A money-themed birthday :)

I'd being lying if I didn't say that my husband really likes just getting money for his birthday. I became pretty tired of just giving him a card with money in it every year, so this year I decided to get creative ;)

First I made him a card and taped money to the front with removable double sided tape:

 

 

Next, the present:

I bought Shaun a box of his favorite chocolates and removed the chocolates. I placed them in a bag for him to eat on his birthday (it took all my will power to not eat one!)

 

 

I then placed different sizes of money in the slots and added a quote from Forrest Gump!

 

 

 

 

 

 

easy homemade birthday card

Now I love my cricut for making cards and scrapbooking, but this is a super easy card that you don't  need a cricut for. It's really simple, just roll up different colored paper and glue to a blank card. For the wick you can use a small white rope or I just used thin white ribbon because I had some spare from another project. Cut the rope/ribbon into small pieces and glue to the card and the inside of the rolled up paper. Then you can either write or stamp "Happy Birthday" and voila you have a homemade birthday card! This project only took me 15-20 minutes :)

Budget bathroom remodel- Phase 1: TILE

 

Well this is my bathroom before . . . I'm ashamed to admit that we had carpet in our bathroom ever since we bought our house TWO years ago. Keeping the carpet clean around the toilet was not easy, so when my awesome Aunt and Uncle volunteered to come visit for the weekend and help us tile our bathroom, we jumped at the opportunity!

Our first step was to remove the carpet and linoleum . . . luckily Shaun did all this while I was a work ;) My Aunt and Uncle arrived friday evening and got straight to work that night laying down the backer board.

All day saturday was spent laying tiles, it already looks 10 times better!

 

Sunday was grout day, luckily it only took a couple of hours because my Aunt and Uncle had a five hour drive back home that day.

 

And then, we cleaned the grout and have a tiled floor!!!

 

Our floor looks so nice, that now we are in the process of replacing the sink and light fixtures and painting to make the rest of the bathroom look as good :) I'll post pictures as we go

 

 

 

Homemade Peach Jam



 

Its peach season!!!! My awesome aunt brought over some peaches from Palisade, CO last week and I decided to try to make some homemade peach jam for the first time. It wasn’t that hard at all and is really delicious!

The first step was preparation, I washed the canning jars, then covered the lids with boiling water from the kettle, and filled the canning pot with water and put on the stove top to boil.

I then washed and peeled the peaches and separated into small pieces (the directions said to cut the peaches, but they were so ripe I didn't even need to cut them). I placed the peaches a pot to heat and soften, occasionally crushing them. Once the peaches were a soft pulp, I removed them and measured them and then placed back in the pot. I added 1 cup of sugar for every 1 cup of peach pulp and heated on the stove until it thickened.

I then poured the jam into my canning jars, cleaned off the rim with a wet rag, placed the lids on and put in the boiling water. I kept the jars boiling according to the canning directions and for my altitude (35 minutes). At less than 1,000 feet ,if you are using pint size jars it takes 20 minutes, and quart size jars takes 25 minutes, but I suggest looking up the canning time table and checking for your altitude as well.

I removed the jars from the water using a jar lifter and placed the jars on a rag so that they were not touching each other. After letting the jars cool for over 3 hours, I checked the seal, if the middle of the lid does not pop up, your good to go!

I couldn't resist and had to open a jar to try the peach jam right away and it was sweet and delicious! Hopefully I will have some left over to give as gifts!