Birthday Extravaganza!

I had a great birthday yesterday filled with fun and wonderfulness, but you probably don't want to hear all about that.  You want to see pictures right?  Well here you go.

These are my big kids eating macaroni and cheese for dinner.  

Doesn't the table look nice and festive?

This is us with our mad taking pictures of ourselves skills.

We did cake and presents first because the kids needed to go to bed.  Isn't she pretty?

I always try to get one of those pictures where it looks like you're barfing on the cake, but it never works out.  I'm pretty sad about that.

I'm not very good at taking pictures, but I'm sure you can tell that that is a beautiful cake.

Then we made sushi.  It's not very pretty here, but it was SOOO tasty.

And it's really pretty here.  YUM!

The conclusion of the sushi making is that it's cheaper and way easier to just go out for sushi.  So, this was most likely a one time thing.  But it was a fun one time thing. Thanks to all those who wished me happy birthday.

Happy Birthday to ME!

Ok, so today is my birthday.  I am 24 for the 4th year in a row.  I'm cool like that.  I'm really excited because my husband does a really good job of making sure my birthday is a me day.  Last year I went shopping BY MY SELF and got my hair did (Missy Elliot reference) and basically spent the day with me.

This year I woke up early with the kids and let my husband sleep in.  After all he was up ALL night baking me this cake and on every other day of the year he gets up with the kids in the morning, so it was the least I could do.  A couple of days ago I got my hair cut and last night I colored my hair.  Today I am going to get a pedicure and by this evening I will feel like a million bucks.  Just in time for my birthday dinner.

A long time ago Andrew and I attended a sushi making class.  I bought us the opportunity to learn how to make sushi from an amazing and well known sushi chef from Las Vegas.  I bought this experience from Groupon.  We went and it turned out that the chef was NOT a well renowned sushi chef from Las Vegas, but a white middle aged chef with a tv segment on a local news channel.  Not quite as impressive.  To say the least we were disappointed, but we did learn the basics of making sushi and had a fun time making it.  (Not so fun was having the TV chef yell at me multiple times for cutting the food wrong.  Have I mentioned I'm not a chef?)  Anyway, we have not yet had the opportunity to use our master sushi making skills, so when Andrew asked me what I wanted to do for my birthday I jumped at the opportunity.    So tonight we will have Sushi galore followed up by the third Harry Potter movie and some serious cake.  I'm so excited!

PS - We're having a Harry Potter marathon at my house and tonight is the third night, hence the third movie.  On the 8th night we'll go see the last movie, so if you've seen it don't spoil it.  I have read the books, but I totally can't remember most of it.

I think this picture is worth re-posting.  YUM!

$3 mirror

I love this mirror.  I saw it at big lots for $2.98.  It was so clearly ugly, but I saw some potential there. I loved the vintage-ish style and the shape and size of it.  It was very feminine, but I have two girls, so I figured eventually I'd get to use it.  And for less than three bucks, why not?

So I took it home and taped it up and got to painting.  I chose black because I thought it would look pretty awesome and you can tell in the background that it was around Halloween that I did this project, so black was sort of on the mind.

Here is my taped mirror.  I painted it and then afterward i realized that you could still see the gold in the mirror from the back side of the frame.  So, I pulled the back off and took the mirror out and painted the back and nailed it back together.  Now it looks like this...

I cannot express how hard it is to keep that mirror clean while having such vein children.  

Soon I think I will revamp it again.  I want to decorate the nursery for our daughter Riley and I think this mirror would look amazing in grey.  What do you think?  Her room will be a pinkish grey color with white, grey and cream accents.  Maybe if it's in there it will stay clean. ;)

Awesome Chair

A long time ago in a far away land there was a mom who wanted some wickedly awesome family pictures, so she called up her awesome photographer/niece and set up a time to get some taken.  Well, the day of the photo shoot this mom wanted to do something a little different.  Enter chair here.  I found this chair on KSL for $20.  It had been on there for a while, so I called to see if it was still available.  IT WAS! (obviously or I wouldn't be posting this right?)  So I offered her $10 and she accepted my offer.

It had a little hole in it, but luckily I had an old sweater that I haven't worn for about 100 years (man I'm old) that was the same exact color, so I cut a little piece off and glued it in the hole with some fabric glue.

Can you see the hole?

Old sweater

Now it's awesome and people always try to steal it from me.  I have actually had people offer me good money for it, but I can't sit comfortably on money.  You can check out the photo shoot here and after you fall in love with my pictures you can book your appointment with our photographer by visiting Eyes Wide Open Photography.

What do you think?  Should I go into photography?  This is a prime example of why we hire a photographer so often.  I am a lousy picture taker.  

Now you can look at the good pictures of the chair.

Obviously these were taken a long time ago, but isn't that chair awesome!

Dresser Redo

A long long time ago (February)  I found a dresser on KSL, which is sort of like craigslist, and I sent my husband to pick it up.  I saw it online and said "25 bucks?"  I immediately fell in love with it.  It was a huge dresser with clean lines and perfect for us to use as a TV stand once we acquired a flat panel TV.  I couldn't wait for Andrew to pick it up.  You have to be quick about cheap stuff, so he went and bought it as soon as he could.  He picked it up in a truck that we were renting (long unrelated story) and as he turned the first corner coming home two of the drawers flew out of the truck and crashed on the ground.  It wasn't a hard fix, but when he brought that sucker home I noticed two things.  1.  The broken drawers and 2. It was really ugly.  What had happened to my clean lines?  I had big plans for this beast and it wasn't what I thought it was at all.  So it sat in my garage FOREVER while I sorted through my feelings about the piece of crap.  Then the looming reality of getting a second car and having no where to put it sunk in and I started pondering what to do with it.  People always ask me if it's hard to refinish furniture and they never seem to believe me when I say no, so if you are one of those people who are daunted by the thought of refinishing something read this step by step of this dresser redo (sorry no pics).

1. Fix the drawers - I just stapled them back together.
2. Sand everything - I use my Ryobi Sander which I love.
3. Prime everything- I'm not super picky about primer.  Usually I'll just go to Walmart and pick up a can if I specifically need primer, but where I'm really picky is paint.  I LOVE LOVE LOVE  Behr paint.  I think it is by far the best and I have tried a lot of paint.
4. spray hardware - I used Rustoleum Oiled Bronze spray paint.  LOVE this stuff!  One of the hardware pieces was broken, so I planned on getting pulls to replace the top four pieces of hardware.
5.  Sat and stared at it for a while wondering what color to paint it and what I was going to do with it.
6. Decided on and painted it off white since almost every piece of furniture in my house is off white.  I figured I would find something to do with it.
7. Distressed it with my sander
8. Polyurethane coats - I use Minwax fast drying polyurethane because it is perfect for the impatient crafter.  ie: me
9. Then I was kind of liking it and thinking it would look good in my bedroom
10.  I went to home depot to pick up some pulls and track pieces for it.
11. Came home and realized that the track pieces were wrong and the pulls wouldn't fit.  ALWAYS TAKE THE OLD HARDWARE IN!  Most hardware these days are pretty standard, but back in the day things were not so standard, so the holes for the hardware in this dresser were WAY farther apart than the standard of today's hardware.
12.  Go back to home depot, buy the cheapest knobs I can find that will coordinate with my dresser and new tracks.
13.  Put tracks on and spray the cheap hardware.
14. Fill old holes with wood putty.
15. Sand and paint over those holes
16. Drill new holes and put hardware in.
17. Decide this dresser is not for me and put it up for sale on KSL and Craigslist

Luckily I found the perfect new owners for this beast and they loved it and were impressed with my mad refinishing skills.  ;)

Office Organization/ Do people really buy these things?

If you are a DIYer or a crafter of any kind you probably know who Anthropologie is.  If not then feel free to check out their website.  They have some really cool vintage inspired stuff and I always see Anthropologie knock offs across blog land.  They have some fun things that I will inevitably copy.  For example ...

This awesome DIY Anthropologie shower curtain tutorial was posted on the HGTV website.  

I see lots of fun jewelry or home decor items from them, so naturally I thought there must be other cool stuff that hasn't been knocked off yet so I went browsing.  Well, I'm not ashamed to admit that I was wrong.  Not only was I wrong, I was WAY wrong.  How much would you pay for this?

I'm pretty sure they'd have to pay me to take that?

However, they do redeem themselves by having some very cool brackets and some awesome hardware.  I replaced part of my old nasty wood fence with a new pretty vinyl one, but I kept the panels.  You can see here that they are going to make some awesome craft projects.  

I want to use something like this ...

Anthropologie

with some of my old boards to make something like this.

http://thebrowyblog.blogspot.com/

They will be in my office and house all my crafty things.  Someday soon I hope to show you a finished office for two.  Until then I'll just keep dreaming.

Chair Make Over/One year photo shoot

Not too long ago I was driving down main street in Springville, UT when I drove by a garage sale. I am not a super garage saler, but if I had the ability to wake up at the crack of dawn I would be. I LOVE Garage sales. Well, it was around noon and usually all the good stuff is gone by then, but I saw this old vintage chair as I drove by, so I made my husband turn around, so I could go buy it. She wanted $5 for it, so I bought it. It probably wasn't really worth five bucks because it was SO ugly. It was one of those half plastic, half metal, vinyl seat chairs. It was a little rusted, but otherwise (haha)it was in great shape and besides I was in love. After some primer, some aluminum paint and some aqua zebra print fabric (and a cute baby girl) I now have this amazing desk chair/photo prop.

Look at that cute baby!  She's all mine!  You have kind of a crappy angle as far as the chair is concerned because you can see how NOT good I am at hot gluing fabric to ply wood.  That's right I said hot glue because that's how I roll.

This one is my favorite.  I have it framed and hung and everything.

I love this baby's smile.

Such a pretty girl.  I painted and distressed this little rocking chair too.  You can't really tell, but I posted about it  here.

She wasn't quite sure, but she got into it.

And then she was done and crawling away.

This was Riley's one year photo shoot.  After having three kids we have enough toys and clothes so we were wondering what to get her for her birthday.  We decided on her very own photo shoot and we all loved how it turned out.  Special thanks to Erica from Eyes Wide Open Photography for these wonderful images of my baby girl.

Pinterest

I have a new addiction.  It is a website called Pinterest.  It's a big deal here in blog land and it makes me happy.  If you like this...

This is the Ultimate Smores Anniversary Cake.  It looks way too delicious for words. If you follow the link you will find the recipe at Fat Girl Trapped in a Skinny Body.  I love her already!

and this...

 Is this not THE ULTIMATE KITCHEN?  It's perfect in every way except that it's not mine.  

and this...

 This chair is from the office makeover party at Back on Festive Road.  If I knew where to find it I would steal it.  

and this...

As if you aren't in love with Matthew Bomer!  Thank you GabrielGPhoto for the eye candy.  ;)

then you are the next Pinterest addict. What is Pinterest you ask?  It is a social networking/bookmarking site unlike any other.   If you are like me then you constantly have all these tabs up or windows open on your desktop of projects you want to do or articles you want to read or quotes you want to remember.  You know that if you simply bookmark them they will get lost in the hot mess that is your bookmarking folder, so you leave it open on your desktop until the power goes out or until your kids decide it would be fun to press the glowing computer button.  So, if you're like me, which not many people are because I'm sort of nuts, this is a miracle website.  It allows you to create your own "pin boards" and "pin"  your interests to them.  Hence the name Pinterest.  haha.  It saves those websites with the picture of your choice so that it's easy for you to find what you're looking for in the future.  The best part is that you can follow your friends interests and get WAY more great ideas from them than you could get just on your own.  I downloaded the pinterest button in my tool bar to make it super easy to pin stuff that I love.  Are you intrigued yet?  If not, I'm not really sure why you follow my blog.  This is seriously better than Christmas morning for me.  You should all join Pinterest and if you "like" the painted dresser on facebook and send me your email via private message I will send you an invitation to join Pinterest.  That's right, it's invitation only.  You'll be in the cool club.  Who needs Google+ when you could be invited to Pinterest.  haha.  You could also request an invitation from them which is what I did.  I was not invited into the cool club.  I had to force myself in.  Don't take the road I did.  It was sad and lonely.  Ok, I'm rambling.

I'm BAAAAACK!

Ok all.  After taking a VERY long hiatus I sat down and reevaluated my blog.  I read through all the posts and coincidentally my most recent post talks about how when I get a house everything will change.  Well, I bought a house in February and a lot HAS changed.  My Camera broke and so did my bank account.  haha.  So here we are joining the rest of the world with a super tight budget.  I have to be VERY resourceful when it comes to decorating my house.  I have done a ton of projects recently, but I never take before pictures because I suck, so here's a reel of pictures to see what I've been up to.

 I LOVE LOVE LOVE how this turned out!  It is amazing.  I was planning on selling it when I was done, but I just loved it too much, so now it acts as a sofa table behind my ginormous couch.  LOVE IT!

 Do you recognize that table to the right?  Those are now in my bedroom!  And they look great.  The rest of my bedroom not so much, so you'll have to wait to see them in their new home.  Also, a word to the wise.  If you are recovering bar stools and you have small children Scotch Guard is your friend.  If anyone has a hook up with scotch guard tell them I said that and that they should send me a free can.  ;)

I (cross your fingers) hopefully have an awesome before and after coming up soon and I am really excited to get back into blogging.  I love your encouraging words and I want to see your fun crafty projects so that I can be inspired.  So please SHARE SHARE SHARE!  Leave links  to your awesome craftiness in the comments box below.  I will totally check out your work and come give you some comment love.

I'm partying @