debor026

I have been dying to cut a hole in this wall for YEARS and I finally got the chance.  The front living room is pretty dark and doesn't get a lot of natural light.  By opening up the wall it brightened it up considerably since the great room has several windows.  It's not a supporting wall so that made this project a whole lot simpler.  I started out by "framing" the opening with painters tape so i could visualize and be sure it was the placement I wanted. The next step was to cut the power in the wall and let the kids go to town with hammers.  They had a blast beating holes all over it. This was our first glimpse of the new view from the great room to the office and front living room.  The electrical still needed to be moved into the new header and the plugs needed to be moved into their new placements. This let so much more light into the rest of the house!  We moved 1 plug to either side of the new opening and put the cables above the new header. Her...

With the boys moved in to their rooms we are working on the cabinets on the outside of the wall. I'm pretty happy with how they are turning out so far. I didn't want to buy expensive countertops for this and even the cheap prefab laminate counters were $100 each and I needed two. Yeah, no thanks. So I built my own counters for about $55 total. Thrifty Decor Chick just did something similar here and I thought I could work that idea in to my project. Because I was putting this on top of 12" cabinets I couldn't use 1x4s only (at 3.5 inches it would only be 10.5 inches total and I needed more like 12.5 inches). I did still want it to look like it was intentional so I didn't want to tack a random 2" piece on the back.  Luckily, it turns out the measurements worked out for 2 1x4s with a 1x6 in the middle which looks way more balanced. In order to hold it all together I put a 1x12 underneath to screw through but since that's only really 11.25 and not 12 i...

Day 24/31: This is our entryway as of this morning. I wanted a light that made a bit more of a statement and I found the perfect one at the Habitat for Humanity ReStore for $25. Even better, it was actually brand new! I bought a recessed light conversion kit so I didn't have to do any major rewiring. You just take out the bulb and the trim there and there is a new piece that goes up that you can wire a light fixture to. One of the steps is "remove the trim from the recessed fixture". It didn't say to duck the mass quantities of bugs that were hanging out in there since this was on a porch light. What you can see in this picture isn't even 1/10th of what awaited me. Gross! And of course this is about how much hit me in the face (mouth closed, thankfully!) when I pulled it away from the ceiling. But doesn't this new cover look nice? Ok, kind of boring but you can see that now I have a place to wire the new fixture in after less than 10 minutes of work. H...

I knew that my living room needed a couple more chairs and when I saw these unloved and filthy little things at the thrift store I knew they would be perfect to fill the space. Then they sat there for a month as I tried to figure out what color to paint them and what fabric to put on the seats. One of the guys at work said I should use a cow patterned fabric like they have on the seats at the corner bar and that jump started my imagination nicely. Sadly there was no cow fabric to be found, though I did find some fun zebra and I like how it worked out. Pulling the seats and backs off of the frames and recovering them was pretty simple but my staple gun has recently turned into an automatic and made that part of the project a little dangerous and living-on-the-wild-side kind of scary. Husband suggested painting the frames teal to match the DVD shelf in the room and I certainly won't turn him down when he comes up with bright color choices (yay!). So we jumped in to our newly or...

When our home was first built I skipped the option of upgrading the knobs on the cabinets and just kept the chrome knobs that were standard. The builder wanted some ridiculous sum of money ($350 ish if I remember right) and I just figured I'd do it later. 3 years later and now I have been looking at options and at $3 a knob, which only affords the plain and kind of ugly cabinet pulls, it would cost me about $120. Yikes! This is where we started: Then I saw a link on Pinterest to these and LOVED them. But, they are $75 for 4 of them. So, um, that's $750 for my kitchen. Right, keep looking. It was at this moment I noticed a jar to my right. It was filled with rocks my grandmother had once collected, I believe from Washington. I had kept them for sentimental reasons after she died since I collect random rocks myself and didn't want them tossed into the flower beds, which is sadly where they were headed. As I looked at them I realized that better than random rocks with...

In our house we have so many board games that there is an entire (full) closet dedicated to them. But really I need that closet for blankets so they have to get out of there. I would have mutiny getting rid of any of them so another solution was in order. Here is the game closet in all of its original glory (nice, right? haha). And it got a whole lot worse before it got better... Much worse... That box on the left has no less than the pieces of 5 different games in there all mixed up. Boo for having to sort. But after a couple hours of work it now all fits nicely in the hutch. A few of the boxes now contain only the game boards (and which boards are where is labeled on the side of the boxes) and the pieces for the games are in labeled zip lock baggies in the drawer. The other game pieces are in jars on display ( idea for that from here ) in the top. The kids really like the new solution, mostly because if they can see it they are more likely to remember it's there/play with ...

Last night I scored on Craigslist. I know that sentence sounds bad but really it was a good thing. Who would sell a solid wood buffet/hutch for $60? It's beautiful and I have a new paint project. That's right, MORE PAINT. Aw, yeah! Luckily I just about have one of my other paint projects done and ready to leave the garage so I have space (hubby will appreciate that). This is the picture from the ad. I need to take a better one but last night it just got put down in the middle of the living room so I haven't gotten one yet. I have to tell you I was so nervous I wouldn't get it. With a price like that (when all the others were $250+ and not as nice) I figured it would go pretty quick. I called 50 minutes after it was posted and I was already the 5th call BUT he said he was first come/first serve and I was the first to make arrangements. Booyah! (Can you tell I was excited? Haha!). Anyway, so we made an appt. for 6 but then I was reading Mandi's blog an...

Despite almost constant painting, there are 4 rooms in my home that have still been unpainted. The bathrooms. I've just never been itching to do them. I don't know why, maybe because I've never been inspired or possibly because there is just something about putting my face that close to a toilet, no matter how clean. In any event, the paint bug bit again and I turned the bathroom into this: From this (Sorry for the awkward pics but it is really hard to get pictures of a seriously tiny room. I actually took the door off of the hinges for most of these pictures): Here's one more before shot. I still have no idea why the builder installed a full towel bar in a powder bathroom. Such overkill. The paint in here was truly awful before because, like the rest of the house originally did, it had flat builder paint. Builder paint being different than normal paint because they buy crap paint super cheap that the store who made it won't even sell to the general public. ...