You "otto" do this project. Wah-wah.

FINALLY! I finished another long-standing project. Yay!


When I moved to Wisconsin to start teaching, I was really excited to outfit my very own apartment. It was the cutest apartment you've ever seen. I called it the Hobbit House. The tallest thing in the place was the refrigerator. I could reach everything! It was very exciting. (I am five feet tall :0)

I bought two of these slipcovered ottomans from Ikea. As you can see, with one wash they started to look a little like they were wearing "highwater" pants.



As I had been seeing a lot ruffles and pleats out in blogland, I was inspired to make those ottomans a little more ladylike (and cover up those legs!) Basically, I cut 4 1/2 inch strips of fabric, ironed them a 1/2 inch on either side, pinned them to the original slipcovers and sewed them around. On the first one I pleated it, ironed it and put some basting stiches in. On the second one I ended up just pleating it as I went a long and that was a LOT easier. I ironed it afterward.


I read a tutorial or two, but I ended up eyeballing the pleats. Its a nice little Ikea upgrade! I like 'em!

Linking up to:

The Shabby Chic Cottage

Miss Mustard Seed

A Before and After + a Fall "Mantel"

Thanks for joining me for the Laura Ingalls party! I had a blast reading the posts and always marvel at how much one can learn from bloggers. And I'm glad Nellie Olson didn't come. :0)

I finally have gotten to the point where I feel like I'm pretty much done with the "mudroom". I may come back to it in the future if I have any spare beadboard or trim, but I decided not to go out and buy it special. I dressed it up for fall and it feels finished to me! Yay!

Here is the grizzly "before". This is just the top of our stairs, what you see if you turn left when you enter our back door. Welcome to our home, right?:I gave the mildew a scrub down with bleach, fresh primer and paint, new baskets/tags, hooks, a corner seat, and accessories!!!

I seriously hardly ever get to accessorize. No room for it. Here are some fall leaves from our yard:

Pine cones, berries and a fern from our yard:

The mirror used to hang in my sister's and my closet (is that right, Grammar Police?) when we were kids. It is from an old wardrobe. I've been trying to use it in our house, but it's VERY heavy and I couldn't find a good spot for it. I like it here!

It's kind of a difficult spot to photograph, but hopefully you get the picture. (wah-wah). We've been using this area more and more as it's gotten colder and I really love it. It has also become the place to store our library books throughout the week, which is handy and cute too!

Happy Autumn, all!

Pump Up the Jam. And the Pillows.

Hey all,

So kind of a silly project. At least I feel silly for caring, but c'mon look at these pillows! Flat as pancakes. Not very inviting. Just sad, sad pillows. I mean, in the swing of things not a big deal, but I just wanted fluffier pillows! So I took the cases off:

One was from Ikea, one was from Kohl's. Circa...2005. Maybe pillows just get flat over time. I tried fluffing them by hand, but I decided to bulk them up with some extra batting I had after taking apart a quilt.

Here they are in their new pumped up state!

Silly? Yes, but I like it!

Don't forget--Get Your Laura Ingalls On party tomorrow. Link up! I'll have instructions on how to do it on the post.

Coffee Talk

As you may have read in this post, I have several unfinished projects around the house, nagging at the back of my mind and preventing me from starting some other projects I'm interested in doing. I was hoping to finish them this past weekend, but of course it didn't happen. But I did finish ONE of them. A big one.

I found this table in Mr. Wonderful's basement after we got married. I love the lines in the legs and the squares on the top. We used it upstairs for awhile. It worked great for playing games, but it is waaaaaaaaaaaaaay too big for our 10x10 living room. It was also in pretty rough shape. It had a thick amber shellac on it that was chipping in a lot of places. So I decided to refinish it. If I had my way, it would have probably been painted. But Mr. Wonderful didn't want to cover up the wood, so I planned to refinish it, forgetting that I was 8 months pregnant and shouldn't be using poisonous chemicals. Preggo brain, right? So that didn't happen. It has been sitting in our garage half-done for 16 months.

Until now! I used chemicals, sandpaper, a sander, a profile sander, a Dremel, a drywall scraper thing and even a flat head screwdriver to sand, scrape, chip and wish that thick amber shellac away. It was not a scientific process. It was not always pretty and I'm not even sure I got it all. But here's what it looked like when I decided to just hope for the best. I actually kind of like it like this. It reminds me of old leather:

(check out the saw horses I got for Mr. Wonderful. $5 at a rummage sale. They saved my back some aches and pains)

Here it is after 1 coat of Red Mahogany:

I read in a post somewhere that vegetable oil gets oil based paints off your hands. It did a pretty good job, and I was thrilled to not have to put mineral spirit on my hands!

The table now lives in the man cave where it has room to run around. I love how the grain of the wood alternates:

I put two coats of polyurethane on it. I think it's improved and its DONE!

The NUMBERED Cottage

Whew!

It's been a long time! Long story short, I'm starting a small business, so projects and blogging (and lawn mowing as you will soon see) have been on hold. BUT I'm really excited about this post, because although the exterior of our house could use a lot of work, we did an upgrade this past month that really makes a big impact on our "curb appeal".

Behold: The "before" front of our house: (creepy stalkers and burglars note that we don't have anything of interest in our house, so ignore the house number). Note the sticker house numbers. For Christmas I asked for these FABULOUS house numbers. They can be found at Home Depot, but interestingly not at their website. It's like a wonderful insiders secret!

Mr. Wonderful did all of the work to put these up. I will tell you that he used some caulk-type stuff to secure the numbers, and then used the tape to hold them in place until it set. I got to enjoy the job of scraping off the ancient sticker numbers that were on our door frame. Let me tell you that Goo Gone did not really work on these suckers. Mostly just elbow grease and some scrapes in the paint on the metal door frame.

Much prettier! I love how modern and clean the numbers look. And much more readable. I would also love to paint the front steps and then paint the house number on the front steps too. Mr. Wonderful says we should worry about the exterior NEXT summer. He's probably right!

Also I changed out the flowers in my wreath to match the ones in the coffeepot on the front steps. Less cluttery that way, I think.

Faux Roman Blindy Thingys

I don't know if I've mentioned it on the blog before, but we received an awesome gift from a friend for our baby. She works for a trade magazine that specializes in baby gear and thus gets a bunch of awesome freebies through work. She passed along a COMPLETE nursery from Cocalo Couture, and some other things to boot which totally floored us and made outfitting Ava's room a breeze. I love all of it, but since our nursery is small, we has to put the crib next to a window. If you have kids you know there are all sorts of safety precautions to make when it comes to windows. It's gotten to the point where I wasn't totally comfortable having those long drapes so close to her when she isn't supervised. (Choking hazard? Suffocation? There is so much to worry about!)

So I took a cue from some other bloggers and decided to try making some Roman Shade looking things. I read some other blogs, here, here, and here. Then I decided to wing it and make it up as I went along. I knew I wanted to just keep the curtain rod. No cornice or anything fancy. I liked the Nester's idea of just tying it up with ribbon, but the curtain was way too long to do that and I didn't want to cut it down. So I did sort of a fusion of a Roman Shade tied up.

Not perfect, but safer. And I safety pinned up the ribbons on the bottom, so if she ever gets tall enough to reach it I can always pin it up higher. :0)

I'm linking up to Thrifty Decor Chick's Before and After Party!

It's In the Bag...

I can't believe that I just sewed two bags. I took fabric and out of this fabric a bag appears. I'm not claiming they are any GOOD, but they serve the intended purpose and this is still boggling my mind! I can do it!

I used the book Handmade Home by Amanda Soule Blake to make them. There were challenging parts, such as dealing with the blasted bobbin, and figuring out how to make button holes (the machine just does it FOR you! Even my ancient one!) I wanted to make a bag to replace the above lovely plastic one, which has been my place to put the multitude of bibs and washcloths that clean up mealtimes. Babies have a way of exponentially increasing one's laundry, no?

This is the one I made! I think it looks much better. I had some sturdy canvas material, which I figured would hold up well. I didn't make the cloth balls hanging down that the book suggests, but I did make a pocket on the front. For color. And I used hem tape that I found at a thrift store (5 packs/$.26!) for the straps and drawstring.

Here is the other bag I made. I made it to hold Ava's cloth wipes, which are currently getting hopelessly mixed in with all her diapers. When baby is on the changing table and you realize you need another wipe, you want to be able to get to it FAST! Hopefully this will facilitate such speed.

I would definitely suggest checking your local library for Handmade Home. There are a LOT of cute ideas for practical things you can use around the house. They aren't too complex, and some of them don't even use a pattern, such as this one. A good confidence builder!

A Goodwill FIND

Here is the shower curtain we received for a wedding gift: I picked it out for our registry, but it never QUITE clicked. Especially with our towels. They are more of a slate blue than the blue in the stripes. Plus, it's springtime and I was ready for a change in the back of my mind. Behold, our new shower curtain:

I got it at the Goodwill for $4! I love the bold, cheerful print! I also really like crisp, white shower curtains, so maybe I'll just have a rotation. I'm excited to explore some accessory changes in the bathroom as well. And yes, the curtain IS wrinkled. I was too excited to put it up to wait until Ava was done with her nap to unfold our extremely squeaky ironing board. I figure the wrinkles will fall out with a couple hot showers. Right? Right guys? Guys?

Arranging our art wall, step by step.

Whew! This post has been awhile in the making. I'm learning that it's all about patience when it comes to frugal home decor. Well, two years ago (I told you it's been awhile!) I got married. Our anniversary is on the 15th! Aaaaand about a month-and-a-half ago, we got this in the mail: Its our wedding pictures! I picked out some pictures that I wanted to put in a collage on our bedroom wall. So I gathered up all the frames we received as wedding gifts. I noticed that most of them were a brushed or antiqued silver color. Except for this one:

I researched whether you could antique something like that and I found a website that described how you can get that effect on your silver dishes with one of these:



The frame said it was silver plated, so I thought what the heck? I mashed it up in a bag, so it looked like this:

I rubbed the egg all over the frame and guess what? Epic fail. All it accomplished is making me feel silly and making me crave egg salad. So eventually, I decided that frame would be best used for another project. :0)

But I had this frame already. And I thought to myself, "how on earth am I going to find pictures that small from our wedding?" And then I dug deep and realized that I could take the matting out and use a big picture!
I heard from Layla that you should lay out the pictures on the floor in front of the wall that you want to hang them on in order to figure out how to arrange them. Buuuut, we don't have floor space, so I used our bed. First, I tried an arrangement where all the pictures are arranged with a horizontal line inbetween. I think I saw it on Martha's website. It's kind of meh, for me.
Then I tried something a little more stair-steppy.
Then I tried putting the biggest frame in the middle (which I think I heard from the Nester) and flanking it with smaller ones. But there are a lot of larger frames in my collection....
Then I tried throwing out all the rules.
I added the new oval frame in. I tried to balance the black and whites with the colors and made sure the matching frames weren't next to each other.
Then I went for more of a "diamond" shape. Roughly. Which I think I saw on Layla's Houzz interview.
And that ended up to be the one I liked the best! Another trick I heard from Martha is that you should use newspaper templates to hang up on your wall before you put the frames up. It makes it easy to get the nails (or whatever you use) in the right spot.
I love having that be our art in our bedroom. It reminds us of that special day and helps me to drop my other concerns at the door. Our bedroom came together in a lot of soothing tones and this really highlights them for me.
Yay! It's finally done! *runs to find a checklist to cross it off of*