Spring Bulbs?!

With temperatures in the low 50's the past few days my tulip bulbs are starting to poke through the ground.  It looks like the rest of the month will have temps in the high 30's to low 50's.  It sure seems early.

After about 30 minutes of searching online about tulips coming up too early I couldn't find much but did find this:

"Fill several empty garbage pails with Straw (or you can use dry leaves) and mound over early sprouting Bulbs. If it snows, you can toss some snow over them to keep them from blowing away. If you can get the shovel into the ground and it is not frozen solid, sprinkle the tops with dirt - or get some sand or other mulching material from Home Depot and cover the leaves just enough to keep them in place over your Bulbs. Say 3 Hail Marys and 1 Our Father, then go inside and wait." -AllExperts.com

Unfortunately, we have a wedding coming up in two weeks.  So I'm thinking the bulbs are on their own. For those of you with some early risers, and some time, this sounds worth a try...maybe I'll try the hail mary part :)

Time to move...

...into our new bedroom that is!

Apple Banana Bread

I made some deeelicious looking banana bread today.  I love banana bread because it uses food that might be a tad too ripe to enjoy fresh.

I didn't have quite enough overripe bananas so I substituted applesauce for the rest of the bananas.  If the smell is any indication...we're in for a real treat :)

Making Room

 

Finished floors!

Our bedroom floors are finished and now we must wait for them to cure for SEVEN days! In the meantime I've been making plans for the new and improved closet space.  One thing I've been meaning to do for a while is get space-saving hangers in an effort to make the best use of our very limited closet space.

I picked up some thin hangers from Storables last week and re-hung all of Tony's clothes using the new hangers.  It is unbelieveable how much more space there is.  I think we might be able to hang twice as many clothes as we could with the previous hangers.

 New thinner hangers

Before: Wooden Hangers from Ikea

After: SoftGrips Hangers from Storables

Projects in Progress: Bedroom Part II

The paint is done. The floors are waiting for some finish. Then we can move in!  I'm hoping by Christmas!!

Getting Organized

We have a couple of very deep shelves in our kitchen. They are great for storing all of our canned goods and baking supplies.  But they have not been very functional when trying to find ingredients.  I've found myself pulling everything out of the shelves several times to track down some spaghetti noodles or powdered sugar.

Enter sliding shelves!  Tony got them in the mail this week and installed them the night we got them. (Thank you honey!)

Turns out we have more than enough flour (five bags to be exact).  Guess I better start making some Christmas cookies and bread? :)

I'm too embarrassed to show you a picture of the shelves before they were cleaned out, but here is a picture of the empty shelves...

 ...and here is a picture of all the food that was on the shelves....

 ...and here is a picture of the finished product!

Holiday Gifts for Co-Workers

I exchange small gifts with several co-workers during the holidays. A lot of people give each other coffee gift cards but I like to do something more unique and personalized. Last year I gave office plants to everyone, but only a few of the plants made it. This year I'm giving away some of my homemade holiday cranberry-strawberry jam.

I've dressed up the jars with some festive fabric and ribbon and made homemade tags for each jar.  I like to use the previous years' Christmas cards to create my tags for Christmas gifts.  There are a lot of great images that can be cut out and glued on to cardstock to create gift tags.  The tags can be dressed up with anything you have in your craft box. I used glitter glue, some holiday stamps from cards we've already received this year, and scalloped edge scissors.