Ottoman Love

Fugly, no?


I had slipcovered this thing years ago,
but my son recently drew all over the slipcover.


Ugh, enough photos of this nastiness.


Tada!


And the best part is, this transformation didn't cost me anything! The fabric was leftover from the window treatments, the fringe was already in my stash, and I already had the spray paint on hand.


I love it!

Going a Little Quote Crazy

Quotes on ottomans...

Source: freakingcraft.com via Jodie on Pinterest

Quotes on the wall...

Source: etsy.com via Jodie on Pinterest

Quotes on canvases....

Source: karenemcgee.blogspot.com via Jodie on Pinterest

And I need them all! Hey, I'm a poet and didn't even know it :)

Today's project is the quotes on a canvas. Michaels has two packs of 16x20 canvases on sale for $5. Yowza. That's cheap.

I snatched up a pack, along with some raised scrapbooking alphabet stickers, and skipped merrily all the way home with my finds.

I already had some orange spray paint on hand, so I painted the entire canvas orange. When that was dry, I added my letters. As you can see, it screams Halloween, and that's not what I was going for.



Then I took off the words "brother" and "hug," painted the black letters with the orange spray paint, and painted the remaining two words with white spray paint. (I also found that the letters needed primed before painting).

After it was all dry, I reattached the white words to the canvas, and voila, it does not look like Halloween anymore :)




Linking to:

Oversized Prints: $3 at Staples

You've probably seen these:

Source: infarrantlycreative.net via Jodie on Pinterest

Source: sugarbeecrafts.com via Jodie on Pinterest

What?! You've never seen them? Well let me tell you, it's easy and cheap! Just visit the engineering prints page at staples.com to get started! The website says that engineering prints are not suitable for photographs, but if you have a good enough camera (ours is 10 megapixels), it works just fine!

Your size choices are 18x24, 24x36, and 36x48. Of course, the $2 poster frame I thrifted was none of those three sizes.


(That thing rolled up on the frame is the print. They print out your photograph on very thin paper).

Most photograph editing programs have the capabilities to crop the photo to the right dimensions. After cropping the photo the way you want it, upload it to the staples website, select what size you want, and it will be ready to pick up at your local staples before you can say "Decorating on the Cheap is more fun than watching Magic Mike!"

When I made mine this morning, it cost me under $3 plus tax to make a 24x36 print. I'm not sure if that was a special sale or that's their every day price, but other bloggers have quoted slightly higher prices.

When I picked it up, for some reason it was still a little larger than my 22x28 frame. I just had a little extra trimming to do, and then it fit into the frame perfectly. I <3 how it turned out!!



I can't wait until the basement is finished so I can get this up on the wall!!

Kitchen Table Transformation

This table was the one we had in our kitchen growing up. My mom gave it to me in college when they upgraded. Unforunately, my rabbit chewed on the legs, and so I still have some repairing and painting to do.

The first thing I did to spruce this up and add some color to the room was add a fitted tablecloth. Very cheery!



For Mother's Day, the hubs and my son made me a hand print. He calls it his "hand cake" because they made it in a pie tin :)



I started with two matching kitchen chairs, found one for free sitting near a dumpster, and then bought one at a thrift store for two or three bucks. They don't exactly match, but they're close. Armed with four cans of spray paint and some primer, I coated them all with this funky blue paint. (My husband says it looks like chairs from a Mexican restaurant. I'm not sure if that was a compliment or not. I don't think so!)

I found four seat cushions on clearance at Meijer for $6 each, and that completes the sitting area! I'm not so sure about the competing patterns, however since the tablecloth won't last all that long (it's already tearing!), I figured it didn't really matter. I already have a new clearance tablecloth waiting in the wings... Meijer has really cute teal with large white polka dot tablecloths, and I snatched one up :)

Keep Calm and Ride On (And Other Nursery Printables!)

{When I printed mine out, they had white backgrounds... I didn't figure out until later how to make the background colored! Oh well!}

Until the newborn babe is born and I can take tons of pictures of my fat little baby and plaster them all over the house, I have a lot of picture frames that need filled. With the help of Microsoft clipart, some cool fonts, Microsoft Word, and Paint (the computer program), I created some free nursery art that I thought I'd share with y'all. I couldn't figure out how to add a pdf file in blogger, so I uploaded them into google docs. Just click on the photos below, and it will take you to the big version.

This is the part where I tell you that these free printables are for your personal use only, so please don't sell them (unless of course you want to give me half the proceeds)! Thanks!

This one is my fav:



By the way, these are centered in the pdf file...
I cropped them and made jpgs out of them for the links.

$10 Photo Ledges. Heck yeah!

I'm still here! I just took some time off for a very hellish intensive week of scrapbooking. I hadn't done a page since my son was born in Feb 2009. I am now caught up! I completed three scrapbooks in just over a week! Hip hip hooray! And yes, two of the three scrapbooks were thrifted for about $2 each, as well as three packs of extra pages. Each pack had five sheets (or ten pages) and was 69c. Woot, woot!



Anyway, can I just say that Ana White is seriously my hero? I found some instructions on her website, showing how to make your own photo ledges, and I was all over it.

Okay, my husband was all over it.

I sat in the driveway, eating popsicles, and talking to my neighbor while our boys played together.

The best part about these ten dollar photo ledges is that they actually cost me less than ten bucks! All the wood I bought was $20, plus the cost of paint and stain (which I already had lying around), plus a couple dollars for new screws. That's about $23, but when you divide that by three, that's only $7.66 for each eight foot section!

We bought enough to make three 8-ft ledges. That's six 1x4x8s and three 1x2x8s. We had the man from Lowes cut the 8 ft sections in half, so that we could make six 4 foot ledges instead after we decided that 8 feet sections were just too long.

After the hubs made them and I painted/stained them, we decided to do 2 ledges in three different rooms rather than 3 ledges in two rooms. (All this math is confusing, isn't it?)

I used some frames from storage in the basement, which received the royal spray paint treatment, and then I went hog wild at thrift stores and garage sales, buying up frames for 50c to a dollar. I bought 27 frames for a total of $15.50. (I use about 6-8 frames per shelf, and remember I had six shelves to fill up!)



So for under $40, I have decorated three walls in my home :) Not too shabby!

Two ledges are up in the family room (the "lodge")...




two are in the master bedroom...


and two are in the nursery.





{Keep Calm and Ride On}

In the nursery, I made a bunch of little printables to put in the frames. I'm trying to share them with you... stay tuned! My computer program is not cooperating!

Photos from Around the House: the Boys' Bathroom

We've been in this house for about 10 months now, so I think it's high time that we get things up on the walls, don't you? During the school year while I'm teaching, there's not much time for doing anything crafty or decorative (or cleaning and unpacking apparently!). Now that it's summer vacation, I've been rolling up my sleeves and getting to work. I have a long ways to go but I think I can do it! I just might need a swift kick in the @ss some love and encouragement along the way!

I'm going to set a goal for myself that every three days, I'm going to photograph and blog about one finished room in the house. Um, we better make that every five days. Or maybe every seven. Many rooms are close to completion (and a few are actually done!), so this shouldn't be that hard, right?

Since I already blogged about my son's room the other day, today we'll start with one of the only other rooms in the house that is finished, my son's bathroom. Isn't it ca-ute?! It's my favorite room in the house, and it's almost completely thrifted. Woot, woot!

Here's a list of all the things that I thrifted for this room: the shower curtain, the little white thingies that attach the shower rod to the wall, still new in the package for something like 30c, the framed lion print, the giraffe picture frame, and the tissue box (which was hideous until I added a fresh coat of chocolate brown spray paint) . I already had the blue rug from the old house, so that didn't cost me anything this time around. I did splurge on the monkey rug and the monkey hanging over the toilet. The rug was from Target for $20, and the monkey wall art was about ten bucks at Babies-R-Us if memory serves me right. But my son loves monkeys, and so it was worth it :)





The paint was an "oops" paint so that only set me back a couple bucks. I also used it in the laundry room because it's so bright and cheery! I have almost the whole entire gallon left, so I can come over and paint your bathroom and/or laundry room bright blue too if you want :) I work for cookies. Or ice cream. Or pickles. Wait, that was the pregnancy talking there for a moment.

You can't tell from these pictures, but I also used paint to spruce up the light fixture. All of the bathroom lights in this house were brass. So were all the cabinet and drawer pulls. Yuck. I hate brass. I spray painted the bathroom lights with a brushed nickel spray paint and replaced all the cabinet hardware in the whole house. In this bathroom, the pulls were in my stash already.

Yes, I have a stash of drawer pulls.
No, I'm not a hoarder. (I bet all hoarders say that).
You just never know when you might need one, you know? Be prepared, that's my motto.

These cute blue stars were a garage sale find years ago. I'm so glad I finally got to use them! They look really cute in here :)


Just outside of the bathroom, I hung a monkey peg rack for my parents' towels when they come down for a visit. It was on clearance at TJ Maxx for $8, because the paper was curling off of the wood. Nothing a little modpodge couldn't fix!

A big boy bedroom and handmade bedskirt

{Joel's first third piggy bank. They're all empty}

A little over a month ago, we made the big move from crib to twin bed! We figured that we better get Joel out of the crib plenty of time before Jonas needs it, so that perhaps he'll forget that the crib was "his." He is a very possessive little thing, and when Jonas arrives, we don't want him to feel like he's been kicked out of his bedroom.

We decided that it would be easier to keep the crib and nursery set up the way it is and just move Joel into one of the other bedrooms. (It was my sewing room, of course, that got the boot. Again. This happened to me at the old house too when Joel was born).

Of course we had to set up his big boy bedroom on the cheap! By the way, the photos don't do this room justice. It's actually very cute in real life! The lighting was bad, and I'm not a great photographer, so excuse the photos!

Anyway, here's the skinny:

Paint: I don't like to buy full price for paint, as I usually buy the Oops paint, but I splurged this time so that I could get just the right shade of blue.

Window treatments: These I bought new because I needed the black-out kind, and I needed them stat. The back of our house gets H.O.T. from the sun coming in. I'm talking greenhouse hot, people. I figured the black-out curtains would help. I think they were about $25 for the pair. (Ouch).

Dresser and TV stand: Free! The dresser was mine growing up, and Jason had the TV and stand in his apartment before we met.



Toy storage: My grandpa made this barn toy box for my dad some 50 years ago. It hadn't been painted in like 50 years, so that was the first thing that I did gto spruce it up. I added some wallpaper scraps of firetrucks, but then Joel ripped almost all of them off. I think I'll try again, this time with modpodge. I'm still going to make a little curtain for the bottom and some kind of fabric covering that rolls back and is held with velcro for the top. So please excuse the mess! The red bins I bought a couple years ago at Target. They were on clearance after Christmas for I think $2.50 apiece. I bought all they had :)

Thing keeping my son from falling out of bed: That was thrifted for two or three bucks. The funny thing is, Joel hasn't figured that he can get out of bed in the middle of the night. He stands there with his arms up, wailing, "Mommy! Mommy!" until I come get him. One night I found him trying to climb over it to get out of the bed! Geesh, child!

Bed frame: free from the in-laws, however they had left it outside lying in the grass for awhile (don't ask), where of course it got all nasty and rusty, so it needed some TLC. The wheels/feet were missing too. Did someone seriously go into their yard and steal the wheels off of the bed frame? Who does that? Probably the same person who stole the lids off our trashcans, and/or the person who stole the doghouse right out of our yard. Jerk. Sorry, I'm digressing. Anyway, luckily I already had some thrifted casters that we attached to the frame. It's really low to the floor, but I guess that's a good thing for a toddler! Ah, the silver lining.

Headboard: a thrift store find for a whopping $3.93. There is a chip out of one of the legs, however that gets hidden by the bedskirt. I was superstoked when I got it home and discovered that the wood tones do indeed match the dresser!



Mattress & boxspring: we bought these back in August when we put the old house on the market. (We used it for staging).

Bedding: we had all that bedding already, with the exception of the bedskirt, which I made with fabric I already had in my stash. The truck fabric was originally thrifted curtains. I cut them in half long-ways to utilize the upper and lower hems that were already there, because I'm a total lazy sewer to save time and energy. I sewed the unhemmed sides to a piece of large white felt since that part will be under the mattress and won't be seen. (The felt was a freebie too... we bought a new leather recliner, sofa, and loveseat when we moved into this house, and they came wrapped up in the felt. Of course I couldn't throw away yards and yards of free felt!) Finally, I made a pretend box pleat where the two pieces of truck fabric came together. In case you're wondering, a pretend box pleat is really not a pleat at all. I simply sewed a piece of red fabric from my stash to the white felt, under where the two pieces of truck fabric met. Once again, because I'm a lazy sewer. Super simple, and it does the trick!




Ceiling fan: (Not pictured because I couldn't get a good photo of it). I found two, almost brand new ceiling fans at a thrift store for $13 each! I was totally stoked! Luckily, my father-in-law is good with electricity, and he installed them for us :) Someone must have moved into a house that was a couple years old and ripped out the ceiling fans and donated them. Lucky me!

Picture Frames & Wall art: Several of the things hanging on the wall were thrifted or garage sale finds. I thrifted the Engine Number 9 metal sign years ago for $3 because I liked it, even though at the time I had no children and nowhere to hang it! The ambulance print was still new with tags, half off at Goodwill. $2.50! The race car print set me back $3. It originally had an ugly wooden frame, which I spraypainted black to match the rest of the frames. I bought the shelf for $5 at New Uses. It was originally purchased for staging the old house. The red and blue picture frames were 50c apiece at a garage sale. The wall decals were Meijer clearance- after the 75% off, all those decals were only $5. Score!





Thrifted little stair-step thingie: I painted Joel's name on it. It actually had some girl's name carved into it, so before I could paint Joel's name onto it, I had to fill in the girl's name with spackling and then prime and repaint it white. I like how it turned out :) He loves going "updairs" and "downdairs" on it!


Thrifted car rug: This was still new with tags for $5!

Eventually I'll get around to showing you photos of the nursery :)