Pottery Barn, Shmottery Barn

I’ve never really been much of a jewelry person, but in the last couple of years, two of my friends {ironically both named Katie} have slowly started turning me over to the dark side. They both sell jewelry {for this company and this company} and I’ve hosted parties and gotten lots of free/discounted stuff.

The problem is, I didn’t really have a good place for all these purdy new accessories. So they just kind of sat in a semi-organized pile on my dresser.

Then I saw these in the Pottery Barn catalog, and I knew they’d be the perfect solution.

Of course, in true Pottery Barn fashion they cost more than any normal person would reasonably want to pay for them. And it doesn’t take a DIY genius to see that these wouldn’t be very hard to replicate at home.

An empty picture frame and some hooks. Not exactly rocket surgery, here

I had planned on keeping an eye out at Goodwill for the right frame to use, but then one day on a random stop at Hobby Lobby, I found this:

They had a bunch of *slightly* damaged frames from their framing department marked 90% off – so this one, originally marked at $37.99, cost me only $3.79!

It didn’t have glass, but I didn’t need it to. And it did have a *slight* chip in one corner, but since I planned on sanding and painting it, that didn’t really matter.

I sanded it – just a little, because I wanted that dark finish to show through when I distressed it.

Then I gave it a few coats of this stuff:

{Rustoleum Heirloom White}

Then took some sand paper and distressed it just a little:

Then I screwed a few cup hooks along the top, and the result:

Now all my pretty jewelry has a home. I’m planning on hanging it up eventually, but for now it’s just hanging out on my dresser.

I think I like it even better than the one in the catalog. Take that, Pottery Barn!

Before and After

A few days ago Dave’s mom asked me how everything was going {i.e. having two kids, being at home all day without Dave, etc., etc.} and I said something like, “It’s going great! I almost feel like it’s too easy…”

I have got to learn to stop saying things like that.

These first few weeks have been really easy…but now Sophia has come down with some sort of cold. Just a stuffy nose and a lot of drainage right now, but newborns and stuffy noses are a yucky combination. It makes it hard for her to eat and sleep – which just happen to be her two favorite activities.

We’ve spent a fair amount of time the past couple of days wielding the bulb syringe to suction her nose, giving her steam baths, and holding her upright so she can breathe while she sleeps. Poor thing…I feel so bad for her! I’m just praying it doesn’t develop into some sort of fever/cough type of thing.

Anyway. So I’ve got a sick baby curled up on my chest right now, a napping toddler in the other room, and I’m trying to find things I can do while sitting in bed holding a baby. Blogging happens to be one of them :) So would you like to see another before and after project I did?

Too bad, I’m showing you anyway :)

(And sorry. That was a really long introduction.)

I actually did this little project right before Sophia was born.  I’ve had these three woven seagrass baskets for about a year now. They were a a lucky clearance find at Wal-Mart of all places! I think they cost me $3.00 each.

They’ve been taking up residence holding books and magazines underneath our coffee table in the family room for awhile now. And I was perfectly happy with them just the way they were.

Then I saw these baskets at Target:

Kinda like mine, but bigger, and these had a little chalkboard label on the front. Mine did not have chalkboard labels. But I really wanted them to.

So I started thinking about how to replicate this at home and here’s what I came up with.

First up, a paint sample…thing…not sure what the official name would be, feel free to correct me if you know:

I’ve seen a lot of people incorporate these into various crafts and I have to say, it’s such a good idea. I mean, they’re FREE! It doesn’t get any better than that.

Next, we needed some of this:

Chalkboard spray paint

I covered the paint samples with two thin coats of chalkboard paint, then used a hole punch to punch holes (duh) in the four corners. Then I took some twine that I had laying around, poked holes in the seagrass baskets, and tied my new “chalkboard labels” onto the front of the baskets.

So before we had this:

And now we have this:

I think this basket looks right at home holding Lily’s books next to the fireplace:

I have yet to find a home for the other two – I’m thinking I’ll use one for blankets next to the couch and maybe keep the other one as a “magazine rack” underneath one of our end tables?

And yes…I need to buy some chalk so I can actually write on the labels :)

So Target, thanks for the inspiration but I will keep my $40.00 and just enjoy my Wal-Mart clearance baskets with paint sample thingys on the front. I think mine look *almost* as good – even if they aren’t as big and probably not as sturdy.

What do you think?

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I’m linking up to this fabulous lady for this fabulous party today.

I Have No Idea What I’m Doing Here

If you would’ve told me a year ago that this summer I was going to tackle not one but TWO furniture restoration/re-doing/whatever-you-want-to-call-it projects I would’ve said you were crazy.

For one thing, I didn’t know the first thing about furniture restoration/painting/re-doing, etc. And really, if I wanted some furniture, why not just save myself the hassle and time and buy it new?

Well.

Maybe because there might come a day when I would need some furniture and I didn’t have the money to buy it new. Which is exactly what happened to us this past January when we found out we were expecting another baby.

We needed some furniture for Lily’s “big girl room” but we also needed to not spend an arm and a leg on it, so I started doing a little research and decided to tackle a couple of pieces of furniture on my own.

First up, a dresser:

This is the master bedroom before we re-did it this summer. And if you look waaayy in the left-hand corner of the picture, you will see the dresser I decided to paint for Lily’s room.

Sorry, that’s the best “before” picture I could find. Basically, it was just a plain, boxy, dark brown laminate dresser. Nothing fancy, but it was free.

Some sanding, a few coats of white paint, and new hardware and now we have this:

  It’s still nothing fancy, but it looks one hundred times better in her room than it would have had we not painted it.

I also wanted some sort of nightstand but again – no money to buy one, and we really didn’t have any extra nightstands laying around the house either. But then we had a garage sale and some friends of ours brought over a few things to sell. One of them just so happened to be this end table and I pretty much fell in love with it the second I saw it.

  I just loved the shape of it, but I wasn’t crazy about the color and I didn’t really like the hardware – and besides, I had no idea where I would even put it. So I told myself that I would put it on the garage sale anyway and if nobody bought it, then I’d ask them how much they wanted for it and take it off their hands.

I spent pretty much the entire garage sale holding my breath every time someone stopped to look at it, praying they wouldn’t be interested and miracle of all miracles, NOBODY BOUGHT IT!

By that time, I already knew that this would be a perfect addition to Lily’s room, so I paid them $5.00 and went to work. And now, here it is in it’s new home:

It turned out exactly the way I wanted it to!

But I mean it when I said in the title I HAVE NO IDEA WHAT I’M DOING. I mean, really. I’m a total amateur, and I was super nervous to take on two projects like this but if there’s one thing I’ve learned about DIY-ing, it’s that sometimes you just have to try. And maybe you’ll fail and totally screw it up and that’s totally fine.

But you also might just end up with two decent looking pieces of furniture to put in your little girl’s room that cost you a grand total of $5.00 plus the cost of paint.

Neither of these are perfect and I’m most likely not going to be making some sort of business out of restoring and selling furniture in the near future.

But you know what I discovered? It’s kind of FUN! I’ve already got two more pieces of furniture on my To Re-Do list, if I ever get around to it after the baby is born.

Before I end, I have to give some shout outs to a couple of people because without them I never could’ve gotten this done:

First, my cousin {actually he’s more like my second cousin once removed or some nonsense like that but for simplicity’s sake let’s call him my cousin} Mark for letting me borrow his power sander:

This seriously cut hours off my time. I love it. And I’m totally asking for one for Christmas.

And second, to one of my favorite DIY blogs Young House Love for their super awesome furniture painting tutorial. I pretty much followed their instructions to the letter, and if you’re looking to paint some furniture on your own, that’s where I’d tell you to go for advice.

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This post is linked to:

Thrifty Decor Chick’s Before and After Party

Master Bedroom Redo

This week Sarah…you all know Sarah, right? If you don’t, you need to just get yourselves on over to her blog and check her out because she’s only, like, one of the most talented home decor bloggers out there.

Anyway.

This week Sarah is hosting her monthly Before and After party and I decided it would be the perfect time to do the big dramatic reveal of our master bedroom redo.

I know!

I mean, I droned on and on and on about it and then I never showed you pictures. I’m sure you’ve all been waiting with bated breath for this very moment ;) Or {most likely} you forgot all about it until I mentioned it just now :)

Either way, today you get to see the results.

So here’s pretty much how the bedroom looked when we moved in:

Plain walls, mismatched hand-me-down furniture, glider rocker shoved in the corner because we didn’t have a better place to put it :)

And now, many months, some new furniture, and a couple of coats of paint later, here’s the after:

    

   See that little cutie that snuck into the picture up there? :)

And yes, I know my super cool zebra print jewelry box doesn’t really fit the decor, but its all I have for now :)

And for those who are interested, here are some of the details of what we did:

  Obviously one of the biggest changes was the furniture. When we moved into this house we had budgeted a portion of our tax rebate to purchasing new furniture, including replacing our bedroom furniture. We didn’t spend a fortune on it, but we didn’t buy it from a thrift store either, so it wasn’t necessarily an inexpensive change.

Apart from that, I tried very hard not to spend much money on the accessories.

I showed you how I made the pillows out of placemats here:

And the bedding I had drooled over at Pottery Barn and then was pleasantly surprised to find that Target had a “knock-off” version of sorts for a fraction of the price!

The “curtains” are actually canvas painter’s dropcloth drapes – thanks to my friend Emily for referring me to Layla’s blog for that idea! They cost just a little over $9.00/piece – seriously NINE DOLLARS for window treatments people! You can’t beat that!

I love them so much I’ve actually considered putting them in our living room, too…would that be totally lame?

Oh, and the bamboo shades we got from J.C. Penney – on sale for 50% off plus a $20.00 off coupon.

I took some plain glass vases I had hanging out in the basement and hot glued some hemp around them to make these:

   And I found some clearance vase filler and this apothecary jar for only $10 at T.J. Maxx:

 

If I wanted to be really cool, I’d tell you that I found this green glass jar at a thrift store and fashioned it into a lamp…but the truth is…it’s from Target :)

Most of the other things – picture frames, candles, baskets, etc. – were things I already had around the house!

Oh, and the paint colors – in case you were curious, we used Sherwin Williams’ “Threshold Taupe” for three of the walls and the green window wall is Dutch Boy “Dried Thyme”.

So, one more time, let’s compare:

This is officially my favorite room in the house. Probably because it’s the only one that’s completely decorated :)

If you’re a total sucker for Before and After pictures, head over to Sarah’s for more!

Clutter Wars: The Pantry

Are you a spring cleaning person?

I am.

There’s something about this time of year that just gives me the itch to scrub and organize every square inch of our house.

Back in our apartment days I could spring clean all 800 square feet of living space in a day and call it good.

But now we have a house. And a toddler. And my cleaning/organizing can no longer be completed in one marathon day. I’ve got to break it into small bites.

My goal is to complete at least one cleaning project and one organizing project a week. This week’s project?

Organizing our pantry

I mean, not that it needed it or anything…

Yeah…right.

Anyway, I had hoped to do this while Lily was down for her nap yesterday, but didn’t get to it and against my better judgment, went ahead with it anyway after she got up. When I was finished my pantry looked like this:

But I turned around to find this…

  

…and this…

…and this…

 

Feeding herself a “nack” as she likes to call it.

Oh well…someday I’m sure my house will be perfectly clean and I’ll wish she was still here to mess it up for me :)

It’s a good thing I got things whipped into shape in there, too, because look what I found:

Hopefully now I can stop buying duplicates of everything because I’ll actually be able to find what I’m looking for.

In the meantime…does anyone have any good recipes that call for parsley and raisins?

From Placemats to Pillows: A Before and After

Last week my bloggy friend Ali asked me,

“Hey whatever happened to painting your room? Pick a color or paint yet?”

Why, that is an excellent question, Ali.

EXCELLENT!

The answer is…no.

I’ve looked at some paint chips. That’s about as far as things have gotten on the paint front **hangs head**

But the good news is, we have made progress on our master bedroom re-do. Lots of progress, actually. The painting is probably the last major thing we need to finish.

And since today happens to be

I thought I would share with you a little before and after project that I completed not long ago for our master bedroom.

I mentioned before that I loved the idea of white bedding with green and brown accent pillows, and I had found a few pillows that I liked. They weren’t horribly expensive – like $15 per pillow or something like that. But when you want to buy more than one, well – that can add up fast and I really didn’t feel like putting down $45.00 just for pillows.

Then one day I was browsing the table linens aisle in Kohl’s and saw the cutest placemats – only problem was, they wouldn’t go in our dining room. And then, a lightbulb went off – I could make pillows out of them! For our bedroom!

I thought I remembered awhile back that Sarah did a post about making pillows out of placemats and it seemed fairly easy, so I snatched up a couple and took them home.

I am telling you right now this is the EASIEST project I have ever done.

I think it took me all of five minutes, no lie.

We had some pillows on the couch in the basement that were once beautiful but the years had taken their toll on them:

 

They looked like the right size and shape so I just unzipped the covers and removed the pillow forms.

Then I took my seam ripper to those super cute placemats:

**Note: To do this project you need to use placemats that are double-sided – as in, two pieces of fabric sewn together. Otherwise this won’t work.**

I just ripped out the seam on one end, stuffed in the pillow form, and sewed it back together.

EASY PEASY.

Here’s a picture of the finished pillows sitting on top of our new bedding.

I love them!

We’ve made several other changes to the bedroom since this picture was taken – I can’t WAIT until it’s all done and I can show you the final reveal!

I also want to get {or make} a couple of other pillows for the bed to fill things out a little. It just doesn’t look quite “right” to me yet -- but I’m not sure what shape/size would be best. Any suggestions?