Home Management

How to Build an Indoor Play Area for Your Kids We have four very active children, so about a year ago we decided that we needed a place for them to play and burn energy in the winter and when they couldn't go outside. In our search for ideas we came across this blog , showing their indoor climbing wall and monkey bars. We really liked the idea and made our own very similar version.  Climbing Wall We used these rock climbing holds from Amazon for the climbing wall. We liked these holds because of the price, the natural rock look, and because they are installed with screws instead of with bolts. To make the wall we used 3/8" sheets of OSB (oriented strand board) that we glued and screwed together to create a double thick board. I made two sets so we could stack one on top of the other to make a taller wall. We used OSB because my parents had some extra and we could get it for free. Plywood would look nicer, but is more expensive. After attaching the boards we s...

Easy, Low Cost Investing with Acorns A few months ago I signed up for an Acorns account. At the time it seemed like a simple way to save a few extra dollars every month (money that I wouldn't have done anything with anyway), and it wouldn't feel like a sacrifice. For the most part that has been true.  How Acorns works.  When you sign up for Acorns you link one or more checking accounts to your Acorns account. Acorns then monitors the transactions in your account and rounds each of of them up to the nearest dollar. So if I spend $3.12 then Acorns records a "round up" amount of $0.88 or if I spend $198.97 then Acorns records a "round up" amount of $0.03. Once the total of my round ups gets to $5.00 Acorns withdraws that amount from my checking account and invests it in my Acorns account where it can earn money on the stock market. This process allows people to begin investing in the stock market for a very low rate (most of the time you have to start...

Apple Butter--No Sugar Added! I posted recently about our no sugar added peach jam . Along those same lines and to provide some variety we decided to also make some apple butter. Here I'll explain this process, that can be quite easy with the right tools.  A few weeks ago my uncle asked if we would come pick his apples (apparently they don't use them and the deer come down and eat them, which he doesn't like) and we were happy to take them off his hands. He has two trees, one with a nice, tart green apple and one with a sweeter pink and yellow variety. Having the mix of types provides a good flavor for applesauce and apple butter.  We started with about three of these banana boxes full of apples since they had a really productive year for apples.  To make the apple butter we started by making applesauce. That process is pretty simple if you have a Victorio Strainer ( Deluxe Food Strainer and Sauce Maker by VICTORIO VKP250 ). To prep the apples: wash ...

Meeting with Our Builder During the process of having our home built we met several times with our builder. These meetings served various purposes from paperwork to making decisions about different aspects of the home.  The initial meeting focused on giving our final approval to the floor plan and how the house would be situated on the lot (we had already discussed most of this via email). We also went over the timeline for building the house and the kinds of options that we would have within the floor plan we had selected. We could choose among various flooring options, counter tops, interior paint colors, and exterior finishes and colors. But we didn't really get to see these options during this meeting. The builder did take time to answer many of our questions. Here were a few of our questions. Q: When you pour the concrete can we have you pour additional slabs for sheds, etc? A: Yes, we would do that towards the end at a cost of $4 per square foot. Q: Could the exca...

Buying our First Home (New Build!) Before we bought a new home from a builder, we had many questions about the process and had a hard time finding good information about the process. In an attempt to answer some of those questions this will be the first of several posts about our experience buying a home. Our main reasons for having a home built (rather than buying an existing home) were to get the type and size of home we needed for a price that we could afford. We hadn't planned at all to build a home at this point in our lives, but it turned out that financially it was the best option for us. Our Criteria These were our criteria 1) location, we knew what school we wanted our kids to go to and wanted to live in that neighborhood, 2) size, we have four children and wanted to make sure that we had enough room (including the yard) for us to be comfortable, 3) price, we are a single-income family and wanted to make sure we were comfortable with the mortgage, and 4) light, ...

We recently decided that we wanted to try making our own sugar-free jam and wanted to try using stevia as well. After listening to the book    The Case Against Sugar   by Gary Taubes we decided that we need to drastically reduce the amount of sugar that we eat in our home. While this hasn't been too bad for Joanna and I, it is harder for our kids. We wanted something for the kids to put on their sandwiches, pancakes and similar things and so had been buying sugar-free jams from our local grocery store. But these were expensive. We checked in speciality stores as well as online and couldn't find anything cheaper. Since we've made freezer jam in the past we thought we'd try the same with sugar-free jam. We bought a box of peaches, since they were on sale at our local Sprout's Market and about 7 boxes of pectin ( Sure Jell No Sugar Pectin, 1.75 oz (Pack of 2) ). Now a note here about the jam, it isn't actually sugar-free since there is sugar in the peaches...

Build your own Bunk Beds Toddler Size! In this post I provide the measurements I used to build bunk beds to fit toddler sized mattresses and link to the plans that I modified to build these toddler bunk beds. When we were expecting our third child we lived in a small apartment at the University of Utah. The apartment was great, but the bedrooms were small, so to maximize space we wanted to have our 5 year-old and 3 year-old use a bunk bed that would accommodate the smaller toddler size mattress. We searched all over and could not find anything, not just anything affordable, but nothing at all! Turns out toddler size bunkbeds can't be sold because of some regulation or another. So we decided to build our own. This was my first real building project and other than one shop class in 7th grade I haven't done a lot of work with wood. I did enlist the help of a friend who had worked quite a bit with wood and who had a lot of the tools. We started by choosing a straight forwa...