shower head is found in this small bathroom:

To be honest I was not entirely impressed with the rain shower head.  It worked all right, but I didn't notice any benefit over a regular shower head.  I prefer the versatility of a hand-held in my own shower at home, and when there's one in a hotel room, I at least can deceive myself that the housekeeping personnel use it to wash the walls of the shower down.  What I really noticed was how hard the water was!  I am spoiled, I've lived with water softeners all my life, and I can really tell when the water is hard.  The soap sticks to my skin, and my hair won't rinse out.  If you look closely at the walls of the shower and the shower head itself in these pictures, you can see the lime scale build-up.  That just does not look clean.  I think that a lodging facility associated with a water park ought to spring for soft water, but then that's me.

Here is a view of the nice granite countertop (or maybe it is quartz like my kitchen countertops) for a dual vanity.  Your typical small bathroom may not have room for a dual vanity (I know ours doesn't) but I strongly believe that it's worth spending money on the vanity countertop in a bathroom.  It's so small that it is not that large of an expense, but it really packs a huge impact.

(I could do without the silk flower arrangement though.)

One of the features of a Southwestern decor for a bathroom or kitchen is painted cabinets. You can see a little of that here, and the pewter drawer-pulls. 

So have fun with your small bathroom.  What is your favorite look?  I might not choose Southwestern, but I wouldn't mind something that looked up-scale.  For such a small bathroom, you can afford to splurge!

The extra refrigerator comes in handy for storing the organic chickens and turkeys we buy from a fellow homeschooling family.  But when we bring home the birds it is sometimes necessary to let them remain in the refrigerator part for a few days before moving them into the freezer.  That is where the problem starts... they are in plastic bags, but the bags are not leak-proof.  As a result, there was quite a mess on the shelves of the fridge, and in the freezer as well since my husband transferred them directly over without paying attention to the leaky mess. 

I ignored the problem for quite a while, being too busy with many other remodeling, painting and organizing projects.  But I am now all about anti-procrastination.  I asked my husband to unplug the fridge so it could thaw out, and intended to have him clean it shortly thereafter.

We both forgot about it.  I would only remember it late at night when we couldn't do anything about it. 

But finally late one night this week I remembered before we went to bed, and made an appointment to get up at 6:30 AM the next morning so we could tackle cleaning the fridge together.  It had been unplugged for several days, with the doors shut... a big no-no.  I wanted to take care of it before any more mildew grew.

Here's what I know about cleaning refrigerators.  You shouldn't use strong chemicals.  The ideal is probably hot water and vinegar (maybe 1 gallon to 1 cup ratio).  I threw in a little bit of dish soap too, since some of the mess was kind of stuck-on.  Our hot tap water is very hot indeed, so I felt confident we took care of any chicken messes quite thoroughly.  My husband brought all the shelves, drawers, baskets and bins upstairs and I scrubbed them while he wiped down the interior of the refrigerator and freezer.  

Finally, our early morning collaboration (only took 1-1/2 hours) resulted in this:

That blue box is a generic box of baking soda, just in case of any lingering chicken odors.  

Now that I know I have a clean extra refrigerator/freezer, I look forward to the next chicken butchering season, when I will learn how to make our own chicken stock and keep it stored in the freezer.  I know, just what everyone dreams about, right?  And I'm a vegetarian!  Oh but it feels good knowing your family has whole, organic food to eat.  And an extra refrigerator to store it in!

• Garbage-- preferably, this is stuff actually in a garbage can by day's end
• Recycle-- Cans and bottles can go in the recycle bin, cardboard broken down
• Wood-- These are burnable courtesy of my sister-in-law, so we can add to the bonfire
• Donations

This then left the other "stuff".  The things that actually belong in the garage.  For now, the idea is to reduce what's there to what is supposed to actually be there.  Later on we can do things like organize tools and hang rakes and shovels.  

My friend Jo, the one with the knitting blog,  has come up with a way to shine her stainless steel sink.  After trying Comet, stainless steel micro-fiber cloths, and stainless steel spray cleaner, all in vain, she finally found her secret weapon.  It was Magic Eraser's cleaner for Wheel and Tire.  It made her stainless steel sink shiny without much scrubbing.  The scum and the dullness that had been caused by coffee and food being poured down the sink, were taken away by this unexpected cleaner.  

She thought some of our home remodeling blog readers might appreciate this tip, so here you are.  I hope you soon have a shiny stainless steel sink too!