Treasure hunt.

Another weekend gone, but not wasted! Although I didn’t get the beautiful weather promised for Saturday I did make the best of it. I was able to check out some thrift stores and find some great treasures. Some I was looking for, others were a pleasant surprise.

$4 for the pitchers, $5 for the beautiful tray that my hubby swears is silver. It looked terrible, all tarnished before I cleaned it.

since I knew I wanted these on my porch, I decided to get to work on revamping my porch. I had this bench on there that I took out of the yard. I’ve always wanted two white rocking chairs on my porch but due to some emergency repairs we just had to make (water heater and furnace) we won’t be buying those for a while.

I had gotten a table a year or so back that was supposed to go on the porch but it was a little big for starters and ugly.

so my first pallet project it is!

pallet +table+leftover paint=

my husband is obsessed with it. He wants to leave it in the house now. He can’t believe the pallet wood turned out so good. I sanded, washed and stained it with one coat of oak stain. So pretty! The bench got a makeover too. White, of course. It’s my new favorite color for refreshing. Makes it look so clean (which it was before too) and new. This is what we’ll be walking up to this spring and maybe summer if I don’t get tired of it by then.

I absolutely cannot wait to get it out on the porch. Oh, and we got the kitchen shelf stained and hung up.

Not bad for a days work huh? Until tomorrow… Sweet dreams!

Kitchen work part-2

After I finally rolled out of bed on Saturday….. Day two!!! First thing was to tackle this crazy wire that was coming out of the floor and had been redirected into the wall.

seriously, who does that?!? I just
can’t get over how lazy some people are. The kids thought it was hilarious to be talking to their dad through a hole in the floor. So, it was good that they had some fun with that 🙂

.
That finished we moved on to taping and floating the walls which was my manly man’s job.

And two coats of koala bear paint from Home Depot. Women’s work:/

I love my helpers!

Does anyone else think cabinets are ridiculously and unnecessarily heavy? I was in the Army and consider myself to be pretty strong for a woman, and um, I almost let them fall.

I’m not sure why they need to weigh so much, maybe to justify their outrageous price? I don’t know. But two hours later, which is pretty good for novice cabinet hangers, and they were up! Yay!
A trip to the attic for some wall hangings and such that had been sitting up there for five years waiting for this day and we were done! Now the shelf is still missing, maybe next weekend. And the 5 and some odd inch gap on the left is waiting on a home made wine rack. Then the entire kitchen can be finished off with some DIY flooring and crown moulding and I might actually cook in there on a regular basis! I think it’s time to start thinking up a new excuse as to why I never cook. I can no longer use the excuse that I hate my kitchen because it’s ugly. I’ll take any suggestions! All in all, it was a great project to start off 2013 with. One weekend and $300 later and I no longer want to hide that side of my kitchen with the refrigerator! One more pic in case you forgot what it looked like originally. I know I have! Then it’s off to bed to dream about what we can tackle next!

Kitchen work part-1

The kitchen. Oh my kitchen. I half like it, half hate it. What I would like is to love it! So the half I like is the side that I actually use. It was done over a year ago by us and my dad. It came out good but I only like it because it’s still not done! We still need crown moulding, cabinet trim, and a new floor. These last touches are going to be finished after we get the other half of the kitchen to the same unfinished stage :/.
Here is the side we’ve neglected completely. These awful shelves have become a catch all for every piece of junk we have in the house. Looking at it now…if that’s all the junk we have then we’re doing ok! It holds all my laundry stuff which is expected because that’s where the washer and dryer are. Yes, we got stuck in a house that doesn’t have a laundry room! Never in a million years would you think you would want a room devoted to laundry, until you don’t have one. Next house, laundry room is a MUST! Anyways… The shelves use to all be whole until we got a stacked washer and dryer trying to save room. It was good for a while until they broke and well here we are. A mess left behind is where.

The never been touched side.

So the plan is to rip it out, fix the walls and paint it the same color as the rest of the kitchen. Yup, I have a two toned kitchen:/ the other side is green. And put up three cabinets and a shelf. The shelf is going to serve two purposes. A shelf and a….. You’ll have to wait for the reveal!
My new DIY attitude pushed me to put this plan into action. I ripped the shelves out. There’s no going back now. Taking them out just emphasized how tore up the walls are. I hope I can get my hubby to just fix them rather then gut it. Can I just say that those little bars of wood were a pain in hump to take out! Those things were on there good!

Also Craftsman needs a lady hammer. The hammer I was using was so fricken heavy that my arms were burning after taking out just one. I almost left them for the hubs to take out. It was ridiculous! But they’re off and this is what we’re left with.

A mess!!!! The last bars are left on to help with getting the cabinets up. (Learned that from my dad:-) ) hopefully tonight I can scrape the walls and the hubby can get his tape and float on. To be continued tomorrow.

Boa wreath

Here it is!

Yay! I love Valentine’s day! It’s such a pretty girl holiday. This year I decided to decorate for it ( just little touches). Of course the first thing to make is the wreath for the front door. I looked and looked and found this feather wreath that I thought looked easy enough and would look pretty on our black door. It’s finished in the above picture and came out so cute! I was going to add more decorations to it but decided to keep it simple.
This wreath was so easy to make that it is pretty much self explanatory. A hanger bent in the shape of a heart with some pliers. Or you could leave it round and then embellish it a little more because of the simple shape.
Then wrap with feather boas found at the dollar store. Mine took four. I tied the strings at the ends of the boas and tied them together and just kept winding.
Some ribbon tied around the top with one tail left on for letters. I used those sticky foam letters from the Dollar Tree that we had in our craft box and a foam heart on card stock. Cut those out so there would be a white border around each letter. Hot glued them on the ribbon. Gave the bottom of the ribbon a split cut and voila! A one hour tops project that looks so adorable!!

Add some candles with character and you’re good to go!

The ghastly garage

The front of the ghastly garage.

Ok, first a little history about this darn garage. There it is above in all its ghastliness. We have lived with this in our back yard for five years now. I literally do not look in that direction. I tried to spruce up the front and failed miserably. The side of it as you can see below is even worse.

The side. Eeeeek!

Our plan was to leave this alone until we had the funds to demolish it and completely replace it. I didn’t even want to try and deal with it. Well, our neighbors had different plans. The neighbor story is one for another blog. Long story short, we don’t like each other and they figured our garage was a perfect target for an attack. Now the city is giving us until March to fix it or get fined. Well played neighbors, well played. We cannot demolish the whole thing because in our city, you need a permit for that. Yes, I’m rolling my eyes too. So we agreed with the inspector that we would take down the back portion (which is the part that’s rotted) and spruce up the rest. I love a challenge, hate one that’s forced on me… Grrrr! We’ve put it off for long enough and now we’re down to the wire. No sweat, we work better under pressure!
Bring on the demolition!

As you can see we’ve left up the wall that faces the neighbors yard as a shield from their nosy eyes. We will get as much of this crap gone on trash day as we can and then take down the rest next weekend. Then the real fun starts!!! Until then, be nice to your neighbors!!

Inspired

Hey all! I’ve been inspired to revamp the blog. Last night I spent all night tossing and turning with tons of ideas running through my head. We have so many things we want to do that we constantly talk about that we NEVER do! I though maybe if I blogged about it we might have more of a push o follow through. We’ll see.
I mean this is not just home improvement stuff. It’s life improvements too. Going back to school, volunteering more, trying new places, moving up at work, whatever life throws at us. I kinda got to thinking that life is like one big DIY project. If you hate something but don’t act to fix it, it just deteriorates and you keep hating it. You could hire someone else to fix it, but you don’t appreciate it as much. So yo have to tackle every aspect of your life like its a project. One you’re going to do yourself and work hard at to get what you want. I recently read somewhere that doers get what they want and everyone else gets what they get. Lets see what comes out of this DIY attitude!