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.