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Month: April 2012

  • The Weeds Take Over

    The weeds have officially taken over.  Who knew that when you tilled weeds, it is like giving them a reason to multiply???  Yes, I did not know that if you chop them up into little pieces, they just make more baby weeds…that grow into monster weeds and take over.  Like this:

    So I spent the entire day pulling weeds from the garden. I had to carefully remove the plants that had already been placed in the garden and they went in a bucket of water.

    To prevent weeds from happening again (at least as much as possible), I put down weed block. DUH! I am not sure why I did not think of that sooner, but after 16 years, I am getting smarter about those kind of things.

  • The Shoe Basket

    Since my family is from the north, I grew up taking off my shoes when I entered the house.  You wouldn’t want to track in snow and mud!  But I have lived in Texas my WHOLE life, so the snow is not really an issue.  Taking off your shoes when you enter the house is just a habit (unless you are Wade and then you don’t understand the point).  Either way, taking off your shoes helps keep the floors clean.

    We have always had 2 wicker baskets behind the couch right by the door.  The get filled with dirt, sand and dog hair, not to mention we usually have a pile of shoes outside of the baskets.  In an effort to make it look at tad bit nicer, I cut pieces for a shoe cabinet at the same time as the laundry room cabinets.  These I decided needed a door though to hide the innards.

    I had some scrap beadboard (wainscoting) left over from the girls desks that I decided to use on the inset of the door. I have never built frames or cabinets before so this was an experiment for me. I set up the table saw and made a small 1″ line through the frame pieces to insert the beadboard.

    I had to make 2 passes to get the track wide enough to fit the beadboard. Then I assembled the frame around it. Not too bad for my first time!

    For this project I opted to paint it before assembling it (since I did already have the pieces cut).  I used a metallic oil based paint that I just love!  I could have added 3 tracks and put in another basket…but that would mean more shoes would get put in here instead of the closets.

    We now have a nice place to hide our shoes!  (These are iPhone pics, so they are a bit grainy…just trying to get caught up on blog posts.)

  • Refrigerator Motherboard

    Who knew that the newer refrigerators have motherboards?

    Last summer, our fridge started making this weird revving noise about every 2 hours.  We did not think much of it and just ignored it.  Around Thanksgiving, the ice maker stopped dispensing ice.  It still made ice, but nothing would come out when you pushed the lever.  Fast forward to April…we had a storm come through on Friday evening and the power went out.  When it came back on, the fridge no longer worked…AT ALL.

    After doing some research, I found that refrigerators have motherboards in them.  And there just so happened to be a recall for ours.  The bad news was that we were over the 5 year mark and the recall was no longer valid.  It was going to cost $100 to have a repairman come out and look at the fridge, or there was a motherboard on Amazon for around $100.  With $100 gone either way…we took our chances.

    It was just like replacing the motherboard of a computer (which I am VERY familiar with since I have built my computer from scratch the last several years). Voila! A working fridge AND the ice dispenser worked again! Who knew???