Chore Charts for Grownups

One thing that I absolutely love about being home more is that I can finally keep my house at an acceptable level of cleanliness. It's not perfectly clean all the time, which is fine, but it's much better than it was in the days when Josh and I both worked full-time jobs.

Even with being home more often, I've found that I still have obstacles in the way of keeping the house clean. Namely, time management. I still have a lot of things to get done any given week, and I've been finding that it's difficult to clean the house efficiently. It gets done, but not without a whole lot of "Did I clean the bathroom yesterday, or was that the day before? Should I do laundry now or go grocery shopping? Should I plan lessons or vacuum the living room?"

So finally, in a moment of exasperation, I decided there was only one thing to do. I needed to make a list. Hello, my name is Mikalah, and I'm addicted to making lists. There, I said it.

I drew up a list of the chores that need to get done around the house on a weekly basis. Then, I decided which ones needed to be done on a daily basis, and which ones could be done every other day or so. Once I was happy with the rough-draft, I made a nice, clean copy of it in Excel. Here's a visual aid so you can see exactly what I mean:


Of course, I had to use a cute font and some little vacuum/broom icons.

I made it small enough that I can fit 2 on a sheet of paper, and then I printed them off and cut them in half so I have enough for a few weeks. Now, whenever I do a "chore" I just check it off on my handy-dandy Grownup Chore Chart. I've been using this for a week now and I absolutely love it. It's just so nice to know that I'm "done" with things for the day, and I don't have to stand and worry about whether or not I cleaned the kitchen sink (I have a bad memory, what can I say). I also left a lot of blank spaces so I can adjust as needed.

Has anyone else had issues with getting housework done? Do you have any tips you'd like to share? I'd love to hear them!

Eeeeeeee!

The title of this post is exactly what came out of my mouth (at a very high frequency, I might add), when I opened my early birthday present from my hubby and found this baby nestled inside.

Seriously. I have been using my husbands old point-and-click pocket sized camera for the past 2 years of blogging. And while it was very sweet of him to let me hijack his camera (thanks babe!) I'm SOOOO happy to finally have a camera that captures exactly what it sees. Especially since our house is rather dark to begin with, it is so nice to have a camera that actually functions well in low light. Also, thanks to the Optical Image Stabilization, no more blurry pictures ever again! I'm no photographer, so I won't get into all the gory details. I will just let the photos speak for themselves.


So here's a "Before" with our old camerama:

Using the flash makes me very, very sad.

New Camera:

But now, I don't have to use the flash! And I can get awesome pictures! This camera makes my house look better, and you know I love that.


I'm so excited to use this camera from now on and get a better quality of photos for this little blog of mine! I love that I can take 1 amazing picture as opposed to 50 crappy ones. Ok, end of spiel. How about you? What kind of camera do you use for blogging?

Sunshine, anyone?

Apparently, there's a few people who are on the edge of their seats to see the transformation of this little magazine rack. Seriously, you are women after my own heart. I rarely ever post the "before" pictures unless a project is actually done because, well, we all know how easy it is to get sidetracked. So I apologize profusely for taunting you with the before of this tacky, brass thingamabob. But, the wait is over my friends, and hopefully the "After" was worth it!


Ah. Cheery yellow. Just like the sunshine that I know is hiding somewhere behind those clouds. It will appear. And when it does, I'll be ready.



Sadly, I realized as I was taking the photos that I need to do a bit of touch up on the paint job. Argh. I just might face the good side out and forget about it though...

A Good-Friday Read

(Photo Credit)

Hey all, just popping back in for a moment! I have a good friend who has written some beautiful stories to go along with this Easter season, and our church has been sharing them for the past few weeks. Another church member who has a blog is featuring one of the stories he wrote today, and I wanted to share the link here so more people can read it! I love his style of writing, and the way he illustrates the time Jesus spent in the garden praying before His death on the cross. It really brings a new, meaningful perspective to those last hours.

Click here for the link. Have a wonderful Easter weekend!

Friday Finds!

Is anyone else getting bitten by the thrifting bug lately? With Spring pretty much here to stay, all I can think about are picnics in the park, wearing dresses everyday, and tall, icy glasses of homemade lemonade. Yum.

So as you can see... my thrifting obsessions lately have been leaning that way too!


I finally found one of these amazing glass lemon juicers that I've been wanting. It's different from the one I grew up using at my parents house- theirs is made from metal. Has anyone else used a glass one before, do they work just as well? Just curious.


Then, I found a set of 4 of these glasses. They are so pretty, and I can just imagine them filled with all kinds of delicious beverages. You will probably see lots of pictures of these pretties throughout the warm months.


Finally, I stumbled upon this little crockery pot that was only $0.49! I couldn't believe the price tag, these types of salt-glazed pottery usually go for a lot more than that (and usually GW puts at least a $4.99 tag on these things). So I definitely had to snatch it up for that price. I'm not sure what I'll do with it yet, but for now it looks awfully cute sitting on the stove next to our owl fondue sticks.

Well folks, that's about it for me. I hope you all have a lovely weekend!

A Trip to Vienna

Well, maybe we didn't actually go to Vienna, but it sure felt like it! This weekend Josh and I and a bunch of friends/family attended a Viennese Ball! It was SO much fun. They decorated the place beautifully, and had a huge assortment of good food, music, dancing, and people. We danced to waltz music, swing, jazz, all played by a live orchestra. Of course, the best part (for me) was getting to dress up and see all of the other pretty dresses there. Yup, I'm still pretty much a 5 year old at heart.



My brother and his girlfriend made the drive there with us, the ball was located at a university in Wisconsin so it was a bit of a drive!

We listened to some live jazz at one point during the evening. They had a bunch of different rooms with different music playing so you could pop in and out of each one throughout the night, it was really fun!


They also had lots of Austrian/German themed foods. YUM. At one point, I snapped a photo of my sister eating a brat in an evening gown. Priceless.




Everything about the weekend was absolutely perfect, except for the hotel stay. I'm not going to go into great detail here, but let's just say that they had a rave going on until 6 am. Yup. A rave. So we didn't get any sleep that night, but it didn't really matter because we just went home and napped all day Sunday!

Waiting Period

We are still waiting to get started on our kitchen tiling project, and that's a-ok with me. We have been SO busy lately, it seems like every weekend there is something going on that prevents us from getting started.

No worries though, it will happen. Just probably not before Easter.

In other news, it's officially spray-painting season again! No more walking to the garage in sub-zero temperature and fumbling for a can of spray paint to bring inside and let it warm up for 3 hours. No more getting my finger frozen to the nozzle. Nope, now I can just waltz out to the garage and use my treasure trove of paint to transform just about anything!

Here's my first victim....


Right now it's sitting in the garage with the first coat of paint. Can't wait to show you the end result!