I am never sure how to answer that.

I LOVE where we live….but I miss my old neighbors.

I Love our house. I designed it and picked out everything in it, so I would kind of think that is expected.

My answer has been …we love it, but it still doesn’t feel like home.

Our old home had sooooo many memories of first steps …first days of school and first dates. How can I expect this house to compare to that?

My best friend is getting ready to pack up her home of 20 some years . I have been trying to prepare her for what I think are very normal emotions.

Excitement….the idea of moving sounds fun and exciting.

Denial…..you can’t really believe that it is going to happen.

Panic…you realize that there is no turning back now.

Sadness…you are flooded with memories.

Guilt…you feel like you sold part of the family.

Regret…why wasn’t I just thankful for what I had.

Then you move, and new emotions come

You feel young again…everything is new

Giddy over the problems you left behind

Grief…you just want to go HOME

Then you start to settle in….you find yourself okay…remembering no longer makes you cry…but the new place is still not home.

The only way to make that house a home is to do a whole lot of living in it..

I’m working on that and I must admit…it’s starting to feel more and more like home.

If you have any advice on how you made your house feel like home I would love to hear it.

My neighbor was getting rid of her dryer because over the years, two of the knobs had broken, but it still worked and I was welcome to it. YAY! Right up our price range…hehehee.

If you too are going to get a dryer from somewhere other than an appliance store you may need to know how to hook it up…I’m going to let Mr. Amazing tell you how he did that…

Well first of all, dryers do not come with a power cord, so if your old one is in good condition feel free to reuse it. Also, there are two configurations of cords, a three prong and a four prong cord. Your house will have an outlet for your dryer, and you need a cord to match. As is typical, the dryer we got had the wrong cord, but the cord from the old dryer we were replacing was in good shape. First and most important, unplug the dryer! This is 220 we are dealing with. The back of each dryer will have a access panel close to where the cord enters the dryer. This is removed by one or two screws. In our case we removed the panels on both dryers so we could recover the three prong cord from the old dryer and replace the cord on the newer dryer.Below is a picture of the newer dryer with the 4 prong cord still attached. This dryer is designed for a 3 cord system so the last installer put both the ground (green) and the neutral (white) on the same center connection. It would have been safer to put the ground (green) wire to a screw hooked to the frame. The dryer typically has the cord layout printed somewhere nearby. In this picture you can see an “L” (load) an “N” (neutral) and an “L2″ stamped into the metal above the access opening. This means that a “hot” leg, red or black, is to be hooked to both outside connections (L and L2) and the neutral (white) should be hooked to the center connection. This dryer uses lugs and nuts. Some dryers will have screw on the connections. As a side note, please notice that whoever installed this cord did not use a strain relief fitting where the main cord comes through the hole in the sheet metal. This is VERY dangerous. A vibrating dryer could cause the sheet metal to chew thru the wire insulation causing a short, a fire or an electrocution. None of these is desirable! At this point I loosened each of the connection nuts, slid the wire ends loose and removed the cord from the new dryer. I repeated the process on the old dryer to get the 3 prong cord we needed, and I also saved the strain relief fitting to use on the newer dryer.

After placing the strain relief fitting in the cord opening of the newer dryer, I carefully fed the connection end of the 3 prong cord thru the strain relief fitting and placed each cord end under the loosened connection nuts.    This cord was not color coded, but all flat 3 wire dryer cords use the outside wires for Load (L) and the center wire for neutral (N). So in this case, each outside wire end went to the outside lug connections and the center wire went to the center lug. Make sure the connection is all of the way in and snug down the nut (or screw) for a good safe connection.   Replace the access cover, plug in the new dryer and enjoy! Laundry is such fun!

Most of the important windows are now covered, but the budget is blown so it will be slow going for the rest of the year. I do have a few gift cards that I am trying to use wisely.  The other day I headed to Pottery Barn and was determined to buy something. I love Pottery Barn, but I have a hard time buying things there. I’m not sure why…I just see things like this and look at the price tag and I think to myself…hmmmm maybe I can find something like this at Goodwill….and sometimes I do.

$179.00….doesn’t that seem a bit high for an old ladder?

My Pottery Barn had two of these marked way down.

I have been thinking of something like this for my dining room half walls.

 I love my half walls but they tend to be a catch all place. Need to clear off the dining room table? Just move it all here…Want to drop the mail…why not dump it on the half wall.

Even at half price these lanterns seemed a bit pricey, but they are very well made and they are vented so you can actually light the candles.

I really like them. I like that I can see thru them. If I had put flower arrangements there, I think I would have felt like my view was blocked.

Now comes the problem of figuring out what to put in them. I gathered some stuff I have, and for now it is okay, but I’m thinking I need three taller candles in there. What do you think you would put in them?

  They were expensive but now that I have them home I realize that these are not really just an accessory they are more like a piece of furniture and if I look at them that way the price doesn’t bother me as much…LOL

Let me start by explaining that I am in charge of a boutique at a Pregnany Care center. If the parents come to parenting classes, they earn mommy bucks to buy things in the boutique. One of the things that we go thru a lot of is diapers. We get large boxes of diapers donated and then put them in bags of a dozen to give to the girls.

We have been doing this for years and guess what …..we never noticed this until our daughter just showed it to us.

I am told both Huggies and Pampers has a program that you can register online and give them the code off the package. You can then earn points to buy things like an  Amazon gift card. How cool is that!

I guess if you buy wipes, they will have codes too.

Do you have any money saving tips that you could share with me….obviously I’m kind of in the dark ages when it comes to these things.

My daughter and grandson are here visiting for 7 weeks, so my days are full of making dinners for large crowds…and picking up…..because you never know who might show up…

Being a grandma is such joy.

I have a few rules about being a grandma…

1. I am ALWAYS  available….well maybe not always, but as available as possible. Lucky for me my kids don’t take advantage of that.

2.I believe that it is the job of a grandma to make each child feel like the most important person in the world.. I try hard to make my face light up when they come over.

3. I try to remember that I am no longer in charge of discipline. This is their parents’ job. If mom is there, then it is not up to me to tell them not to jump on the couch.

4. If the parent doesn’t care, you shouldn’t either…some day everything I own will belong to my kids so if they let their kids break it now, it shouldn’t bother me too much.

5.  There is always enough food…if more people show up than I planned, I order out.

6. If all the people start to stress you out…throw a kid in a stroller and head out. They will all think you you are just a great grandma…hehhehehe

7. If chaos drives you crazy, come up with theme days. Tomorrow we are doing bubbles . We are going to try to do swimming and pizza once a week this summer. I have a girlfriend that has done Princess night…the grand daughters came and played Pretty Princess…dressed up like Princesses and watched Princess movies.

8. When I get tired, I just remember…this is just a season…all too soon their lives will get busy and I want to be able to remember these days with a smile on my face.

I don’t pretend to be a Grandma expert…all my babies are 2 and under. I know this job will get harder as my sweet little darling becomes a teen and yells at their mother. Or when I have to bite my tongue in half when they are texting at the dinner table. But for now I will quote Scarlet Ohare….Fiddlie dee…I’ll worry about that tomorrow.

She turned 30 this weekend and I wanted to do something really special for her. We talked about sending her away on a mini vacation with her husband, but she really didn’t want to leave her babies. I understood, but it left me wondering what we could do for her.

A year ago her and her husband bought a really cute older home. The house had pretty much had a makeover done on it before they bought it except the laundry room and the master bathroom.

They have been slowly working on the bathroom but I knew that it would probably be years before they would be able to find the time for the laundry room.

It was bad!

It had lots of space it’s just that the space was poorly laid out.

We asked permission from her husband….on which we got an excited YES!

They had planned to head out for the day to the zoo with friends to celebrate. The minute they left we drove in and got to work. I should have probably aborted the plan when Mr. Amazing was scratching his head in the first 5 minutes…but I wasn’t going to be discouraged. I had a dream. Besides I watch HGTV, I know that amazing things can happen when people are away.

First thing that needed to happen…move the hot water heater to the garage…no problem..until Mr. Amazing pushed the pressure release switch and it broke off. OOPS. So there is one unexpected expense….a new hot water heater. We realized that her hot water heater was also celebrating it’s 30th birthday. We decided to provide it a trip to the dump for it’s birthday.

As Mr. Amazing took care of that, my other daughter and her boyfriend helped me take out cabinets and get the walls ready to paint. In walks Mr. Amazing with another problem. The layout our daughter wants for this room requires a lot of new plumbing and the way to do it right is the open up the wall  going to the garage and put the pipes in there. $$$ and more time.

Meanwhile back in the laundry room we discovered that the carpet in the room needed to go. More time. All the while my son in law is trying the best he can to stretch out the day. When he text to say they were on their way home my husband told him to drive by way of Kansas. At this time the yard was piled sky high with everything we had torn out and the water still wasn’t hooked up in the house.

We ran the best we could to get ready for the big reveal. Let me tell you it was nothing like the tv shows. lol

My poor daughter tried really hard to act excited .

We have lots more to do but I know that when we get done we will have added value to their house….and maybe make life a little easier for a very busy family of four.

Have you ever tried to surprise someone with a home makeover?

May poles were a thing of the past by the time  I was growing up, but I can remember my husband’s grandmother telling me about May Day celebrations when she was a young girl.

She loved the dance that would take place on that day as the ribbon was wrapped around the pole. She told me often about how special that day was.

May Day was special when I was growing up too. I can remember carefully making my May basket. Mom would have me make just one…it was to be given to someone very special.

After the basket was made, I would fill it with candy and head to my best friend’s house. I would quietly place the basket on the door handle…push the doorbell and run.

There was nothing like hiding behind a bush seeing and seeing my friend come out to get her basket. After seeing her basket she would look to see if she could see who left it.

Giving in secret…what a wonderful thing to teach our children…what a wonderful thing to remember ourselves.

Giving should be about the person recieving and yet we often forget and make it about the person doing the giving.

Here is how my mother used to have us make our baskets…

Take a piece of colored paper….we always used construction paper growing up but I couldn’t find any in the house today…how did that happen???

?

Then you cut the paper square saving the part you cut off to make the handle. I always just use tape to hold it all together but I have found, especially if you are filling them with candy, it is best to staple the handle on.

Now that I am a grown up I tend to put flowers from my yard in my May baskets.

Here is the basket hanging on my friend’s door…just waiting for her to discover. I used ribbon to tie it on.

I hope the smile she gets recieving it is as big as the one I have giving it.

Have you ever done May baskets?

Please let me know…I am the only one that I have ever met that does them…heheee…guess that was a funny way of saying that but I think you get my point.

I’m linking up at…

So the other day we went strawberry picking.

I had never been before …I’m not really sure why…but I hadn’t.

I wasn’t there long before I started  to relate the strawberry picking to life.

As I approached the fields, I started picking right away. It’s kind of late in the season, so it was difficult to find good ones and I found myself settling. Soon some not so pretty strawberries were in my bucket. I thought about how many times we all settle in life. God has something amazing for us, but we look with our eyes instead of our faith…and we settle.

We should have come earlier in the season but we were busy. This is often what happens. God has plans for us, but we think we are too busy…we will get to it later. If we had waited much longer, the opportunity would have been gone. How sad would be if we put God on hold in our life and one day we find our destiny no longer available to us?

Berry picking was hard because we had waited, but we didn’t wait too long. Yes, we had to go deep into the fields and be patient, but it was so worth it. God blessed our labor with a plentiful bounty.

No…berry picking isn’t my destiny…but it did remind me to pause and see His handiwork all around me.

Do you have something in your life that you have been putting on hold? Or maybe you have just settled with what is easy…Let me tell you…God has something amazing that He wants you to discover.

If you were to ask any of my daughters what their dads basketball clothes look like this is what they they would describe. Mr. Amazing has always been good about seizing the moment when it comes to his kids.

This scene reminds me that a home isn’t really about beautiful decorating. Its about the memories that are made in those spaces.

Recently a girlfriend of mine said to me …You live in your house…I wasn’t really sure how to take that at first…did she mean that my house is messy? Then I realized that she meant …I’m not afraid to clear off the coffee table so that the grandsons can color….or to bring the basketball hoop into my living room

in hopes that some day I will have another generation to watch outside my kitchen window.

Tell me…what is your favorite spot in your house and why?

Unless we change the cottage into a work shop, I can assure you that my garage will NEVER look anything like that!

We haven’t done anything amazing in our garage yet. Mr. Amazing has done a good job of organizing it all, but I still have hopes of trying to make it look a bit better with some doors over the shelves like we had in our old house. My brother tells me “it’s a garage”. I just personally don’t like everything out on display.

We did work on one wall the other day…of course it was the wall with all of our grandson’s toys…lol

It started by looking like this…

After a quick trip to Lowes and about $80 we now have this

The long wall brackets were easy to cut to whatever length we needed with an electric miter box. If you don’t have one of those any wood cutting saw would work.

We have always just had plastic shelving units in the past but I love the idea of things up off the floor for cleaning purposes.

This is not a sponsored post…I just like the way it turned out so I thought I would share it with you.

So do any of you have pictures hanging in your garage?