Decorating on a $0 Budget

I live in a 2 bed/ 2 bath apartment with my husband and 2 kids. We don't have a backyard and we don't have a lot of space. We can't paint our walls and we don't really have extra money to spend on decorating. I have recently been working on making our children's bedroom feel more like a bedroom and less like a storage room and so I decided to go room by room and show you how I have decorated and what I still have on my to do list for each room. Obviously I did spend some money, but I try to be as thrifty as possible and only spend money on things that we really need. I am constantly keeping an eye out on craigslist (the free, furniture and baby sections) and freecycle and when I'm driving if something on the side of the road catches my eye I'll slow down or stop and take a look. When ever I go shopping I always check out sales sections first, scour the thrift stores and I find lots of things for decorating at the dollar store.

I'm gonna start off with a corner of our living room. I know that my bookshelves are very messy but if I went to clean them up then I wouldn't have time to blog about it.

My parents bought us the bookshelves as a Chanukkah gift the first year we were married (they are from Ikea). The baskets on the bottom shelves I bought on sale at Target ($5 each down from $25) about 2 1/2 yrs ago and until recently they were they only toy storage that we had. The accent chair and the little side table are from a local organization (people in our community can give their old furniture to them and other people in the community who need furniture can take it). The lamp is Ikea (the base was thrifted) and the stack of kiddie chairs is from a local thrift store $1 a chair.


Lastly the wall decal I made myself. I looked around on Etsy for some inspiration and I bought the solid black contact paper on Ebay then I just drew on the contact paper and cut it out. I paid about $10 for 2 rolls of contact paper shipped and I only ended up using one roll for the tree (later I will show you what I did with the other roll) which makes it about $5 for the tree vs paying about $75 and up to buy it.
Do you have a zero dollar decorating budget? Do you have any decorating ideas for next to nothing? Let me know in the comments bellow.

Hubby's On The News!

My husband was at the synagogue today when some reporters came up to him and asked him his opinion about construction on the 405 and the effect that has on the Eruv. Watch a clip of it here.

What I Wore Wednesday

Head scarf: www.savvysheitels.com // T-shirt: Gap and refashioned by me using a variety of flower tutorials found all over the internet // Skirt: thrifted // Flip Flops: Old Navy

It's been a while since I linked up to The Pleated Poppy's What I Wore Wednesday, so I figured I might give it another try. The past few weeks I haven't really gotten dressed everyday so now that A is in camp I'm trying to get back to my usual schedule.

A To Do List

I spent the past 2 1/2 weeks giving all my time to trying to keep A entertained (and somehow I still didn't do enough). Now that she is in camp life is getting back to normal some what and it made me realize that for the past 2 1/2 weeks I haven't written a to do list for myself at all. Every morning I write myself a to do list on a little white board next to the computer. Without a to do list I don't accomplish as much as I should each day. My apartment really could have used more cleaning in the past weeks then it got, but I had to let something go while having A home all day and I figured it would be better to put food on the table then to make sure to sweep under all the couches and beds.
Did you have your kids home all day since school was out? Are you having them home the whole summer? If so how do you handle it? Let me know in the comments below.

Though my husband is going to be working the whole day today I will still try to make our day a little festive. I have red white and blue outfits for the kids and for dessert we'll have a bit of leftover cake. I made it for Shabbos knowing that my husband wouldn't be around today and we started our celebration a little early.
Happy 4th of July!

Morning Routine Ideas?

My kids wake up at 5am most mornings (if we are lucky its 6). I'm a bit embarrassed to say what our morning routine is but here is the full confession. At about 5am we hear the little pitter patter of tiny feet running to our room and A says "I want special milk and cheerios." One of us will stumble out of bed give A breakfast and turn on a video for her (usually barney on Netflix) and then stumble back to bed without fully opening their eyes and go back to sleep. Every so often one of us must resurface to refill the cheerios or turn on another video or bring E out to join her. We only really wake up for the day at about 9am (when there is school its more like 7:45 or 8)! I know that's kinda crazy, leaving our children babysat by the computer but for some reason we just haven't been able to pull it together to wake up earlier. We try going to sleep earlier at night but that will last one night and then be forgotten.


Yesterday I decided that regardless of what time we go to sleep our day must start at 7am. It's not crazy early and we can't continue to leave our children in front of the computer for so many hours in the morning (I know 2 hrs is still too much but hey at least I am making progress in the right direction). I got out of bed at 7 and woke Husband up also but he just couldn't pull it together and he went back to sleep fully dressed (still sleeping now at 9:35) he'll probably sleep til I force him out of bed again and then still say he is so tired because he had to get up early with the kids. I know it's all in the mind, if you don't perceive it as a normal waking time then you will be exhausted from waking up too early. We just have to figure out how to deal with such an early wake up time.
I'm not really sure if this will work do you have any ideas if so please let me know in a comment below.
Photo credit here

I never really saw the point of someone like me having a twitter account. I know what twitter is, how can you not, twitter being what it is. I just never saw a point to me tweeting (I still don't). Last night my husband convinced me to get twitter. So I joined. If you want to check me out my twitter is @ShevyLdr (I think that's how you are supposed to write it, I'm just learning how to use this thing now.

Summer Time & A Giveaway!

Summer is here and school is out. When you're a kid that means fun and relaxation, as a mom these past few days have been the opposite. Some of it has been fun but for some reason even the fun seems like work. I realized today when talking to my mom that what I'm missing is a break in the middle of the day. I miss the fact that nap time means quiet time. My daughter doesn't nap anymore so even though E is napping I still gotta be on my toes looking after her and keeping her entertained. I need to come up with a way to get just 15 minutes of quiet time midday.

On a completely different note, Jessica from What I Wore is having a giveaway for her new book What I Wore: Four Seasons, One Closet, Endless Recipes for Personal Style which will be in stores in two weeks. I love her blog, she has an amazing personal style and what makes her so different from many of the other fashion blogs out there is that she seems to have a closet only slightly bigger then a normal woman. Meaning she wears many items more then once (I feel like so many fashion bloggers never wear the same item twice, so unrealistic for us normal folks). So go check out her blog for a chance to win a copy of her book!

Completed Passover Outfit For A

Here are some pictures of the outfit that I made for A for Passover. I took an adult skinny belt and cut it down to fit her. Making this outfit was hard, I made a lot of mistakes that I had to correct and the fabric was difficult to work with. I decided that from now on I'm gonna work with simpler fabrics until I get a lot better at this.

XL Pants Refashion

I bought this pair of pants a while ago, when I saw that they were only $1 I couldn't pass it up. It was a size 3x and I wear a 6 or 8, but I knew the material would cost me more then that let alone the zipper, buttons and studs (if I could even put such stuff on and make it look professional). Here is the skirt after it was completed. I added some textured fabric, so that the skirt would be fuller. I finally finished it last night (it took me a long time).



scarf: www.savvysheitels.com // t-shirt: old navy // skirt: made by me