Clean Home, Clean Life Challenge Update

Ok, I admit it. I totally dropped the ball on posting the weekly challenges here on the site. I hope that you can forgive me. If you're ever wondering what they are (because I yet again forgot to post them), they all are up on the Facebook group. It's pretty quiet over there but don't let that put you off. Just jump right in!

This week's challenge was to tackle our hobby supplies. Since I feel like the queen of hobbies, I chose just one and decided to tackle it. Since it's going to be getting cold here soon, I decided I ought to try to make some sense of our barn/garage. It's a total disaster and you're lucky if you can find a path through it. Don't believe me? Here's the corner that I decided to turn into our gardening/tool area before I started:

See what I mean? Things are stacked everywhere! Right after I took this picture, I spent about 20 minutes just rearranging things and throwing some stuff out. This got it to here:

It's amazing what a mere 20 minutes can do to a space, isn't it? I created a path and discovered that there really was a workbench under all of that, just like I remembered! The next steps required three..yes, three trips into Lowes. I decided to tear down the old peg board (it was cheap and filthy and badly hung) and replace it with some new and improved peg board. Then, I decided I didn't want it to be brown...and here's where I made my mistake. For some unknown reason, I thought it would be easiest to spray paint it. So, I bought one can of spray paint...yep, just one...now you see where this is going right? One can got me this far:

Another trip into town and 4 more cans of spray paint later and I had this :

Yep, this required a 3rd trip into town and 2.5 cans of spray paint more and finally all of the peg board was painted :

Then, I grabbed the gallon of yellow paint that we had bought for the kitchen (right before I decided I wanted to paint it red!) and I painted the top of the work bench. It took 3 coats and needed a 4th but since it's a workbench, I don't mind it looking a bit scruffy.

Today, I headed back out to the barn and after...well, we won't say how long or repeat a few of the words I may/may not have said...I managed to get the peg board hung up. It's not the prettiest job but my nails kept bending and I was trying to hammer and hold at the same time :

Ta da! Badly seamed peg board! That's ok because I promptly went to work covering all that up. First, I added this cabinet that I picked up on the side of the road last summer. It was missing an interior shelf, but a quick look around the barn/garage and I came up with a scrap that fit perfectly!

Up next was sorting out the tools and getting things onto the workbench itself.

Last but certainly not least, I hung up the tools that I saw laying around (I'm sure there are more somewhere!) and put those pretty flowers into a larger vase. They probably won't survive too much longer but I'll enjoy them while they do. When it was all said and done, here's the final look:

Oh! I forgot to mention that I did do one little side project while I was doing this. I had 2 partial and 1 full bag of potting soil laying around. Since nobody has invented a bucket on wheels, I bought a 5 gallon paint bucket, wrote potting soil on it and put it on top of a plant dolly. Now, whenever I need potting soil, I can just pull it out. I filled it with both of the partial bags. The full bag is going to end up in my composter as soon as I drag it out back.

My thanks go out to the guys at Lowes who good naturedly teased me every time I walked back in the door to buy just a few more cans of spray paint. I hope y'all enjoyed this little step by step walk through of the first but certainly not the last of the home improvement projects I have scheduled for around here!