a pretty little wine rack for under $40!

we've needed a wine storage solution for the house for awhile now. below is what it

was

. a non-functioning 12 bottle wine fridge, a six bottle wine rack stacked on top of it, and a bunch of other bottles just sitting on the floor. not very pretty or organize, or consistent. i've done quite a bit of research on wine fridges, and all that's really told me is that they are often expensive (for the size i want) as well as finicky. no fridge has consistently good reviews - always about a quarter of the reviews say they don't work out of the box. i take all that with a grain of salt, but nothing has made me confident enough to put the money down for it.

a few weekends ago, we stumbled upon the Omar Bottle Shelf from IKEA (only $30! to hold 24 bottles!). the only thing i didn't like about it is that it's so CHROME. which, you know, works great for storage shelves in the basement, but not so much for the corner of the dining room! so we threw in a bottle of Rust-Oleum's Champagne Mist metallic spray paint from home depot and ended up with a pretty little wine rack that holds a decent number of wines

plus, i think it really cleans up the space nicely. we still don't have a good solution for the growlers, but at least we no longer have wine bottles stored three different ways in our dining room (not including the whites in the actual fridge, of course). and it's much easier to see look at all the bottles now too, which makes picking one less of a chore, which means we've been more likely to have some wine with dinner.

a cheap DIY place for plants.

sanford says this part of the yard is UGLY, mom and dad!

we have to agree, so we decided to do something about it!

we don't really have a back yard so much as a big, covered concrete area that is used for storage of things. and recently, because of all the plants we bough, a lot of the plants ended up sitting back there until we could find a place to plant them. we spend a little over $10 at home depot on a bunch of cinder blocks, and combined them with a couple pieces of lumber that were left by the last ownders of the house (plus some ol' fashioned sweeping) and voila!

it's still got a long way to go - we have plans to update this space to make it more open and airy and green - but in the meantime, we have an organized place to incubate plants until we plant them!

it's especially great for plants that like morning sun (which it gets lot of, below) but like shade otherwise.

a door problem.

our door may have fallen out of its hinges a few weeks ago. we may have managed to get it closed temporarily and left our house unlocked for a week while we used the back unlockable-from-the-outside door. and we may have propped our very heavy door up on stacks of magazines, stuffed toothpicks into the holes and screwed everything back in and all is working now. and we might be crossing our fingers that this will hold for another month or two while the custom doors we ordered get made and we can install brand new doors on the front and back of the house and never have to deal with this issue again. maybe. possibly. this could be true.