Menu Monday

We had another good week sticking with the menu plan, although I will admit that I did go back and fixed a couple of things that I didn't fix the week before - the Tangy Chicken and we had Country Ribs tonight instead of Chicken since we had chicken on Chef's Choice night.  On Friday night - Homemade Pizza Night - I fixed a different kind of pizza.  Instead of my usual thin pizza crust I decided to try a suggestion from one of my followers and used flour tortillas to make individual pizzas.  They were pretty good, but I think that I will go back to my homemade crust this week.  However, it is nice to have something for a change sometimes.

I also fixed Southwest Taco Pie again this week - the hubby loved it when I fixed it last month!  I had planned on taking pictures and posting them, along with the recipe, but he ate the whole thing AGAIN, before I could get the pictures.  I guess that is a testamony to how good it is.  You can be assured that it will be on the menu during the month of March - so, I will try to get pictures of it then (and post the recipe)!

Now, this weeks menus:

Monday - February 20 - Taco Salad
Tuesady - February 21 - Pork Chops and Rice w/cabbage
Wednesday - February 22  - Chicken & Yellow Rice, Salad
Thursday - February 23 - Skillet Macaroni & Beef
Friday - February 24 - Movie Night - HOMEMADE PIZZA NIGHT
Saturday - February 25 - Chef's Choice
Sunday - February 26 - Steak, Baked Potatoes, Salad

I must say that one of the best things that I have done this month is create Chef's Choice night - it is my night for left overs - or going out to dinner - or going to a neighbor's house or even to my daughter's.  It's GREAT  - plus, it even gives my hubby a chance to fix something of his choice!  Gotta love it!

If you are looking for other menu ideas, please check out these other blogs, and tell them I sent ya!

http://goodcheapeats.com/2012/02/meal-plan-february-19-25/

http://orgjunkie.com/2012/02/menu-plan-monday-feb-2012.html


So, what are you thinking about this week's menu?  How are you doing with your menus this month?  Are you sticking with them, or are you having a hard time?  I really would like to know!

Remodeled Bedroom

Today I thought I would show you our Master Bedroom.  I wanted to show you all the steps that we have gone through as we have progressed to the master bedroom we have now.

As many of you know, we bought our house about a year and a half a ago as a foreclosure - it was not in that bad of shape (at least the interior of the house)- just very outdated. 

The other thing that many people don't know, when we first moved in, we had NO furniture - not even a bed.  You see, we had been full time RVer's for years and we didn't have any thing - except some things we had stored at my mom's - to move into the house.  For the first three months Dan and I slept on blow up mattresses and sat on fold up lawn furniture in the living room!

Let's go for a tour of the different phases that our master bedroom has gone through in the last year and a half - please get ready for a lot of pictures!

After the first three months we finally got our bed that we had left at my mom's house in Atlanta - and started phase one of the bedroom ------

Don't forget to check out the mirrored window blinds!  Have to love them - NOT!

The main thing that we loved about this phase of the bedroom was -

WE HAD A BED!!!

This is a shot of the bedroom from the bathroom door.  Still a little bare, but so much better than sleeping on the floor! 

 We lived with this stage for about three months before we went to phase two --

This picture was taken from the same vantage point as the last picture, but now we had painted the walls a shade of green (I can't stand white walls!), gotten rid of the mirrored blinds (yeah!), bought a new comforter for the bed and new lamps.  We have even hung some pictures on the wall!

I'm not really sure if you can tell from threse pictures just how big this bedroom really is, but it is a large room!

Now, if you have noticed, in all the pictures above,  I have only shown you one side of the room -

well, here is the other side.

Yes, that is an angled wall you see. 

One of the reasons, others were very evident, that we decided to do the major remodeling of the house was - every interior wall of the house was at a 45 degree angle.  Yep, you read that right - every single one!  Yikes, what were these people thinking!

Now, I don't normally have a bag of clothes hangers sitting on the floor, but I took this picture the day before we started the BIG remodeling

project.

Speaking of which -

This was day one of the project 

Yes, that is our bed in the background, and no walls!  We gutted all the interior walls of the house (but I'll show you other rooms in the house in later posts)!

Day four saw walls going back up - and those walls in the background are the master bedroom walls - not an angled wall in sight!

Now, let's fast forward to six weeks into the project.  Dan and I move back into the house (during the first six weeks we had to live at my daughter and son-in-law's house because we had no bathrooms or kitchen in our house).  There still wasn't much in the house - but we did finally have a bathroom we could use (but still no kitchen) and we were able to uncover the bed -------

Not a whole lot in the room - but we do have a "new" bed - which is a king size adjustable bed (which I love)!  Yes, we painted the walls two different colors, but when you see the final decorated room I think it will make sense.

Fast forward again to eight weeks into the project.

Furniture is finally starting to be delivered.  Of course, we did not buy all the furniture from the same place - that would have been too easy - and the pieces do not match. 

One of the things that I did not want to pay a lot of money for is curtain rods - so Dan and I came up with a very inexpensive alternative.  These windows are eight foot long - plus there is another set on the long wall and sliding glass doors that open onto the Lanai.  I refused to pay the $200 or more for curtain rods for EACH window.  After thinking and thinking - we came up with an idea - but I'll wait to show you what we did on a later post!

Fianlly, after twelve weeks we had our finished master bedroom!

Please excuse my photo's - I do not edit my photo's. 

The cedar chest at the foot of the bed serves two purposes - first, it was my grandmother's and it is great storage for blankets.  Second, it gives the pups a way to jump up in the bed.

Through the door in the picture below is the remodeled master bathroom and master walk-in closet.  I will save showing you these spaces for a future post!

On the far side of the bedroom, where that angled wall used to be - is now our home office.

This is the wall with the sliding glass doors that lead out the Lanai and pool.

All the photographs that are used in the room are photos that I took on one of our trips to the Caribbean.  I love using photos of places that we have been in our home and have used them in other places as well.

I hope that you have enjoyed the reveal of our master bedroom - we think that it has gone through a major transformation from this -------

to this ---------

                               I would love to know what you think!


I'm linking up to:
                       

                                             

                               

                                

It's a MIRACLE!

Well, folks, let's go back and revisit the garage.  Yep, the dreaded garage!  As you all know - I have a love hate relationship with our garage.  As I have said before, I love the fact that we have a garage and I hate the fact that we have a garage.   It has been a royal pain in my backside for months, but I think things are definitely looking up!

Let's go back and do a little review, shall we?

This was the garage when we started the remodeling project last April

As you can see for yourself - this was a major disaster, and this wasn't even at it's worst point.  At one point you could just barely walk through the garage - all the old kitchen cabinets (remember all those ugly pink cabinets??), all the kitchen appliances were stored in the garage along with all the tools that Mountain Man needed to work on the house with.

Fast forward to December.  This was phrase one of the "clean up project".  We had bought storage shelves on sale at Walmart and a couple at a garage sale.  We worked really hard and made great progress on one side of the garage, but we had a problem.

Semi Clean

Four shelving units put together

Mountain Man's workshop side of the garage.  

We, or I should say - I knew that he needed a space to work and we had agreed that he would use half of the garage.  However, he did not have a workbench - he was using a folding table and that just wasn't cutting it (no pun intended).  So, he found a workbench that he liked, but Lowe's had sold out during Christmas. 

Fast forward to about three weeks ago, and Phase two.  We found the workbench at Lowe's - finally!  So, we picked it up for MM and he spent the next morning putting it all together.  We spent the afternoon getting his side of the garage all cleaned and everything put away.  The next morning I was all ready to take pictures when we remembered that it was the last weekend of the month and we needed/had to clean out the large storage unit that had all our "treasures" we were keeping for our garage sale.  We knew we had to get it emptied because I refused to pay another month's rent on a storage unit that just had a bunch of junk (I mean all our treasures) in it!

So, my nice clean garage turned into a nice big storage unit!

This past weekend we FINALLY had our garage sale!  Can I hear a great big YEAH!  (and we did pretty well, thank you very much!)  Last Thursday I spent all day getting everything out of the boxes and crates and on tables.  Then I had to price things - all you garage sale people would have LOVED my garage sale - I priced things to sell!  I had determined that I did not want this stuff back in the house or storage, so what didn't sell would be donated on Monday morning!

Friday morning was a great day - and we were very busy!  One our neighbor's also decided to have a garage sale - so we had quite a bit of traffice because people could go to two garage sales with one stop.  Sweet!  Then about 12:30 it started to cloud up and 15 minutes later it started to rain.  Mountain Man and I started grabbing stuff and putting it on the one table we were able to get inside the garage. 

Saturday morning the rain had cleared, but it was COLD and the wind was blowing!!!!  Customers were few and far between for the first hour or so, then things started to pick up.  It worked out that we had quite a bit of traffic and we sold most of our junk  treasures.  There were few things that needed to be packed up, but by 1:30 what things had not sold had been packed and were ready to be loaded in the truck for their trip to the thrift shop.

Monday morning we loaded what was left in the truck and off we went to the thrift store.  Then, it was time to clean the garage again.  I was determined this time to get it really, really clean (and get pictures of it to prove it)!

So, after another day of hard work we did it!

 

Ta DA AA!

Do you notice anything different from the almost clean garage? 

Yep, we don't have all the shelves anymore!

One of the things that I did was clean out all the built-in cabinets and repack them so there was a lot more room in them that there had been.  We were able to get quite a bit of things in them and we were able to take two of the shelving units down. Yeah!

Yes, the motorcycle is for sale!

And if you look on the right side of the picture you can see the back of the bicycle that we bought at a garage sale a couple of weeks ago - not too bad for $10.00!

We did a little tweaking on MM's side of the garage - moving one of the shelving units to the opposite side of his new workbench and then turned the shelving unit that was left sideways, so it takes up much less room.  We can also access the things on this unit from either side.

(These is also another shot of my bicycle!)

If you look - you can actually see the top of Mountain Man's workbench AND his saw!  This might be a minor miracle in itself and I had to have a picture of this because I really don't know if that will ever been seen again!

I don't know if you can see or not, but everything is labeled so you know what is in each and every crate.  Even the recycling containers are labeled (one on the shelves is for newspapers and the white trash can is for plastic water bottles).

Then, just to top things off - there is one more picture that I have to share with you.  This is something that I did not think would EVER happen in this garage!

Are you ready???

Wait for it

Wait for it

Yes, that is our F150 in our garage, with the garage doors closed!  I was actually able to walk down the side and across the back to get over to the workshop side of the garage (but NOT over to the extra refrigerator)!  I don't think this is something that we will do very often, but it is nice to know that the truck will actually fit in the garage IF we ever need to.

Well, that is my miracle!

I FINALLY have a CLEAN garage!

AND I HAVE PICTURES TO PROVE IT!

Plus, I have you as witnesses!

So, what do you think of my clean garage?  Have you ever had a room that you didn't think you would ever get clean?  What did you do to conquer it?

I'm linking up to:

http://orgjunkie.com/2012/02/29-day-organizing-challenge-3rd-progress-link-up.html