How to Display Your Holiday Cards Quickly and Easily (and Cheaply!)

We may have a newborn baby around here, but we can't let everything slide, can we? 'Tis the season to receive endless stacks of holiday cards and yearly updates from people. And just what are you supposed to DO with all of that stuff? You're pretty much heartless if you toss it in the trash recycling, and you're just asking for a pile of STUFF if you keep it around. I mean, where do you put it?

Last year I just put them all in a bowl on our coffee table. That was nice, but it didn't really give us a chance to look at all the cards at once. And since most people these days put family pictures on the front of their cards, it's really nice to look over all our loved ones with a glance--and with said newborn, sometimes that's all I can spare at the moment!

Enter the quickest organization solution I think I have EVER come up with. Seriously, y'all, it took me two minutes to think of this, two minutes to run upstairs and grab the supplies, and ten minutes to put it up on the wall. All this while I was frantically praying that Junior would nap more than half an hour as he's been known to do around here.

If I can do it in those circumstances, I KNOW you can do it too!

Let me tell you how!

Baby Prep: DIY Book Shelves

I spent last week working on another favorite project of mine. After seeing this project on Pinterest, I impulsively decided to make these shelves. They would fill a dead space in the nursery, provide a way to store all the books we already have, and cost far less than buying pre-made shelves.

While the shelves ended up being more complicated than I thought, they were still a pretty simple project. They did end up taking 3 days to complete, but this had more to do with the multiple trips to Home Depot and two coats of paint than anything else. I'd still recommend them to anyone looking for a simple, DIY solution when it comes to book storage in a small nursery space.

Let's get right into it, shall we?

Baby Prep: DIY Star Mobile

This is probably my favorite project to date. It was a bit tedious and time-consuming, but man, was it worth it.

Let's get right to the good stuff!

Baby Prep: Finishing the Bathroom for $100

It might seem like a strange thing to call a bathroom project "Pregnancy Prep," but I've made an executive decision. It totally is. This bathroom is upstairs, which is where the nursery will be. This upstairs bathroom will be the place for many baby-related things: baby baths, late night bathroom breaks when we don't want to stray far from baby, spraying out soiled diapers, etc. Taking this bathroom from bare bones to my kind of beautiful was a big part of my nesting plans.

Here's what the bathroom used to look like:

Pretty boring right?

Well, here it is after I finally worked on it last week.

In which I create a Family Menu Board

Psst. Guess what? 

I made something in the last two weeks I've been MIA. I know a few friends who will be super happy that I've gone back to a few DIYs. 

I present: Our Family Menu Board!

Freshly painted walls are finally here!

I won't do a lot of waxing poetic about the painting project. Let's just flash quickly to a picture of what it used to look like:

In which I complete my very first DIY project!

I have finally done it. I have finally become an official blogging woman. How have I accomplished such a thing? I have done so by initiating, constructing, and completing my first DIY project by my own strength and ingenuity. No help from the hubby here.

In which I describe my new ventures . . .

As I sit here typing this I'm still watching snow blow around outside. Our front window faces west, so the snow looks like it's just blowing sideways outside as the vicious wind whips down from the north. Also, we're alone out here, so there are no other buildings to block the wind. What does this all mean? Huge drifts that will threaten to blow over our freshly shoveled driveway every day. Hooray!

In other news, I have decided to take up a few things to keep myself busy this winter as I continue to navigate the waiting game that is trying to start a family. And, to give myself a little bit of a rush, I've decided to tell you in list form. Nothing makes me more calm than making lists. Well, maybe budgets. Or hourly calendars. I'm not a control-freak, really. I can stop whenever I want.