DIY $5 Wal-Mart Mirror Makeover

I've had this on my to-do list ever since we've moved into our new house. The sellers didn't have my style at all, but they did have a mirror leaning down the end of the hallway that brightened up the space.

I don't have a million dollars for a fancy leaning mirror, nor would I want a million dollar mirror anywhere in my house at my current life situation (hello, breakable items at kid level... I'm smarter than that.)

I went to Wal-Mart and picked up this mirror for $5.88. I won't lie, it's not the best mirror on the planet- it kind of shifts and bends and gives a slight funhouse mirror vibe- but it reflects light down a hallway and that's all I needed. Sold.

They also have a "high end" $15 mirror if you want to live life like the rich and famous, however I'm not sure if the process of removing the frame would be similar to what we did or not (but I image so...)

So this is what we did.

We used a box cutter to remove the backing from the mirror. The backing is a thick cardstock type paper. Just cut around the edge and it's fairly easy to rip off. It just takes some time. Do not stick your box cutter anywhere other than the edge near the frame. If you scratch the backing of the mirror, it's going to scratch off the reflective surface and put a scratch on the mirror part of the mirror.... I just said mirror a whole lot of times but I'm hoping that made some sort of sense.

Use the box cutter to then cut down and horizontally into the adhesive attaching the frame to the mirror. It's okay to cut into the actual frame of the mirror too. You won't be keeping it (but your 4 year old will probably want it to do some sort of craft with... Heads up.) Pull up the adhesive and your good. Again, this looks way easier with YouTube magic. It takes some time, but it will come off.

Use a screwdriver to twist the corners and pop the staples holding the corners together. Again, this isn't too hard because we don't really care about what we do to the actual frame of the mirror.

Once you have your mirror free from the frame, measure in a set amount all around the edge. The more you measure in, the less mirror you will see. We measured 1cm and used a washable marker and our wood edge to mark some straight lines.

Once we had our lines, we knew just how long we needed to cut our reclaimed fence posts. We just measured the lines and miter cut them.

We used wood glue and our staple gun to hold the frame together. Having the whole thing flipped over, we carefully set our mirror on top of the frame. We went around the edge with a bead of liquid nails. We added more liquid nails onto the frame. We cut out a piece of plywood slightly smaller than our frame and placed that on top of the whole thing. We then went around again with our staple gun and stapled the backing into place. We also ended up using our nail gun (when we ran out of staples). Just be sure to nail or staple as far away from the mirror as possible and with a little pressure as possible. To much pressure or too close to the mirror could both add stress and break your mirror.

Once we had it all stapled/nailed into place, we added some weight to the backboard and let it sit over night. The next morning it was dried and ready to be placed.

I'm pretty excited about it. Even if I'll have to clean it daily and make sure kids don't crash into it, it's still a perfect addition to add some light into our tiny hallway.

Watch the whole build here.

How to Kill Time on a Snow Day

If you got hit by the Bomb Cyclone like we dod, chances are your kids had a few extra days off school. I'm all for snow days, they just went back to school on Tuesday from winter break and then were off Thursday, Friday, and the following Tuesday!

Here's a few things we did to past the time.

1. Legos
2. Play doh
3. Popcorn
4. Movie (or 5?)
6. Outside play/ build a snowman
7. Lunch time picnic
8. Color
9. Board games (I'm really over you, Soggy Doggy...)
10. Cheerio necklaces

Bonus: Find a surprise. I happened to have a few bonus chap sticks. Got a random box of snacks? That works too. Surprises are fun for everyone.

If want to watch one of our snow days, check out our video.

Free Blanket Gift Printable

We made these super cute gifts for our teachers this year. The main gift consists of a simple $2.50 fleece throw from Wal-Mart. You can make it even more special be adding a handmade card or ornament (see how we made ours here) and a coffee gift card.

Watch the YouTube Video Here

We even made printable to hand out with just a coffee gift card.

Get your free printable here.

DIY Good Deed Tracker for the Holidays

Every holiday season it's always a good reminder to do good for others. This year, I felt like the kids were old enough to really understand the idea of service. During our North Pole Breakfast, I added a "Good Deeds Bucket."

I found this super cute printable full of good deeds here and cut them out and put them in a cute Santa bucket from the Dollar Tree along with some blank cards so we can add some new good deeds or "catch them" doing good deeds and praise them when we see them happening.

I found a cute Buffalo Plaid alphabet banner here and made a "Good Deeds" banner for us to pin up all of the good deeds we do this season.

I've created a simple PDF with the banner so you can easily print it out without having to resize or save multiple letters. Print it out here.

December Daily : North Pole Breakfast : Christmas Decorating

We don't do the Elf of the Shelf (because I don't need anymore cray in my life), but we have adopted the North Pole Breakfast tradition.

Every year, before we put up our tree, we have North Pole Breakfast or Breakfast-for-dinner (depending on when December 1st falls on a weekday or a weekend.) Each kid get their Christmas Pajamas so they have them to wear all month. This year they also got a matching ornament, a candy cane, and some stickers and reindeer ears (all from the Dollar Tree).

We made some super simple Snowmen pancakes (with powder sugar and whip cream snow, a jelly bean nose, and candy cane arms). Car was very adamant about everyone eating the "healthy food" before they ate the candy... But nothing about North Pole Breakfast is healthy food. Haha.

We also added some Good Deed cards to our North Pole Breakfast. This way the kids can grab a Good Deed from the bucket throughout the month and we can hang them up as we complete them. I found the way cute free printable here. I also like to make a big deal about awarding the kids a Good Deed card when we "catch them in the act" of being a good helper without being asked.

After breakfast-for-dinner, they all put on their matching buffalo plaid pajamas (thank you, Target store pick-up!) and we got out alllllll the Christmas decorations. Last year we were in the tiny townhouse so Christmas was very much understated. This year; however, is our first Christmas in the new house and we finally get to discover all of the things we've had packed in storage while we moved.

I used to be a "fancy tree" person, but since the kids have started preschool, it is so so fun to go thorough all of the cute little ornaments they have made for us each year. We make sure to have their name and year on the back of each one. And when they (inevitably) come home with more Christmas crafts throughout December, we just add them up on the tree to admire!

We had so much fun (after a bit of a rocky start trying to find different things...) and I hope the kids always have fun memories of the Christmas season.

Watch the fun here. (We also have added some way fun DIY projects so be sure to check out our channel here.)



Every Christmas we also always create a December Daily photo book. They are so fun to flip through every Christmas and to document the fun things we do each holiday. I put them together in my Project Life App and print them at the end of the month with Shutterfly. Easy Peasy. I take a lot of photos with my "Big Camera" but I make sure to take a photo of the preview to pop in my temporary album as a place holder until I get all the good pictures downloaded on my phone. This helps me keep on track with planning and documenting the pages without having to wait for them to get downloaded. And then I can swap them out for the real-deal easily and all at once.

Before (with back of the camera shots) 

After (to be printed in our Shutterfly book)

Amazon Fresh Review #4 : Our Final Order

If you've been following along, you know that we've been doing a month of Amazon Fresh. We've had some hits, but for the most part - we've had a lot of misses. And nothing was more of a miss than our very odd, totally strange, final Amazon Fresh Order.

You can read about our other orders here, here, and here.

Our order came in the morning around 9am just like usual. I unloaded everything onto the table and made a list of what was missing. And it was a lot this time. I sent an email off to Cory and he contacted Amazon about what was missing. They've been really great about refunding for missing product, but it's a big bummer when you order online delivery so you don't have to go to the store and then end up having to run out to the store anyway. We were especially hopeful this time since it was Cor's Drill Weekend. He wouldn't be home and having me grocery shop with all four is just not an option. Just. No. We also had problems with this order coming with smushed bread, smashed boxes, and a crushed milk. Womp Womp Womp.

So, we went on with our day. Playing and hanging out on a random Sunday until about 3 in the afternoon when a neighborhood kid came knocking on the door asking for the kids to play (yes! yes! go, now kids!) Except, he also had with him a single Amazon Fresh bag. I asked him where it came from. If he brought it (Was it delivered to his house? That would be odd? Was it already outside when he came? Probably. But who really knows?) When I asked him where it came from, he gave me a "It came from me." and that's about as much information I could get out of a 7 year old. I even thought that maybe I accidentally left it outside when the full order came. But thanks to this blog post and my intentional photo-taking to go along with my post, I'm positive that it was not delivered along with the rest of the order.

I'm thinking that this mystery box was redelivered after our original order. The problem is that it was ALL of our freezer foods. All of them. And they had been sitting on our porch for a good portion of the day. I didn't get a push notification that it was delivered (like I do when my original order is delivered) and no one knocked on the door to tell me it was there.

So all of our freezer food was just pretty much gross. Especially because Amazon also puts some produce in with the freezer food. Not cool. (no pun intended) Our cucumbers were mush and our mushrooms were barely salvageable.

One cool thing that is built into Amazon Fresh's free 30 Day Trial is an option to cancel on your end date without having to remember to actually go in and cancel it before they charge you for the service. So here's how to go about setting that up. We didn't have to worry about when our last day was, and we were never charged the subscription fee. Hooray!

Even with all of our issues with Amazon Fresh, it was nice to give it a try completely free. Different areas obviously will either have the initial problems worked out or still be working on figuring out how things work. If you're interested in trying it out. Give it a go! It's free for a month. Although our actual product wasn't the best, Amazon customer service was always amazing and refunded us whenever we had a problem.

Interestingly enough, we decided to go back to Aldi and shop a repeat list in store. And it was cheaper even though with Fresh we avoided buying things we saw that were off list. When we were ordering off of Amazon, we would still have to run out and get diapers and formula, which added up to what we were basically spending in Aldi before trying Fresh. We feel like we're getting more bang-for-our-buck in store. And now we know we can be conscious about staying strictly with what is on our list and not grabbing those extra treats we see in store to keep us more on budget. Maybe we'll try another pick-up service eventually. We'll be sure to let you know how it goes.

If you try it out, let us know how it goes!

Amazon Fresh Review #3 | A Month of Amazon Fresh

So, here we are again. Reviewing our order with Amazon Fresh. You can learn more about Amazon Fresh from there site here. You can also see our first two reviews here and here. We even added a video on our YouTube of our first unboxing, which you can watch here.

I'm not going to lie, ordering groceries from home, not having to lug children around a store, and being able to .. um.. get our drink on, is really really exciting.

Here's the rundown of how our third order with Amazon Fresh went.

Ordering was smooth sailing. We did find out that you need to double check your recently order items because prices do jump up. Cereal that we ordered before was now a whole dollar more expensive and we found a cheaper option just searching for more cereal. So keep that in mind. While it may seem easy just to click that reorder button, sometimes it won't be as cost effective.

We also had a problem when or order came this time. The quality of our lettuce was subpar and our green onions (scallions? -- call them what you want...) we're quite sad. One of our loaves of bread also got slightly smushed in transit. I'm sure Amazon would have refunded us for these items, but we just used half the head of lettuce and threw out the bad part and made the meals with these two items first since we knew they wouldn't last for the end of the week meals. We also got tomatoes on the vine instead of the roma tomatoes we ordered but this was a swap that was in our favor.

So here we are again. Here's a recap for those of you following along at home.
Order 1 - Missing items. Great customer service.
Order 2 - Perfect! Everything was great. No complaints here!
Order 3 - Quality issues. Womp.

So the more we keep doing this the more we may realize that it's just not worth it to Amazon Fresh our groceries (goodbye, online shopping with my trusty glass of white...) We still have two more shops on our free trial, so we'll finish it out and follow up with a conclusion.