Funfetti Birthday Cake

I try to keep up on everyone's birthdays at work, so I obviously couldn't forget the bosses birthday!  He wanted Funfetti, loves sprinkles! So instead of getting a box mix, I made my own Funfetti cake!

Yellow Cake Ingredients:

3/4 Cup Butter
3 Eggs
2 1/2 Cups Flour
2 1/2 tsp Baking Powder
1/2 tsp Salt
1 3/4 Cup Sugar
1 1/2 tsp Vanilla
1 3/4 Cup Milk

1.) Let Butter and Eggs stand at room temperature for 30 minutes.  Grease and flour 1-9x13 baking pan

2.) Put Flour, Baking Powder and Salt into bowl/measuring cup, stir together and set aside

3.) Preheat oven to 375*

4.) Beat Butter on medium speed

5.) Gradually add Sugar until well blended

6.) Add eggs one at a time, blend well between each, then add in Vanilla 

7.) Alternate adding in Flour mixture and Milk until all are gone

8.) Mix just until well blended, add sprinkles and stir by hand

9.) Pour into baking pan and spread evenly

10.) Bake approximately 30 minutes, or until a toothpick comes out clean

11.)  Let cool completely before frosting/decorating


Use this Frosting recipe and decorate however you'd like!
 

             

Mmmmmm, Stir-Fry

Over the years, I have changed up my stir-fry a little bit, but I think I have finally got it to where we like it.

Ingredients:

2-3 Boneless Chicken Breasts- diced and boiled
2-2 1/2 cups dry Minute rice-cooked per instructions
1 can of baby corn nuggets
1 can of sliced water chestnuts
Fresh snow peas (ends cut off, washed and cut into bite size pieces)
Matchstick carrots
Mustard Seed
Sweet Peppers- cut into bite size pieces (red, yellow, orange)
Onion-diced into reasonable pieces   
1 jar of Sesame Garlic sauce (or your favorite sauce)


Directions:

1.) Get out a large fry-pan (Wok if you have one) and put in corn nuggets and water chestnuts, juice from can too.  Also sprinkle in mustard seeds to your liking.  Cook on medium heat to get them softened up

2.)  Prepare other ingredients into bite-size pieces; Peppers, snow peas, onion.  Once all these are cut into pieces, add them plus carrots into pan to cook.  You should have enough liquid in the pan from the canned veggies, but if it gets dry add a little water.

3.)  Dice up raw chicken, put saucepan on stove and bring to a boil.  Once rolling boil, add chicken pieces.  Cook until done, shouldn't take long at all.  Drain chicken in strainer

 
4.) While chicken is cooking, make your rice per instructions. With Minute Rice, boil same amount of water as rice.  Once boiling, remove from burner, add rice, stir together.  The put lid on pan and let sit for 5 minutes.

5.) Once all items in Wok are cooked/tender, and liquid is mostly gone, add in chicken and rice.  Mix well
 

6.)  Add in your favorite sauce, mix together and serve!

 YUMMY YUMMY!
















 

Ooopps!!!

As I was uploading pictures from the dessert I made tonight, I realized that I have 2 other groups of pictures that I forgot to do write-ups on!  So keep an eye out for the following:

Stir-Fry

Funfetti Birthday Cake

Toffee Bars

Tata for now!  Check back soon!

Basement Before and After Pictures

 Okay, so I forgot about the floor in the last post.  OH MY GOD the floor.  Under the carpet and tiles, the previous owners painted the concrete floor red.  RED!  And it was not proper floor paint or whatever.  It literally came up if it got wet.  You couldn't walk on it or else you would have red icky socks.  To do the whole floor, it probably took me over 50 buckets of water.  I could only do little sections before I had to change the water out.  Can't clean up a floor with dirty water ya know?  So here are some lovely pictures of the floor for you.

Clean water

Dirty water

The tiny area that got mopped

 The floor was a giant PITA.  I HAD to mop up all the red otherwise it would bleed through when I tried to paint it with concrete floor paint.  Also, since I previously painted the utility area floor, I used the rest of the bucket that I had and bought a new one as well.  It was pre-mixed, same exact thing, but it was 2 different colors so to speak.  So even though I painted a portion of the bar area floor, I had to go back over it with the new paint because of the color.

 
 So without further adieu, here are the before and afters:

Stairs got painted,
and new stair treads

 

 

 

This was behind the bar,
currently nothing got put in its place,
I would like to build something similar

An angle that I didn't get a before shot of,
but that cabinet has our gas meter in it

 

Taking our basement from the 70's into the 2000's

My Grandmother wonders what we liked about our house when we bought it because we changed almost every room in the last 3 years.  The worst offenders in terms of rooms in our house were the bathroom and the basement.  We took care of the bathroom in 5 weeks, the basement....well that took about 2 years! Hahaha!

I am not too sure how to write this post because it was a lot of work, and I will probably be all over the place with the renovation.  The basement was straight out of the 1970's.  Red-orange carpet, wood paneling, silver-foil wallpaper and beads, omg the horror!  Ok, so it wasn't that bad, wait, what am I saying, it was that bad!  See for yourself!

 

The saving grace for this basement was the bar.  I had/have visions of parties and lots of good times for this basement.  I also have dreams of my husband playing all of his video games down there and making it his man-cave.

First of all, we ripped up that awful carpet going down the stairs and into the 'living' area.  It was even on the door to the utility area!  And the black paint, oh god, black paint!  Do you know how hard it is to get rid of black paint?  Hard! 2 coats of primer and 1-2 coats in certain areas of white paint.  On small trim.  I used A LOT of painters tape!  After we ripped up the carpets, we started taking down the even more awful drop ceiling, followed by the floor tiles around the bar area.

After inspecting the wallpaper in the stairwell, it appeared that it would come off relatively easily as far as wallpaper goes.  Boy did it ever!  I was peeling off huge chunks!  I used a putty knife to help peel so I didn't leave ripped/frayed edges.  Once all the paper was off, I used some leftover paint I had from the bathroom reno to paint the walls the wallpaper had been on.  It truly did brighten it right up making it look so much better.  I also had been trying to decided what color to paint the basement.  I was not going to mess with putting up drywall because taking down the paneling to do it would have been a huge project.  I decided on a nice blue color and my vision was blue with white trim.  So, I got Behr Paint and Primer in one and painted the paneling in the stairwell.  I also had some chair rail left over from the living room project so I put that up between the wall and paneling transition.  I was really proud of myself and couldn't wait to do the rest of the basement.

I then decided since the wallpaper came off so easily from the stairwell walls, I would try to take it off the wall behind the bar.  It came off pretty good, but what I found underneath was no bueno. The hot-water line is not hooked up to the sink at the bar so if you turn on that handle, water runs out onto the floor, under the tiles and over to the wall.  Yep, the drywall was moldy about 6" up.  At this point, we knew the drywall had to go.  We also had decided we wanted to eventually put in a cedar closet on the other side of the wall.  This wall was not studded properly, it was using 2x2's instead of 2x4's.  So we ripped the.whole.thing.down.  This way, we get a new wall, done correctly, and can also frame in a door for future closet and easier access to storage area.

Standing behind bar looking at new wall (and all of our stuff)

Backside of the new wall, standing where utility area is

Next up was the ceiling and lighting.  The ceiling was nasty drop ceiling tiles with black grid.  There was also a shop light that you had to plug in to use each time and a recessed light over the bar.  We ripped down the whole ceiling and all lighting fixtures and started over.  My husband wasn't too sure about putting up a drop ceiling by ourselves but I managed to convince him it was our only option considering we would still need access to everything up there.

We were so proud of ourselves getting the first 2 tiles in

Even prouder when we got the first 2 lights in and wired/working

2 of the 4 new lights on the bar side, and 2 rows of tiles

Got most of the grid up and lights wired and working on switches

I think this is it for this post, it shows all the demo and some stuff put back together.  The next post will have the before and after pictures.  This post does no justice to the transformation.  Hold tight, before and afters coming!

  

Quick Check-in

Hey there to all my readers, wanted to pop in and let you know I have not forgotten about you!  Been a little busy with work and school, not a lot of time for making new things.  Also, the weather hasn't cleaned up it's act yet to get started with outdoor projects.

I do promise that with spring around the corner, there will be some home-wrecker posts.  I have list a mile long of things that need to get done outside.

I currently have a post in the works about our basement re-model, but it's turning out to be reallllllyyyyyyy long.  I might have to cut it into 2 parts.

Stay Tuned!

Vinyl Siding for our Garage

Well, I thought I would put a Home-Wrecker post in the middle of all my food posts, so I'll put in the garage siding project we did in September!

Our garage was getting pretty bad, I was literally peeling off paint in pieces as big as my hand.  The 'nails' were starting to rust and show through the paint as well.  Our first thought, was to save money and scrape/sand/paint the whole.damn.thing.  Yes, we were seriously considering this.  And then we talked to my dad and he assured us it really wouldn't be all that bad to just put vinyl siding on the garage for now.

We eventually want to do the whole house, but really can't afford that right now.  Between our house and garage, there were 4 different types of siding on it.  Yep, 4!  Wood siding on garage, cement board stuff on the back door area, small area of vinyl siding on the front of the garage around the door, and the whole house is aluminum siding with a faux stone facade on the front.  Needless to say, we want to continue pulling this house into the 2000's.

So we took measurements, I drew a diagram of the sides/front/back, wrote down how many outside corners, inside corners, J-channel, starter strips etc we would need, and off to get prices!  Dad convinced us we could do the garage ourselves and could do it in a weekend.  My husband was skeptical and didn't want to mess anything up by doing something wrong, but in the end, we convinced him to do it ourselves!  I brought home some samples and a price quote from a local place and we both thought about going with a green.  Currently, the color scheme was/is brown/white, so we wanted to liven it up a bit.  We decided on Mastic Mill Creek in Scottish Thistle color.  I went back to the store, and placed the order after we double checked our numbers.  It was delivered a few days later!

Along with this project, we decided to replace the 2 windows on the sides as well.  They were literally falling apart with the rest of the garage, so we picked out some nice vinyl slider windows from a local bargain place for home remodeling.  Approximately $70 each, couldn't get a better deal than that.   We did have to frame in the new windows because of the sizes, but no big deal according to Dad!

So, one weekend, my dad came out to rip out the windows and put the new ones in and assess the rest of the project.  That morning, it was pouring rain, I was really bummed, but I had to go to work and hoped that the rain would let up for my dad and my husband to get some work done.  They got both windows in and half of the East side sided. Then, the next weekend was the big weekend.  He and my mom came out and brought the family dog too!

Getting started was a little slow, had to get the corner pieces, J-channel and starter strips on which takes the most time, have to make sure they are level otherwise it will not work out well in the end.  Once all that is in place, the siding actually goes up pretty quickly.  The tricky part came when we got to the back side of the garage, the peak.  Now, we have 2 garage doors, one on the front and one on the back, so the back side took longer to make sure that the right and left of the door was even going all the way up.

Once we got to the peak we all had a job.  Dad and I were on 2 separate ladders, my husband was making the angle cuts and mom was supervising and getting any tools needed etc. 

To this day though, we have not finished the front of the garage.  It is a tiny bit problematic because of the inside corner meeting the rest of the house (that we can't afford to put siding on yet).  So, the J-channel is up around the garage door, but that's about it.  We also need my father-in-law to come out and work on some electrical, the main power line comes in right in the front of the garage so it's in the way for new siding anyways.  

But for now, enjoy the pictures!  I love it so much, cannot wait until we can do the rest of the house though!  

(sorry so long, I get long-winded sometimes!)

Also, for reference, the whole project cost less than $1,000.  :-)

North side/Back of garage before any work done

West side before any work

South side/front of garage

East side before any work

East side with new window and half new siding!

Left side of the front of garage,
that pipe is the electrical line
feeding the garage

Started the west side

North side prepped for trim pieces and siding

West side half done

Pooped puppy hanging out in the shade

This pooped puppy was under-foot.... :-)

North side/Back of garage, no it's not uneven,
just more was up on the left side than the right

East side completed

West side completed

We did put up some composite/pvc type trim around
the door, but after I took this picture