Home Management Binder ~ Binder Love

When I was looking around and starting my own home management notebook, I looked at ALOT of binders online. I looked through a zillion (yup that's a number!) printables and finally picked out what was right for us. I still look for new inspiration and my binder is continually changing to fit our current needs.

I thought that I'd share some of my favorite binders that I found and some of the printable websites that I found helpful!

Home Management Binder ~ part three

It's time to talk about the last sections in my home management binder. These sections are my contacts, blogging, our new house, and a rotating section.

My contacts tab hasn't been used much yet. I'd like to get it all filled out soon In this sections I have a few printables that will eventually list our family doctors, emergency contacts, and other important contacts. We're in the process of choosing doctors so once we get those chosen, I'll begin to add their numbers and contact information. I have a general contacts page but since everyone is programmed into my email or my phone I haven't really started that either. I'm hoping to start adding names and addresses so I can send out Christmas cards this year.

The blogging tab is one that I try to use every day or at least every other day. I have a few pages for each of the different categories of posts I write. On these pages I list any ideas that I come up with so that I never run out of stuff to write to ya'll about! I also have a weekly planning page. At first, this page was a bunch of pages that I had to print each week. I've tweaked the page since then and decided to print it on card stock, put it in a page protector and make it dry erasable. Now I don't have to kill as many trees! :)

Home Management Binder (Part 2)

So, after a long wait.... and now that you have most of your materials, let's start on a few of the sections of your binder! Here are four sections that I'd like to focus on today. Of course, you don't have to include these sections, and you can come up with your own, but I'll share mine for now!

Today's sections are:
Calendars
Menu
Cleaning
Finances

The calendar section of my notebook doesn't have a divider. First I have my day at a glance pages. I made my own pages, printed them on card stock, and placed them in sheet protectors. This makes the pages dry erase safe and I don't have to waste paper every week. I use permanent marker so that it doesn't rub off. *Quick Tip: you can erase permanent marker by coloring over it with a dry erase marker than erasing as normal (definitely comes in handy as a teacher!)*

Behind my day at a glance pages, I include a monthly calendar. This could be a dry erase standard blank calendar, but I like these pretty calendars and so I printed them for each month!

Following the calendars I have any schedules such as Keeton's baseball schedule for reference.

Chocolate (Wasted, Dump, or Suicide) Cake

So, in honor of Mother's Day, I'm going to share an awesome dessert that I made for my mother yesterday!

WARNING! You will need ice cream or milk or something because this cake is SO rich!

This cake has been called many things, as I'm sure you can tell from the title. I always heard dump cake, Keeton calls it suicide cake, and the recipe that I followed was called wasted cake! No matter what you call it, it's an amazing cake that you can make a hundred times and make it differently each time.

Happy Mother's Day!!!

Today we celebrate one of the most important people in our lives and everything she has done for us!

I have to say (and no I am not biased :) ) I have the best mother in the whole wide world! It's funny how growing up over the years, I always said how awful my life was and that I had the meanest mother in the world.  As I get older, I realize how wrong I was. My mother means the world to me. No, we don't always get along, but she's usually right (mom if you're reading this don't laugh!). I have learned so much from her and I see how although she was the meanest mom in the world, it's only because she loves me and wanted the best for me. She was teaching me how to live in the real world. The funniest part is that now I'm married and there are many times that my husband will look at me and say, "You know, you sound just like your mom" :) What a great compliment. 

So mom, thank you for everything you've done for me and continue to do each day! I know that when I'm sick or upset I will always have someone to cry to and when I'm having a great day, there is someone to share that joy with! 

Love you mom!!!! 

And to all you other great mothers out there today, Happy Mother's Day! 

Jennifer

Home Management Binder - Part One

I should have gotten this post up this weekend. Sorry! No excuses, it's going up now and I'll try to get extra bonus posts up this week to make up for it. This is a quick and easy project for today. We're going to start our project for this month, our Home Management Binder.

Make your jewelry sparkle and shine...

With your own homemade jewelry cleaner!

It's Quick Tip Tuesday ya'll and for today's quick tip, I'm sharing a jewelry cleaner that I made last weekend that makes your jewelry sparkle like new!

Take a bowl, add a piece of foil to the bottom of the bowl.

Heat 1 cup of water in the microwave for 2 minutes.

Pumpkin Cream Cheese Muffins

Pumpkin Cream Cheese Muffins

These muffins take a little bit of preparation, but they are really yummy when they're ready!

The original recipe calls for pecans and canned pumpkin. However, I left out the pecans because Keeton doesn't love nuts, and I of course freeze my own pumpkin because it's WAY better so I used that instead!

For the muffins you will need:
2 1/2 cups flour
2 cups white sugar
2 tsp. baking powder
2 tsp. cinnamon
1/2 tsp. salt (Oops, I knew I forgot something!)
2 eggs
1 1/3 cups canned (or fresh) pumpkin
1/3 cup olive oil
2 tsp. vanilla

Some big changes are happening...

I spent the weekend in bed because I was pretty sure I was dying. Actually it was just a cold that one of my wonderful kiddos gave me but I still thought I was dying! While lying in bed, I decided to look over my blog and see what changes should be made. What I came up with was a HUGE list. Number one on that list, I need to write more posts more often. Agreed? So, over the next few weeks, expect some changes to the layout, the background, and most importantly, the number of things you get to read! :)

Make your old pillows look like new...

...with easy pillowcases!

Sorry it’s been awhile, a week ago was spring break for us so we spent the week painting the house. This week after work was then spent painting some more and putting stuff back together. We still have a LONG way to go, but it’s a start!

For today’s project I’m going to show you how I fixed up my parents old couches for our new home. We bought brand new slip covers. They are kind of a pain because if we want them to look nice we have to continually stuff them back into the creases but they are way nicer than the old fabric.

The old pillows looked awful on the new slip covers so I decided that I was going to cover them with pillow cases. This way if we got tired of the color or we spilled something on them (very likely), we could easily just slip the cover off and wash it.

I decided that I wanted a bright color so I bought this awesome orange fabric from Walmart. It was $2 for the whole bolt so it was totally worth it. 

Lemon Butter Pollock

We've lived in our house a week now. It's been a long stressful week but we absolutely LOVE our new home! I finally got around to making our first meals in the new house almost a week in. The first night was just a simple burger but Friday night was fish. 

The funny thing is, Keeton hates fish! We were shopping at Aldi last weekend and he said "No, I'm not sick, but I'm craving fish". So, we got some. I ended up making it Friday night with lemon butter because he loves lemon pepper anything. I threw some corn and brown rice on the side and made a surprisingly delicious meal. In fact, Keeton ate all the fish and rice that night! 

The rice was simple, I just threw brown rice, half an onion - chopped, and some garlic in my rice cooker. I used half water and half chicken stock. It was really good! 

The corn, just as simple. Frozen corn from someone's garden! 

Now, the main dish.

Diaper Basket

Congratulations to my best friend! She had her beautiful baby boy this weekend. He’s a big one too: 8 lbs 10 oz. He’s absolutely perfect! In honor of his birth I thought I’d post the instructions on how to make the diaper basket I made for the baby shower.

Steak and Hassellback Potatoes

Sorry folks, it's been awhile since my last post. We've been so busy trying to pack (and seriously failing) to move that I haven't had much time to type up a post! Well here I am again and this time with a new recipe. And by new, I mean it just came out of my oven new. We're in the process of using up all of the random groceries that we have so that we can start fresh in the new house. This has been great to weed out close to expired things.

Tonight's dinner was steak and potatoes, our favorite nights! The steak I prepared last night and let marinade overnight as well as through the day. The marinade was made with: 

Easy Marinade For Flank Steak (Taste of Home)

1 small onion, chopped

1/2 cup dry red wine or reduced-sodium beef broth

2 Tbsp olive oil

2 garlic cloves, minced

1 tsp brown sugar

1/4 tsp pepper

2 fresh sage leaves thinly sliced, or 3/4 tsp dried sage leaves

1/2 tsp salt

1/2 tsp minced fresh ginger

1 beef flank steak (1 lb)

She's Ready to Pop!

It's Marvelous Monday and time for another project! 

A few weeks ago I threw a shower for my best friend and her soon to be baby! It was so much fun! I had the whole thing planned out from the moment I found out she was pregnant. Thanks to Pinterest (as usual), I had so many cool ideas for this shower. I ended up with many projects that I can't wait to share. So without further ado.... 

She's Ready to Pop 

Here were the invitations that I made on Photoshop. They went right along with our theme of "She's Ready to Pop!" 

To go with the "Ready to Pop" theme, we had "Pop"corn and Cake "Pops". There were four different types of popcorn. If you'd like to try them, we used these RECIPES. We had four kinds, Cinnamon Bun Popcorn, Blue Party Popcorn (Originally Pink, but she's having a boy), Popcorn Brittle, and Plain Popcorn. The crowd, and my, favorite was the Cinnamon Bun Popcorn. It sounds strange but seriously melts in your mouth! The Blue Party Popcorn was my second favorite! 

The spread. The caramel corn looking popcorn was the Cinnamon Bun Popcorn that everyone loved. You can see the cake pops on sticks placed in plastic cups with rocks left over from my wedding.

We of course had to sample everything! 

Menu Board

Keeton: “What’s for dinner?”

Jennifer: “I don’t know. What sounds good to you?”

Keeton: “I don’t know. How about you?”

ONE HOUR LATER

Keeton: “So… what’s for dinner?”

Jennifer: “I still don’t know… How about popcorn”

Sound familiar? This is how we spent the first months of our marriage, living off of popcorn. Every day I’d come home, stare at the fridge, sigh, and pop popcorn. It was driving me nuts. I couldn’t understand how my mother always had dinner on the table and it wasn’t cereal or popcorn.

I tried different things to plan my meals. I planned on paper each week for about a month until that was too much work. I even tried planning out the month on paper but for some reason that just didn’t work for me either. Finally, after another afternoon on Pinterest, I found a new idea, a magnetic calendar, color coded with all of my meals for the month.

Welcome!

Hello! Welcome to my blog! 

Before I jump into my blog I'll share a little about myself. My name is Jennifer and I married my wonderful husband Keeton in July 2011. We currently live in a little rental home in a little town surrounded by cornfields in northern Indiana. In the following weeks we will become first time homeowners! Our soon-to-be home is an older home in great condition but in need of some major updates. We are so excited to move and to begin the many projects to make the house our home.  


Keeton is a jack-of-all-trades kind of guy. His main job is teaching math at the nearby school district. In the fall he coaches jr. high football and in the summer jr. high baseball. Right now is baseball season so he is helping with varsity baseball and hopes to take on the freshman team himself. On top of all of this he also takes care of our local cemetery (I have to say, this took awhile to get used to when we met!). When he finally has free time, he spends it with me! 


I am currently a Title 1 teacher at the local elementary school. For those of you that don't know what Title 1 is, it's a reading program for struggling students. I spend my days pulling Kindergarten through fourth graders out of their classes to work on reading and writing skills. This is a transition for me as I would love to be a classroom teacher next year! In the free time that I have when Keeton isn't home, I LOVE to read. It is seriously my favorite thing to do. I also enjoy painting, organizing, and other coming up with fun, creative projects to make our house a home! 


Now that you know a little about me here's a little about my blog. I plan to post my favorite recipes, projects, and tips from our house to yours! I am constantly trying new things in the kitchen and the ones that make the cut may just make it on here! Pinterest has been my inspiration for projects. Unfortunately it is slightly addicting so instead of actually doing projects I tend to just pin them. I plan to change that as soon as we move. And finally, I will pass on any tips that I find helpful as we start a new home, continue to grow in our marriage, as we start a family, and as I someday take on a teaching job. 


Thanks for reading! 
Jennifer