DIY Eye Makeup Removal {A Pinterest Project}

Once upon a time, as I was perusing Pinterest, I came across the idea to make my own eye makeup remover.

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Someone had found a recipe for eye makeup remover here in blogland and shared it on Pinterest. (My cousin's friend also has a recipe for eye makeup remover. Visit her blog,  A Lighter Journey, for her recipe and many money saving ideas!) What a good idea! I usually avoid washing my face before bedtime because my mascara and eyeliner get smudged all over the place and I find it in my pores the next morning. (gasp! I know. Some people say that a woman ages seven years for every night she doesn't wash her face. I don't believe those people -gasp again! I know. But if it were true, I'd look like I was 100 years old....and I don't think I look like I'm quite that old yet) Nevertheless, no matter how I try to avoid it, I always end up washing my face at night. I get into bed and get all snuggled up and then...dun dun dun...my eyes begin itching. The only way to make the itching go away is to get out of bed (and get cold again) and wash my face.

It hasn't always been this way. I used to purchase Clinique's Take the Day Off Makeup Remover, but have avoided the price of it lately. And so, I've been in the conundrum of black pores vs itchy eyes for quite a stretch. I decided that making my own eye makeup remover would be the solution.

Until I thought of a different problem.

Cotton balls. Those little white balls of fluff shed and the fibers get in my eyes. I don't like using cotton balls. What else should you use with eye makeup remover?

These!

Alli Crafts is a crochet blog with lots of useful free patterns. These are Alli's eye makeup remover pads.  These are my answer to cotton balls. I modified the pattern to reflect my own personal preferences and tastes (I really dislike the look of the double crochet stitch in anything) and made some of my own. I also used Kristin's formula for home made eye makeup remover. And now I can wash my face at night. No itching eyes. No straggly strands of cotton balls stuck in my eyes. No black pores. (and no looking seven years older every morning...if you believe in that sort of thing)
YAY!! I can get in bed, snuggle down in my covers and not have to get out and get cold anymore.....or at least for a few hours until my alarm clock wakes me up.

Here is my own eyemakeup battle remover kit

These little eye makeup remover pads work really well. I find that when they are made out of cotton yarn, they are soft and not at all abrasive to my skin. They also wash well, so my mascara doesn't stain them. I just throw them in my washing mahine with my towels. So far, so good.

I made a bunch of them (more than pictured here) because I....want to do laundry more often.

I also made coordinating washcloths. I think the pattern is really pretty and modern. Pretty, modern, and functional.

So, thank you, fellow Pinner, for putting this miracle answer to my every night problem on Pinterest. I am so glad you did!

One Decision Down

I have chosen the flooring for my house! Part of it, anyhow. This is monumental progress in my book. It took days and weeks of dreaming, looking, pricing, and dreaming some more to make a single choice.

The house had hardwood floors when we purchased it. Everyone wants those, right? The problem with the floors in this house is that the upstairs living room and hallway were done in a blood red cherry wood, and the bedrooms upstairs were done in a very light blonde bamboo. High contrast, right! And the transitions were done very poorly - you could see stripes of blonde bamboo at each bedroom doorway down the hall because they installed it up to the outside of the door jamb. We looked into what it would cost to just have them stripped and refinished to being the same color and found that it would be less expensive to replace it all.

This is the laminate wood we have decided to install for the upstairs living room, kitchen, hall, and bedroom floors.

It is called Marble Falls Teak. Had it fit in my budget, I would have liked to go with something a little bit darker and more rustic in walnut, but I really like this flooring. It was on sale and I had a coupon. Score! (Lumber Liquidators got the price even lower for us when Doug went in to negotiate with them) Definately an improvement from what was in the house when we bought it. Also an improvement from what is in there now. Though what is in the house now is a HUGE improvement from what used to be there. Doug has all of the floors ripped down to the subfloor. Believe it or not, the subfloors actually look better (and are much cleaner) than the floor that was there. Even so, subfloors aren't the prettiest. Those ugly subfloors will get covered up with new laminate flooring as soon as we get a fresh new coat of paint on the walls (or maybe 10 coats of paint...they desperately need it!)

Ug. I still have to choose paint colors. I've been looking for them for three months and haven't come any closer to deciding than the first day I began. But, stay tuned. I may eventually pick something out. Pinterest has given me many many ideas.

House Update

We got it! It didn't happen as quickly as we would have liked....but it didn't take this long either. Nope. We actually purchased our new 5 bedroom, 2 bathroom, 2 car garage home in December. And we've been renovating it ever since. It needs a TON of work. See for yourself.

This is a wall in the "finished" basement kitchen

Another "finished" wall in the basement

The laundry area (it is in the downstairs kitchen)

Peel and stick tiles in a lovely shade of blech (downstairs kitchen)

The dirtiest, ugliest carpet I have ever seen in my life. It was bright emerald green and had never ever been washed or vacuumed. This is the entrance from the downstairs kitchen into the downstairs family room. Ew.

I will just leave it at that so that my blog doesn't completely repulse you. *Sigh* There is a LOT of work to be done. Husband has been working on it after work every night, on his days off, and through the weekend. It is going to take a while. A while is a good and bad thing. Good because I am having the hardest time picking stuff out. Mostly because I like too many things and it is hard to narrow it down to just a few. I promise the next time I post about the house, you'll see better looking photos!


Why would we buy a house that needed so much work? Our condo was in good condition, and we could have easily made it fabulous instead of coming up with an insane amount of money to put down on a dump. The reason is simple. It just made more financial sense for us. Our mortgage for this house is much less than the mortgage on the condo, and there are no HOA fees. We are saving about $500 a month in this house. We also have instant equity in this home. It appraised for a significant amount more than what we paid for it. Even in the condition it was in when we purchased it. So we get a bigger (about twice as much space as the condo), detached house that we can customize to our style for less. Score!! As far as we're concerned, this house is a diamond in the rough. I'm glad my husband has carpentry skills and vision. We are both excited to turn this into a comfortable aesthetically pleasing home for our family.

Possibilities Maximus

I have my computer back!! Our computer's name is Max. I have missed Max, oh! how I have missed him. For the past few weeks, I have been working on our netbook named Mini. Mini's name is very descriptive of her screen. Miniature. A mere 7.5 inches I think. Yeah. Mini. Max, however has a comparitively humungous screen and all of the brains I need. He has my shop design, my product pictures, my photoshop and room to store all that stuff. I haven't blogged using Mini because she just doesn't have what it takes. Sad. But Max is back! Glad!!!

Anyhow. Remember how I said that we were going to close on our short sale house purchase within 30 days? And that we had superbly lucked out with the time frame of this house? Well, we haven't been as lucky as we thought we were. Short sales are famous for bank stall tactics. And stall they did. While we still won't have to wait six or nine months to close on our house, it has taken longer than we expected it to. It hasn't been all that bad. It took us a while to get a renter in our condo & to decide that this house is really what is best for us right now. We've been staying with Husband's parents, and we've been able to save more money up than we thought we would be able to. The only real downside is that I had to buy a new set of crochet hooks (mine are burried in storage) and I've had to use Mini for a few weeks. I have Max back (have I mentioned that I am so very glad about that?) so now I can blog and edit pictures and crochet and be happy during this inbetween houses waiting time....that will end December 6th -ish.

I say 6th-ish because we're planning to close on December 6th. But we're also planning on renovating the entire house. Little by little. Except the flooring and the wall colors. We are going to replace all of the floors and paint the entire place before we move in. Yay! actually....YIKES. I might not have all the crochet and blogging time I want. I might be going crazy trying to decide between carpet, wood, or tile and what paint colors in which rooms.

We went to Home Depot tonight to look at some options. Did you know the options are limitless? Have you ever been entirely overwhelmed by possibilities? I just don't know where to start. I thought I knew what I wanted. I saw it on Pottery Barn for the living room, and on HGTV.com for the kitchen. And then I get to Home Depot and get dizzy with a combination of alzheimer's and anxiety. We went from talking getting the countertops refinished with some paint kit thingamajig to considering granite in almost an instant. I thought I had to have wood flooring in the kitchen, but now I might want tile. White cabinets or off white? Black or brown glaze? What is that color in that picture? Why is that stuff too expensive?

One good thing did come of our trip to Home Depot. We got one of those color swatch booklet things that has like a million colors in it. And now when I see a color I like online, I can find something similar and not get distracted by the endless possibilities.

I Will (probably) Survive

Remember how I was going to be away for a while due to Fall Cleaning? I had a momentary spark of ambition to organize my house again and seem to have become lost in the process. Somewhere between emptying closets and deciding what to donate, what to sell, and what to keep we decided to buy a house and move.

We've been on the lookout for a house we would want to live in at a price we would want to pay for a long time. We've been particularly interested in short sales because we weren't in a huge hurry to move. We found a house - and everything has just taken off at lightening speed since then.

For those who don't know, the term "short sale" is misleading. There is nothing fast or speedy about purchasing a home that is worth less than what the bank loaned to purchase it. There are hoops and red tape and offers and counter offers and waiting and bidding. It usually takes 6-9 months and sometimes longer for these sorts of deals to go through.

But not in our case. We made an offer on the house, and the bank approved it about a week and a half later. And they want to close within 30 days. We sure did get lucky!! The difference between this house and other short sales is that this one is owned by the State's housing authority and the price had already been approved by the bank, so we didn't have to execute our mad hoop jumping skills.
I am still busy organizing my house. The task just exploded into being everything in every room, rather than just a cupboard and a few closets. We're organizing everything into boxes. J doesn't seem to appreciate this. He unpacks things as I pack them. He does appreciate the packing peanuts. I don't appreciate him trying to eat them. My house is a disaster - it looks like a whirlwind went through and undid everything. We are ( I am) staying up late each night to be productive with packing. I am also trying to fill some Etsy orders for hats and duvet covers. Plus I took some more family pictures. The moving thing happened when I wasn't ready for it, and it will probably be over before I get my head wrapped around the fact that it is happening. I haven't had enough sleep and my brain is as jumbled up as my house is. Trying to manage a very curious toddler while packing on my own, finding my way through a mountain of ruffles, learning how to dye fabric, editing and critiquing my pictures, thinking about inspections, planning renovations, trying to find renters for our condo, trying to come up with an insane amount of money, worried about getting financing....oy. I am very overwhelmed right now,  but know it will all be over soon and that I just might survive! And when it is all said and done, I'll have a single family dwelling with a private yard and a two car garage and I will get to do all of the fall-ish crafty things I've been desperate to try. By then, maybe all of the supplies for my projects will be on sale. yay!

Spring Cleaning

In getting ready for summer fun with Spencer here, I did some spring cleaning. Last year NO cleaning got done around spring time. I was on bedrest, and then voila!...baby...and 6 more weeks of cleaning prohibition followed by I don't know how long of no time to clean. This year, ther was no spring, but there was a lot of cleaning.

For example, the office/spare bedroom.
Before


After


And Jaden's closet.
Before


After


Everything feels so much better when all of the clutter is GONE. Did you notice how much more light let into the rooms after they had been cleaned? I felt like I could actually breathe and think and function in my house again. It was such a rush that I cleared out nearly every room in the entire house.

I recently read a book by Peter Walsh entitled Lighten Up. The main point of the book is that our homes are often a reflection of our emotional state of mind, and that our environment affects our state of mind. Clutter can be a symptom of an unorganized personal and emotional life, and it can be the cause of one. It is a vicious cycle. Walsh empowers readers with the ability to recognize the emotional attachment to stuff and coaches them through letting go. The most important impression made on me from reading this book was that material possesions can take time away from my family and prevent me from becoming the best version of myself. It takes time to clean up my house because it gets cluttered with stuff. It takes time to fold all my laundry. It takes time to maintain my cars. If I can reduce the time I spend taking care of my stuff, I can increase the time I spend with my family and on becoming a better person.

Spring cleaning is awesome!