Laundry Room Make Over

When we bought this house, I was really excited to have a real laundry room. Our last one was fine, but there was only room for the washer and dryer in there. I had to get collapsible baskets because we had no place to put them, and the dirty laundry sorter was in our bedroom. So a real room with a place to keep the dirty clothes (and, much too often, a basket of clean clothes) sounded fantastic!

When we first moved in there was a weird shelf in the corner and a wall of hooks under the cabinets--don't ask me why. We tore those out right away, but we were still using the old canvas sorter we bought right after we got married. The sorter finally fell apart a couple of weeks ago and we decided it was time for a redesign. Mike built me a shelf--but in order to do that he "had" to buy a router. We also got four new hampers and two shelves above the dryer. I was so excited that I even labeled the hampers! We finally got the last shelf hung yesterday and I felt it was worthy of a picture.

I never remember to take a "before" picture, so just try to imagine a room that didn't function well for a family of four. Now I almost enjoy doing laundry. Almost.

And notice the doorknob. A few months ago we bought new knobs for the entire house (and I installed all 11 myself). The old gold ones were no longer gold. They were just old.

Two Wheeler!

Ally has two bikes. One is a really small one with training wheels and the other is bigger with training wheels. She's been riding the bigger one more often, but has trouble keeping up with the twins down the street who ride two wheelers.

I asked her today if she'd like me take the training wheels off of the small bike and try it out. If she didn't want to ride it, she could still ride the big bike with the training wheels on. She conceded (which was a surprise because she isn't very adventurous) and I ran for the wrench before she could change her mind.

I took the wheels off, walked it down the driveway and held the back of the seat while she got on. I held the seat for two or three steps and let go. She went all the way across the street (which is pretty wide) and used her brake to stop and didn't even fall. Then we went back across the same way. Within 5 minutes she was climbing on going like a pro. 5 minutes after that she could climb on and start by herself. She's fallen a few times but only after she stops and doesn't have any scrapes on her knees.

I guess that new two-wheeled Christmas scooter has vastly improved her balance the last few weeks. We even took the training wheels off the bigger bike, but she tried it and told us she wasn't quite ready for it yet. We spent two hours outside today and she rode all over the street the entire time. I wish it would have been that easy for me! I still remember needing every band-aid in the house the day I learned to ride. She didn't even need a single one!

She starts a lot better than she did in this video, but you'll get the idea.