A little bench for the hallway and 100 Posts

 A couple of weeks ago I found a little table at our town´s antique fair. 

It had seen better times, but overall it was in good condition and I liked the lines.

 

Can you see its potential? With its curvy legs and strong built it was the perfect candidate for turning it into a little bench or stool.

Especially since the top “tiles” weren´t really my taste anyway.

A few days later I went to the home improvement store to gather my supplies:

• Fabric
• White Paint
  
• A Paint Roller
  
• A Sponge for buffing up
  
• Foam

I already have an upholstery stapler.

This weekend I finally got work, by first roughing up the wood and cleaning the stool.

Next I added 1 layer of paint …

… then a second layer …

… and finally a third layer of white paint …

Patience is key. I started on Friday night, added the second layer on Saturday morning and the final layer on Saturday afternoon.

Next, I started thinking about how to add the foam and fabric.

As you can see from the above picture, I initially thought about just adding a small pad to the top, but then I decided on taking the fabric all aroung the stool. I forgot to take a picture, but I simply added another layer foam the size of the entire stool to the top. Then I added my fabric, flipped the stool over and started stapling.

Here is how the stool looked like mid-way through. Unfortunately at that point all of my staples were used up and I had to wait to get new ones.

Finally, after another couple of days, I was able to get more staples and to finish the foot stool.

Linked up here:
- Pinterest Challenge at YHL
- Pinterest Challenge at Bower Power

Living on a budget - Homemade vegetable stock

Every once in a while I will post about little projects that can be done very easily with very little or no upfront cost.

Growing up, I remember my mom making chicken soup from homemade stock. The taste of it was always great. I never remember her though making a large batch and freezing portions of it.  That is an idea I stumbled upon while reading various "mom-blogs" and similar websites.

Considering, that making stock didn't seem to be something requiring a whole lot of attention, I decided to try making some myself. Besides tastes factors, I also thought about the costs of homemade stock, which is next to nothing. We never really bought any ready made stock in a can, but we do spend quite a bit of money on those little spiced cubes you can add to water to create a stock.

Just for fun I  took a closer look at the ingredients on there, but most of them I can't pronounce. The first thing that becomes clear is, that these cubes contain a lot of salt and artificial ingredients.

So with the goal to reduce our spending as well as do something for our health, I have spent the last couple of weeks adding scraps and unusable pieces of veggies and meat to a quart-sized ziploc bag that I kept in the freezer.

Following this recipe, I collected enough ingredients to prepare my first own batch of stock. After we came back from our father's day breakfast I prepared everything for my newest kitchen experiment.

A large pot full of water to which I then added my veggie and meat leftovers and scraps (mine included some chicken bones with leftover meat, peppers, tomatoes, zucchini, cabbage, garlic and some other ingredients I can't remember).

This was by the way about the time my hubby came around looking at what I was making for lunch. Taking a look at me as though I had gone completely crazy he returned to doing his own stuff.
I added some salt, pepper, and bay leaves to my mix, and then let the soup boil on low for about 2 hours or so.

Here you can already see how my stock had gotten a nice color.
Since I wanted to avoid spending any money, I prepared some tupper-ware in all different sizes to store my stock.

I used a large spoon to remove the larger veggie and meat pieces, and then simply used the pots lid (which comes with a built-in strainer) to remove smaller particles.

These went into the freezer after they cooled down, and I'll use some of it this week for my veggie soup that I have on our dinner menu.
If my experiment turned out well, I'll get some better fitting storage containers from the dollar store or so. We'll see.

What have you been up to experimenting in the kitchen?