If I didn’t know better I reckon that this would be a book written by wife …

I’ve been following the simplemom blog for a few months now. It has been a great source of information and tips and I have been forwarding some of the articles to my wife.

There have been quite a few good articles lately about keeping your house clutter free (which is something my wife strives for, and I struggle with). SimpleMom has put together an ebook with these good ideas for spring cleaning, plus more in it and is selling the book online for only $7.

The book consists of two different sections:

• An essay about "stuff" and our consumer culture
• A 10-part guide to spring cleaning, including
  • room by room checklists
  • inventory templates for printing
  • Daily game plans
  • Natural household cleaner recipes
  • and more

It’s a 68-page book and complements some of the other free charts and checklist are are downloadable for free from Simple Mom.

Box air conditioners are everywhere here in North Queensland. Almost all of the old Queenslanders have been fitted out with them and box air conditioners are an inexpensive way to add air conditioning to your house.

One downside to box air conditioners is that they are ugly looking things, especially if you can see them from the road down the side of the house, or worse, on the front of the house.

On one side of our house the box air conditioners for the kids rooms are pretty well hidden by the trees. You actually have to try to see them, so I’m not too worried about them.

On the left side of our house though the box air conditioner sticks out like a sore thumb (as you can see above). This room will eventually be our office and because it is at the front of the house it is really quite obvious.

Even though split air conditioners are become more common box air conditioners are still being installed in a lot of new homes. One of these new homes that we saw had a box air conditioner visible right from the front of the house, so they built a simple slotted box and installed that around it (see the photo on the right).

Although it doesn’t actually conceal the air conditioner, it at least helps it to blend in a lot more with the rest of the house. I might do something like this with ours, or we might wait to see if the new window hoods we are putting on the house will help to hide it. I hope that this is the case, but we will see.

I put up my cheap and easy garage storage shelf a few weeks ago, with plans to finish the shelf off with a bit of timber along the front and side of the shelf. Here is a photo of the finished project …

As you can see, I added the timber trim around the outside of the garage shelf and painted the timber that I used to join the two shelves together. My original plan was to paint the timber trim white, but I like the raw timber look, so I reckon that I will leave it at that.

All up the project for a 3.6m long garage storage shelf cost me around $120.00, which is a lot cheaper then any of the ready made solutions I could find at Bunnings or Mitre 10.

Quite a while ago now we installed a new double sink in our kitchen to replace our existing single sink. Our first flat had a double kitchen sink and it certainly made cleaning up easy to handle.

The first thing that we had to do to pick our new double kitchen sink was to measure the exterior dimensions of the old sink. The new double sink had to be the same size, or bigger, than the old sink, otherwise we would have to look at replacing the countertop, which we would rather avoid.

Because our single sink had drains on either side of it we had to get a double sink with drains on both side. It was wider than our single sink, so we had to cut out some of the bench top to make it fit, which was a lot harder than we expected since the bench top ended up being made of synthetic stone, rather than the laminate that I thought it was.

After grinding away at the counter top and making a heck of a mess we finally got the new kitchen sink in. One thing that I hadn’t planned very well for was the drains. We almost had to remove the shelf on the left side of the cupboard under the sink, but after getting the plumbing set-up just right we managed to get around that problem. It’s pretty tight under there, but it’s not too bad.

Ideally I would have liked a double sink with a drain only on one side, but this worked out pretty well for us.