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:

My Little Man with a Yellow Hat

You've all heard of Christmas in July, right? Well, it's Halloween in July :)



After reading over how other people have used yellow felt to create a yellow hat and realizing that I value my sanity too much to attempt it, I decided to go thrifting and find one to spray paint or dye instead. That didn't pan out so well.

But one trip to Michael's later, and voila! For $4, I scored a brown foam explorer hat! I already had yellow spray paint, black ribbon, and hot glue on hand.





If you're wondering how I made the faux necktie or how I changed the outfit from white to yellow, just follow the links :)


Linking to:

Operation Finished Basement: Two Toned End Tables

We've been in our new house for almost two years now.
(When does a new house stop being a new house?)



We've been slowly but surely crossing things off our to-do list. When we first moved in, we remodeled the laundry room, painted 90% of the house, recarpeted the living room, and changed out many of the lighting fixtures. Eventually we swapped out the ugly builder grade bathroom mirrors for ones with frames and painted the kitchen. Last summer we put in a patio.

This summer it's the basement!!! (Paid in full by Uncle Sam's Tax Refund Check!)

Thank goodness for large tax deductions for having our children.

We have an awesome next door neighbor who is a contractor. We hired him to do the job. While he's been toiling away in the basement, I've been getting all the decor ready. As soon as he's finished, I'm going to swoop in and get my Nake Berkus on.



Here are my two-toned end tables that I finished this week (and in case you missed it, here's the two toned furniture I did last summer). They used to be a drab wood color, but I can't complain because they were free from my ex-boyfriend's mom. At my old house, our basement had a water problem, and the bottoms of these legs got damaged. I had to use Kilz primer to block out the stain, and then I painted most of the dresser white.

I like the two tone look though, so I decided to stain the table tops in a dark cherry. I <3 how they turned out!

Nightstand turned Kiddy Play Sink

At a garage sale years ago, I bought two nightstands for $5. Each nightstand had 4 drawers, but between the two of them, there was only six good drawers. I put four operational drawers in the one nightstand, modpodged it with sheet music, and took it to work for my office (I'm a music teacher).

And then junior high kid wrote the F-word on it. *Sigh*

The other nightstand just sat around in my basement for awhile until I got the ingenious idea to turn it into a play sink for my son.

At a garage sale, I scored a metal bread pan and a chrome soap dispenser. The bread pan is the sink. I envisioned the soap dispenser becoming a fully functional spigot. The water goes in the bottom part that would normally hold soap. There used to be a chrome outer sleeve to cover up the ugly white part, but I tossed that since I didn't need it. After I got rid of it, I had the idea that I could have used it as a pencil holder or something. Oh well!

I got out my trusty little jig saw and cut out the openings for the bread pan and the soap dispenser. And then it sat. For two years.

At the moment, we're getting our basement refinished (yay!), and when we were cleaning out the basement, I found the half-finished kiddy sink from way back when.

My. Son. Loved. It. It's a car wash! It's a rock wash! And so much more!

He had so much fun playing with it that now I have to finish it. I decided to just make shelves instead of trying to fix the two broken drawers, so I used luan plywood that I had lying around in the garage (free from a construction site a few years ago-- just make sure to ask first!) Don't look too close at the luan shelves- I'm not the best jig-sawer.

I envisioned a sink apron to cover up the ugly make-shift shelving. I used a cup hook on each side connected with a dowel rod (all of which I already had on hand) to create a curtain rod, and a piece of $1 kitchen-y printed fabric (that I thrifted eons ago) to make the sink apron.

Nightstand + Bread Pan + Soap Dispenser + Luan + Cup Hooks + Dowel Rod + Fabric + Paint = One Happy Boy :)

Thrifted Candlesticks on the Mantel

I'm addicted to pinterest, people. It's like inspiration central on that website. When I decided to decorate my mantel for the holidays, pinterest is the first place I visited for ideas. (Actually it was the only place I visited)! This one from Pottery Barn is one of my favs. I love all the candlesticks of varied heights.

Source: potterybarn.com via Jodie on Pinterest

Kiddie Table

At our old house, we used this little side table in the sunroom. It used to belong to my ex-boyfriend's mom, but she gave it to me years ago. After a crisp coat of white paint, it fit into my decor perfectly!

At the new house, there is no sunroom, and so this little table has been in the crawl space for the past year. I got the idea the other day to get it down and use it for a kiddie table!



I already had these three adorable Mexican chairs too. Can you believe I actually thrifted them on three separate occasions?! At the old house, I had them hanging up in the den on a peg rack. Here at the new house, they've been sitting in the basement.

I'm so glad I brought them upstairs. My son l.o.v.e.s. them! They've made quite a nice little nook in the family room :)

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 :)

Vintage Cart Before and After

I've been meaning to fix up these old, rusty, ugly vintage carts. I finally got around to it :)

Before (I forgot to take a photo of the red one before my husband disassembled it):



And after! (Ok, the other one isn't done yet because it's too dang hot to spray paint...)

$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!