Mobile Home Living: One Year Later

A year ago we moved into a delightful little mobile home in a wonderful community (no, seriously, this place is awesome).

Overall, when we moved in the house was in good condition. It didn't need any repairs. Everything we have done has been primarily cosmetic, as the previous owner(s) had "interesting" taste. Pink floral wallpaper is not my idea of good design choices.

Our first major project was simple. Paint the living room. It had already been primed, so it was just a case of taping off the trim and picking a color! We went for a nice light-medium slate blue.

The second project was the bathroom. It started as an awful striped pink floral wallpaper. *shudders at the memory* We found a lovely medium green color (and one shade lighter for the bedroom when we get around to it). As I am a hater of faux gold, the knobs on the cabinets were quickly replaced.

In between project, we were able to replace the old, inefficient washer and dryer with a brand new washer and dryer (yay early Black Friday deal), as well as a new refrigerator we got a huge deal on as it was a floor model ($400 instead of $750!)

Our third project was to replace ALL the gold cabinet hardware throughout the house (see my post about 99centknobs.com and my post about how we got rid of the gold.). I told you, I really really really hate that fake gold! The new hardware made a huge difference in the kitchen.

Right now we are working on the spare bedroom, which is our hobby room (and the room the tree came through on Thanksgiving). It was painted a bright paleish yellow color, with a yellow and light blue wallpaper border. I found the exact grey color I was wanting on the mismatch shelf at Home Depot for $10! It was better than the paint chip sample I had selected. What I am looking forward to most is finally being able to bring home my 200+ Breyer model horses that I have collected since childhood. After the walls are painted, I'm going to get shelving put up around the perimeter of the room, about a foot from the ceiling to display my collection.

I'm looking forward to the warmer weather and seeing what grows in the garden. I planted some bulbs in the fall and it seems some are starting to grow. It'll be nice to see what comes up as I can't remember what I planted! We spent an entire day raking the storm debris and years of built up pine needles from the previous owner. Forty five bags later, we were almost done!

After a year, I am thrilled to be living here. I love our little mobile home!

Missing in Action

Sorry I have been a bit scarce around these parts lately. As I am between jobs at the moment, I thought I would take the opportunity to take a free 3 week class at my local community college to better my skills as an employee. The course is called WorkReady NH and it focuses on developing soft skills such as communication. It also gives you the opportunity to receive a National Career Readiness Certificate that shows your skills in Reading, Mathematics, and Locating Information. Both of these programs are designed to boost your resume.

The class takes up much of my day between the actual classroom hours and the minimum 5 hours I have to spend online a week preparing for the Certificate test at the end of the course.

In my now-limited spare time I am trying to restart my Hobo Cat Creations Etsy Store. I will be branching out from the cat toys I started with and including polymer clay figurines and hopefully Breyer and Schleich model horse tack and accessories. There is a good chance I may get to participate in my first craft show in June, so I definitely need to build up an inventory.

I have a couple blog entries in the works about getting "stuff" for free, and about life in the mobile home after a year and the improvements that we have made.

Stay tuned....class ends on the 27th so hopefully things will be back to normal and I will be back to having too much free time!

Review: 99centknobs.com

I LOVE Pinterest. Whoever came up with that site is an absolute genius! I have spent countless hours dreaming and planning. Being able to save all those ideas in one easy, organized area is perfect.

A couple weeks ago, a pin came across my board for 99centknobs.com. It was like Pinterest was reading my mind!. I have been trying to get rid of the fake gold that was all over the house for the past year. The cabinets were a large source of it. Between the old, discolored, broken hinges and those hideous gold and white cabinet pulls, it was time to update.  I had no idea how I was going to afford the replacements though. Then 99centknobs.com came into my life. Now, my kitchen, and all the other cabinets in the house are beautiful!

I was skeptical at first. What is the catch? How can they sell knobs for $0.99 when they are usually $2 to $5 a piece at the hardware stores? Are the knobs super cheaply made? Are the hinges going to fall apart in the first use? I tried to research reviews of 99centknobs.com with minimal success. Their BBB rating was good. There were no product reviews on their site, so it was a gamble. The only "expensive" part of my order was the shipping. They have flat rate shipping of $13.95, so if you only need a couple items, it's not really worth it, however if you need to order 27 pairs of hinges, 9 pulls, and 1 knob, then it is completely worth it. Those items are heavy!! (On a side note, I did order 20 pulls from Lowe's for the main part of the kitchen because I completely fell in love with the design, more about that in a future post.)

As I received some birthday money from my Grandma, I decided to use some of it to make this purchase. I was defiantly nervous as there was no information about this company. However, I was pleasantly surprised when 2 days later, my shipment arrived on my doorstep!

The pulls were very nice. They are slightly more grey in real life, but they are nice, solid and sturdy. I understand that computer monitors are not accurate in displaying colors. They did not include the screws, but I just reused the existing ones, so no big deal. Online, the hinges were listed as being manufactured by Liberty, and I found the identical product at Home Depot for three times the price (literally, listed for $2.98 per pair). I was very pleased to see that was the same product that I received. Everything was new in package.

I am thrilled with my purchase and would definitely recommend 99centknobs.com for large quantity knob, pull, and hinge purchases.

Sorry for the bad pic, but you get the idea!

(For the record, I did not receive anything in exchange for my review. I simply want to share this great company with you!
)

Tutorial: Scarf/Belt hanger

As I have been going through the entire house eliminating clutter and unnecessary items, I decided I wanted to make my closet just a little bit neater with a scarf/belt hanger. Money is tight, and while there are some very nice store bought options, I thought I would use some items I already had laying around the house.

SUPPLIES:
Hangers
Shower Curtain  Rings (cheap plastic ones are perfect)
Electrical Tape

Optional:
Yarn
Crochet Hook recommended on yarn
Yarn Needle


INSTRUCTIONS:

Step 1: Lay out the shower curtain hooks inside the hanger.


Step 2: Tape the Rings to the hanger and to each other. I found bring the tape up from underneath worked the best.

Optional:

Step 3: Single crochet around the outside perimeter of the hanger, going inside the rings when you get to them.  Don't crochet around all the rings in the center.

Step 4: Wrap yarn around the center rings. When you reach a section you have already wrapped, use your yarn needle to "tunnel" through it to the other side, then continue wrapping.

I made the crochet one for my belts. I felt that the yarn would help keep them from slipping.

For my scarves and pantyhose, I just used tape as I needed the items to slide and I did not want fibers from the yarn getting on my scarves.

On a side note, I used a belt hanger I had but didn't care for as a belt hanger to organize my tank tops. I am not much of a tank top person, but I have a few for layering. By using the belt hanger, I was able to free up precious space in my drawers.

I'll cry if I want to...

Some say turning 30 is a big deal. It's the start of a new decade of your life. You have officially been an adult for 10 years. I fail to see the significance. Age is just a number to me. It means nothing. Supposedly these are the best years of my life.

Part of my life is going great. I have an amazing boyfriend who always makes me laugh even when I don't want to and has been extremely supportive throughout this awful time in my life. We have a beautiful little mobile home that we are slowly making our own. I wouldn't trade him or our life together for anything.

The rest of my life is not, and runs the risk of jeopardizing the only thing going well. He deserves so much better, someone who can keep up.

Ninety nine point nine percent of mornings when I wake up, I feel like crap. The Idiopathic Hypersomnia causes me to never feel rested, no matter how I much or how long I sleep. I get dizzy randomly for no apparent reason. Don't even get me started with my digestive system. If I don't eat regularly, I get either crazy angry or weak and shaky. Everyone else I know has no problem if they skip a meal once in a while. Of course, when I go to the doctor, all my test results are normal. I even made a real effort to start exercising. No improvement. On paper I am technically healthy, so why the *explicative* don't I feel it?

I am terrified as I feel so awful all the time that I will never be able to enjoy life; that feeling so awful day in and day out will never improve. I was hoping finally getting a diagnosis would help get me back on track, but the medication causes just as many problems as it solves. Is it better to be tired and sleepy all the time or dizzy and anxious?  I can't live with either of those. I want to function.

I'm trying to find a job. I want to be able to pay off my debt, contribute my share to the household, and be a productive member of society. I don't want to be a leech. The job search is going awful. There are plenty of local jobs I've applied to, but they always want someone with experience. Who's going to hire someone who used to drive a school bus and had to stop because they have a medical condition?

I just want to have more days where I feel good than days I feel bad. Is that really too much to ask? I can't keep going on like this. I don't know what to do anymore. Lately all I feel like doing is crying, but that won't solve anything either.

:'(

Spring Cleaning Purge #2: Clothing and Accessories

The next area of the house I tackled was my clothing. My side of the closet was overflowing. My dresser was stuffed to the point of breaking, and under the bed was 3 of the large underbed plastic storage containers full of clothing. That is just too much to handle. My boyfriend has a small dresser and a smaller section of closet, yet has everything he needs. I want to have less.

So out everything came from all of its hiding places; the bedroom closet, the spare closet, under the bed, the dresser drawers. I made a HUGE pile in the bedroom. The pic doesn't even do it justice as the whole queen size bed was covered, plus stuff was still inside the plastic bins.

I tackled the hanging clothes first. I had already pared down a good amount of those when we moved a year ago, so I decided not to get rid of anything. As my career future is up in the air, I am hanging onto a lot of dressier clothes that I rarely wear, but would be perfect for an office job. If it turns out I can't work, then I can go through them again. As for the rest, I tried on a lot of my wardrobe. If it didn't fit or I didn't like the fit, it went away, easy as that.

I had a lot of duplicates or extremely similar items. Somehow I acquired over 10 blankets (including 2 snuggies). He also has his blankets he likes. As we live in NH and the winters can get cold, and we don't have a generator, we do need a few more blankets than the average household, but more than 10 is a bit excessive. I got rid of 6 of them (including the 2 snuggles).

After all was said and done, I had 3 big garbage bags full, 2 medium garbage bags, and a small bag of winter accessories to donate. I also had 2 out of 3 underbed plastic storage bins completely empty, as well as a large stack of shoebox sized plastic storage empty. Freedom!

I used to keep many seasonal clothes under the bed as there was no longer room in my dresser drawers, but between getting rid of items I never wore or didn't like, I was able to put all except my middle of summer clothes in the drawers!

As part of the Konmari method mentioned in a previous post, folding is an important part of the organizational process. Now, when I open my drawers, I can see everything I have in that drawer at a glance. It's great! I know exactly what I have and I won't just grab one of the same couple of shirts from the top of the pile.

Let's hope that I can keep it this way!

Spring Cleaning Purge #1: Health and Beauty Products

I have been on a weird, pre-spring cleaning rampage in my house lately. Even though we only moved in a year ago, I still had too much stuff laying around. One of my major areas to tackle was the bathroom. Over the years I have amassed a huge number of travel sized, sample sized products. I pared them down when I moved, but still kept a large number, thinking well if we ever have guests over unexpectedly, I will be prepared. Yeah, ok. I think his son has been over once at Christmastime. I am just not the entertaining sort.

So with all this free time on my hands, it was time to purge. I took everything out of both bathrooms and placed it in a huge mess on the bedroom floor. I also dug out all of my old Ipsy pouches. Scary mess huh?

When I first sat down to start I was like "What the heck, where do I even begin?" I started with my makeup (which you can't see in this pic, it's to the side in front of the cute grey kitty on a mission) I have a 8 drawer plastic organizer and a drawer in the bathroom that was full of makeup. If you know me in real life, you would be like WTF? as I am rarely seen wearing makeup. Don't ask. It was a phase.



Between coupon savings, my subscription to Ipsy (which btw is an awesome monthly makeup subscription box if you are looking for one!), and winning contests I had quite a bit of new, unopened unused makeup. Now what to do with it all? I dug through, saving items I had used or enjoy using. Everything else...gone. What to do with it? I didn't really feel right about selling it, so I thought I should donate it to a women's shelter! These women have often been through a lot, and a little makeup may help brighten their day.

I went through all my travel size shampoo, deodorant, lotions etc which once again were nearly all free samples. I kept a few as my boyfriend and I are hopefully going on a motorcycle trip this summer, but the rest are going. Once again, I felt a women's shelter would be a perfect place to donate these too. I used my old Ipsy pouches to make up little kits with shampoo, conditioner, lotion, and body wash. All the extras will be donated as well.

As for the dreaded time of the month products, I had a huge supply of tampons (which I never use) that were all free samples. Once again, great thing to donate!

How did I get so many free samples? I will go into detail on another post (and link it here) but a quick summary is websites that specialize in samples, Facebook, and on-product packaging promotions.