My "spice rack"!

Lately I’ve been trying to learn how to cook more at home. What I’ve come to discover is that proper application of herbs and spices can make all the difference in a good meal!

As my cooking skill grows, my spice drawer has also grown exponentially. It’s so full that when I went to buy some oregano, I didn’t have anywhere to put it!

A crafty and creative storage solution was needed!

I have been lusting after those adorable spice containers with magnets on the bottoms that stick to your fridge. This weekend I grabbed a few on clearance and went nuts stocking up on essential spices from the bulk food store.

But what about the spices I already had?

I had several of those little orange tins of spice from Club House. Seeing the magnetic tins from the store got me thinking…why couldn’t I get the orange tins to stick to the fridge, as well?

How to make your existing spices magnetic:

If you’ve got a bunch of the little spice tins like I do, or something similar you can give this a shot!

You will need the following items:

• spice tin
• scissors
• magnetic tape with sticky backing

Cut two strips of magnetic tape to the width of your spice tin.

Adhere to the tin, like so:

Plonk it on the fridge and PRESTO CHANGE-O you have a cute new way to display your spices!

This method worked out great for me because the side of my fridge is part of my kitchen workspace. The spices are now easily within reach when I’m prepping and I can quickly see how much is left of my commonly-used spices.

Plus, making my existing tins magnetic cost loads less than buying those little tins from the store! This cost me about $6 for the magnetic tape, and 10 minutes of time to assemble. I’m rather proud of myself! LOL

Do you have any other crafty kitchen hacks to share?

Well, today’s the big day!

My old, financially-unreliable roommate is moving out, and the new one is moving in!

What’s funny is that it seems everyone else had the same idea for this weekend! My street is positively filled with moving vans, giant garbage heaps of old furniture and people milling about with boxes!

It’s as if everyone decided that May 1st is the best date to move in. Really, I can’t blame them! I myself moved in here on May 1st 3 years ago. OMG that makes today my 3rd anniversary of moving to Toronto and becoming a big city girl. Yay!

I am celebrating by cleaning & purging. Some of the floors and walls have not been visible for over 2 years. Now that the furniture and rugs are gone, I can finally tackle them and give them a good once-over!

I even cleaned the inside of the fridge! No more funny smells for me! Underneath the sinks where the garbage cans are is all clean, too. And of course the bathroom is spotless. But it’s usually in a near-state of cleanliness.

I think the biggest project is my bedroom. I have a lot of crap, people. I have a big room, but more than enough stuff to fill it!

I could never be a minimalist, but sometimes I wish I had less stuff! The thing is, I actually like all of my items. I only keep things that have sentimental value, or that bring me joy when I look at them. However that is still a lot of stuff! I would love to be able to move some of my more decorative items out of my room and into the general apartment space, then others can enjoy them as well. Maybe this new girl will be open to using personal items to decorate?

I also have about 100lbs of laundry to do I am NOT happy about that. My kitty has been having some issues using her litter box lately and she seems to think it’s ok to pee on my bed. My BED. It’s awful. Anytime I see a new spot where she’s gone I have to strip the bed and start cleaning the mattress–there is NO WAY that I am going to let that cat pee smell set into my mattress!

So while I’ve been able to successfully clean the mattress, I have a few pillows, several sheet sets, blankets and even a bedspread that are awaiting a good wash! Ugh what I would give for a washing machine in my apartment! Instead I have to haul them around the corner and down the hill (then back up!) to the local laundromat. I hate it.

So I guess that’s the next major project of the day or weekend. But I really don’t want to do it, that’s 2 hours of my day gone doing nothing. I may just procrastinate until next weekend and get someone to pick me up and take me to my parents’ where I can wash in comfort.

This weekend while I was waiting for a friend to come over I took a moment to organize one of my drawers by my desk. It holds a myriad of items, including hand and face creams, prescription lotions and pills, dental stuff like floss and picks and a bunch of other random crap.

As you can see, it was pretty darn messy:

I began by taking everything out of the drawer and sorting it into categories on my desk. This gave me a good idea of what I have, and of any duplicates or expired items.

I washed out the drawer itself and also the basket inside, then went through all my crap and tossed things that needed tossing, and relocated things that didn’t belong there.

It really only took me a few minutes–much less than I thought it would!

I scooped another basket from somewhere else in my apartment and used it to hold all my elongated creams and lipbalms. I was able to stack almost all the other products rightside up in the larger basket.

Voila!

I still have a ton of stuff, but oddly enough I use all of it fairly frequently. I find using those little baskets to organize my drawers is the best solution I’ve come across so far. They’re 3 for a dollar at the dollar store and come in several different shapes and sizes. The trick is just discovering the best configuration to use in your drawer. It’s kind of like a puzzle!

The baskets are great but not the best… does anyone else have some cheap or free organization tips for small spaces such as drawers and under the sink? I’d love to hear them!

This is the next installment in what I hope will be an ongoing series of decluttering, paring down and organizing my life and belongings.

Earlier this week I decluttered my purse (which was very much needed!) and took a load off my shoulders.

This time around I went to work on my makeup drawer *shudder*

I didn’t remember to take a before photo… but it was getting pretty bad. At one point I tried to organize it a little by placing baskets in the drawer in an effort to wrangle in all my products… but at the time I didn’t really make much effort in going through everything or thinking out the most effective way to organize.

Not so, this time! My drawer went from mountains of makeup products and tools haphazardly strewn about to neat, clean and organized. I went through my collection of stuff and organized it into the three classic piles: Keep, Toss and Donate.

Obviously all the old opened stuff hit the circular file, but anything that was only gently used (still safe to use) or unopened is going to go to the Need Table at one of my monthly Pagan pub moots (it’s a table where you can place donations of anything and folks have the opportunity to take what they need for themselves or others) and also to one of my friends who is going through a tough financial time right now but loves makeup.

Knowing that all my lovely products may be going to someone who would appreciate them really helped me get through it all. I am loathe to throw things out, but with this goal in my mind I was able to be ruthless.

I still have quite a bit of stuff, but now I have it organized into 6 baskets: stuff I use everyday, lip products, eyeliners, loose eyeshadows and other miscellaneous pots and finally a basket in the back for random stuff that needs a home. I use MAC eyeshadows almost exclusively so I keep the majority of them in a professional palette which sits on the side of the drawer. As for all my brushes and other tools, I have a pro roll-up case for them I keep elsewhere. The brushes I use regularly are in a cup on top of my desk for easy access.

It’s been a week since I organized this and so far its working really well for me. Before the basket for everyday stuff was too small, so things overflowed. Now that I’ve upgraded it to a large basket everything stays in its proper place.

Now I just need to stop collecting makeup!

Bonus makeup tip: Did you know that you are allowed to request up to 2 samples of any product at MAC to take home with you? It’s a great way to try out their pigment collection–I’ve got about half of the colours now! LOL

A view from the top

All spread out

As you can see there is quite a lot of crap there. I’ll save us all the pain of listing the exact contents simply because there are too many! I have duplicates of lots of stuff like lipgloss, USB drives, hand sanitizers, etc. It was quite silly to think I had been carting all that around with me! It was actually making my shoulders hurt at the end of the day!

So in I went and tried my best to cut back on all the duplicates and items that I didn’t really *OMG* need to carry with me on a day to day basis. I cut out a lot of lip products (why do I have so many? Sheesh!) and other cosmetics stuff. I also got rid of the purple case that was holding it all and grouped it all in a ziploc baggie to save on space.

I consolidated all my “health” stuff like advil, eyedrops, Tums, bandaids, etc. into another small baggie and stashed that in the inner zipper pocket of my purse. My current purse is awesome because it has a lot of pockets, but not all my other purses do, so I wanted to pare things down so that I could easily transfer ALL items into another purse without having to spend 30mins organizing everything again.

That’s one of the reasons I bought the Purse Pleaser. I’m still testing it out to see if I like it, but so far it seems to be ok. The real test will come when I decide to change purses. I’ll report back when I do so.

Anyway, this is what I was able to pare down to in the end (minus the “health” baggie which I had already stashed):

I’m quite happy with this accomplishment. My purse now has everything I need tidily stored away, and finally weighs less! No more shoulder aches for me! And now if I want to change my purse I can do so easily and quickly *happy sigh*.

I’ll have a post on my makeup drawer cleanout up shortly.

So, have you cleaned out your purse lately? If not, hop to it! Write up a post about it and share it here in the comments!

Yay! The drought may have finally ended!

Since the economy has been doing so poorly lately, the stream of events, parties and general free stuff in the ad world has all but dried up Since moving to my position a year ago I was receiving much less anyway, but since Christmas it has been positively dismal.

So it was nice to get some left-overs today at the office.

Teletoon is going around all the agencies for their annual upfront presentation. This means goodies, and lots of them! I wasn’t actually invited to the meeting this year since I don’t work directly with TV anymore, but it turns out I knew one of the reps anyway, so he grabbed me a gift bag and candy apple, and I was later able to have some gourmet cupcakes from the kitchen, too.

Here’s what I got:

The cutest little tin lunchbox filled with a lip balm, rubiks cube of cartoon charaters, a couple of pens, a sticker and a cartoon deck of cards! And the caramel apple, of course

Pretty good considering I didn’t even have to sit through the presentation!

I really like the lunchbox too. Normally I wouldn’t know what to do with it, but it just so happens I’ve been on the lookout for a small box such as this. So I turned it into this:

My dental kit!

I needed a small box to stash my stuff in…since the bathroom remodel there isn’t anywhere hidden to keep my things. I had been keeping it all in one of those bathroom caddy things, but I didn’t like the fact that you could walk in and see all my hygiene paraphenalia; not to mention my toothbrush was out in the open picking up who knows what kind of germs!

This way it’s all tucked away in a cute little box with a lid. If you look closesly you can just barely see my toothbrush, floss, toothpaste, cup, mouthguard and dental appliance brush. Neat and tidy!

I am just tickled pink!

I finally got most of my Christmas stuff put away… with the renovations still not complete it’s hard to get organized, but I’m slowly getting there.

Tonight I skipped my kung fu (which I feel really guilty about since I haven’t been in months now) but ended up sweeping our upstairs landing, the entire staircase inside the apartment and the foyer. Then I washed it all. On my hands and knees. Using elbow grease and a sponge.

The water was BLACK by the time I was done. The worst part is, it is so dirty I think I’ll have to wash all the floors again since this only took off one of the multiple layers of crud caked on my floors. They used to be beautiful gleaming hardwood floors, now they’re just a faded version of themselves. It’s quite sad.

The bright side of this is that I didn’t freeze to death. It’s -30 C (-22 F for you Americans out there) and even my super-warm apartment has cooled significantly. I can normally walk around in my undies and be comfortable, but today I had to get fully dressed in warm things and slippers. The horror!

I can’t really remember where I was going with this post. I stayed up late last night watching episodes of Big Love on my laptop and now I regret it. Oops.

*Don’t forget to enter the draw for my give-away of 3 FUZE prize packs!

I’ve just updated my tracking bars on the side and have also decided to make a few changes.

Primarily, I’ve decided that right now is just not a good time to buy a Vespa, what with the economy the way it is and the chance that I might lose my job. It would involve large upfront and ongoing costs. I could handle it in a good economy, but not this one.

The decision was difficult, but I’m switching all the money I saved for travel and the scooter into my emergency fund, and my old emergency fund into my fun & travel fund.

Got that?

I feel better now, knowing that I’ve got at least two grand to fall back on. Now I just need to moderate my spending. I’m also going to try and do what everyone else in the PF world seems able to do: actually sock the money away.

I want to actually reach my EF goal, and then move onto the next one, I suppose. I will continue to simultaneously contribute to all of my accounts, but anything extra I receive will go into the EF from now on. I will also try and use it less!

The next change I made was swap the Wedding Fund account into a TFSA. We’ll see how that works out.

I also updated my networth through NetworthIQ. I am SO happy to see it starting to go up again. My RRSP’s have gone up since the huge drop in October, and my credit cards owing has also gone down, increasing my networth overall.

Thank goodness!

This year seems to be off to a good start. Now I’ve got to keep it going that way!

*Don’t forget to enter the draw for my give-away of 3 FUZE prize packs!