RTR!

We love Alabama football in this house. My little monster has crimson walls in his bedroom and wants it decorated Crimson Tide style. I have plenty of houndstooth plans running through my head but I was browsing pinterest for more ideas and to find some ways to make sure it doesn't go over the top. That's when I found this photo...

I L.O.V.E. it! This is going to end up in my living room for football season some how, some way!

It's essentially our family in elephants. Dad, mom, and the little wild child. That baby elephant cracks me up and reminds me of my little high energy boy.

P.S. I finished recreating another pin! Yay! More on that tomorrow :)

 



Easy DIY Zinc Letters My Ass

I wanted some of those Anthropologie zinc letters for my kitchen and I've seen plenty of DIY versions on Pinterest. Apparently these letters are so easy for others to DIY however mine ended up looking like grey mud in letter shape. About the time I was about to throw them in the trash I figured I would try out the nickel spray paint I had. I threw away everything I know about getting an even spray paint job and got the can up close and personal so I would have some color variations. After the spray paint was dry, I dry brushed on some dark patina metallic acrylic paint.

I think they look darker in real life. I'm happy with them for now. I might try out a tutorial again for letters in the laundry closet but after how angry I got at these three little letters my guess is it will probably be awhile. I want a couple baskets to go on either side to hide some lesser used kitchen items. The more I look at this picture, the more convinced I am that I need to carve out some time to go buy a camera instead of continuing to use my phone. The letters are really darker and my walls look grey here but are actually taupe. arghh. It's driving me crazy now so it's obviously my bedtime.

 

 



From Pinterest to my kitchen counter

Anytime I get around to actually doing something I've pinned makes me very happy. After all I spend time finding and pinning things that I want to create and I don't want the things I pin to only ever be dreams of fun projects. This time this was my inspiration pin...

This is from Natalme and she created this fun little cake stand like to corral her dish soap, sponges, etc.

I wanted to make one. I felt like it would definitely pretty up the kitchen sink some. So off I went to Salvation Army to find a candlestick and a plate and they did not disappoint. I had plenty to choose from. I walked away with a lovely brass candlestick and possibly the ugliest plate I've ever seen. With a glop of E6000 glue I attatched the two and after it dried I started the process of

 spray-dry-turn-spray. I sprayed it with Nickel spraypaint. All the hardware in my kitchen is brushed nickel and I'm not brave enough to go with as daring a color as she did.

 

 

This is what I ended up with. I love it and while I still need some different soap pumps, for now it is happily holding my pretty gloves, soap, and windex. Mine is plenty stable and hasn't tipped while using the soap or windex pumps but I'm pretty sure it's because I chose a candle stick that was wide on both ends.

The next project I'm hoping to tackle is this one

This one is from Love in Motion I believe.

There are lots of variations of these floating around Pinterest. I'm hoping to get this one accomplished this week.

 

 



My First Experience with Stain

When we bought our house we were fortunate enough to inherit 6 cans of Minwax stain in all different colors. That got me pretty excited because I've never stained anything before but I've been wanting to try it out for sometime now. My mother and father got a beautiful solid wood dining room table from my grandparents as a wedding gift. My mother decided she wanted to refinish it sometime around my early teen years but her version of stripping it was scrapping the finish off with a butter knife while she drank coffee and talked with friends or me and my sister. It has been my intent to strip it and refinish it ever since I inherited it almost four years ago. Now that I have a garage that gives me space to do projects like this I instantly got cold feet. I'm scared I'm going to ruin this table that is older than I am and holds so many memories of all those years.

 I remember making "biscuits" with my sister when I was my sons age. At 8 and 6 years old we had no idea that bicuits had more ingredients than just flour and water. Thats right, we coated that entire table top in paste while my mother was on the phone with my grandmother. She made us clean up the mess we had made and I'm amazed that there isn't still paste in the groves of the table. Over the years we have spent a lot of time around that table and I'm amazed it's still in such good shape after all that plus the 6 moves in 3 1/2 years I put it through after it became mine. So that rambling explains the cold feet I have about messing with that table.

In an effort to get some staining under my belt I felt i should go with something less sentimental like the unfinished shelves in the laundry closet. So that was my test run and I survived it and now I'm ready to tackle a bigger project. Maybe not the table just yet but something bigger than a closet shelf. But here is a picture of my newly stained dark oak shelf in the laundry closet.

 

Uh oh! Please ignore the wet white touch up paint and the dark iPhone pic.

 I love it and it makes me happy every time I open the doors to wash clothes :)

 

 

Stomach viruses and a miracle

So since last Thursday or so we have been sick in this house. I started off the stomach bug we have passed around. It started while I was at work early Thursday morning and it lasted well into the weekend. Ugh! and now my little monster has it. He woke up this morning saying his arm and legs hurt and he was "noxious" which seemed to go along pretty well with my experience of achiness and nausea.

Along with the fun stomach bug he is having a little respiratory flare up so the inhaler is back out and so is the vapor rub. Speaking of vapor rub that is where the miracle happened. After listening to him cough all afternoon Friday after school I knew he was never going to sleep through the night with that cough. I had seen on pinterest that you can put vapor rub on the soles of your feet and slide some socks on and it would get rid of the cough. I didn't have a whole lot of faith in it because the cough medicine I had already given him had decreased the frequency of his cough but by no means got rid of it. It was a bit of a fight to convince him to sleep in socks but it definitely paid off. Now for three days we have been doing vicks slathered on feet and no cough medicine and he is sleeping soundly with no coughing. I'm totally suggesting this to people from now on if they are struggling with a coughing kiddo because if it can get rid of my little monsters cough then I know it works. Pinterest to the rescue again, however there was no miracle stomach bug cure that I could find on there so hopefully that will be out of his system soon.



Cricut fun

We finally got a fill in washer and dryer for the front load washer that decided to call it quits at 3 years old. I have decided that as much of a pain it is to do laundry, it's even more of a pain to have to haul basket after basket of dirty clothes outside of your house to do laundry. Oh and the real joy of having to haul all this laundry around is that boys make sweaty,stinky clothes so my car constantly smlled like a men's locker room. Eeeewwww! Man am I glad that's over! And at $30 for the washer and the dryer we really couldn't be happier at this moment.

Now that I'm going to be spending a lot of time doing laundry I would like that area to be a little prettier. The entrance from the garage into our house opens up into the kitchen right near the laundry closet area. I had three frames that I couldn't find a good spot for in the house so they have been sitting on an end table until they found a home. I decided to make a little project out of them while dinner was cooking. A little vinyl applied straight to the glass and voila!

 

 Our little back entrance is headed in the right direction.

I think I need to add a couple items to the shelf but I'm nervous that my little monster is going to pull to hard getting his backpack one day and it's going to crash down. It feels sturdy to me and it's able to hold a lot of weight so far but I just don't trust my little one with anything breakable :)

 



Summer Mantle Inspiration

Now that I have a mantle to decorate I'm excited to be able to change that decor up pretty easily with the seasons or holidays. My mother is a big fan of fireplaces(like really huge fan, she likes to text pictures of her warming her hands in front of the fire to her friends almost every day in the winter) but she never ever mixes it up on the mantle. The arrangement of pictures,candles, etc. that is on her mantle would be almost the exact same arrangement that you would have seen there yesterday, last month, or even 3 years ago when she moved into her current place. For me I feel like this is a spot where I can get creative and inject some holiday(seasonal?) cheer without making major changes in the house or investing a whole bunch of time. However, having never decorated a seasonal mantle before I needed a little inspiration and her are a few I rounded up...

  

this one is from Ashley's Thrifty Living and she shows how she created the banner along with highlights of some of the other little touches

 

 

I love the nautical feel and the muted blues in this mantle from Completely Coastal and I feel like most of the things here wouldn't be too hard to recreate with just a qiuck trip to Lowe's.

 

 

I really love this one from The Lettered Cottage with that adorable flag idea.

 

I can't wait to get started on making my mantle summery so I can enjoy it on every one of those long summer days. With our fireplace being in the kitchen, whatever I choose to put up there I definitely will see a lot of since so far that is where I can typically be found when I'm at home.



Craft night

I finally got around to having a craft night with a friend of mine that we have been talking about doing since February! We have been so busy around here with work and all the things to do with our new home and any sort of craftiness has gone out the window so it was nice to take a little time out. We tried our hands at making some burlap wreaths for our doors. Thanks to Pinterest I had no trouble finding a whole lot of tutorials and ideas. I went with one from the blog Rooms for Rent that you can see Here. In the tutorial there they looped the burlap through the two outside parts of the wire wreath form, I opted to alternate outer and inner rings because I felt like it would make it look a little fuller. Also I made a small one to practice on that I used burlap wire ribbon on and having tried wired and non wired ribbon I would go with the non wired every time. Trying to pull that stupid wired ribbon through the wreath form made me so frustrated and mad it feel like my fingers were arthritic by he time I was done. So no more wirey burlap in my future, at least I don't think so. Here is what I ended up with

I loved it and still do but now I'm feeling like it needs a bigger "M" and maybe that "M" also needs to move a little further up the side. I don't know yet wether or not I'll actually change it but we'll see.

I was so sure that once we moved I was gonna be able to be crafty all the time and I would have tons of stuff to be DIY-ing over here and now I feel like I've been so busy with everything ese that I don't have time for my crafty outlet anymore. But it's looking like every other Tuesday I'll be able to do some pinterest inspired crafts with a friend of mine and so hopefully that will get me going again.

 

We are finally home!!!

We closed on our first home on April 2nd and we could not be happier. I can't believe today makes exactly one week of living here. There are boxes and bags and bins everywhere still. I was determined that I was always going to park my car in the garage(that's how excited I was to finally have a garage) and it's surrounded by more boxes and furniture. Our kitchen is up and running and I have already cooked a total of 4 meals in there and we have already grilled for the first time in our new backyard.

And then it came time to do some yard work and oh how that was a project I expected to be easier than it was. We are still not even halfway done with our front yard and we have already completely filled 40 bags. 40!!!

This was just at 20 bags so imagine the stack at the curb this morning!!

If anyone else has ever had to rake and bag leaves on a hill like this my heart goes out to you because I now know how insane this process is. The thing is, I can't even complain because I'm so happy and thankful to have a yard to rake that's our very own! Hopefully I will have everything in place soon so that I can start working on some projects.

 



One thing long overdue

One thing definitely long overdue for us was a real vacation...as in we haven't been on one in FIVE years! Well we went to Gatlinburg, TN and had an absolute blast. Get ready for picture overload and two adorable little monsters

me and the boys playing with the giant lite brite

creating giant bubbles for my sweet nephew

my little guy helping with a driving lesson at Wonderworks

our lovely view

Park is a good bit smaller than the worlds largest man

awwww, his nervous face. He wasn't so sure about sitting on the fake fish

can't get more excited than this

my monster pretending to be swimming in the fish tank

a little laser tag time

Best.Spring Break. EVER!
We are about 12 hours away from closing on the house now and I can't wait but for now back to packing.

 

Ready for our new home!

We are closing in one more day!!!! I couldn't be any more excited! We have been getting the last of our things packed the last couple days which has also happened to coincide with this stomach virus I got. The nausea is making me completely miserable so packing has become very sporadic and is only getting done when I can stomach it(pun intended). But about 36 hours from right now we will be buying our first home and here it is...

On the list of things we want to get done early on planting grass seeds is definitely at the top. We want those big silky blades of grass that just begs for you to walk barefoot through the yard. I'm so excited for my little monster to get home from school on Tuesday and get to run around in our yard for the first time. I'm so excited for all the extra space.. And yay! For those enormous trees that will hopefully offer plenty of shade during the triple digit temperature days we get during at least half the summers here!

Get Outta Town!

Awful! That is the only way I can sum up Thursday for us. After finding out that our close date is being pushed another week because the final inspection had a couple issues and our loan originator woman is a super procrastinator. We found this out a whopping 18hrs before we were supposed to close, which was also right in the middle of my 30min off between job one and job two. So I decided we needed a break and some time away from it all doing something to get us excited about this house again.

I've never been to Ikea, I've wanted to go for a couple years now but the closest one is 3 1/2 hours away. Yikes! Not a drive I want to make with my monster just to drag him around a store then trap him in a car again. But today was the day! Parker was in school and my mom agreed to pick him up for us and keep him til we got home. We drove the entire 3+ hrs there and the whole time Shane and I talked. We vented about the things that we were mad about with this home buying process, we spent some time talking about gross stuff making each other laugh for the first time since we got the crappy news, and we talked about the house and what we want to do once we do(finally!)get in there.

So I officially LOVE that store!!! I could spend days walking around in there. Since we need some furniture we spent time inspecting,testing, and deciding on what we liked best. But after that drive I wasn't about to leave empty handed so this is what we got:

-A grey and white fleece throw that Parker loves

- a Gurli throw in white/cream that will go with our current sofa(and hopefully make it look prettier) and our future grey sleeper sectional we found today

- a pack of 3 cork trivets

-2 packs of Hären wash clothes

-Tons of Tekla dish towels that I'm considering doing a DIY monogram on

-a Rationell utensil divider for the new kitchen

-a Patrull alligator bath mat to keep the monster from slipping in the tub, although I'm not sure if he's gonna think he's too big for it so it may go to my nephew instead

-A couple ice cube tray that are shaped to make cubes that fit down in drink bottles

-4 white Nyttja frames for 5x7's

-2 white Virserum frames for those 8x10's I have coming

-a 2 pack of white Kassett magazine/paper holders 

Overall a great day that gave us time to just talk and spend time together getting excited about the house again instead of dwelling on the fact that we aren't gonna be moving in this weekend. Shane went with me because he loves me and wanted me to be in a better mood but when we left he was telling me how we need to come back and how there were things he didn't get to test out because we ran out of time. I hope everyone else had day that was better than the one before it!

Treadmills, and classes, and scales oh my...

So getting my footing in the gym again has been hard. What's been the most hard has been accepting the fact that I have to sacrifice one or more of my few precious hours of sleep a day to make it these workouts happen. I've been through that part before so it is quickly becoming second nature to work and then knock out a workout before following that up with going back to work. It's also hard for me to step on the scale and see the number jump up in 2-4 lb in a week. This is also something I've dealt with before. I know my body and I know that I tend to gain muscle really easily and quickly, a lot more quickly than I lose fat but as always the pounds are now starting to drop as my body begins to get the idea of what I'm putting it through.
Here is what surprised me and what is really hard...I'm sore. I'm very sore, can't-reach-up-to-pull-back-your-hair-legs-tremble-when-you-walk sore. And I'm not sore for just a day, I've been sore for a week and its finally getting better now but I don't know if I'm just over-doing it or if its just that I'm older and more sleep deprived.
I'm definitely ready for my body to get a little stronger so all these power pump and Pilates classes can quit kicking my booty!

This is why I love Shutterfly

I get emails from Shutterfly almost daily with coupon codes for all kinds of their products. Today I got a "today only" code for 2 free 8x10 prints and I jumped at this one. With tons of wall space coming our way in less than a week(YAY!!!!!!) I'm gonna need some photos to cover those walls with. I ordered these two photos in 8x10 matte finish

They are both pictures I took on my phone but I love how my little monster looks in these B&W snapshots. I love how there's no posing and it's just him hanging out. These pictures of him feel very natural to me like I could look past the picture and find him laid out on my lap on the sofa or curled up in a blanket listening to Dad read us a book just as he is in the pictures.

And possibly best of all, here is my receipt...

gotta love that total :)

 

 



Houndstooth vinyl

eHoundstooth.com

So...I'm now more obsessed with the Cricut  than I was before I bought one. My baby turned 8 this week(I know that means he doesn't really count as a baby anymore but I have a hard time with the realization that he is now closer to being a teen than a baby so for now I'm still calling him my baby especially this week). His class does posters featuring the birthday kid of the week and used my Cricut to make his. I cut his name out in vinyl and then used some random paintings he did to cut out the other words and letters.  Anyway moving on, at least where I work about 3/4 of the nursing population there use clipboards to corral all the paperwork we seem to constantly have being thrown our way. On the clipboard of one of my coworkers there was a lovely little elephant cutout of black and white houndstooth vinyl(Roll Tide) and I decided right then and there that I needed some of this STAT! I have looked and looked to try to find it and have come up with nada. There is lots of houndstooth vinyl out there in crazy colors but I can't seem to track down the standard black and white kind in a roll and not a 12x12 sheet. My google skills are failing me and I've been wanting this to have on hand for when we move because my lovely little 8 yr old monster has selected a room in the new house that is already red and I want to do a monogram for his wall(clearly not in the lettering above but maybe something a little more masculine...). Ughh...I need to hurry up and find this stuff so I can quit thinking about the fact that I need it! If anyone knows where I can find some and you want to maybe drop me a hint for where to look it would be much appreciated :)

see how cute!!!! found this here

 

 



Ready to DIY to the extreme

I'm so ready for us to get in our house and get it decorated. Unfortunately our close date has been changed which is going to put it "on or before" March 22 which also happens to be the day we are getting married(wow this March is busy!). So with this new date we are going to have all of about 1 night to get stuff moved in and enjoy our house before heading off for some fun Honeymoon vacation time in the mountains.

So before the end of the month rolls around I'm trying to wrap my head around what colors I want to use and how I want our house to look/feel. This is where I'm getting some inspiration...

 

I L.O.V.E yellow and grey and I think something like this would make a happy and fresh room to spend time relaxing in.

I really, really want to get a new sofa because the one we have is Shane's bachelor pad one that while comfortable, it is super ugly. I'm definitely hesitant to get a white sofa because all I can think about is little fingers covered in Cheetos orange being wiped all over it.

 

I like how eclectic feeling this room is

 

I like a lot of the ideas here from House Pretty

 

I'm so unsure of what direction I'm eventually going to go with.

 

So I think we might go with this Ektorp sofa in Svanby Gray from Ikea because it's neutral and I think it would fit in well with any direction I decide to go.

I think it will hide stains much better than the white.

I'm ready to order this and get it in the house ASAP and get the old ugly sofa out

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 



Command Center Inspiration

 After adding additional jobs to my schedule it has been hard for me to get into the swing of my new routine. After a month at my second job my hours have doubled there from what I had originally planned. I have no complaints as I am very happy there and couldn't imagine working for any nicer people or with such amazing co-workers but it has made it difficult for me to continue with my normal routine. Now that a month has gone by and I'm getting the swing of things I have incorporated the gym back into my routine and hopefully will soon be doing the same with my meal plans/grocery store visits. It will be a very happy day for me when I am able to get some semblance of a normal routine back in my life but I feel like that is still going to be a couple months away. Once we get moved in to the new house I will have a lot more kitchen than I do now. With all this new counter space comes a nice little nook between the door that leads to the garage and where the fridge is. This nook I'm hoping will become a command center of sorts to help keep this crazy little schedule of mine running as smoothly as possible. I'm gathering inspiration for this and can't wait to put all these ideas together to make something that works for us. Here is where I have been getting ideas so far...

This is from The Handmade Home and while my nook doesn't offer this much wall space I like all the organization going on here

 

I will have a cabinet above the counter I'm planning on using and this is an option I'm definitely liking. Of course I will have to find a way to fit a chalkboard in there somewhere but I like the idea of being able to have a space for tings I can close the door on. Unfortunately the link to this site was bad but according to pinterest it is from Interior Design Ideas

 

This next one is impressive and elaborate and I might possibly have to spend more time on it organized than it would save me in the end by keeping me organized. However there are several pieces of this one that might work for our family, one I like from first glance is the bin for coupons and receipts. I have had several requests for me to start couponing hard core again from both family and friends and this would be a good place to stash the Sunday inserts til I have time to cut them up. Also having a place for us to drop receipts might be good for us with the new budgeting we plan on doing and may help us keep track of our spending. Tis one also had a corrupt link and so no reference for this one either, sorry, but it appears to come from One Creative Housewife.

So that's where I'm at so far. If anyone has a command center in their home that would like to share tips on what works or what to avoid I would appreciate any input you can give!