Good Idea #37: Pintrest

Have you heard of Pinterest?  If you are into design, art, party planning or anything else that wants for inspiration; if you just like collecting images from the web; if you are a blogger; you need to be on Pinterest.  Pinterest allows you to collect all those items, inspirations and good ideas in one spot and categorize them to create your own inspiration boards.  It also allows you to check out what everyone else is pinning and repin their ideas to your own boards.  Every pin saves the link back to the source so you and others will know where all your inspiration came from.  Finally, if you're a blogger, Pinterest makes it really easy to share your pins with your blog readers.  Each pin has a code that you can embed right on your blog and allows your readers to link back to your pinterest account and see where your pins came from!

Check out my Pinterest here: http://pinterest.com/twoseekhome

happy pinning!

Good Idea #24: Getting Rid of Fungus Gnats

Hi my name is Caroline and I have fungus gnats.  Gross.  But actually not all that gross.  If you have houseplants you may be familiar with this pesky little problem.  Fungus gnats are little flies, similar to fruit flies, that live in the moist soil of house plants.  They are completely harmless but are annoying and can quickly get out of control if you don't take action (note:  by "out of control" I really just mean "very annoying and difficult to get rid of").  Today however, I came across some very timely help for getting rid of fungus gnats.  Let me begin by telling you the story of this very sad little lemon balm plant:

I've had trouble with fungus gnats in the past and have often resorted to throwing out entire plants to get rid of them (sad story, I know).  This time, however, I am determined to save my little plant.

Lemon balm is supposed to be an extremely easy herb to grow.  It grows quickly and can be invasive if planted in a garden but on it's own it thrives.  Recently, my lemon balm started to deteriorate and I discovered that it had been growing so well that it had outgrown its little pot.  So I re-potted it in this nice big terracotta pot, but now I have a new problem.  The number one way to get rid of or prevent fungus gnats is to let the soil dry fully between waterings.  But this pot is so big and the terracotta hold so much water that I can't seem to get the soil to dry completely before the plant starts getting very thirsty.  Now I have fungus gnats AND my plant is dying. 

I was just noticing a few little gnats flying around my apartment when I sat down at my computer to scan through a few of my favorite blogs.  Almost immediately I came across a post by Ashli from Maillardville Manor on getting rid of fungus gnats!  Ashli suggest a few things that I already knew about like drying soil thoroughly and using those little yellow sticky fly catchers, but she also gave me two new tips.

I will now by adding potatoes and sand to my fungus-gnat-fighting artillery.  Apparently, if you cover the top of your soil with fast drying sand the gnats will think your soil is dry and won't lay eggs there.  Also, the larvae are apparently attracted to potatoes, so placing a fresh potato wedge on top of the soil each day will allow you to easily throw away many of the little guys before they become annoying adults.

I will be trying both of these tactics and I hope they will help other plant owners out there, too.  Check out all of Ashli's tips at her original post by CLICKING HERE.

Now I'm off to meet with a real estate agent for the first time about possibly buying our first house!  Have you been following all of those new developments?  Check it out at: www.twoseekhome.blogspot.com!

Sweet Home 3D Update

I've been working on finishing up my apartment in Sweet Home 3D and wanted to share the results.  Now that I'm done, if I want to rearrange my apartment all I have to do is move furniture around in the program and see how it looks.  Here are the photos of my finished product as my apartment is now:

Read my original post on Sweet Home 3D or visit www.sweethome3d.com to learn more about it and download the program for free!

Good Idea #23: Sweet Home 3D

This week design sponge contributor Kate Pruitt shared her Top 5 Apps for Design Lovers on My Life Scoop.  One of the five is a free, downloadable room design program called Sweet Home 3D.  This program is so much fun and, once you get the hang of it, very easy to use (I recommend watching the video tutorial first).  You can start from scratch or upload a floor plan of your house or room as a guide.  I found a floor plans for my apartment building on a rental website.  It was a slightly different model apartment, but I only had to measure a few walls to make the corrections.  You can change the wall and floor color, add doors and windows and then start adding furniture.  The furniture database is pretty complete, and you can manipulate the dimensions and color of pieces to match your own.  This is my apartment so far:



It's a bit time consuming to get all the furniture right (I've been at this for a couple hours now and this is as far as I've gotten).  But once you get all the furniture in there you can start having fun.  Has there ever been any easier way to rearrange your furniture?  You could try endless configurations and even move things from one room to another with no sweat.  This will be great for figuring out how furniture will fit into a new place, too!

Speaking of which, did you know that you can find out more about my current place and my hopes to move at my newest blogging endeavor?  Click here!

Good Idea #20: Two Free Projects

We're getting to the point in our lives when we're thinking about buying a house.  The lease on our apartment is up in a few months so in hopes that we might not have to renew we're saving like crazy.  This means we're working on a zero dollar decorating budget.  Here are two quick updates that I did this week without spending a dime:

I am always up for some good shelving.  Unfortunately floating shelves haven't ended up being a priority in our decorating budget.  I decided, money or not, I really wanted a shelf above the little desk that we have in our bedroom.  So I made one out of a cardboard box.  I had a really sturdy shoebox lying around, so I simply cut the end off the cover, angled the corners and covered it with my favorite sturdy wrapping paper from Ikea.  Covering the corners was a little tricky and took some patience, but it's hung pretty high up so you can't see the imperfections.  Of course a cardboard shelf doesn't do much for our book collection, but it makes a perfect little decorative display for some photo mats and a little mahogany buffalo.

I think it adds a little height and interest to the wall over the desk.

We've also had this big blank wall in our apartment for the two and a half years that we've lived in this apartment:

This September we bought two large photographs of Zion National Park for ourselves for our first wedding anniversary.  They came mounted on museum board but not framed.  For the last five months they've been sitting in our bedroom just waiting for a mischievous cat to take a good swipe at them.  Needless to say we've been getting pretty anxious to get them up on the wall, but with no budget for custom framing I had to resort to other methods.  There was no way I was going to ruin the photos or museum board with double stick tape or by sticking tacks through it, so I ended up simply tacking the top and bottom of the pictures with nails:

It ended up working really well and is a great temporary way to get the photos off the floor and fill that empty wall at the same time.

Little things like this freshen up and add new life to a living space and of course save money for bigger and better things! 

And... Click here for four more quick and easy project ideas on ApartmentTherapy.com.

Good Idea #14: Super Easy DIY Pins

This is pretty much the easiest thing ever and a great use for some old jewelry.  I acquired some clip-on earrings from my grandmother that I loved, but who has use for clip-on earrings?  So I went to Michaels and got myself some pin backs and E6000 multi-purpose adhesive.  I also got some plain pushpins at Home Depot; amazingly, the only place I could find them.  I swear there have to be plain flat pushpins meant for crafting somewhere in the world, but I couldn't find any for the life of me so regular rounded ones would have to do the trick.  It turned out that with the super-thick E6000 glue it wasn't a problem.  I was able to pull the clips off the earrings pretty easily with a pair of pliers.  The rest is kind of a no-brainer, so I won't do a step by step, but here are photos.

 

If you're wondering, the lovely ornaments are from Jackie Bos.  Find similar items in her etsy shop:  http://www.etsy.com/shop/jackiepeppermint

Good Idea #11: DIY Dresser Makeover

Update:  July 6, 2011

Thanks for visiting These Good Ideas!  My husband and I recently bought a house and I've since transferred most of my writing energy over to our new joint home-owning blog.  If you want to see more of my designs, DIY projects and good ideas check out the new blog:  www.twoseekhome.blogspot.com

Thanks for reading!

Original Post:

This dresser makeover has been a long time coming.  The dresser is a thrift store find, and while it is in good condition, it's not the highest quality construction.  Over the three years that I have owned it, the bottom of the top drawer has warped and broken free of the rest of the drawer, leaving my delicates free to wander out into the depths of the back of the dresser.  Our attempts at fixing this problem include both packing tape and slightly more successful gorilla tape, and finally some drawer organizers that simply kept small items contained rather than wandering free in the still sagging drawer.

Recently, however, a few things happened that moved my dresser makeover along a little bit.  First, the second drawer of the dresser broke completely.  The back of the drawer fell clear off, leaving no support for the flimsy bottom or the clothes contained therein.  Then I came across an old DIY tutorial on Design Sponge describing how to construct drawer dividers out of cardboard (click here to see the article).  While I was not in need of dividers, I was inspired by the suggestion to cover the bottom of the drawer with wrapping paper.  This was just the motivation I needed to pull those drawers out and get fixing.  Furthermore, I recently inherited some jewelry from my grandmother who moved out of her home a few months ago.  This left the top of my dresser in disarray and in need of organization, so I figured I might as well find a fix for that too.

Keep reading to see my full dresser fix-up and clean-up project and for some helpful tips.

Good Idea #9: Design Sponge

I just discovered a great website. Since Grace Bonney began her blog in 2004, Design Sponge has squeezed out much more than just design advice. Along with several contributors, Bonney supplies readers with everything from recipes to gift ideas to diy projects to current trends and even a brilliant guest blog. It's really everything a blogger could hope to aspire to and is an awesome inspiration for so many parts of life.

Check out Design Sponge now at:

www.designspongeonline.com