Under the Tree

If you will be celebrating Christmas with small children this year, but you don’t want to place too big of an emphasis on the gifts, might I suggest something?

Don’t pile up the gifts too early under the tree for your little ones to gaze at all Christmas season.

What’s easy for an adult to ignore, a child will notice all the time. I want them to enjoy a sense of wonder this holiday, but not always wondering about what’s under that wrapping paper and bow?

I didn’t want it to be bare underneath the tree, so I arranged some blankets and books for them to curl up and read. We’ll bring the gifts out when it’s time to open them because I love giving gifts to my children, but I know if they saw them every day it’s all they would think about.

One of the Christmas books for children that I’m enjoying is Who Is Coming to Our House? The animals get ready for Mary and Joseph to arrive, and they tidy up the barn. I think about it when I’m tidying up the house for the holidays.

Advice for Downsizing the Family Home

A reader’s question:

Yes, I always recommend decluttering first, no matter who you are or what season you’re in, because that makes everything easier. It gives you the freedom of flexibility when you don’t have to carry a ton of stuff with you.

I just moved into a house for the first time after living in apartments with my family for many years.

The most important thing to think about when shopping for apartments is what your family currently needs. One time a few years ago we looked for a new apartment, and we found one in a popular part of town with bars, shops, and restaurants. It was an address we would have been proud of, and the building had high style. But before we signed the lease, we realized: it would have been perfect for us a few years before, but it didn’t fit our current life. We were about to add a new baby to our family. We weren’t going to be going out to bars at night. We ended up finding a different apartment with parks for our little ones to run around.

Since you have kids, I would place a huge priority on the kitchen. Sometimes apartment kitchens are designed for one or two people to eat dinner there a couple of nights a week and go out to eat the rest of the time. With little kids, your kitchen receives a lot of use, and you need a decent amount of pantry space. Can you make do with a small kitchen? Of course you can make it work, but a functional space will go a long way to helping you feel satisfied in your new place.

Storage is also important, but you might be surprised to find that modern apartments have more closet space than older houses. Shelves make the most efficient use of space if you need to add storage. We have the kind of metro restaurant-style shelves that can be adjusted and don’t need to be mounted to the wall, and I can’t believe how much stuff it holds. When we need to move it can be disassembled for easy transport.

Of course there is more advice. Continue reading:

What to Expect When You’re Expecting and You Still Live in an Apartment

The Fridge That Cleans Itself

Our kitchen is in progress right now. We have a couple of new things so far, but no backsplash, curtains, or art on the walls yet. I’m just showing peeks of the kitchen until it’s finished, hopefully, soon. (It looked like this previously.)

I’m no stranger to the way that smaller things can cost more than bigger things. The small houses in the historic district cost much more than the massive houses on the edge of town. One good writing pen costs more than the cheap pack of six. And you can’t just buy one battery, you have to buy the entire package and find a place in your apartment to store the rest you don’t need. Travel-size and apartment-size, while practical, often carry a premium price for their small design.

So it came as no surprise when I looked for a smaller counter-depth refrigerator that they cost significantly more than what I would consider to be a normal fridge according to American standards.

I looked for weeks, reading reviews and studying dimensions of cubic feet, but I saw no clear winner. The dozens of refrigerator models aren’t very different, after all; they’re made by the three or four companies who own the variety of brands. It’s hard to be impressed when an expensive appliance’s life expectancy is just 7 to 10 years according to the salesperson. What happened to quality? We used to expect better. But I digress.

IKEA had a model at a reasonable price that was a true counter-depth of 24 inches, but it was out of stock for months. We couldn’t wait for it. We needed a fridge for the house we just bought, and though our kitchen is a large size, a regular-sized refrigerator unit would have blocked the window.

We had our sights set on having a fridge that was smaller. That was one of the changes we decided to bring back with us from Italy. In Florence we became so accustomed to our dorm-size refrigerator with just barely enough room to store our fresh food that we didn’t want to go back to a deep fridge with enough food stored inside to rival a corner market.

A dorm-size fridge might really be too small, but a counter-depth fridge seemed just right. We liked how they look as well.

One fortuitous day we browsed through the aisles of yet another appliance store, studying the models that all looked the same, and we came across one lone fridge with a big yellow sign. It was a scratch-and-dent markdown with a steep discount that put it squarely in our price range, thanks to a burned-out light bulb and a small dent above the handle. We became excited when the dimensions fit the space we had for it perfectly.

The dent makes me happy every time I look at it.

So that’s how we now have a pretty little counter-depth fridge in our kitchen, but still it’s only half-full. We keep our fresh food for the week in it, and when it’s time to go to the grocery store at the beginning of the week, our fridge usually looks like this:

Clean and almost empty, ready to fill with fresh, new groceries.

I have so enjoyed having a smaller fridge that I can easily assess what’s in it, reach everything, and not let food go to waste. I find that an enormous fridge full of food can be overwhelming, and I can’t seem to remember what’s in it. Most of our food goes in the pantry, anyway. We use up what we have, and we don’t throw out as much.

Everything is fresh, and I never need to clean it out.

Cleaning the stainless steel:

When I titled this post about how the fridge cleans itself, I was referring to the inside, but the stainless steel on the outside of the fridge is easy to clean too. I spray it with H2, which is an all-purpose cleaning concentrate that I use for most everything, and then I wipe it in the direction of the grain with a microfiber cloth. It’s almost perfectly streak-free, but no one is looking closely enough to inspect my fridge. (If you’ve used polishes or other oil-based cleaners such as Pledge on the stainless steel already, then this method may not work as well on the residue those leave behind.)

Progress on the Pink Room

It was four months ago that we bought this house, to the day. (It feels like longer.)

Such a milestone should have fanfare, so how about we celebrate with something pink?

This is the bedroom our daughter inhabits. Our five-year-old daughter with a sparkly personality. I suggested painting it a stylish color like a silvery-gray (“Think of all the bright colors we could accent it with! Yellow! Pink!”), but that idea was rejected as not special or fancy. I thought about what my favorite color would be if I was young, almost six years old, and it would be unabashedly pink. So pink it is.

In case you could forget, this “before” picture pretty much sums up the way all the bedrooms in this house looked when we bought it. That was a burlap wall with crazy wallpaper underneath.

It was a plain room, and kind-of small, and I really want each bedroom to have something memorable about it, so I decided that the large window in the center of the wall that you see when you first walk into the room would be perfect with bookcases on both sides.

(Thanks to my brother for helping!)

The bookcases were planned and built, and the paint rolled. A built-in desk will go under the window. Next the new crown molding will wrap around the top of the shelves to make them look as though they were always there. The bookcases are being primed and painted white this week for crisp, bold contrast.  More to come…

(Doesn’t that last bit sound a little like HGTV? I can tell I’ve been watching it lately.)