My Crafting Nook

Every time I needed to sew or work on another project I had to lug out my machine and all my supplies. Then everything had to just sit there until I finished the project. It was getting old. I started looking around the house for a corner or wall where I could make myself a crafting area. Charlie and I have a walk in closet and we both don't have huge wardrobes. There was so much wasted space in our closet so I decided to rearrange our clothes and see if I could come up with something. My sister had an old entertainment table she was getting rid of so I snatched it up, then I spray painted it blue. It looked good!
  

Here is one side of our closet before I started moving things around.

Here is the other side.

Basically I knocked out everything on the left side of the closet. Then I added a level of storage on the right side to put my clothes on. After ripping out all the shelving I patched up all the holes and painted that side yellow. Since it is a closet with no windows I thought yellow would be nice and bright.

Here is the shelf and area after they were both painted. Now my sewing machine is always up and ready whenever I want to work on a project. I use it a good bit more now!

See how I store my fabric scraps? I took a small strip of wood, wood glued clothes pins on it and spray painted them. Then I just attached them to the wall. Boom! The other storage for my odds and ends is also a strip of wood spray painted, but I put in hooks to hang different things on.

It does not take a lot of space to create a great crafting nook! I really enjoy my little spot :-)

Kitchen Makeover

When we bought this house, we knew the kitchen would eventually need to be... gutted basically. I'm not kidding when I tell you I have stayed in hotels with bigger kitchens. One bedroom apartments have more counter space! However Charlie and I are both good at seeing potential. We saw potential all over the yard, all over the playroom... and most importantly, all over the kitchen. Gutting our kitchen is going to be a big project, financially and work wise. That project is probably a good 3 to 5 years down the road. Knowing that I will have to live with my one person kitchen is not so bad, it is much more than some people have and I am grateful for it. Can you remember the kitchen when we moved in?




Yes, the cabinets are purple along with the knobs. The tile around the top is orange and the decorative tiles have different herbs and spices on them. The boarder has grapes all over it. It was a very specific design, but it did not fit our style at all. Also the crazy mini fridge microwave combo thing made for a very awkward set up. Those closet doors? That is the pantry.

Interested in seeing how it looks now, at least part of it I guess... please excuse the horrible lighting....


I made this shadow box thanks to Hobby Lobby. Charlie and I took a Disney behind the scene tour and got a special key pin. So I displayed that and our name tags from the tour, paired with a Disney sticker. Ta-da Disney shadow box!


On our last trip to Disney I picked up these post cards for a dollar or so. Then I grabbed some dollar framed and hung them up. Disney art for a fraction of the cost of actual Disney art.


Last I hung up my Mickey Mouse oven mitts. Adorable right? I know! I also painted the tile white. Much more fitting I think. Did you know you could paint tile? I paid roughly $8.00 for the can of paint where as new tile would have cost much, much more!


My last detail was the small Mickey head stickers on the nail heads. They are my hidden Mickeys ;-)

The cabinets are also white again, the knobs are nickle, the weird mini fridge is gone, the regular fridge is there now.... all these little changes have really made me enjoy my kitchen much, much more.

A Little More Progress

As time goes by, more things on our big "to do" list get accomplished. Which I am glad of that because my family is celebrating Christmas together at our house this year. Therefor I would like for as much of 1992 to be removed before then. Here are a few before and after photos for you. Sorry the lighting is horrible in the second one.... hey, it happens.


Let me point out a few of the changes we have made so far:

*Paint
*Boarder removed in kitchen above chair rail
*Removed the plastic shutters off of the dining room windows
*New carpet
*An actual piece of furniture under the TV
*TV wires hidden in the wall (way to go Hubster and Eric on that one)
*New light hanging above table (hard to tell in the picture, more on that project soon)

*Vertical blinds have been removed and new curtains put up.

And that is just the living/dining room! Boy it seems like a lot now that I write it out.... wow. I have also been changing out little details. All of these dated gold knobs have been replaced...

...with these brushed aluminum ones. Much better! I have also gone through the entire house replacing the beige light switches with nice white ones. All of the non matching switch covers plates are now white as well, which really makes things look more uniformed and put together.

It is amazing to me what a big difference all these little details have made. Somehow, it feels... cleaner... call me crazy! I am excited to be nearing the end of our updates. It will be nice to just live here. This place is feeling so much more like home :-)

Extreme Makeover : Lula Mae Edition

The past 4 days Charlie and I have been working together on Lula Mae's room. When we moved in it looked like this.

Luckily shortly after we moved in the carpet was replaced, which left us with removing the wallpaper boarder and painting.

After we removed the very stubborn boarder backing it look like this.


Just real quick.... for the love of all interior decorating please promise me you will never ever put wallpaper or any wallpaper boarders in your house!!!! Taking them off is freaking T.O.R.T.U.R.E. Literally I would rather nail my tongue to a table than have to do that again! And moving on....

This was the room freshly painted in a nice gray (gotta say it is my very favorite paint color right now. Love it!)


And then the fun began! Next we set up a projector and traced Cinderellas castle on the wall. Then, we traced the little Disney girl and got to work painting them both.


We always had a great audience willing to cheer us on.


After then it was all just detail work. Meticulous painting... lots and lots of meticulous painting! The castle took several coats of paint, which included several layers of paint around all the edges of the castle and all is towers, windows, corners, etc.... yeah we had a few late nights working on all those coats, but it was all worth it in the end. I also had to work on the word bubble over the little girl. By the way, I did not paint the Disney letters. A friend of mine got them for me off of ebay a while back. They worked perfectly! All I did was glue them right on wall. It's one of my favorite parts of the room.

After the final coat was finished I set up the projector again and painted the fireworks above the castle.

The little Disney girl turned out better than expected.


Here is the finished room! Yes, it was a lot of work and no I don't think I would do it again, but it was all worth it!


Because this little girl adores her new room. She has thanked us over and over and has not stopped talking about her Disney room.

See, there are a few things Lula Mae really, really loves:

1. Jesus/God/Church/The Bible
2. Uncle Eric
3. Disney World and all things Disney

So basically she LOVES it! I am so glad that she loves it too. Although if she hadn't I would have gladly moved into her room ;-)

Looks like our room is next on the Bell House Extreme Home Makeover. Luckily it won't be so fancy and won't take nearly as long to do. Whew!

I want to close in saying I really understand why decals have become so popular. Murals are no joke!

One Room Down!

...plenty more to go! I can't believe we have been in our house since January. I still feel like we are getting settled, even though we are quite settled. We have worked on different rooms trying to make them ours but I feel like the progress is slow. We have finished the play room, basically finished our bathroom (to the point we need to right now), finished the living room and finished Jayce's room. The kitchen is still an eye sore but it functions (for a single person, but hey it functions) and our bedroom has yet to be touched but we haven't lost sleep over it yet. Poor Lula Mae keeps asking us when we are going to paint her room so she is next on the list. When we took down the boarder in her room it really messed things up. We have a lot of work ahead of us to get her room ready to paint. She is being so patient but I am ready to give her the big girl room she deserves. But enough of my rambling, I came here to show you Jayce's room!

The owl was my inspiration for the room
(This picture is the only one that really shows the color of the room well. The lighting was horrible so just remember that when you look at the rest of the pictures. Continue on now...)

This is the owls tree

This is the other tree that balances out the other tree

View of both trees

Jayce's toy box, closet and shelf

You can't see it well but the painting says "Jayce"

Jayce's teeny tiny little bitty baby feet and his one year frame (minus his 12 month photo because I am slack and haven't printed pictures in... a while...)

Someone really loves his room :-)

Slow Progress

We have been living in our home for 6 months now. When we moved in I was overwhelmed at the amount of work that needed to be done inside and outside. Well, we are starting to finally see some of our work pay off. This is what the outside of the house looked like when we moved in. There was tons of overgrown shrubs, a crazy fence that needed to come down, the baby blue shutters were in desperate need of new paint.



So look at what we have now! We still have quite a long list of things to do, but we are happy to be seeing progress!


I will have a few pictures from the inside soon!

Oh, Well That Explains It...

My back hurts...

Yes, that is a pile of limbs, bushes, dead plants, etc.... in our front yard (sorry neighbors!). Yep.... it is bigger than our car. (Did I mention that our yard needs lots of work? Oh just wait until you see the before and after pictures!) Yep, my back is KILLING me! It was actually feeling better about 2 days ago.... then Lula Mae had one of her "you can't control me because I may or may not be possessed at this moment in time" spells. While fighting to get her pull up on her for nap (which took roughly 20 minuets, by the way) I felt a horrible pull and snap. Shock waves shot down my legs and up my back. Since then, everything hurts... well except standing. Sitting is horrible, laying is pretty rough and even stepping with my right foot is painful. I made an appointment to see the doctor tomorrow. So fun! I am ready to not hurt anymore.

Progress

Every time I turn around this little guy is standing up! He is close to cruising and I just can't believe it! Luckily the playroom is finally done so Jayce can have a safe and fun place to play.

Here are the before pictures of the playroom.

It was a horrible dungeon of a room. There was popcorn texture all over the walls which was seriously sharp.

Not to mention the horrible baby green walls and green trim and accents. So very dated!

It was being used as a catch all. Things just hung out here until we got around to finding a home for it.

What is all that????

And that????

That is what it looks like when you try to scrape popcorn texture that has been painted twice off.

This section took a total of about 5 man hours to scrape. It still wasn't "done" either. We would have had to scrape the entire room, sanded it, mudded it and sanded it again.... folks it is a BIG room...

So the hubby took my advice and we began ripping out the drywall. It was literally going to be easier to re-drywall the room than go through the 50 million steps to get the popcorn off. Ridiculous! Soooooo we had a big mess for a while. And for some stupid reason I forgot to take pictures of the room being re-dry walled. Oh well, too late now!

Now when you look down from the kitchen this is what you see...

I have a closest now! That door to the left is my new homeschooling central! It makes the room look so much more like a room, and less like a "mud room" like it did when we moved in. I LOVE our carpet!!!!! The concrete floor before was just a joke! You can't live on concrete!!!

This is the view coming in from the garage. So nice and inviting!

View from the picture window looking towards the garage door.

And this gives you a good view of my new closet!

I know it is hard for you to see the difference like we do, but trust me it is a HUGE difference! It changed the feel of the whole house! It just feels so much more like home now! We really love it! The only problem I am having is Lula Mae not liking to be down here with Jayce. She is a great sharer with other kids..... not so much with her brother. We are working on it... but it is a bumpy road!