Project Time

I didn’t do any shopping this week. There isn’t much that we need but I plan on going to Publix over the weekend and CVS next week so I’ll post about those deals next week.

Since there wasn’t any shopping being done we had to keep busy otherwise. We’ve been doing a bunch of different projects and experiments.

On Monday my Mom came home and was planning her lesson for a class she taught on Tuesday. Then she was telling me how she needed play-doh or modeling clay for this demonstration. By then the only place opened was Wal-Mart and she didn’t feel like going all the way to Wal-Mart. So I began doing some research and found a recipe to make homemade play-doh. Conveniently enough we had all the necessary ingredients to make the homemade play-doh. Here are some pictures to relive the experience with us:

This is the first batch from Recipe #1:

The first batch you had to cook on low till it “looked like dough.” However when it cooled it “looked like mush” and not play-dough. So we tried Recipe #2:

1 Cup Salt

1 Cup Water

2 Cups Flour

1 Tablespoon Cooking Oil

Instructions: Mix the salt, four, oil, & water together. (Courtesy of playdoughrecipe.com)

We altered this recipe and mixed the water a little bit at a time so that it didn’t become mush like in Recipe #1. Here are our pictures from Recipe #2:

On Wednesday I’m not even sure how we ended up on this topic. I think my sister wanted to make a cake. So I began telling her about this cake recipe I kept reading about on several different blogs. I also read that it was only worth 3 weight watchers points (that sounds good, I don’t know ANYTHING about weight watchers point system).

This recipe is SUPER EASY! All you do is buy any kind of cake mix that you want, you follow the instructions as directed on the box EXCEPT when it asks you to put water, eggs, butter or oil in you don’t. Instead you add 1 can of any kind of diet soda.

We mixed the cake mix and it tasted okay raw and it was legitimate to eat because there were no raw eggs in it!! We cooked the cake like normal and decided to try it before we wasted the icing on a gross cake. The cake was DELICIOUS!! I think it was even better than with the eggs and oil. It was very fudgy and fluffy. Here is a picture of the finished cake:

Conclusion: Diet Coke + Cake Mix = DELICIOUSLY healthy cake. Although putting all that icing on top I’m not sure how healthy it is but at least the cake part is healthy! If you’ve heard of this and were afraid to try it now you can because we can be picky when it comes to “healthy desserts”!

About two weeks ago or so my mom and sister went to the thrift store. I forget what they were looking for, maybe a couch. They didn’t find a couch but they bought this vanity:

 I had looked for a vanity about a year ago but everything I found was either for kids, not of good quality, or really expensive. So I just bought a nice mirror for my room and moved on forgetting about the idea. Well at this thrift store they had this vanity that needed some work. It was nice and sturdy but needed a paint job and some sanding. The lady at the store kept talking about all these different ideas of what we could do. My sister kept talking about this idea with tiles that sounded cool but expensive since you usually have to buy a box of tiles and we would only need about 10. So we went a cheaper route and just painted it with an antique finish. Here is the finished vanity:

I thought it came out pretty good. This was something different that we did together (okay mainly my mom and at the end mainly my sister). But for about $100 we bought and refinished the vanity that normally would cost over $200. So that’s a pretty good deal in my book.

All in all the projects were successful and we had fun doing them all. You never know what project we’ll work on next with us. I’ll be sure to keep you posted.

Do you have any projects going on in your house? Did they come out good or bad? I hope you had fun doing them either way!