Area Rug for the Living Room

I’m not exactly sure what convoluted way I stumbled upon this rug at Walmart.com, but now it is mine:)  At 63×90″, I have never seen an area rug this big for even close to this inexpensive.  Usually the cheapest are still over $200 and they look just that, cheap.  This one was an even better deal, because the day I ran across it, it was on sale for $59.  Not to mention the fact that if you choose the site to store shipping, it is free!

I wasn’t sure if I would love it in our living room, but I was surely going to try it out for the price.  Both Bradley and I like it, and I think the quality is great for the price.  I would love for it to be about 6″ wider, but I am happy to cover at least part of the seen-better-days carpet in this room.  I keep going back and forth about whether I want to make plans to save for replacing the entire downstairs flooring with a new laminate wood or just re-carpet the living and dining rooms (it will need to be done one way or the other before we sell someday).  I know we would enjoy not having carpet, but then again this is not our forever home, so I’m not sure how many big ticket items we want to tackle.

House Plants

Besides finding a new ‘cloche’ over the weekend, I also brought home a couple of new house plants.  Some of my plants have not done well over the winter.

I read an article recently about Peace Lilies that made me really want one.  I don’t remember what the article said to make me want one, but whatever:)  I bought a large one to fill the corner of the living room where the air return vent and sub-woofer thing is to hide them.  I like how full it is compared to the palm that I had there before.  (I combined the two palms we had into one pot and it lives in our bedroom now.)

I also bought a plant to try out in the beautiful African Violet pot that my sweet friend Tara gave me at Christmas:

I already have two violets from BIL’s wedding, and I decided not to get one for this pot because I found that it fit really nicely under my large cloche in the foyer.  Since violets grow wide and not tall, I added height with this little feathery fern-type plant:

And here it is in the foyer:

Clock turned Cloche

Back in the summer, the Thrifty Decor Chick showed off her collection of cloches, one of which I thought was very creative.  She found one of those awful clocks with a glass cover, and took it apart to make a cloche.  Over the weekend I found my very own shiny gold clock at Goodwill for a couple of dollars:

The clock was mostly made of plastic, so I didn’t feel bad about separating it from its glass dome.  Instead of reusing the base like TDC did, I am trying it out on a cute white plate that also came from Goodwill last year:

I don’t know if I will keep it with this base, and I don’t think I want to keep it in the dining room, but I had fun playing around with it.  We will see where it ends up!

Radon Testing

My favorite blog, Young House Love, recently highlighted an issue that I had not given much thought.  Radon.  Evidently, It is the second leading cause of lung cancer after tobacco smoking.  YHL had their new home tested before buying it and when the levels came back high, the sellers agreed to remediate for them.  From their post, I linked over to the EPA’s website and found that it is pretty easy to find an inexpensive test from local resources.  Eventually, I was able to find a program through the University of Georgia (Go Dawgs!!) from which I ordered a test kit for only $6.50.  The price includes the kit and the testing once you have returned the kit.

I hung the kit in our dining room, since we don’t have a basement.  It is not to be hung in the kitchen.  Hopefully, I am doing everything correctly.  It comes down later today, and I will get it in the mail tomorrow.  The results will be posted online and I will use our individual kit number to access the results.  (Fingers crossed!)

January is National Radon Action Month!

Update:  I got the results back from our test = 0.8 pCI/L.  They recommend remediation if the level is higher than 4, so we are looking good!

Garage Organization

Today was a pretty day, so I was able to get out and take pictures of my new Rubbermaid FastTrack system hard at work.

Left Side:

Once we started pulling everything out, I realized that I wasn’t going to be able to get as much along this wall as I had hoped.  (I didn’t measure)  So we made sure to get one rail at the right height for the wheelbarrow hook.  Then we chose to hang a short rail higher for the shelves.  I was very excited about hanging shelves, because the garage floor was not leveled all the way to the edge at the base of the walls, so any floor-sitting shelf had to sit a few inches out from the wall so that it didn’t tilt forward.  The shelves are not the picture of organization, but I really like them.

Right Side:

I had not planned to hang anything on the right side, but because the wheelbarrow and shelves ate up so much of the left wall, we decided to hang flat items along this side.  Luckily, the new car takes up less space than my old car and we can easily get in and out of the passenger side, even with these items here.

Passenger Side:

I have never tried any other garage organization system, so I can’t compare.  All I can say is that I really enjoyed working with this system.  It is super easy, because the only thing that is really important to get right is hanging the track at the right height for your needs and making sure it is level.  The hooks and shelves are extremely easy to snap into place.  Even Bradley was impressed with the simplicity, and he doesn’t usually care one way or the other with these types of projects.  He’s happy if I’m happy.  I love him!

And just for comparison, here is the garage right after my reorganization and paint job a couple of years ago:

 Now that we both have garage door openers, Bradley comes into the house this way.  It is nice to keep open space to the left of the car so that he doesn’t have to weave around a lot of stuff.  This new organization gives me a little more storage in the garage, without it taking up all of the floor space.  We received the wheelbarrow and the golf clubs after the initial organization.  Also, he enjoys the easy access to the string trimmer here for front yard use instead of in our back yard storage building.  (We keep both the building and the gate fence pad-locked)

Oh, and you may have noticed, I still have not ‘gotten around’ to painting the ceiling in here.  I’m not sure what my hang-up is, just that I’m not a big fan of painting I guess.