The Perfect House ... We Can't Have

 We saved for months and years for our down-payment on a new house.  

We waited until we were at a comfortable level of savings before we started to look.

We spent weeks looking at run-down house after run-down house.

Last week we found the house we wanted, a little less land (only 4.6 acres), needs a lot of work to get it to where we would want it, but livable as it currently is.

We put in an offer, went back and forth with the seller, and finally agreed to her final counter offer on Sunday at 10:04pm.

Went to the bank yesterday and everything looks good, except, that now they feel we need another $17,000 for our down-payment. in 2 months!

"Well just get someone to give you $20,000" the loans officer said! What world do these people live in?!

We do not have someone to just "give" us $20,000, and we can't come close to adding that into the account in the next 2 months!

We are waiting for the last mortgage lender to tell us their opinion and then we have no choice but to back out of the deal.

We see no other options and are all beat down tremendously. I have spent the last two days randomly bursting into tears and can no-longer think straight.

Three months until our lease is up and back to square one.

I found it! I finally found it!!

The week before this past Christmas our son lost/misplaced his Nintendo 3DS. We looked EVERYWHERE. I rearranged furniture, I cleaned every room in the house and we even looked through tote bins in the basement.

Being the week before Christmas everything was busy; the day he lost it I was doing holiday baking and I was getting really frustrated that every time I asked him for something he was on that stupid 3DS. At one point I got mad and told him to put it down right now and (fill in blank with whatever was pressing at the moment), so he did, and then we never found it again.

Until last night that is. We had pretty much given up on it, assuming someone had thrown it out somehow by accident. Then last night daughter threw a fit about a nightlight, something she never uses, and while searching for that I found the 3DS. In the oddest place.

Yup there it was! Sitting in a tin! In plain view! On top of the kitchenette in daughter's bedroom!

Now imagine how utterly stupid I am feeling right now. I had cleaned this room countless times and never, not once opened these tins. I moved them to clean around them, but never opened them.

As far as we can figure she got mad at her brother for something and hid it, then when she was asked if she knew where it was she simply forgot.

Our son is ecstatic that he finally got it back, especially as he got 2 new games for Christmas and his sister got her own 3DS. But I am telling you we now have designated spots where they are kept when not in use.

Spice Cabinet Organized

 

Today I spent 2 hours cleaning out and reorganizing this cabinet.

It houses most of our spices and my baking ingredients. It may not look very big but holds a lot when I can keep it organized.

Happy Valentine's Day!

My husband is out shoveling snow for a couple of hours so the kids and I decided to bake some cookies for Valentine's Day.  The kids had a blast and I wish that I had taken a picture of the kitchen when they were done (picture a flour bomb being set off). We baked basic sugar cookies we cut out with round cutters, half with heart cutouts in their centers, sandwiching them together with leftover chocolate frosting and heart sprinkles. We only baked half a batch of the sugar cookies and put the rest in the freezer for another day.

Sugar Cookies

1 1/4 cup    butter, softened
1 cup          sugar
1                 egg
1 1/2 tsp     vanilla extract
2 1/2 cups   all-purpose flour
1/2 tsp         salt

 Preheat oven to 350°F.
Cream butter and sugar on low-medium speed. Mix about 1 minute scraping down sides of bowl.
Add egg and vanilla, mixing until combined.
Sift flour and salt together then add to bowl. When dough clumps around the paddle it is ready.
Roll out half of the dough on a well floured surface and cut out your shapes. place cutouts on cookie sheet(s). Reroll scraps, and second half of dough, and repeat.
Bake 8-12 minutes until edges are golden brown.
Let cool on trays for 5 minutes and then transfer to cooling racks. Once completely cooled, decorate as desired. Enjoy!

Whats been happening

   We had a great Christmas and we are well into the new year now. My husband got a job the week of Christmas and is now being laid off, again, tomorrow. Which isn't such a great loss, as out of the weeks he has worked for this company he has only worked one full week and is getting half the pay cheque we are used to. I have some projects for him to tackle and he has a few plans.
  
   We found out that our son is apparently so quite in class that the teachers didn't notice that he hasn't been doing very much of the in class work, until I pointed it out to them. They have no idea what levels he is at and this year seems to be completely focused on the EQAO testing that is done in May. Now that I am aware and on top of him about it, we hope to see improvements.

   There are lots of home canned goods still sitting on the shelves in the basement and I am starting to plan out this years small garden. We built a new plant stand this week and I have started some herb seeds we will grow inside all year round (some times it's just nice to have fresh instead of dried). I also have a rabbit who should have a litter at the end of this month.

   Oh and my husband bought our daughter two dwarf hamsters, so she can have her own pets, that the kitten just can't seem to stop watching. She has named them Sophia and Amber from one of her favorite cartoons, and she is learning the responsibility of taking care of them.

  I have set myself the goal of blogging regularly now and there are so many projects coming up that I can't wait to post about. Here's hoping :)

A Shock When Least Expected

My husband has been laid off, effective immediately (as of last Friday).

 Now this would be less of a shock if they hadn't been telling all of the workers that they would be taking the whole crew with them to their next project. They even went so far as to push them into finding apartments/rooms/cottages to rent in the area of the project. My hubby and I went to the area two weekends ago and looked at apartments, luckily hubby is a sceptic who errs on the side of caution and refused to sign a lease until the official move had been made. A lot of the other guys, and a few girls, were not so leery however and are now stuck with year long leases in a city that they have no job in.

Of course this is not how the company planned it (they say) but it is an American company and they are having to cut through a lot of red tape to achieve what is needed here in Canada. This company has no sympathy for those workers they have left in the lurch and no projected resolution in the near future.

I have spent a lot of the last few months stocking the freezers and pantry so we should be fine. We have enough saved to get us through to the end of December and my husband has already contacted a man about some snow shoveling work. The Christmas shopping is pretty much done, only the father-in-law left, and we've been here before. "Been there, done that" as they say.

Here's to some major holiday planning that uses what we have, costs little or is free. Good thing I know how to be creative. No worries.

Doing Laundry without Electricity

So I decided to do an experiment.
I wanted to try doing the laundry for a week without the use of electricity. Why you ask? Well for starters I like to be prepared, for whatever, then I wanted to see if I could do it, for a whole week, without breaking down.

Many of us have had that time in our lives when things are tougher than most of us thought we could handle, when money is just too tight to spend on "frivilous" things like the laundry mat. There have been times when I have washed the clothes in the bathtub, wrung them out by hand and hung them to drip dry in the livingroom. But after the last time, when helper boy was small, I decided I needed to buy a few things, as insurance if you will, so that if we got to that point again I would have an easier time of it.

First I bought a laundry plunger, the hard blue plastic kind, and a five gallon bucket. Next I bought a washboard and this year I was able to save enough to buy a small hand wringer that screws onto the side of a laundry tub or washtub.  These tools make laundry by hand sooo much easier.

First I filled the bucket with hot soapy water about 3/4 full, then add a few articles of clothing, not too many or it won't agitate enough, and then use the laundry plunger to agitate the clothes for about 10 minutes.

I washed a few pieces of clothing at a time then wrung them out by hand and then used the same water to wash a few more until I finshed that colour group of clothing.
Next I rinsed out the bucket and filled it with clean water and a little fabric softener then repeated the agitation process again. I then did a final rinse with clean clear water.

After the final rinse the clothes were put through the hand wringer and then hung on a clothes drying rack.

The bucket is grey (the water is not that dirty eww)

This amount of laundry (about a load and a half) took me around an hour. Hanging in our basement the clothes took almost 36 hours to dry.  I washed laundry this way every other day for a week.  It was more time consuming then anything else, you can't just turn it on and walk away. But I did learn that doing laundry this way is totally do-able. However I did not atempt to wash heavier items such as blankets or heavy adult hoodies. I don't think I would want to tackle those unless I had really had to.