My Suburban Kitchen

Delicious Recipes to Keep my Family of Four Happy and Full

Orange Cream Monster Bread

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I am always so excited when I get to partner with brands my family loves. While this post was sponsored by TruMoo, as always, all thoughts and opinions are my own.

Halloween is just around the corner! I know it is totally crazy to think about it already being mid-October but here we are. We are headed out of town for a few days so I wanted to make sure our Halloween costumes were all set and maybe do a little early Halloween celebrating too with a few baking projects. We did a few but one of my favorites was this orange cream monster bread.

A great Halloween snack that is so easy to make too! This orange cream monster bread is the neatest idea for our Boo bags.

Orange Cream Monster Bread

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Installing French Doors

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One of the things I knew I wanted to change when we were working in the basement was the door to the walk-up. It was an ugly slider with a screen that never worked properly.

Enter the French door idea. I got Mathlete on board thanks to Rock Boy and Shopaholic and all that was left was the door shopping…oh, and the installation.


So, how did we do it? At first, we had thought about trying to keep the slider intact but then realized that was unnecessary because we wouldn’t be reusing the slider anywhere.
Mathlete cut around the slider at the frame and then basically went ninja on it to remove it.

Then, with the help of a lot of tools

He fit the new door into place and secured it.


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shannah
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© 2012 Just Us Four.  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

Rugging Me the Right Way

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One of the things I have the hardest time finding that are cute and reasonably priced are rugs…especially outdoor rugs!

I was doing a little web surfing the other day and saw a great solution for finding pretty much any kinds of rug for you home.

Vecco offers a ton of options for creating a completely customized rug that is all your own.  In the kit, you get the rug, stencil, paint and sealer.  From there, the options are only limited by what you come up with.
I’m a big fan of the “Honey, I’m home”…take a look at some of the options with that one.

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Sprucing Up the Curb {Appeal}

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I have a black thumb. I pretty much kill just about plant that I work with in our yard.  The sole survivor in our house is a Christmas cactus that was a gift from Junior and Stud Muffin when my grandfather died.  
Knowing my limits, I tend to focus on other things on the outside of the house like lanterns and wreaths.  It’s Spring though so I feel like I have to have some pretty plants around.  Enter the $1.25 flowers.

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The (Not So) Haunted House

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Our house is finally (mostly) decorated for Halloween.  I found so many awesome ideas around the web but didn’t find much time to actually do them.  Let’s take a look at what I did manage to complete though!

Lanterns – I posted about creating lanterns for the front porch here and here.  They are now in their rightful home and ready for Halloween night. Real candles = only going to be lit for one evening because I’m super cheap.

Spider Wreath – Liz and I had a cradat and made this little jewel for my front door.

Mummy – I jumped on the make your own mummy bandwagon which I first saw here.

Ghosts – Scored these ghosts at my goodwill trip from forever ago for only $.96!

Boo – I pulled together some quick and easy B-O-O letters to add to my hay bale outside and shared the creation here.

Candy Corn Filled Votive Holders – The dollar store to my rescue again.  Some $1 vases and candles combined with candy corn.  Perfect addition to my little table display.

Dead Pirate – Our yard has always been a refuge for bunnies but it seems a dead pirate has taken up residence in my front lawn now.  I’ll let him stay though because it is pretty neat to watch his heart beat at night.

and he brought his own tombstone along.

So, there are the basics of our Halloween decorations.  We have a few other items not shown (hanging mummy, purple lights on the porch and some spiderwebbing) because they look much better at night.  My photography skills are limited enough that darkness would just completely shut them down.

Now, the top 5 things I wanted to do but time didn’t…always next year right?!

  1. Scrapbook paper pumpkins
  2. Pumpkin Treat Holders
  3. Floating Ghosts
  4. Candy Corn Bottle Vases
  5. Burlap Ghost Lights

Did you get all of your decorations completed?  Have a list as long (or longer) than mine that are still in the to be completed pile?

© 2012 Just Us Four.  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

It is getting spooky in here…

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I’ve always been a Christmas decorator.  Christmas is my favorite holiday and I like to decorate every corner of our house and yard.  Seriously,  I have to give a courtesy call to the power company the day before I turn on my lights so I don’t black out the neighborhood!
Other holidays tend to fall by the wayside when it comes to decorations; especially Halloween.  That is until we moved into our new neighborhood where everyone decorates.  Last year, we had the excuse that we were new and blah blah blah.  I quickly went out the day after Halloween and snagged some half price decorations so we could participate this year.  I also figured I would add to them a little bit this year.
Have I mentioned that I went to Ikea recently?  Oh, I did?  Sorry for the repeat mention.
I’ve been searching around for some reasonably priced lanterns and Ikea was happy to help.

I picked up two sizes of the lanterns and brought them home with grand plans to decorate them.  So far, only the little ones have decorations in them because my cheapness thriftiness is preventing me from paying the $30 it costs for the candles I need to finish the larger lanterns.
To fill the smaller lanterns, I stopped at Michaels, coupons in hand, and grabbed a bunch of random Halloween related items and brought them home.  Then, I selected some pumpkins and sparkly leaves to go in the lanterns.

The lanterns have this nice, large metal pick in the center to hold whatever you put in there in place.  I shoved a metallic pumpkin on it.
Then, I used my favorite new tool (for today anyways) to cut the glittery pumpkins and leaves off of their stalks. <Dad, if you are reading this, sorry but Mathlete wouldn’t tell me where his were>

I casually tossed in two glittery pumpkins and some leaves to finish off the lanterns.


Front view…oooh, glittery



Side view – the leaves are behind the pumpkins

 So, there you have my little lantern project.  All told, the entire project cost me less than $25 and I’ll get to re-use the lanterns for other holidays.  Since I know I love to see what people paid for things, I’ll share a breakdown of this project:
Lanterns:                                 $7.99 x 2 = $15.98
Metallic Pumpkins:       ($3.99 – 40%) x 2 = $4.79
Glitter Pumpkin Stalks: ($1.99 – 40%) x 2 = $2.39
Grand Total:                                              $23.16

So, do you decorate for Halloween?  Getting started this early?

Edited: Linked to Tater Tots and Jello Weekend Wrap up Party, the Marvelous Monday party at C.R.A.F.T., the Primp Your Stuff Link Party at Primp, Whatever Goes Wednesday on Someday Crafts, Show & Share on Southern Lovely, Show Me What You Got at Not Just a Housewife, Get Your Craft On Link Party at Today’s Creative Blog, the Unwasted Homemaking Party on Don’t Waste Your Homemaking, the Fall in Love Link Party on Decor to Adore, Coffee and Conversation at With a Shot of Brandy, Craft, Scrappy, Happy Me Thursday at Craft, Scrappy, Happy, and the Under $100 Linky Party at Beyond the Picket Fence.

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© 2012 Just Us Four.  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

Swing Away

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If you come around looking for us most evenings, we’re out in the backyard…on the swing set.  Really, we (Mathlete and I) are pushing the kids in the swings on the swing set. I get really tired of this quickly though because of laziness the gnats.  For some reason, our backyard is cursed with gnats!  I suppose it could be worse and I could fighting with spiders (shudder) or bees but gnats are just downright annoying.
[Source]
The backyard and swing set are a place that our kids and dog spend a ton of time though so I didn’t really want to fog my yard with a ton of chemicals in the hopes of ridding it of annoying, but really harmless, bugs.  Then, I heard on the radio about an all natural way to treat your yard for bugs: garlic oil! Yum, think of the smell too!
 
The interwebs confirmed that such a thing does exist for us on lawns!
[Source]
Excited at the prospect of a gnat free swing experience, I raced to Home Depot yesterday in search of this garlic oil solution!  I was unsuccessful.  They don’t carry it. (I probably should have done better interweb research to find a retailer but excitement got in the way of rational research).  They did have an alternative though:  Green Light Bioganic Concentrate
[Amazon]
I bought the kind you hook onto the waterhose and the separate spray bottle for smaller areas of yard. By the time I got home from the Orange Spot, it was well after dark so no spraying down the yard at that point.  Here’s hoping for a gnat free experience this evening though!
 

© 2012 Just Us Four.  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

Don’t Stop Playing

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5.31.11
While I was working on my own project, Mathlete hubby undertook the task of putting together the play set we purchased for the kids. The interweb is filled with accounts of how putting together one of these things can take 10-12 hours with two people working on it non-stop. I was pretty worried because I knew that we wouldn’t realistically have the time to undertake a project like that unless it spanned over several days. So worried that I almost purchased the play set from one of those places that charges a lot more but will deliver and assemble the play set for you. Mathlete hubby insisted though that he could a) do it mostly on his own and b) do it in less than 10 hours.
So, we purchased the play set and it sat in our basement from February until this weekend. To be fair, we were waiting on our HOA approval before beginning the task…not just being lazy or procrastinating.
Here is what we started with
And here is daddy’s little helper (prior to daddy being rescued by our neighbors who invited H over for a play date…isn’t she charming?)
The backyard has full sun until mid-afternoon so Hubby suffered a lot more than I did for his project. By lunch time, he had made some pretty good progress.
He kept working until it was time for the barbecue. At one point, he said he was going to skip the barbecue because he was determined to finish the play set in one day! We talked him down from the proverbial play set ledge though and he joined us for the cook-out. He quickly snuck off to work some more though after we ate.

He worked until 8pm or so on it and got to the point of attaching the swings. He stopped though because the whole thing needs to be staked down for security and he didn’t want to attach the swings prior to staking it down. Here is how it looked at the end of the night.

Fast forward to this evening when he spent another 30 minutes or so on it (staking and hanging swings) and you have:
And this is where you could find H for the rest of the night.


 

Total time: 8.5 hours. Hubby 1, Play set 0

© 2012 Just Us Four.  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.