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With the mounting demands of school and work and all of my usual duties plus my teenager breaking his arm (yes, that's right- Colin broke his arm at lacrosse practice 3 weeks ago), I was in serious need of a quick, simple, fun, and rewarding crafting project to lift my spirits.  My mantel has felt a little blah, and I knew just what would gussy it up.  After a quick trip to Hobby Lobby, I had all of my supplies:  3 sheets of craft paper, 1 page of card stock, scissors, twine, and a hole punch.

I made a template with the card stock, totally guessing on the dimensions until I landed on something that pleased my eye.  Using the template, I cut 3 shapes (what the heck are they called?  flags?) in each color.  I punched 2 holes in each and strung them on a piece of twine, and I was done-zo.  Boom.

Since the craft paper was on 50% at Hobby Lobby and I already had all of the other supplies, this beauty set me back $0.94.  Picture me patting myself on the back.

 

Anyone else out there get their craft on lately?  Can you beat my cute-and-new-for-only-94-cents price tag?

xo,

Emily

Señor Ombre

Class is still in session, and my sister is still holding down the blog-fort.  And, look: here she is with another project that has me drooling all over my keyboard.  Take it away, Amy!!

I'm back again, this time with my latest YHL-inspired project!  (Remember the others?  The Custom State Art, the Fun Geometric Art, and the Venn Diagram, which was additionally inspired by Our Humble Abode?)  Well, this time the project involved more than an X-acto knife, Mod-Podge, some canvases, and an hour of my time.  I took inspiration from Idea #230 of YHL's book, "Paint a Gradient."  

This was one of the items from the book I had mentally put in the "must do" category, and I already had the perfect victim, er, piece of furniture, sitting in my basement.  The dresser my husband brought into our marriage was something his family had inherited at some point from some relative (I asked my mother-in-law, but she wasn't sure when or from whom).  I loved the dresser, and especially the hardware, but it had seen better days.  

 Structurally, it was in great shape, though.  I decided a makeover was definitely in order.

 

The first task was deciding on color.  I set out for Home Depot (which, incidentally, is a half-hour away and I took three of my kids with me!) to consider colors and grab some paint chips.  I immediately gravitated toward the greys -- I love the dresser in the book and I have a habit of imitating what I like since I'm fairly sure I don't really have any natural design or decorating talent of my own.  But my daughter Naomi, whose favorite color these days is turquoise, convinced me to take home some of the turquoise/teal paint chips.  Long story short, once I got home, I settled on four shades of teal, all from the same Behr paint chip.  (Shallow Sea, Tropical Tide, Lagoon, and Mosac Tile, by the way.)  I went back to Home Depot and got a quart of the darkest color in satin, and Behr tester pots of the lighter three shades.  
Something I learned:  the tester pots only come in a flat finish, so if you want a wipeable finish, you'll need to put a clear coat of something over top.  I also picked up a quart of grey-tinted Glidden Gripper water-based primer.  Love the stuff.  I'll get to that part later.
 
I started by taking the drawers out, removing the hardware, and giving everything a light sanding and wipe-down.  Then I used a foam roller to apply one coat of the Gripper primer to the fronts of the four drawers and the top, front and sides of the dresser.  

 

It went on great, covered well, and provided a nice undercoat for the paint.  By the way, this stuff is advertised to stick to almost anything -- Tile?  Check.  Wallpaper?  Check.  Plastic and wood laminates?  Check.  Even glass, according to the person at the paint counter.  I can tell you that I did drip some on my tile floor (apparently my cereal-box dropcloth wasn't sufficient) and I had a pretty hard time scraping it off a few days later.  So I'm pretty confident that it won't chip or peel easily from the dresser, even with five kids opening and closing the drawers on a regular basis.

Then, I rolled a different color of teal paint onto each of the drawer fronts, and I also rolled the darkest color onto the rest of the dresser.  

I think I used three coats of paint.  Unfortunately, I only had one foam roller, so for the first coat, I had to wash out the roller in between painting each of the drawer fronts.  It then occurred to me that I should buy more rollers and store them in a sandwich bag in between coats.  Honestly, it took me more time to wash out the roller than it did to paint each drawer front!  I had also picked up a can of Krylon ORB spray paint to freshen up the hardware.  A few thin and even coats did the trick.

The girl at the paint counter at Home Depot had recommended purchasing a quart of untinted Behr Deep Base Self-Priming Interior Satin Enamel to use for the top coat.  She showed me that the paint looks milky-white while it's wet, but said that it dries clear.  I ended up buying it and using it on the four drawer fronts, and wasn't happy with the results.  She cautioned me against making my coats too thick, but said I could do as many coats as I wanted, as long as they were thin.  So I rolled on two super thin coats and should've only used one.  It may not be clear from the pictures, but there's a milky haze on the drawers.  It was more apparent in the darker colors, so I repainted the bottom drawer with the dark teal paint to get rid of the haze.  (Since it was a satin finish anyway, it didn't really need a top coat for wipeability's sake.)  And thankfully, it's in our guest room, which is in our basement, which is dark, so the haze isn't too obvious.

Once everything had a couple of days to completely dry and harden up, I reattached the hardware, put the drawers back in, and moved the dresser to its new home, (which happens to be the basement wall adjacent to the wall that used to be its old home).  The bottom two drawers hold the kids' DVDs, and the top two remain empty for guests.

 

 

 

 

 

Overall, I'm really happy with how it turned out.  We've been using it for several weeks now and it still looks flawless, so that's a good sign!  I have several more projects on the agenda (can you say Board and Batten a la YHL?), so if I have the opportunity, maybe I'll be back!

Okay, by show of hands, who loves this dresser makeover?!  **wildly waves hand**

It think it was a great way to give the old, tired piece a new lease on life, and I think Naomi deserves a big hug for convincing my sister to choose these fresh, happy colors.  Don't you just love it all?!  Oh, and I, personally, am super excited to see Amy and Jim's board and batten project!  I've been wanting to do this treatment to my hallway, so hopefully they're learning all the tricks that they can pass on to me once I get back on the DIY horse!

xo,

Emily

Glogger: YHL inspiration

Since I started taking a statistics class at the local community college, I have had little time for any DIY projects or even little crafty things.  And, without those, I've got nothing to blog about!  But, thankfully, I've got a glogger today (guest blogger=glogger) who is here to share a couple of her most recent DIY projects.  That is, of course, aside from her best (and most involved) project to date of being a wife and mother and homeschooler of 5 young'uns.  Take it away, Amy!

Some of you may know that Emily's birthday is in November.  Some of you may also know that both Emily and I are devoted Young House Love followers.  So this past November, when Emily's birthday and the release date of John and Sherry's book nearly collided, I saw a great gift opportunity!  In the late summer/early fall of 2012, when the book became available for pre-order, I purchased one to be sent directly to Emily, (specially birthday-wrapped with a card, of course!), hoping that it would arrive just before her birthday.  And it did!!  She was delighted, and of course, I was DYING to get my hands on a copy.  She had never gotten me a gift for my most recent birthday (way back in May!), and she had been waiting for "just the right thing"....  I bet you know what I'm going to say next -- yes, she bought the book for me as a 6-month-belated birthday gift.  So after reading through the entire book, (which didn't take too long since I read it at every opportunity!), I mentally broke their ideas into categories:  "must do," "might do," and "hmmmm, that's interesting...." 

I've been plugging along with the "must do" items here and there, and Emily asked me to share what I've done so far.  So here goes:

We have a frame wall in our upper stairway (by the way, poorly lit stairwell + awful photographer + inexpensive camera = BAAAAD pictures, so I'll only force you to look at one picture of these projects hanging on the stairway wall -- I then attempted to stage them in better-lit areas).  The original idea for our frame wall came from John and Sherry's awesome hallway frame gallery.  When we originally hung all of the frames, we used some things that were just meant to be placeholders until something more permanent was found/made.  So after a year of staring at magazine/catalog pages, I made some custom state art!!  (And for those of you who own the book, it's Idea #124:  Whip Up Custom State Art.)
Until we moved to Pennsylvania in 2007, both of us had lived in Maryland all of our lives.  So I decided to do both Maryland and Pennsylvania.  I searched online for maps that were about the size I was looking for -- I was using a 5X7 frame (although you could just print out any size map and enlarge or shrink it to fit -- I didn't do that because our copier wasn't working at the time).  I also read a tip recently about printing maps:  if you just want the outline and not all the stuff inside, google "[your state's name] coloring page" and state outlines should pop up.

So after I printed out the two maps, I used my X-Acto knife to carefully cut out the outline of each state.  (That cursed Chesapeake Bay!)  States with lots of right angles and straight lines = a cinch.  States with lots of little pieces of land jutting out into water = not a cinch.  But remember, it doesn't have to be perfect.  The unfortunate part of this project was that I didn't just have to cut around the outline of each state once -- I had to do it twice!  I used the first cutout as a template and traced around it onto decorative paper, then had to cut around that outline.  Let me just say that this experience brought back some not-so-fond memories of the X-Acto knife project I did in middle school art class.  But once that was all done, I taped it onto a cut-to-size piece of contrasting decorative paper, popped it in the frame, and it was done!  And little by little, one step at a time, my frame gallery is becoming more personalized!

For my next project, (which, thankfully, involved scissors rather than an X-Acto knife!), I decided to try Idea #147:  Make Fun Geometric Art.  (It involved cutting and Mod-Podging tissue paper shapes onto canvas.)  

This was one of those projects I started without intending to start anything, so I didn't exactly take inventory and purchase any supplies first.  In fact, it was New Year's Eve, and the kids were in bed and Jim was running a race.  (Yes, he was running into the new year!)  I felt that little spark of creativity, had a couple of hours of quiet, and figured I should seize the opportunity to get something done!  So I gathered tissue paper, scissors, a pencil, round objects, Mod Podge, a sponge brush and canvas, and I set to work.  I love the combination of blues and greens Sherry chose for her piece, but since my tissue paper selection was a little bit sparse, I settled for yellow, and went back and forth on the shapes/placement and whether to use other colors.  I eventualy added some black construction paper to the mix.  I don't absolutely love the final result, but it's not completely awful for a first attempt.  Who knows -- I may buy a bigger canvas, more tissue paper, and have another go at it...

 The next thing I decided to tackle was actually inspired by something I saw on Amanda Bowe's (of Our Humble Abode) Etsy shop.  Check out her custom Venn Diagrams -- cute idea, huh?  (She's even got one on her own mantel with her and her husband's initials.)  I figured I'd throw in a twist, though:  I decided to combine the mod-podged-tissue-paper-shapes-on-canvas idea (Young House Love) with the husband/wife-initial-venn-diagram idea (Our Humble Abode) and ended up with a mod-podged-tissue-paper-family-venn-diagram-on-canvas (Our Young Humble House?  Hmmmm, not too catchy...)  Anyway, after playing around with different colors of tissue paper circles, I settled for pink and yellow since the other color combinations didn't blend well in the overlapping part.  I printed out the first initial of each person in our family (seven, all together) on plain white paper, in the same font each person had chosen last year when I printed our initials as part of our frame wall.  (That was a fun and simple project -- my kids loved picking a font for their letter!  And I got to pick out Jim's font -- I chose pirate writing since he's the captain of our crew!)  For this project, I printed mine and Jim's in a larger font than the kids'.  After I cut around each letter semi-carefully, (they show through a little, so if I did it again, I'd be more careful), I figured the correct placment of each of the initials and the tissue paper circles.  I mod-podged each of the letters to the canvas first, then mod-podged the tissue paper over that, then put a coat of mod-podge over the entire thing.  The letters were still not as clear as I wanted so I ended up going over them with a black Sharpie after everything was dry.  Overall, I'm really pleased with the result.  Just seeing how it represents our very own family makes me smile each time I go up or down the stairs!  (Although if we have any more kids, I'll have to make another one since the five kids' initials take up most of the overlapping space!)

So that's about it for now.  I'm currently working on another project from the book, though:  #230, Paint a Gradient.  

My daughter helped me to break out of my comfort zone and go with some fun colors for an old dresser that Jim brought into our marriage.  I'm liking what I see so far.  Hopefully I'll be back with details.

 

Thanks, Emily, for allowing me to glog!  All afternoon and evening the kids kept walking by me at the computer saying, "You're STILL writing?!", so I know that full-time blogging isn't for me!  But I appreciate being able to share a few projects here and there!

 

Um, how awesome are all of Amy's projects?!  How in the world does she find time to do these crafty things- that's what I want to know!  You know what I love so much about my sister and the way she dresses her home?  She takes time to personalize the beautiful things around her.  I feel like anyone can have beautiful things, but Amy has beautiful things in her home that have meaning behind them.  And, that is so special in my opinion.  Stay tuned- maybe she'll share with us that ombre dresser she's working on!

 

xo,

Emily

Going Dutch

Well, lookie, lookie what we did.  We converted the door at the top of the stairs from the kitchen to the basement from a regular old door to a dutch door!

You can see the door here on the left side of the photo in all of its natural wood glory.

And, this is what it looks like now:

Oh yeah, and I might have forgotten to mention that I PAINTED IT BLACK!!  Which might be the coolest part of the whole project, but back to the door itself.

Why do I want a dutch door, you might be wondering.  Well, I'm glad you asked.  Our kitchen is sort of the doggy isolation area when we get back from our daily river walks.  You see, my dogs love to swim in the river that we walk along, so most days I return home with two dirty, wet, happy swamp monsters for dogs.  See exhibit A:

And, exhibit B:

So, to keep the entire house from becoming a nasty pit of dirt and filth, I often keep them in the kitchen until they are slightly less dirty.  Which means I need to be able to close off the exits.  And, having a door that can be open on the top and closed on the bottom means heat from the basement stove can travel up and light from upstairs can travel down while the dogs stay put.

Of course, turning a door into a dutch door was not as easy as I had hoped it would be.  (Is anything?)  Making the actual cut was simple:  a friend came over and did that for me with a circular saw.  After cutting the door in two, I was left with a top half, which already had 2 hinges, and a bottom half with only 1 hinge.  The top could be rehung right away, but I needed to install a second hinge on the bottom before it would be functional.

I won't go into the gory details of installing hinges, but let's just say that it's not one of my talents.  If you ever decide to give it a try, I have one word for you:  precision.  Be precise!  The hinge placement- both on the door and on the door frame- can't be just "good enough".  It has to be exactly, precisely correct.  Or else you get a wonky door.  Which won't go back on its hinge.  Ask me how I know that.  Go ahead- ask.

Anyway, after some trial and error, I was able to successfully add a hinge to the bottom half.  So, I had a door, cut in two, which now had two hinges on the top and two hinges on the bottom.

Time for paint!  The painting process was simple:  one coat of primer, three coats of paint.  While I was at it, I also painted the molding around the door, which also required three coats of paint.  All of the waiting between coats of paint (and that darned full-time job) made this project drag out to nearly 3 weeks.

Once all the paint was finally dry, I was super excited to rehang the door and finally get to see all of my hard work pay off.  Picture me springing out of bed last Saturday morning (this alone is noteworthy, as I am not a morning person) ready to *finally* pop the door back onto its hinges and fall in love.  Now picture my disappointment as I discovered that 7 coats of primer/paint can really affect how a door fits into its opening. It wouldn't fit.  Not even close.  Cue the violins, and give me some cheese for my whine.  'Cause I was super disappointed.  Back to the drawing board.

But, you know what they say:  where there's a will, there's a way!  And, will has never been something I've been short on.  I pulled out my palm sander, and showed that door who's boss!  I sanded down the edge of the door (on the door knob side, not the hinge side) until it closed without hitting.  And, I also ended up needing to recess the strike plate on the door jam a touch further.  But, once it was all said and done, I was left with a fabulous and wonderful dutch door.

It's totally functional for us, and frankly I love it for its looks alone.

It's unexpected, and the black paint really sets it off with the white molding and bead board nearby.

At this point, this project is about 90% done.  You can't tell from the pictures, but when both halves of the door are closed, they rub each other just the slightest bit.  I'm sure this is because of my questionable hinge installation skills, because when the halves are open, they don't touch at all.  At any rate, this can be easily corrected by taking a blade width off the top half, which I plan to do this weekend.  Other than that, I just need to decide how/if to top off the bottom half.  Right now, the cut edge is just painted, but I could top it off with some wood or laminate or something to make it feel a bit more polished.  I'm still researching what to do there, so stay tuned.

 

I love catching a glimpse of the black door from across the room.  See how it ties into the black curtain rods and shelf supports?

 And, when its all closed, it looks like a normal door!

 

But, of course, I prefer to show off all of its dutch-ness!

So, what do you think?  Do you like dutch doors?  Do you like doors that have been painted black?  I hope so, because I foresee some more in my not-too-distant future!

xo,

Emily

**  linking to
Elizabeth & Co.
Shabby Creek Cottage

Thrifting Sisters

A bit of trivia for you today.

Q:  What do you get when you take two sisters and give them a day full of shopping including stops at 3 thrift stores, Ikea, Home Goods, Marshall's, TJ Maxx, Target and Old Navy?! 

A:  A trunk full of goodies and very little moolah spent!!

Thanks, Amy, for spending the day with me!  It's not often that you are able to have a day to yourself, so thank you for sharing it with me.  I love you!!

xo,

Emily

Do you see what I see?

Something is different in our living room, and I'll give you 3 guesses, but you probably won't need them.

Anyone?!!

We got an awesome, soft and fuzzy, correctly sized, wool, trellis patterned rug, and I am IN LOVE!

I have known our living room rug was on the small size, but rugs are expensive, people!  And, I had been passively searching for a replacement, but I hadn't found anything I couldn't live without.  And, if I'm going to shell over that kind of moolah for a rug, I have to LOVE it.

Enter: online rug retailers, namely RugsUSA.com and Overstock.com.  If you cannot find a rug that you love on one of these sites, then you cannot love a rug.  Serious.  They have EVERYTHING.

When I saw this beaut, I knew she was destined to be mine.  And, the fact that she was 20% off made the deal even sweeter.

I labored over what color to get, and I originally was going to go with the gray.  But reading the reviews revealed that the gray was very much a blue-gray, and I was worried that it would be too blue.  So, I went with my second choice:  khaki. 

And, now that I have it, I love the color and think it's perfect with what I have going on in the room.  It's a nice neutral, and I think it will prove to be quite versatile, as this room continues to evolve.  The khaki section is looped and slightly lower than the tufted cream trellis pattern.  Overall, the rug is very soft and fluffy, and it's 100% wool, which was a requirement for this purchase.

 

I feel like this addition just pulled the whole room together.  Oh, and don't mind the tv on the hearth.  It's football playoffs season, people, and this Ravens Fan needs to see her team play.  Even if game time is during dinner-making time.  M'kay?!

Some reviewers complained about the rug shedding too much, but I haven't had any issues.  I suspect the worse offenders are probably the darker rugs, because the light pattern and the dark background make the shedding so much more obvious.  I have no complaints.  There has been some shedding, but compared to what I was expecting?  Nada.

Ah, home sweet home.

xo,

Emily