Another nice try

I bought this night stand from DI for $5 and I thought I could revive it.  Why do I think that?  Hopefully I have gotten over this need to save poor sad furniture.  I took it home and decided I would turn it into a night stand that has one drawer and a basket underneath.

So I sanded and primed and painted and WHAT THE HECK?  The nightstand was swelling.  So, I sanded and sanded and sanded and put wood putty on top and primed and painted and STILL, it was swelling, (This is the short version of events.  I tried about one thousand times to make it work)  So I changed my mind about the plan.  It was around Christmas time, so I decided to make a kids kitchen similar to this one over at The land of oz.

So we got to work.  We ran into a lot of snags, but we got it done on Christmas eve.  The kids were so excited the next morning.  They wanted to play with it right away.  And... thirty seconds later it broke.  Pretty much everything broke on it, so we set it aside saying we'd fix it, but here we are in August and we haven't fixed it yet.  Do you think it will happen?  Probably not.

Another glorious moment in parenting documented for all to see.  My poor children.  Just so you know my children are not toyless.  On the contrary they have way too many toys.  Feel free to share your own parenting mishaps, so I will feel better about my failures.

Bake Me Away

A long time ago in a far away land my husband decided he wanted to have a food blog.  He is an amazing chef and makes dinner most nights.  He loves to cook and really identifies with the rat in the movie ratatouille.  hahahahaha.

Ok, back on track.  I decided we were going to start a diet and he decided he was going to start a dessert blog.  Isn't he nice?  BLAH!  (Ok, he really is nice)  This was his description of the blog...

"Can a person maintain a healthy lifestyle while not giving up any of the sweet things that they love? We're going to find out."  



Well, we did find out, and the answer is NO.  One cannot maintain or achieve a healthy lifestyle while eating a bunch of crap.  Keep that in mind while you are baking and consuming these cinnamon rolls.  

You are welcome!

Feature Fridays

So recently I've been hearing a lot about coupons.  I really like the idea of coupons and I think it's probably because I LOVE getting a good deal.  So after doing some research and talking to some friends who are big couponers I decided to dive in.  I really don't know what I'm doing, but luckily we have this really cool website called http://savvyshopperdeals.com/utah/ that has most of the deals you can use your coupons for.  There is a ton of information on that site.  Well last night I went on my first shopping trip to a local grocery store called Fresh Market.  They sent out a $10 off/10 18oz. boxes of Kellogg's Frosted Mini Wheats coupon in their mailer.  And I had five $1 of two boxes of Kellogg cereal coupon from my newspaper.

So I got these 10 boxes of cereal for $1 each and these boxes have are part of the cars2 program where if you redeem four box codes you get five dollars in gas cash.  Well I have 10 box codes, so I will get $10 in gas money, so basically this cereal was FREE!  Cars2 program link


However I did spend $18.75 on a month's worth of papers, but I'm on my way to making up for that.  I think I'm going to like this.

If you are in the Utah area and would like to attend a couponing class to learn more about how to get sweet deals please let me know because I will be hosting a couponing class in the near future.

Bye Bye Wallpaper

Surprisingly I am not a wallpaper hater.  I am actually a wallpaper convert.  I LOVE awesome wallpaper like this wallpaper from Design your wall.

But who can afford it at $65 a roll?

This is why I would recommend stenciling.  There are so many fabulous stencils everywhere now days. 

Weather you like the look of wallpaper or not, don't ever do this anywhere in your house.  It doesn't look good.  

So if you have this wallpaper in your family room go take it down right now.  It's not that hard.  I'll even show you how to do it.

Step 1: Get a scorer and score the heck out of your wall paper.  Scorers are found in the paint section of Home Depot and range from $8-9.  The $9 ones have a scraper attached.  I already had a scraper and I borrowed a scorer from an awesome friend.

You just rub this little thing around on the wallpaper.

Then it will look like this. (Click on this picture to see more detail.)

Step 2:  Spray your wallpaper with hot water.  If you're doing a bigger space you may want to use an equal parts solution of fabric softener and hot water.

After filling up my water bottle with hot water and trying to spray my wallpaper I quickly realized it was broken, so I fashioned this wonderful ghettoness.  It didn't last long either though, so I grabbed my favorite Tinkerbell wash cloth and used that to get the wallpaper wet.

Step 3: Let the water soak in

Step 4: Scrape it off.

Once you get it started you should just be able to peel it off.

There you have it.  No more wallpaper.  If you have a little bit of wallpaper that didn't come off on the first try just put a little water on it and let it sit for a minute and it should come right off.  Now we have a bunch more work to do on the bathroom.  Including cleaning it.  Now go tackle your tacky wallpaper.

Before and After

Sometimes a before and after can mean hours upon hours of work.  Others can mean a little fabric change.  Both are very satisfying.  

Check out this awesome chair I got for $15!

Check out that horribly ugly fabric. (No offense if this is the fabric you use for all your decorating needs, but maybe you should rethink that.)

Now check her out after a whopping $1.80 worth of new fabric and some hot glue. (Technically I only used half the fabric, so it was only $.90 of fabric right?)

I LOVE HER!

I'm linking this project up here.

Nursery Plans

You guys don't even know how long it took me to get this done.  I have been working on it forever, but here it is.  These are my nursery plans.  It will take a while to get it all together, but I will be showing you my progress as it comes along.  I am so excited!  Oh yeah, and we're not having a baby.  I have a daughter who is almost 18 months.  My husband is convinced that we'll have more daughters and I secretly hope he's right because once I'm done this room will be FABULOUS!  What do you think of my plans?

It seriously took me forever, but I'm glad I got my plans all laid out.  I am so excited to start decorating this room, and I'm really glad I had my first experience with GIMP.

Complete and utter failure

A while back I bought a dresser from DI for $5.  It was in REALLY bad shape.  I thought I could revive it and I'm sure I still could, but it would take a ridiculous amount of time and most of all money and isn't the point of buying stuff at DI to save money?  Needless to say I gave up.  Here are some pics of my epic fail.

These are pics of what this thing looked like when I brought it home.  When I started to sand the paint became goopy (spell check doesn't think that's a word.  What do you think?) and started to melt.  That's when I realized this was going to be a bigger project than I thought.  So I bought some stripper and started working on it again.  I used a whole can of stripper and didn't even make it half way through the project.  I did however find out that this was originally stained a cherry color, then it was painted white, then it was painted orange, then grey then drawn all over and duct taped and I'm pretty sure there are some cigarette burns on the top.  Too bad I don't know who the previous owners were so I could hire them to decorate my entire house.  ;)  I really need to inspect things more carefully, but I just get so excited at that $5 price tag.  So at this point I was thinking "I'll just buy some more stripper and work on it until it's done," but then I ran across this post about three minutes ago at 4 the love of wood and I have come to the conclusion that I am done.  She spent a lot of time and money on her dresser redo, but her dresser was secretly cool underneath.  Mine is not.  Mine is crap.  So it's over.  Here is the final pic of this dresser and if anyone wants a free dresser let me know because I have one available.