Shed a Little Light…

It was some time ago that the lamp in the trailer bedroom fell and was squished in the slide-out.  The lamp itself was unharmed, but the lampshade was, well, let’s say, it had definitely seen better days. But, it was one of those things that I never really thought about unless I was turning on the lamp, or putting it in a safe place for travel (this lesson was quickly learned).  Never once in all my pre-shopping list-making did I think to put “lampshade”  on my lists.  For months, it was a live and let live situation.  As long as the shade was not in danger of catching fire, I let it be, cringing at it’s misshapen ugliness whenever I really looked at it.

The metal spokes of the frame had actually come apart, and poked out through the fabric in several places.  The day came when I finally decided to get a new shade.  I was tired of trying to make this one look presentable.

Off to my favorite store – Hobby Lobby – with  a 40% coupon in hand.  It was lampshade hunting day.

I was somewhat disappointed in the selection of shades.  If  you wanted a whole lamp, they had some gorgeous options, but my lamp was fine – I just wanted a shade.  I finally (to my husband’s great relief) decided on a design-your-own shade that could be covered with fabric.  I paid less than $5 for it, and I knew I had some fabric back home in the trailer.  So I came home and dug through my stash, finding a bright, cheery fabric scrap leftover from one of my favorite aprons. 

The shade was wrapped in a wax paper template, so cutting it out was quite simple.

I didn’t have my hot glue gun with me, so I had to make do with Elmer’s school glue.  Even then, it was really easy – no burnt fingers from boiling glue!  Yay!  :)  It went together quickly, and I was pleased with the speed of the project.

Ta-dah!  The new sassy lamp shade!  I could add some fringe-y stiff, but I didn’t have any in my stash.  Perhaps I will do that later.  I actually kind of like it just as it is. 

New vs. Old

The finished product – yes, it makes me smile.  :)

My “New” Hutch

For several years, I have had this hand-me-down hutch.  Not really happy with it, I was unsure of how to improve it to meet my décor standards.  I thought about getting rid of the hutch, just because it was so blah.  Brown and blah.  I even toyed with the idea of having my wonderful hubby make me another one more suited to my taste.  However, that seemed like a waste of time and money when I already had a hutch.  (Sometimes being a good steward is not all that fun. )

I decided that I would just paint it.  But what color?  I already had a lot of red due to the benches we made and painted, and I wanted something a little different  that would add some zing to the room.  Turquoise came to mind, but that is a huge step that I wasn’t sure I could make.  It would really zing, perhaps a bit too much.  I discarded the idea and thought black – nah, too dark and boring.  I kept coming back to turquoise.  I also wanted an aged look, but was trying to find out how to replicate that look.  I searched the internet, found some awesome DIY refinished pieces, and watched a few tutorials. 

Seized with the desire to strike while the iron was hot, so to speak, I ran to Lowes and picked out paint.  Yes, I did end up going with a turquoise blue.  The weather was gorgeous, so I headed out to paint just as soon as I got back.  I also bought spray paint to redo the hardware.  I liked the drawer pulls and little knobs, but they were yucky, and the hinges had been painted brown by a previous owner.

I had to get creative when I painted the hardware screws and dangly drawer pulls.  I was trying to figure out how to  paint all sides of the drawer pulls without having them rest on another painted part.  Enter the common wooden toothpick.  I wedged a toothpick into the swiveling part until it stood upright, not touching any other part of the drawer pull.  Voila!  It worked!  Fueled by this small success, I turned to the screws.  I poked them  into a piece of cardboard so that they all stood upright.  Again, success!  I could now spray paint all the surfaces without having to touch them and flip things around!

Maybe those of you who do this kind of thing all the time are laughing at me, but it was fun to figure out. :)

I looked all over for the finishing glaze to add the antique look to my newly painted hutch, but no one seemed to know what I was talking about.  Back to the internet I went, and read carefully the blogs that I had found those awesome pieces with the same finish.  I found out some brand names, and learned that I would have to mix the glaze with whatever color of paint I wanted the glaze to be.  This was going to be more work than I had anticipated.  The Home Depot was the only store in our area that actually had glaze, so I went there.  While I was looking at quart cans of clear (add-your-own-color) glaze, my eye fell on a display of Martha Stewart special painting finishes.  There were several different varieties of pre-colored glaze.  They were much smaller cans, and the price was happily less.  I decided to get the small jar and experiment.  I f I didn’t like it, I could always paint over it again.  This is what I wound up buying.

I highly recommend this product (Black Coffee is the name).  It is latex, so it dries faster and cleans up easier than the clear glaze, which is oil-based.  This little jar was more than plenty for my whole hutch.  In fact, I used over half a quart of paint to repaint the hutch, and I may have used two or three tablespoons of glaze to finish it.  A little of this stuff goes a long way!  Glazing is one of the most fun things I have ever done.  I told my husband that I have a new favorite thing to do! :)

Basically, you apply the glaze with a sponge brush or regular brush, if it is very detailed, and let it sit for 30-60 seconds.  Wipe off the glaze with a damp cloth, allowing as much or as little of the glaze to remain in the cracks and crevices of the piece.  This is where it gets a little messy, since the glaze gets all over your hands.  I had to keep changing the water in my bowl because it was paint-y after a few dips with the cloth.

The whole project took one afternoon, and I am so thrilled with the results!  I have moved the hutch into my laundry/craft room, where I will store some of the items that now reside in cardboard boxes.  I am thinking I will be able to keep quite a bit of fabric and craft items in the bottom cupboard.  Here is what it looks like now!

 

This is not the best picture because the sun was blazing in the windows.  You can still get a good idea of the way it looks now.  As you will notice, I left the back of the hutch brown, just for a bit of contrast.  It was not painted very heavily, and the wood grain shows through, giving it a unique look. 

The best part about glazing is that it does not have to be perfect.  If it is a little darker or thicker in some places, it just adds to the antique look.  I will definitely be using this technique again in the future!

Do you have a piece of furniture that you want to change?  Have you ever tried glazing?

It’s Curtains for Me!

My laundry/scrap/sewing/crafting room has been at the bottom of the totem pole since we moved into our house this summer.  Not that I didn’t care what it looked like, but it was not the most important area on which I needed to focus.  (It hurts to say that scrapbooking is not a top priority.)  The laundry part of that room was the only one getting much action.  Way too much action, if you ask me! :)  Once the remodeling aspect of the room was finished, it just sat for a while, with all my junk sitting on every available surface.

Here is a picture of it when we first walked through the house.  Nice shelves, but the eye-crossing wallpaper and the fruity border just weren’t quite my style…  I especially liked the cat door under the desk.  Very convenient – the cat can go out, come back in, and be rubbing around your ankles as you sit at your desk.

This is the laundry closet – behind the little folding doors.  I like it.

Here is a picture of the room two weeks after we bought the house.  Dreadful.  The wallpaper had been put on unprimed drywall – a serious construction no-no.  When we pulled the wallpaper down, it took part of the sheetrock with it.  This meant that we had to mud the whole room lightly to fill in holes before we could prime and paint the room. 

You can see by the shreds of wallpaper on the floor, that it was coming off in less than acceptable-sized pieces.  If I recall correctly, there were only two layers of wallpaper in this room, so we were very happy about that, “happy” being a somewhat relative term.

I thought the painted pink plywood floor was a nice feminine touch, too.  :)

This is what it looked like after we finished repairing the walls and had the flooring installed.  Much better. 

Then I filled it up with all my scrapbook, sewing, stamping, crafting items. It no longer looked very nice.

As you can see, the shelves came in handy to store my books and scrapbook albums.  The countertop table was made by my step-father.  It has a cracked (and therefore free) piece of Corian on the top.  The table is actually on castors, so if I choose, I can roll it to another part of the room.  How neat!  It is high, so I can stand or sit on a tall stool to work, and it is a great place to scrapbook, sew, or cut out sewing projects. 

Since returning from our last round of meetings, I have made a concerted effort to get this last room in some semblance of order.  That meant sorting through all my scrapbook paraphanalia, sewing supplies, books, and the like.  I really wasn’t looking forward to that part of the job.  Ugh.  So much stuff! 

It now looks much better, since almost everything is in its place.  One notable exception being that the folding doors are still leaning up against the wall. (*Ahem)  I am sure that they will be re-installed soon, though.  Since it was looking so nice and clean, the windows, still ensconced in their protective plastic paint shields, stuck out like a sore thumb. 

I had seen some adorable reversible curtains at a friend’s house, and promptly asked her where she got them.  She replied that she had made them.  Even better!  When I got the chance, I found the pattern and got it from my local craft store.  I knew those curtains would be perfect for our house – especially for my special room!

My choice was Butterick pattern B5369, option D (top right).  These curtains were super simple to make!  I chose a rather wild paisley print in blue and green, and the ribbon ties would be green grosgrain with white dots. The reverse side was just a cream-colored muslin, providing  a little neutral area.

It took about two hours total to make the curtains (not counting the time it took for an extra trip to Wal-mart when I didn’t have enough ribbon) from cutting out to finish! I may put these in every room! Ha!

While my room is still a work in progress, it feels a lot more civilized now that I have some cute curtains hanging in the windows.  If I had it to do all over again, I would go with a slightly darker fabric for the reverse side, since you can see the seams when the sun shines through the windows in late afternoon.  However, I am very pleased with them overall, and can’t wait to upload pics of the entire room.  As soon as my doors are hung, that is!  :)

Christmas at Home

After a few weeks in the sunny south, we arrived home two weeks before Christmas.  Having left the day after Thanksgiving, I had not been able to decorate the house for the Christmas holidays (I love decorating for Christmas)!  I decided that as  soon  as we got back home, the bins were getting lugged out of storage, and the tree, lights, garlands, and etc., were coming out and resuming their places.  Thus, last Monday afternoon, we pulled into our driveway, unpacked our belongings from the trailer and headed out to find “the perfect tree.” 

Question:  How many stores did we have to visit before we found anything but a Charlie Brown special?

Answer: Four!  I was amazed!  At each successive store we visited, my hopes grew smaller.  One large retailer had a total of four trees left!  Well, of course, we could have bought a ten foot tree and then hacked off about four feet so it would fit in our living room, but that is not my idea of a good tree, let alone a perfect one!

Thankfully, my longsuffering husband was involved in the quest, and was willing to chauffeur me all around town.  We finally found a great selection at Home Depot, and while Paul went to find a cart of some kind, I held up a prospective tree and asked the kids, “What do you think about this one?”  Josiah, in his pre-adolescent wisdom said, “Um, I don’t know.  They all look about the same to me!”  Out of the mouth of babes…

Meanwhile, the temperature had dropped considerably, and we (I say we, but in all actuality, it was just I, since Paul and the kids wimped out and went inside the store to wait) were shivering in the garden center section of the store, waiting for the one elusive employee that could trim the tree down and net it.  Apparently, that takes a special kind of skill.  I think the ability also entitles you to extra long coffee breaks.  We waited in the howling wind for at least twenty minutes before the employee came sauntering in, wiping the doughnut crumbs from her lips, and eyed the line of people waiting to get their tree trimmed.  Yes – there was a line.  Even at this late date, there was more than one family without a Christmas tree!  Unbelievable! 

After we stuffed the tree into the back of our truck and I packed my two ice blocks, otherwise known as feet, into the truck, we headed for home like a barn-sour horse.  I dragged out the decorations and remembered that half of my lights had died last year.  Crud.  The lights have to go on first, wouldn’t you know.  I decided that fixing dinner was the better part of valor, and that you can bear almost anything on a full stomach.  So the decorating was put on hold temporarily while I nourished our bodies and souls with hot dogs.  Hey, cut me some slack – the fridge was pretty empty after being gone for two weeks!

As soon as I finished my tube steak, I jumped in the truck,  accompanied by Esther, and we headed to that great retailer, the ubiquitous Walmart.  You know, the store that sells everything.  Except white indoor Christmas lights.  Seriously… they had none.  Frantic that my evening of decorating was in peril, I dashed off to my favorite store – CVS.  While I browsed their limited selection, Esther pointed out that the lights were BOGO, saving me a costly error.  So, in the end, we got twice the lights at a store closer to home.  Whatever. :)

The kids love decorating.  The Christmas music blares while they hang all the ornaments on one side of the tree, clustered thickly like forbidden fruit.  They shriek and dance around the room, causing me to fear for the safety of my precious ornaments. 

Once the lights were on, decorating began in earnest, and the kids worked extra hard and fast, because at the end of the tree decorating process, they know their favorite part is next – the Fisher Price nativity set.  I bought it years ago when Josiah was a baby, and we only get it out at Christmas.  I guess that is what keeps it special.  Having a toy that you can only play with a few weeks out of the year is pretty memorable. 

It was quite late by the time we finished, because of all the delays, and they were all tired and ready for bed after the long day.  I cleaned up the boxes and bins, and put them back in the closet and returned to the living room to view our handiwork.  Ahhhhh!  Beautiful.  This will also show you what our living room looks like after the renovations we made.

Before: concrete floors covered with paint spray and freshly painted trim

The stone thing in the corner has been a rather difficult obstacle to overcome in my interior decorating.  It used to house some kind of wood burning stove, but that is ancient history.  It became our tool central for several months, and, I must admit, only the last vestiges were cleared away when we brought out the Christmas decorations (yikes)!

However, this is what it looks like right now.  Notice my wall collage in the making just behind the tree.  I plan to fill the whole space with pictures of different sizes and shapes.  I’ve got a pretty good start, but I still have several pictures left to mount on the wall.

 

The stone corner is now home to the much-beloved nativity set.  I love it!  There is plenty of room for them to re-enact the Christmas story on the ledge – just like a little stage!

I am looking forward to a very merry Christmas in our lovely new home! 

Home-Grown Decorations

I mentioned in an earlier post that I was pleasantly surprised by some spider lilies that were growing in our back yard this summer.  Yay for good surprises!   I had another good surprise this fall when we returned from nearly six weeks of meetings.  There was a giant bush taking over the back yard close to the fence, and I had trimmed it back this summer.  It had sharp, pointed leaves, and I had to be careful about getting too close, but I shaped it a little and had fun playing gardener.
When we came back in the fall, though, it was covered in bright sprays of red berries – it was some type of holly bush!  I was thrilled with how beautiful it was, and decided to bring some of the boughs in to decorate the house!  There’s nothing like growing your own decorations, right?

The best part was that they last forever – I guess because it is they are a type of evergreen. So a little water in my jar kept things bright and cheery in my kitchen!  I have a new favorite centerpiece!  I also put a few little sprigs in a jar on the window above my kitchen sink – makes me smile while washing the dishes, and that really is a feat.  :)

Happy Holiday Wreath

A few weeks ago, I mentioned my “new” picture frame and the big plans I had for turning it into a Pinterest-inspired creation.  I was able to finish it to my complete and utter satisfaction last week, and it now hangs on my front door!  It is so very different that I love it!  It has also given me a few more ideas…

And here is the full effect…

I just love coming home and seeing this!  What decorations are you putting up right now?

Thrift Store Treasures

We are in Minnesota this week, and while in town, I passed a thrift store.  I vowed to stop in before the week was up, and ended up going on Tuesday.  Boy, was I ever glad I did!  It was a treasure trove of finds!  I browsed the aisles, trying not to grab everything that I fancied!  There were a few things that I absolutely could not leave behind, though!

Check out these super finds!

The large embroidery hoops were an item for which I had been looking, due to several posts on Pinterest.  I have big plans for these in my craft/scrapbook/laundry room!  :)

The little white jug was love at first sight for me.  It has a little blue windmill painted on the other side, but I haven’t decided what I want to do with that yet.  I may just leave it facing the wall.  Or, maybe I will spray paint the whole thing… I haven’t decided yet.

The salt and pepper shakers were so cute!  I actually can use them for something other than decoration.  I picked them up because I liked the shape, and found that they are wooden. That means that I can paint them to match my kitchen décor if I like, or just leave them for a pop of contrasting color.  Whatever I decide, I will be happy with my find!

My other great find was a picture frame…  “What’s the big deal?” you may think, but I have been looking for a certain size and shape of frame for some time in order to make this particular Pinterest project that I saw a while back.  It is perfect for my front door!

Isn’t it adorable?  And so very “outside the box” for a holiday wreath!  I wanted something a bit more ornate, but this frame was very sturdy and the perfect price, so I grabbed it.  I can’t wait to get back home and get to work on this holiday project!  The question now is where I am going to store all this stuff until we get home.  I have run out of space in my bin! :)  Hopefully, I will have enough time to get this done before Christmas.

Office/Guest Room

Well, one of our dreams was not only to have a place where Paul could study for his messages, write his books, and keep up his correspondence, but to have a place for people to stay when they come to visit.  When I first saw the house, this particular room grabbed my attention! 

You can see the large built-in desk right in front of the window – perfect for studying!  This room is located right next to the master bedroom, and across the hallway from the downstairs bathroom.  It is also perfect for a guest room!  The door you see going off on the right is a large walk-in closet that is now housing my Christmas decorations and CVS stash!  (By the way, that seems to be dwindling… better get back to those coupons!)

The room was stark white, with guess what (?!) – a wallpaper border around the top.  The carpet reeked of cats, and was stained and threadbare in places, so it had to be replaced.  For the walls, I chose a lovely “neutral” green called Seamist  (it is also in several other rooms because I loved it so much!)  It was a relaxing, calming shade that I felt was not too girly to be in a man’s study (Paul does not do girly), while still matching my personal taste and style, such as it is! :)

This room really had the least amount of work to be done, so it was our kid central station while we were working on the other rooms in the house.  They hung out here and watched movies, played dolls, and fought amongst themselves. (Hey, I have to be honest!)  Here are Esther and Daniel with the one-eyed babysitter…

When I uploaded my pictures, I found all kinds of weird shots of strange things that I know I didn’t take.  Hmmm… This picture of Esther reveals a whole new realm of speculation. 

I wonder who took all those odd photos?

This is the first after picture, with new paint, new carpet, and a whole new look.  Of course, since then we have added blinds, bookcases, and other office equipment.  (We also put the doorknobs back on after painting, for those of you that are wondering.)  I am looking for a bed to go in this room since it is, after all, our guest room. We have an air mattress right now, but I am looking for something a little more permanent.  Just have to wait for that perfect yard sale find!

Here is Paul, sitting at his desk to study.  You can see the few still-packed boxes of books stacked under the desk and next to the wall.  We are planning to build some floor-to-ceiling bookshelves in this room, to help with our library storage (we have a lot of books).  For now, though, we have just a few bookshelves in here for all of his theological books and history/hobby volumes.  It is a work in progress, to be sure.  He loves it, though, and it is an answer to prayer – every preacher needs a place to call his own and get away from it all to study the Word!