Home Improvement

We're almost halfway through our prison sentence duty station term here in New Jersey! Which means it's time to make more improvements to our little abode to make it a "home". 

I've noticed in the last two years living here many complaints things about the kitchen that I'd like to improve (two in particular):

a) it's TOO SMALL. 
Solution: Blow the damn thing up -- punch a hole in the wall -- nothing. Shit!

b) There's barely any cupboard space!
Solution: There isn't much of a solution to it, but I'm working on little things. Like our spices. It takes up an ENTIRE drawer (that's serious real estate in this place!). So I took the leftovers of that magnetic tape I used recently for Calen's puzzle and stuck them to the bottom of all these empty baby food jars I'm accumulating. Then dump spices from old containers into said baby food jars, and stick them on the metal stove hood. Brilliance. I ran out of magnet tape but I have tons more to make.The goal is to completely empty that drawer and fill it up with new shit something else.  

Spices on our stove hood. An earthquake will be catastrophic. And flavorful.

I've also got my garden up and going! Last year we only had two tomato plants and a jalapeno plant, both hanging off our shed (have to keep things HIGH so that dogs don't pee on them and kids don't munch on them). THIS year we have expanded! We still have our two tomato plants on the shed, but now have TWO jalapeno plants (still up high), green onions (another high planter), and tons of strawberries in this awesome upside down hanging planter thing my cousin gave me for my birthday. 


We decided that wasn't enough. So our next door neighbors and us combined forces and built an enormous garden in the community yard. I'm not sure what they're planting in there, but I've already got two extra tomato plants and like a million onion bulbs and cucumber seeds. I put the hubby to work today and he used his awesome handy skills and built a fence around it so all the local nasties (bunnies, skunks, BUNNIES, panthers, raccoons, did I mention bunnies?) won't eat our veggies. 

Bunny-proofing the Hansen-Trinidad garden

Side note: our jalapenos have been in a large round plastic planter box/bin/barrel thing for the last couple of weeks. Today I noticed it smelled like swamp and wasn't draining ANY water. I looked at the bottom. There is no drainage hole! It did have writing on it that said "hole for drainage is necessary". Ummm....sorry, but when I buy a PLANTER in the GARDEN section of Lowe's, I expect it to already have a hole. Oh, New Jersey. So we drilled like 28 holes in the bottom of that bitch. Try not draining now!

And because I didn't have enough projects today, I did a bunch more work on Camden's new Monkey Room. It's taking forever. No pictures until I'm done because right now it looks like ass ridiculous. My goal is to be done with it by Thursday.

I'd be done already if Cam didn't take enormous naps throughout the day that disallow me to be in his room. How rude of him.  

Calen says: "Daddy is TOO LOUD!!" But he loved watching.

 
 

Pin It