I’ve spent a few days working in my new library, cleaning things out and getting ready for the start of school in just a few weeks. I’m not quite ready to show it all off yet, but I wanted to post a little “sneak peek” of this amazing new room I will be working in. I’m still pinching myself because I can’t believe I get to work here!
My Maytag washer and dryer has made me love doing laundry. It really is a huge help to have smart, efficient machines that take the guesswork out of settings and drying time. I also love the fact that I can wash and dry larger loads. Did you know the average family does around 400 loads of laundry a year? That’s probably time you’d rather be spending with family. With products like Tide and Maytag, and a functional, well-designed space, you can get clothes clean in one wash.
The Home Depot is your one-stop shop for finding everything you need for your laundry room, including great cleaning products, appliances, organizing, storage and decorating items. To celebrate the #BrilliantHEClean campaign, Home Depot is offering a $100 gift card with the purchase of a Maytag Powerwash machine & 150 oz. Tide.
Jenny Komenda, decorator and blogger at The Little Green Notebook, has some great tips on how to create a more efficient space in your laundry room located at www.tideandmaytag.com. When you’re organized, things just flow better and no time is wasted. This is true of doing laundry, also!
Jenny’s tips for overhauling and organizing your laundry room:
Tip #1:
Dealing with a dark, cave-like laundry room is a chore in and of itself! By taking off the doors on a few of your upper cabinets, you’ll open up the space and create a place to store baskets. In this laundry room, we assigned baskets for every member of the house, which makes sorting a breeze!
Tip #2:
Why not decoupage or paint insides of cabinets for a fun pop of color? It’s a guaranteed smile each and every time you reach for your detergent.
Tip #3:
Don’t like the cabinets, floors and countertops in your laundry room? Every surface can be painted or resurfaced! For less than $30 in materials, the outdated linoleum, brick pavers and old, dark cabinets were updated in this laundry room with paint and with a concrete overlay product.
Tip #4
A rolling laundry butler can be your best friend, doing triple duty with a hanging bar, a rolling basket and a drying rack. It’s the perfect choice for a laundry room with limited space that hasn’t been updated in a few decades.
Tip #5:
Don’t neglect your laundry room walls! Hanging interesting art and mirrors will elevate your room and make it feel less utilitarian and more “homey”. Suddenly those 400 loads of laundry most of us will do this year might actually be enjoyable!
Tip #6:
Use a slab of stone or a simple piece of painted MDF on top of the washer/dryer units to create a folding station and to prevent socks from slipping in between the appliances.
GIVEAWAY
How would you like to win something to help you get started on your own laundry room redesign? One lucky read will win a #BrilliantHEClean Laundry prize Pack which includes:
$50 Home Depot Gift Card
Tide Samples
TO ENTER
Use the Rafflecopter form below to enter. Giveaway ends August 5, 2013 at 12:00 AM EST. U. S. Only. Void where prohibited.
I was provided with the prize pack above as a thank you for facilitating this post. No other compensation was received. All opinions are my own.
Vintage children’s books shouldn’t automatically be tossed out just because they are old or the covers don’t exactly look appealing. As an elementary school librarian, I run across quite a few old books that need to be weeded from the collection to keep up with state standards. Although they have to be removed from the shelf, it still doesn’t stop me from looking through them to see if I can’t use it as a teachable moment with my students or my own child. So what can your child learn from a vintage children’s book?
In May when I was packing up the library at school, I ran across this older, sweet children’s book. The book, Questions Children Ask by Edith and Ernest Bonhivert, had a copyright of 1969, with previous editions dating back to 1956.
Because of its age and physical condition, this vintage children’s book was weeded from the collection and headed for a fate that would probably include a dumpster at some point. I was curious about what this book could be about, so I opened it and instantly fell in love with the illustrations. Further proof you should never judge a book by its cover.
I could tell just by checking over the table of contents that this was the perfect book for my son, even though some of the information in it was outdated. Most of it was just straightforward answers to everyday questions that children ask, such as, “Why is the sky blue?”, “Are there really such things as mermaids?”, and much, much more. There are almost 200 pages of questions and answers. My son is very inquisitive, so I decided to rescue this little book and bring it home. I’ll admit even I wanted to know the answers to some of the questions in this book.
What happened next when my husband and I took turns reading this book to our son before bedtime was something of a bonus. Some of the topics dealing with science and history have, of course, changed greatly. When we came to points in our reading where we knew that information had changed (such as space discovery and advances in technology), it made for some great conversations and teachable moments with our son about how much things have changed and what improvements have been made since this book was published. It even sparked conversations amongst us as parents because we were anxious to hear what the other had read aloud the night before. Since this book was also written before my husband and I were born, some of the things were funny to us as we remembered things like telephones with cords and a world without cell phones and personal computers. It still amazes me that my son won’t ever know a world without these things. Now he will at least know how these things evolved, thanks to vintage children’s books like this!
What Can Vintage Children’s Books Teach Your Child?
-How the world used to work.
-Vintage Children’s Books can spark conversations about what we used back then versus what we use now.
-The illustrations can be quite eye-appealing, sparking conversations about art.
-Some values and lessons just never change.
-You shouldn’t judge a book by its cover.
Your child may fall in love with a particular vintage book and want to read more from those authors.
There are still copies of this book floating around at Amazon. While looking for more information about the authors, I discovered that Edith Bonhivert passed away just last year, and her husband before her in 2005. I can only imagine how many children and parents have read and enjoyed this book over the years. I’m so glad I can count our family in that number.