Having Zachy's bed redone this week!

Before

I am super excited that Zachy’s bed is being refinished this weekend by a girl I met from Craigslist. I bought Emma’s bedroom furniture from her and while I was picking it up I noticed a wonderful bed she had built out of PALLETS! It was amazing and I just have to have one in my house now. She agreed to take Zachy’s bed and redo it using the rails and drawers. She is also making me some pallet shelves for that back wall. I am super excited to get it done and can’t wait to see the results. I will post pics as soon as I get the bed back. Check out her blog at Sweet Sweet Simplicity


UPDATE:


Got the pallet bed back on Sunday and after a few minor setbacks (my old bolts no longer fit and new ones were too big AND the old rail no longer fit) I finished assembling it today. I LOVE it! Leslie did an amazing job. While I love the bed I have to say these shelves are my FAVORITE! She sells these for only $30 each! Amazing! When I initially saw the pallet bed and shelves I was concerned that they were too dark but now that it is all together, it's just PERFECT. I do have a few minor things to fix, like the part of the rail I cut and the holes I had to bore out to make the bolts work but otherwise it's done and here are the pics to prove it!

After

Notice that the top shelves have a ledge on the top for sitting his favorite things! 

I had to cut the rail but will be staining that part tomorrow!

Notice the rope handles on the drawers. LOVE!

Emma's Paris room makeover

Before Makeover

After Makeover

My Bonus daughter is 12 going on 25. One day she was saying how much she wished we could transform her room into a Paris themed room because she was ready to get away from the stuffed animals and twin bed. I can’t blame her! So, I decided to surprise her by going out and buying everything she would need to have her Paris room! Let me tell you, there is a TON of Paris themed decor out there. Have you any idea how hard it is to buy the ‘right’ items for a twelve year old? I do! After, 4 days of shopping and some great finds on Craigslist, I had everything I needed to get to work. I ended up buying a bed and dresser off Craigslist, a new mattress, new bedding, wall art, curtains, baskets…and much more. I spent two days trying to decide if I should paint her walls and ultimately decided that I was going to make a Paris themed room with her already PURPLE walls. Whew! That was a hard decision but it paid off. We just added the vinyl words (these look way easier to apply than they actually are) above the bed and now the room is finished. 

I just fell in love!

I was just duncing around on Pinterest and came across this absolutely marvelous deck and sand box. I am in love! I wonder if this can be done with my existing deck. Guess I will be finding out very soon! lol

You can see a bigger picture at here.

It's one of those days!

I think I will stay in my p.j.'s all day. It's gloomy outside and I have nothing pressing to leave the house for. Yep, it's definitely a p.j. day!

Dressing up an entire wall with wainscoting! Say WHAT?

When we moved into our house our a 50" flat screen T.V took up a pretty large portion of our now tiny living room. I was suddenly not impressed by the massive size of this beast as it became the focal point of my darling new living room. Because of the layout of my living room there is only one place that the T.V. can actually go. Unfortunately, the T.V. is the only thing that can go on that wall. I realized that there really wasn't anything I could hang on the wall that wouldn't look completely out of place. Was I doomed to have a giant T.V. as a focal point and a bare wall behind it? Of course, this didn't bother my man one bit! Isn't every man's dream to have a giant T.V. in every room? Or is it just my man's dream?  Anyhoo, a few weeks after I moved in I saw a wainscoting picture like this one.

I loved the look of this wainscoting but I knew that just doing half a wall wasn't going to take care of my problem. So I decided that the whole wall needed to be wainscoted. Luckily I had some people working on the basement at the time and I ran my ideas by them. They LOVED the idea and stopped everything they were working on to tackle my wall. It took them half of a day and cost me about $120 in lumber (we used poplar). I could have done this myself but my guys charged me only $75 to put it up and that was well worth it! Unfortunately, I didn't take any pictures of the work in process but I do have this one, (which was taken at Zachy's 3rd birthday party) just look past the smiley people.

I LOVE the results and every time someone new comes over they always gush over the wainscoting. I contemplated  painting the boards a different color than the wall. That could look really cute and someday I might do that but for now its all one color. See for yourself and let me know what you think!

Projection screen D.I.Y for under $75

When we refinished our basement we knew we wanted to get a projector instead of a regular flat screen T.V. We priced out projectors and actually ended up buying a really good one for just under a thousand dollars. Then it came time to price out the screens. We found a few that would do for around 300 dollars with shipping but I just didn't really like the looks of them. That's when a friend told us about screen paint. So I did the research and ended up finding this screen paint for about $45 on Ebay. Click here for paint.  The paint came with some black felt border but we ended up getting some poplar wood at our local Home Depot and framed out the screen. The wood cost us about $25. I love the concept of the paint because we were able to paint the screen whatever size we wanted to and if we ever wanted to go bigger then we have that option as well. Here is the final result and I have to say that I am very pleased!

Ugly Mirror Makeover for $67

I don’t understand why builders put those ugly mirror sheets in bathrooms. I mean it would cost them about 25 dollars to frame it out and make it look presentable. I took all the ugly mirrors out of my smaller bathrooms and replaced them with framed mirrors I bought at HomeGoods. However, my master bath mirror was very large and I just could not find the right sized mirror to replace it with (one that didn’t cost a gazillion dollars anyway). So I decided that my boyfriend and I were going to do it ourselves. We bought some wide baseboard at Home Depot and had one of the employees cut it to the right size for us. My boyfriend mitered the sides with his mitering saw and we attached the board to the mirror with liquid nails. We taped the boards to the mirror overnight so the liquid nails could dry and caulked the seams the next day. I then painted the mirror with a High Gloss Espresso colored paint. Voila…A much nicer looking mirror for a fraction of the cost of a framed one!

Utility Stairs Revamp!

When I bought my house, I fell in LOVE with it immediately. Well all of it except this back stairwell. You see, this stairwell leads from the laundry room to the garage and had very light colored carpet and walls.  Talk about dirty! I couldn’t keep it clean, especially in the winter. So for a year and a half I was stuck with this terrible hallway because I had NO idea what to do with it. Then one day my son spilled a whole bottle of soda on the carpet and I SNAPPED. I got out the tools and ripped all the carpet out. UH OH! What had I just done? I wasn’t expecting the tack strips, staples and very damaged wood stairs that I found underneath that carpet. I had some serious thinking to do. No way was that carpet going back down so I proceeded to rip out the tack strips. Unfortunately, that damaged the wood stairs even more, not to mention the big chunks of concrete that pulled up on the bottom landing. At this point I was at a loss, I didn’t know what to do. So I lived with it like that for another 6 months. UGH! I shopped on occasion for indoor/outdoor carpet but was never able to find something I really liked. Then one day I decided to tackle the problem. I went to Home Depot and bought a gallon on Martha Stewart brand glossy exterior paint in a wonderful color called Francesca and some wood filler. That night my stepdaughter and I filled all the cracks and gouges in the wood steps. The next day we sanded the steps and put our first coat of paint on. At this point I realized that I was going to need something that was anti-slip for the steps. I researched everything from rubber mats to anti-skid additive for the paint. I eventually chose to go with the anti-skid additive because it was the most economical solution. So I divided up the remaining paint (so I would have some without the additive) and added the anti-skid to half the paint. I used Skid-Tex by Zinsser which I bought at Lowes for about $6. After putting on the last coat I realized that my steps were so dark now that it was hard to see where to step. Oops! So then I had to research safety treads for the ends of the stairs. I went with a light grey and used 3M Safety-Walk Slip Resistant Medium Resilient Tread 1 in x 60 ft Roll. I bought it on Amazon for about $25. I was pretty happy with the outcome of the stairs and decided that I needed to paint the walls too. I used another Martha Stewart color called Bay Leaf. I used a satin sheen for easy clean up. I LOVE the look of the back steps now and I especially love the green walls. I love color but don’t usually use such bold ones. This color makes me smile every time I come home!

Happy Valentine's Day

We are celebrating Valentine's Day today since the guy has to work tomorrow and the kids got a half day due to snow. We went out to Red Lobster (mainly for the cheese biscuits) and had dinner. The kids and I made white and dark chocolate covered strawberries for dessert, YUMMY! They turned out pretty awesome especially since it cost us a total of $13.45 and we made about 30 strawberries and had plenty left over. These things were selling for $12 for four at our local supermarket. YIKES! My 4 year old son is having a friendship party at his preschool on Wednesday and he and I have been busy making treats and cards for his classmates. We made candy cane and white chocolate lollipops which I got from this website Pleasant Home. The cards and tags on the candy are my design exclusively, even though in hind sight I would have put You're as Cute as a Button instead of XOXO (I used buttons in the center of the white hearts). Yeah, yeah, I know they are a little girly for a boy to be taking to school but I just couldn't bring myself to buy Star Wars cards to give out. Here are some pics of our creations.