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.

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!