Daily schedule or chore chart

I have been wanting to do a chore chart/schedule chart for Isabel for quite some time.  Nothing on the web really hit the mark as to what I really wanted.  There didn't even seem to be anything on Etsy that I thought I could tweak.

So I bit the bullet and designed my own chart.  Isabel needs a schedule in the morning and in the evening that she can follow.  I feel like there will be less arguments if she knows what is expected of her each time.  I found some awesome and fairly inexpensive graphics at www.scrappindoodles.com.

For the middle of the chart I put some spaces for what we were going to do during the day.  I created a whole bunch of "play" cards and will have her pick two out each evening for the following day.  The play cards are something that she and I will do together.  Hopefully this will cull some of the constant requests to play.  I will also have her choose one "chore card" for her to complete the next day.  The other space in the middle will be for things that are scheduled each week or month, for example "Dance Class", "Preschool", "Valentine's Day".

If I were to do it again, I would change the wording on the chart a little.  Instead of "Today I am:", I would put something like "Things that need to get done today".  That way I could switch up cards from the morning and evening cards and not worry about having to change the wording from "Mopping" to "Mop" for example.  Does that make sense?

Anyway, here's a few of my cards and the chart.  I made the chart 40" x 25", but if you make your poster 24"x36" most online poster printers have sales on that particular size.  I used Walgreens online to print my "cards" on 4x6 photo prints (on sale for 10c a print).  We are so excited to get our poster and start using our cards

If you are interested, I can make a generic 24"x36" chore chart to be used by a boy or girl.  Just leave a comment.

First Renovation - The Man Room

This Christmas just gone I decided to renovate our detached room for my husband.  Make it into a "Man Room".

Two weeks until Christmas. I walk out to the back room and discover a lovely person in the past had painted OVER wallpaper*. That was the easy part. Other hiccups included the large holes in the walls that had been filled in by a person oblivious to the fact that there was painted over wallpaper, hence forever STICKING the wallpaper around the hole to the drywall. Electric outlets had been left on during the last painting, so the outlets were not only screwed to the wall, but also permanently stuck there by paint. I managed to crack two when I pried them off with a screwdriver. No great loss.

So, I got stuck into it. Here's the result.

BEFORE

This was an old rusty lamp without a shade that I reused in the room (see below - I spray painted it white)

AFTER

All of the stuff on the shelving is from Dal's life up to now.  He plays the drums, wants to be Indiana Jones (see plush Mickey), loves film, etc.  I guess the fake plant is just there for aesthetics. 

The storeroom.... still has a bunch of junk in it.  The lower white frame has a rubbing of Jimmy Hendrix's gravestone that I found among Dal's stuff.

Now before you say that it is too feminine.... Dal's favourite colour is purple. So there's only so much you can do with purple without it looking feminine! The pillows will probably be delegated to another room soon and the chair that is in there isn't actually the chair that we will be using in there. The correct chair is a nice deep manly red leather rocker/recliner that we got for $50 off craigslist (hooray for craigslist!!). I got all but one of those picture frames for free. The shelving I found in the storage room that I just painted white. The tv we already had. So all in all it was a pretty inexpensive project.

* Just so you know why painting over wallpaper is BAD, BAD, BAD!!!! Wallpaper should be easy to peel off. A special solution is sprayed or wiped over the wallpaper and because of the porous nature of the wallpaper it sucks that solution right up and then you can grab big sheets of the stuff and pull it right off. IF you paint over wallpaper, then you screw up that porous part of the wallpaper and poor schlepps like me come along and have to score the painted wallpaper and pick the shreds of wallpaper off with their fingernails or if you aren't as poor as me a fun scraper tool. I googled "removing painted over wallpaper" and all I got was that there is a special place in heaven for people who have the job of removing painted over wallpaper. It wasn't really helpful.

Easy Disposable Paint Pots

I like to recycle our garbage.  One of the things I kept back in Australia were the cute little soda cans.  I needed some paint containers for kids to use at a Halloween party I helped throw in 2009.  I used the little Coca Cola cans that I had collected and they turned out to be quite good at being paint pots - from the little holes in the top that held the paintbrushes nicely to the large quantities of paint that was held.  Here is my first tutorial that I ever did.

Wash as many coke cans as you will need. I also took off the little ring pulls.

Grab some black poster paint.


Paint TWO coats of black poster pain on to the sloped part of the coke can. I used smaller coke cans (250 mL). Let the first coat dry before applying the second coat or you are going to have streaks of red showing through.


Measure the height of the straight part of the coke can - from edge of slope down to where the red and silver meet at the bottom. My measurements were precisely 67mm. I then took a burnt orange A4 piece of cardstock and cut a rectangle 67mm wide with the length of the A4 paper. Having the rectangle the length of the A4 paper means it will double around when you glue it to the coke can, but I was too lazy to trim it and I don't think it looked any worse for it.

P.S. Glue the rectangles to the painted coke cans.

Print out some labels and glue to the paint pots.


And there you have it. Easy paint pots that you can just dispose of once you are finished with them. I am thinking of making some for LQ to use here at home. I probably wont spend much time prettying them, though.

A Virgin Post

A post to remember... this being the very first post of "Becoming Jill".  May this blog bring much happiness... and no frustration.