Handmade robot costume: Girls can be robots too!

Elise's Halloween costume request: a robot.

"A blue robot. I want it to be a lightish blue, not a darkish blue."

At four years old, this has to be the most specific thing she has ever said.

I have to admit, I was excited. I live for requests for robot costumes.

Still, time is tight lately, and this costume had to be relatively easy and quick. I know some of you may look at this and dispute that it surely doesn't look easy and/or quick, but I'm telling you, it went faster than sewing a costume from scratch.

I started with a couple of cardboard boxes. A small one that fit on her head relatively well and a larger diaper box for the body. After cutting holes for her face, head, arms and the side for her legs, I fortified the boxes down the seams and on the inside with brown paper packing tape. This made the boxes really sturdy, and I knew they wouldn't fall apart during all the Halloween festivities. I gave them a couple of coats of aqua semi-gloss paint with a small foam roller. (Yes, just regular wall paint that I had leftover from other projects.)

In between coats, I created some faux bolts with a hot glue gun for some extra detail. After the glue was cool, I followed up with the second coat of paint.

I collect junk. Junk comes in handy for projects such as this or my homemade dollhouse furniture. I save things with interesting shapes from food packaging and other sources. Bottle caps, odd bits and pieces of plastic, etc. I raided my collection for robot-y type items and did not come up empty-handed.

The eyes are a pair of metal jar lids that I topped with spoked plastic circles. (I think they were inside jars of pepperocinis!) I can't remember where the nose and ears came from; I've had them in my junk box for years. I painted the eyes and the nose yellow with some plastic-friendly spray paint so they would stand out better.

Every friendly robot needs a heart, and this one came from a Valentine candy container. The large circle on the front of the body was a clear plastic canister lid once upon a time, and the smaller one was the top of an earbud case.

The parts inside the circles are those small plastic pieces typically from toy packaging painted yellow. I don't really know what I was trying to emulate here, but inside the clear plastic circles, they look mechanical enough.

I backed the circles with some aluminium foil and put battery operated LED lights through the holes in the plastic. All of the wiring is taped down inside the box and the switch is up near the neck for easy on/off. The lights blink and reflect off of the foil and the clear plastic. It looks really bright and shiny!

I found the battery-operated lights at Hobby Lobby in the Christmas section. I guess there is a benefit to having Christmas stuff in stock before Halloween hits.

All the pieces were hot glued on, and they lasted through two Halloween parties plus half of trick-or-treating in the rain. The eyes fell off first, but I'm sure it was due to the cardboard getting wet.

Elise really loved wearing her robot costume, even though it was a bit cumbersome to walk in. She's still talking in her robot voice multiple times a day!

See more handmade Halloween costumes here >>

I organized the garage in two hours and lived to tell the tale.

Everyday, I would walk through our garage and think, "hmm, I really should clean this up sometime." And I've been thinking that for, oh, maybe a year.

There's never a good time to clean the garage. Summer's too hot and winter's too cold. Plus, you know, not exactly a fun task. So as soon as the temperature dropped from this summer's crazy heat wave, I put the garage on my short list.

From a distance, it may not look super disorganized. But close up, another story.

Junk and dirt from old projects. Trash. Stuff we don't need anymore. Stuff that I didn't even know was in here. It was so so much dirtier than I thought. Lots of dust and spiderwebs.

I needed motivation, so I challenged myself to get it done while Elise was at preschool one morning. I set the stopwatch and hoped I could get it all done before pick up time.

I started by making piles of stuff that didn't need to be in the garage anymore, whether it needed to be moved or moved to the trash. I went to throw out this can of roofing tar (which hasn't been touched in probably three years) and found that it had rusted through the bottom of the can. Nice!

Also trashed (well, recycled): glass shards dug up from the backyard.

These lovely vintage tile installation guides that I found with some leftover tile for our upstairs bathroom. (Still have to decide if the extra tile is worth keeping.)

Oh and that leaky tar can? It left a small puddle for me to deal with.

I covered it up with an old car floor mat. I was going to throw that out too, but this was the most logical solution for dealing with that sticky tar.

I also removed a few things added by a prior owner of the house like this paper towel holder (never going to use it) and some random screws (subbing for hooks, I presume).

And this homemade pencil cup. I guess it's fine if you're working a lot in the garage with pencils, but in recent years, it was just serving as a haven for spiders. Bye bye!

After about an hour and a half, I was a sweaty mess. It was time to get cleaned up and pick up Elise from preschool. (I swear, preschool time goes about twice as fast as normal time. Is this a documented phenomenon?) I wasn't completely finished, but I was so close! Challenge fail. Sort of.

Later that afternoon, I spent another 20 minutes taking out the trash and sweeping the floor. And finally, my work here was done. Look! Clear surfaces!

Simplify: Living with too much stuff

Something came over me about a month or two ago. I'm not exactly sure where it started. Maybe with cleaning out Elise's closets before I painted them. Slowly, I started tackling one small space at a time. A drawer here, a box there. Removing anything expired, unnecessary, redundant. If something didn't belong, I moved it to a better home.

And then, I intensified. I wasn't just doing mini organizing projects. I was on a mission to rid the entire house of unnecessary things.

Like many people, I struggle to find balance between having stuff and having too much stuff. Keeping what we need to be prepared versus being paranoid.

It's easy enough to remember to purge your clothes closet or the kids' toy box or the pantry, but what about that kitchen gadget drawer? Or maybe the toolbox? (Mine seems to be the place where IKEA allen wrenches go to die.)

Do I need two pasta forks? Three bottle openers? Eleven sports water bottles?

What about three hammers? (I'm not even sure where the third one came from.)

Do I need three staplers when I probably staple something once every six months?

Or could someone else be using this stuff?

I've slowly been going through the house on small area at a time. It's going to take a while to complete, but I think it's worth it.

I'm not ready to go full tilt minimalism; I love stuff way too much. It makes a home feel cozy. But I am ready to simplify. I don't want to hold onto things only for "just in case" moments anymore. I don't need to hold hostage perfectly useful items just because I'm too lazy (or paranoid) to get rid of them.

I don't want this house to turn into one of those old houses with the basement packed to the gills where everything comes in and nothing goes out. I want it to be lean and well organized. Efficient. I want to know what's in every box, drawer and closet. And I want the things we are keeping to be things we actually need or want. No hidden crap.

So where did the stuff go?

We spent a few Saturdays on the donation circuit. I don't have photos of all the things that have left this house. This process has been so gradual that it didn't occur to me to document it bit by bit.

• We took old light fixtures and some drywall scraps to the Habitat Re-store. Plus some weird plumbing parts that were in the garage when we moved in.
• Books, CDs and DVDs not worth selling on Amazon went to a charity book fair donation box.
• An old computer, a printer, old cell phones, one very old and very dead iPod, and two huge bags of wires went to an electronic recycling event.
• A giant stack of junk CDs (outdated software, CD-Rs) and jewel cases got dropped off for recycling at Best Buy.
• We donated a barely used cat bed and other pet items to the humane society. And some old sheets and towels. (Never throw that stuff away!)
• A scratched non-stick skillet that I no longer used (but somehow couldn't bring myself to get rid of) finally went into the recycle bin.
• I let a couple of magazine subscriptions lapse and blew through the nearly two-foot tall stack of back issues. So long, Elle Decor. I won't miss your elitist tone. And Martha Stewart Living? I have a feeling we will meet again someday. I'm actually thinking of letting more of my subscriptions expire as I'm forever behind on reading.
• And there were more than a few trips to Goodwill.

And we were able to sell some things too!

• My husband took one of his old, unused tennis rackets and got cash for it at a sports resale store.
• I sold a few pieces of gold and silver jewelry I didn't want anymore. (Nothing fancy, just some necklace charms.)
• And we sold a handful of random items on eBay. (Did you know you can list items for free now? Still have to pay fees at the end, but not if the item doesn't sell.)

We also made an effort to use up gift cards and gift certificates. At this point, I think we only have a couple left, and while I guess logically that should make me sad, I think it's a good thing. Because we used them and kept the cash in our wallets.

And we're still purging.

I still have to go through much of the basement and the office. (Ugh, holiday storage. For someone who barely decorates for Christmas, I sure do have a lot of Christmas decorations.)

I'm going to purge many of the recycleables I've been saving (hoarding?) for future projects. I have to remind myself: there will always be more glass jars, there will always be more cardboard boxes.

I'm even going to venture out and put some things on craigslist. (And I'm a craigslist hater. Mainly from being repeatedly stood up by flakey buyers years ago.)

Incentives (trading the stuff for different stuff)

Eventually, I would love to turn some of our unfinished basement into finished space or at least pleasant-to-be-in space. You see that silver wall at the back of this photo? That's a closed up metal garage door with a hodge podge of insulation on top of it. But really, it's about as insulated as an open door. We're hoping to finally take care of that in the coming months.

I also got the idea that if we could sell any of our excess, we would put the money toward new countertops and appliances for the kitchen. (Our appliances are at least 18 years old and are showing their age.) I don't know when that will happen, but it's an extra incentive. We like to play those little savings games around here. So far, we've accumulated around $250. (I guess the money could also go to repair the basement wall, but it's more fun to thinking I'm working toward new countertops than cinderblocks.)

Anyone else living with too much stuff? How do you keep it all under control?