#65 - Touch up the paint spots all over the house (with the correct shade)

As it turns out, after nearly 10 years in a house, paint fades. For the life of me, I could NOT figure out how to touch up any spots on our walls because the right paint color, with every sheen under the sun, was not a match.

I later learned that sprayed-on paint can't necessarily be touched up with a paintbrush. Who knew?

Now that we've decided to stay put in our house for a while, I decided it needed a face lift. A friend had her cabinets and banister painted and it looked nice in pictures, but once I saw it in person, I couldn't stop thinking about it! 

Was there anything "wrong" with my house before? No, not really. I was just ready for a change, and paint is a relatively cheap way to change things up.

I didn't mind the tan that was throughout our house, but I have had an itch to cool things up with gray for a couple of years now, so I started looking for grays. There are brown grays and green grays and TONS of blue grays...finding a shade of gray turned out to be a lot harder than I imagined.

I finally pulled the trigger and picked one. We painted all of the common areas of the downstairs, up the stairwell, into the office and in the halls. I really like how it turned out! I went with a basic white for the cabinets, even though I considered tea-staining it, I decided on white in the end.

Kitchen: Before

Kitchen: DURING the painting of the cabinets. I thought ahead and pulled out some dishes and silverware and put them in the pantry, but they moved the fridge right in front of the pantry door. Curses!  So we had to eat out almost every meal for 3 days and, what's worse, is that I couldn't get into my kitchen to make Mike a birthday cake this year. :(  He got a birthday pumpkin pie from Trader Joe's.

(I didn't know what was going on behind that quarantined plastic wall, so I peeked through from the backyard window.)

Cabinets painted, walls the same

Kitchen: After

Family room: Before

Family room: After

I bought some pillows to try to tie together the old brown and the new gray, because we're clearly not replacing our furniture and window coverings anytime soon!

This was my inspiration for the staircase. We'll rip up the carpet and put in wood down the road.

Banister: After

This was my inspiration for a VERY dark charcoal bathroom with red and white accents.

Bathroom: After

It's easy to decorate with red and white at Christmas, but we'll keep the colors the same when we replace our decor in a few weeks!

In the bathroom, I spray painted a useless, mint-green tin container bright red and that's what's on the back of the toilet, holding extra towels. I also touched up a giant red basket that holds extra toilet paper on the floor. I know it seems silly to pay this much attention to a random half bathroom, but I am in there every day, multiple times each day, and it makes me happy every time I see it.

#66 - Hang the glass flower vase thingy somewhere where I'll appreciate it

My mom bought me this suspended vase thingy years ago. An embarrassing number of years ago…like six. I never knew where to put it, but now it's finally up! Right next to my kitchen sink, where it won't be bumped but it's visible where I'll see it appreciate it often.

#66 on my 101 in 1001 list is done! It only took six years to spend 3 minutes hanging it. Nice.

Neat Freak Rule #121 - Don't Reinvent the Wheel with Storing Christmas Decor

Packing away Christmas decorations used to be so stressful for me. All of my big, bulky decor that was a puzzle to cram into the designated boxes I have that just-barely fit in my garage cabinets. 

Then I got a label maker and started labeling everything. It seemed silly when I was decorating because I didn't care what was in each box…I put out ALL of the items and the boxes ended up being empty! But. When it was time to put everything away, I realized how easy it was for me (and others in my family who can read!) to get the big items in the right box and squeeze everything else all around them.

These labels have saved my sanity more than once. Even if you use masking tape, consider labeling your holiday containers!

(PS - Your house will still look like a disaster when you un-decorate, but at least it might save you a little time.)

Out with the old...

I don't do a lot of refurbishing of old furniture around here. It's just not my thing, I guess. But I've been sick of the handles on Mike's childhood furniture (that is now in Ryan and Jason's room) for quite a while now.

So this week, I brought these dressers out of the 70s and into the...um...2010s? (What is this decade called, anyway?) I'm sure many of you would love to take a sander or a spray paint can to these pieces, but for now, the knobs are enough for me.

This shorter dresser is now Jason's changing table...

(these pictures make the dressers look different colors, but they actually match...I think...)

What Makes You Smile?

My sweet blog friend, Heathahlee, wrote a post last week about "What Do You Love in Your Home?" which spawned into a challenge to post about "What Makes Me Smile."

Today was the perfect day for this post because the kids have had a really rough day. (translation: MOMMY has had a rough day as a result!) It's naptime, finally a break for me, and it completely cheered me up to walk around my house with the camera to get a visual representation of things that make me smile in my home. I think I'll also read my list of 100 Things That Make Me Happy as a pick me up later today.

So here are some things that I love in my home and a few extra things that make me smile at the end...

The bookshelf in our office: this used to be a HUGE eye-sore, but has made me happy every time I look at it since I finally decided to clean it up and make it presentable.


A mirror my grandmother made for our wedding...countless seashells on this thing. Took her months to do.


Sconces above the reading corner in our bedroom. These were in the Good Will pile until my friend Donna helped me decorate after we moved in a few years ago. Now I love this little area every time I see it.

My scrapbook room; my own little corner of the house. After unintentionally taking months off from my favorite hobby, I finally printed some pictures this weekend and am back in the groove of preserving our memories.

The baking drawer in my kitchen. Yes, I realize how stupid this sounds, but when we unpacked from our old home years ago, my mom suggested keeping all baking items together (including measuring devices, cookie scoops, birthday candles, baking cups and sprinkles). Sounds simple enough, but I bake SO often, that having everything in one place makes my life just that much more efficient. And being organized makes me really smile.

Dress up bins in the kids' playroom closet. I finally got around to taking pictures of each bins' contents and putting them under the word labels that my kids couldn't read. Now things go back where they belong instead of necklaces on top of hats on top of tutus mixed in with sheriff's badges and princess shoes.

I miss seeing this picture as my blog header, but it was taken over a year ago, so it was time for a change. I just love it and I smile every time I look at it in our front room.

The entryway to our house makes me smile. I love how warm the colors are, the random sticks hanging out of the vase on the left, and the table and chest that my grandmother convinced me to take from her house were the perfect addition to this long, empty wall. And now the collage above my dining room table (seen in the mirror) make me smile!


It makes me smile to see my kids laugh and play together.

It makes me smile to see my family work together...on anything, really. Here the kids are painting a pole for Mike this weekend for a backyard project he was working on.


And last, but not least, my awesome new camera makes me happy each time I use it, every time I see pictures I've taken with it...really any time I see it on the counter, I get giddy inside. I love this thing.

What makes YOU smile?

#74 - Find the perfect picture for above the dining room table

When I went away on my girls weekend last month, I found some black, matted, 15"x15" square frames on clearance marked 80% off, down from $30 to $6 each. Instead of paying big bucks for one larger picture to hang above my dining room table, I decided to do a collage of family pictures. Mike helped me hang everything last night (it would have taken me forever to get everything straight and proportioned on my own - thanks, honey!) and now I get to check #74 off my 101 in 1001 list. Looking at the picture below, I just realized that the space between the top pictures is wider than I wanted. Hmm...that's what I get for starting this project at 9:30 at night...

Since my dining room table is square and the frames are square, the wall needed some variety and a different shape, so I picked up the maroon and gold plaque at Kirkland Home the other day to complete the project. (my walls are gold on top and maroon on the bottom 1/3 of the wall below a chair rail)

I realize it's a bit cheesy, being that I'm from Kansas and all, but it is the perfect sentiment for the display.

Keeping Paint Colors Handy

I learned a valuable lesson when we moved out of our last house. After painting the walls, I kept the leftover paint "just in case." After 6 years of sitting in the garage, the paint dried up. So naturally, one day when we were cleaning the garage, I looked inside each can and figured, "Why have I been keeping these cans? There's barely any paint in here!" (*toss*)

When we moved out, I pulled pictures off the walls and realized I needed to touch up some of the paint in almost every room of the house. (each painted a different color) I quickly remembered throwing the cans away and was kicking myself, wondering how I'd get the hardware store to match a color that I couldn't show them! I actually had to take pieces of the dry wall in with me...it was a disaster.

So when we painted the kids' rooms and my craft room when we moved into this house, I wised up. For two of the rooms, we used every drop of paint in the can, so I just kept the lid in a Ziplock bag. That way, when I need touchup paint, I can bring the lid into Lowe's and they can mix the formula on the tag on the lid. I felt like a genius for coming up with that!

This came in VERY handy yesterday when the painters came to paint over the dry wall repairs they did the day before. I handed them the Ziplocks with the paint lids and they were able to match the color exactly. One of my neighbors had such a problem matching a color in his house that the painters had to re-paint the whole room in a similar, but different shade of green. They did it, but it was a lot of unnecessary work.

Also, if there's just a LITTLE paint left (that will likely dry up soon) you can transfer it to a smaller container (I used an empty baby food jar) for smaller touch ups.

That's my big tip of the day. Save the paint lid, not the whole can (unless there's a bunch of paint left in it, of course). It totally worked for me!

#3 - Complete the never-ending project over our bed

Finally! This was seriously the never-ending project. I began it last summer and put everything up on the wall, I even posted about it being done. But it didn't look right. It was just...there. I decided it needed something to tie the 12x12 pieces together; an anchor. So I painted a celery-colored block, but it still didn't look right. Then I bought wood pieces to paint and assemble to "frame" the whole thing to make it look like all one piece. But those needed to be cut by my neighbor, then adhered to the wall...without being on my list of 101 Goals in 1001 Days, I don't know if I would have finished it until 2013. Giving myself over 2.5 years to finish it seemed like an attainable goal. :)

But today...it is complete!

Here is the "before" picture from August...

Then I painted the green block...

And the wood "frame" pieces...

And here it is altogether...

My bedroom looks complete!!!

My windows have been mistreated

I would hardly call these "window treatments," but I can't wait to show off what I've been doing over the last week.

If you're looking for something cheap-ish, quick-ish and easy (I don't sew, so these were right up my ally) to do to your windows, this is it. Last weekend, I noticed some cornice boxes in my friend Cathy's kitchen. She briefly told me how she did them and I was on a mission. As early as the next morning. They were all done a week later!

Saturday: I bought the fabric and batting

Sunday: I spent an hour at Lowe's (with a total of 7 men working together to help me...they just love a damsel in distress who's doing a project involving wood)

Sunday afternoon: Mike connected the side pieces to the longer pieces

Monday: Cathy came over with her staple gun to help me attach the fabric to the wood

Friday: my mom brought over some extra chocolate brown fabric to add some detail (and to cover up a cutting error...) to the downstairs cornices

Saturday: Mike hung them all up

The process of making these seemed really quick and easy, likely because I never spent more than an hour doing any one step. Materials include: wood (Lowe's or Home Depot will do all of the cuts for you), L-brackets, screws, fabric, batting, staples for the staple gun. That's it!!!

In my craft room (click on the picture to see the fun stitching)...

In the family room...

A different accent in the kitchen, but similar concept...

If you want to recreate these, measure the width of your window plus about 3 inches on each side for the length of the cornice and cut 2 side pieces that are 3-6 inches wide. (I did 6" and think they stick out a little too much, but Mike had plenty of room to move around with his drill when hanging them) Next, I'm going to use this gray-blue and chocolate brown fabric to do something to our office window...but I need a creative break, so it will be a while. (can you tell I'm into brown???)