Random shots

Posted on 2013/04/24 by daisyeyes

I’ve slowly been working on our master bathroom. Here’s the before post and here is a sneak peek after I exchanged a few mirrors in the house and finally got it painted.

I’m learning the hard way that it’s all about the right tools. Being married to a carpenter, woodworking handyman you think I would just know this but alas I don’t. Today I was introduced to the Clover version of a water soluble tracing pen for embroidery. It. Is. The. Bomb. Like totally amazing; I don’t know where this pen has been all my life kind of amazing. Go buy one fast. I got mine at Michaels and I think I’m going to go buy some more.

This silly wedding cake topper is stretching my brain cells. Nothing like messing with a few hours worth of embroidery and hoping that you can salvage something out of it. This is where I’m at with it as of today. Still not a finished product. Ugg.

My yoga teacher has this sticky note in her bathroom that drives me crazy. It points people to the trash can where people should throw their reusable drying washcloths. Every time I sit in there doing my business I have this great embroidery design in my head. Yesterday I finally sat down and made it. I love it.

Sometimes the color requests just don’t work out and we go back to the drawing board. This was the case for this turquoise version of the THINK embroidery. Look for it this summer at the local farmer’s market and maybe an option on etsy soon.

That’s about it for right now. I’ve been crazy busy this month with orders…more in a month than I’ve ever had before. I’m truly blessed and every day humbled by how the Lord has gifted me with the ability to follow a dream.

master bathroom BEFORE

Posted on 2013/04/01 by daisyeyes

I’ve got a big project ready to go this week (well actually this month or maybe the next couple of months!). Our master bathroom has bugged me to no end since we moved into this house almost 3 years ago. But it’s been on the back burner for a while as I wanted to get so many other places painted first.

We have a pretty nice cabinet and countertop in there, but I’m not crazy about the natural color so I’m planning on painting it a glossy white-ish color. I’ve found a few good tutorials via Pinterest.

I have a budget of about $200 to get this job done. Pretty small, but for the most part I’m doing the biggest changes with paint.

The walls right now are this weirdo greenish-white-brown color and I’m planning on painting the bathroom a sort of neutral creamy color.

The floor is horrific. Sticky tiles stuck to lovely hardwood. Smart people. The plan is to paint the wood a brownish-grey. I’ve gone back and forth on trying out a stencil, but I think the room is too small. This is a scaled down version of what I would love to do the floors in our bedroom and what we hope to for sure do in the kitchen down the road.

The toilet is blue. Enough said. We are replacing it. This will be the bulk of our budget, but the blue toilet has to go. The tub is blue too, but alas there isn’t much we can do about that right now besides hiding it behind a shower curtain.

Speaking of shower curtain this cheapy one has to go and I am replacing it with this awesome crazy quilt top that my great aunt made. It’s amazing and it’s the reason why I’m going pretty neutral with this space.

My overall desire is to do sort of a vintage modern look. The shower curtain rod and the rod for the big window will be galvanized piping like this

Source: hometalk.com via aimee on Pinterest

And I plan on hanging a simple white tablecloth remnant or tea towels or even just some white muslin in the window. Something plain, but pretty.

I would love to make something like this to set on the counter

Source: flickr.com via aimee on Pinterest

And get some cool doorknobs for hanging towels on

Source: modernvintagesoul.blogspot.com via aimee on Pinterest

We have this long angled wall in the corner that I would love to find a cool window to hang there

Source: Uploaded by user via aimee on Pinterest

That’s about it for now. The plan this week is to finishing sanding all the spackled holes and get to painting the walls. Then I hope to clean and prime the cabinet doors so that by the next paycheck we can get some paint for the cabinet!

where i sew… a lesson in flexibility

Posted on 2013/01/17 by daisyeyes

This is where I used to sew.

This was my special little creating space. Albeit a little bit cold and sometimes dark at times. But it was a great little spot.

And this is it now.

Seven plus inches of rain in a few days can do havoc to a basement and ours turned into a pool by yesterday morning. I’ve never seen so much water and honestly we kind of felt like we were on the Titanic. We kept moving the water out and the water just kept on coming.

That said. I am beyond grateful that it wasn’t so much worse than it was. Sure I lost my space and we lost the use of our basement and storage space for a while, but that’s it. I still have heat. I still have a roof on my head and a house upstairs that is ample for our little family. There are people around us who lost their homes because of this rain. So I may be displaced for a while and the Lord is surely stretching is in ways I would greatly prefer not, but I will soldier on; filled with thankfulness for what He has given.

That said, the shop is still up and running….just at a much slower pace. Kind of like the pace I run at. Walking

before & after {front door holiday style}

Posted on 2012/12/04 by daisyeyes

Our old house didn’t really have much in the way of decorating curb appeal. This house, with it’s front porch stoop and columns leaves much for me to ponder in decorating (which is truly not my gift). But this year….aw man. I was totally excited to dress up the front.

If you’ve followed this blog at all you know that my husband is deep in the midst of restoring the original wood siding on our 1950′s house. He stripped off all the aluminum last year and this past summer he got almost all the way around with one coat of paint. The cold has set in (well not really…it was 70 degrees today) and he has moved to inside projects. But he was able to get the front done and we.love.it!

Here is a glimpse at my front decorations from the last couple of years:

How about this crazy red door?

A photo from Pottery Barn was my inspiration for all the garland and hanging ornaments and while I liked it I wasn’t too gung ho about repeating it again this year. If you remember, I’m trying to move away from the fake garland and while I did use it around my front door, it seemed less obtrusive than wrapping the front columns with it.

Here is the current “after” shot:

I decided to take garland around our door and wrapped it in ribbon, along with wrapping the little trees in the same ribbon. Everything lights up at night and it looks really cool.

I saw the idea of hanging the ornaments across the top on Pinterest and thought I would try it for something different.
All I need now is a new front door rug.

I really wanted to get something to put on the steps but the budget really didn’t allow for that this year and I never could hammer down exactly what I wanted to do so I just gave up! Any thoughts?

Overall, I am crazy pleased and know that next year it will look even better!

before & after {linen closet}

Posted on 2012/09/08 by daisyeyes

A while back I watched this video (the most organized home in America) and it prompted a great purge and organizing buzz in my house. While I was in my early days of recovery this August, I went around my house taking photos and writing up descriptions of some things I would love to do to the house that I could ACTUALLY accomplish without much help from the sweet husband (who is eating his own elephant of restoring, painting and re-trimming the windows on the exterior of our house). That said, I have zero budget for most of the projects so it’s going to be pretty slow going.

Nevertheless, today I tackled the upstairs linen closet.

Here is the before photo:

This closet primarily houses medicine stuff, bandaids, the kid’s sheets, extra towels, blankets etc. It’s a mess and has been a closet of chaos for a while. I really liked the idea from the video of using separate plastic bins for organizing all her medicine closet stuff versus these drawers that we had been using. (although I have to say…we have like 1/4 of the medicine stuff she has!)

Here is a glimpse at the mess that our medicines had become:

We had expired stuff in there from 2005, more floss than I can even begin to imagine or use, a cowbell (who knows?) among other crazy things. I sorted it all out and organized them into these snap containers that I found at Walmart. As much as I dislike Walmart, I have to say they have the best prices on plastic storage stuff. I think this whole lot cost me less than $15. (I do need to go back and get 2 more to replace the things in the green basket, so that might bring the total up to less than $20.)

After sorting through the kid’s sheets, cleaning out a bunch of mis-matched towels and moving the humidifier to another spot (under our bathroom sink)…

here is the after:

Here is a close up of the medicine stuff organized:

I ended up having to write/draw the labels myself because our color printer is on the fritz, but I’m sure you could google some great images and make some cute labels really super fast.

Overall, it’s funny how taking less than $20 and one hour can make a person take a huge sigh of relief when opening a door! I’m very pleased with how it turned out.

Next up…I’m hoping to take a little bit of wood trim, paint, scrapbook paper and mod podge to transform this medicine cabinet.

Here are a couple of my pins for inspiration:

Source: bhg.com via aimee on Pinterest

Source: marthastewart.com via aimee on Pinterest

before & after {beginnings of a family message center}

Posted on 2012/07/28 by daisyeyes

I’ve complained about our kitchen before and honestly this one corner of our kitchen has driven me crazy since the first time we walked into our house. The door is the back door and the one we use 95% of the time. The microwave in that corner and the 12 inches of usable counterspace under it did much to make me nuts!

We’ve been attempting to use this as a sort of message center and drop all for keys, mail, school stuff etc. But looking at the microwave all the time was making me nuts.

My resident handyman demoed the cabinet and voila…instead space! (We moved the microwave to a small counter on the other side of the kitchen.)

This is a temporary fix as the current plan this winter and spring is to start taking down this whole wall of cabinets and remove the soffit and replace them with open shelving. This is step one in the redoing of our horrible welcome to the 80′s kitchen! Knowing we were going to start repainting in the next 6-9 months, I bought a sample size of paint that matched and painting the soffit and the corner.

I’m still researching a few other options for this space, but as this is temporary it’s nothing I can invest lots of $$ in. I did find a couple of inspiration photos I found this morning…

Source: imgfave.com via aimee on Pinterest

We also have a couple of tall cabinets that used to hold our calendar etc and I’m thinking of combining a couple of these ideas for that space

Source: theclayfamilyblog.blogspot.com via aimee on Pinterest

Especially once we start taking down the soffit and remove our little temporary space.

Source: landeeseelandeedo.com via aimee on Pinterest

I am thrilled with out this turned out and I’m thinking of getting a piece of sheet metal for the wall to the left to hang school reminders etc on.

How do you organize your family message/drop all spots?

before & after {girl’s closet redo}

Posted on 2012/07/10 by daisyeyes

I shared a few weeks ago the before & after of the boy’s closet and today I finally put the finishing touches on the girl’s closet. As I mentioned in that first post, we live in a house built in the 50′s and the closets and bedrooms that our kiddos reside in are pretty darn small. When I saw this original idea from i heart organizing on Pinterest months ago I knew this would relieve us of the need for dressers and free up more floor/wall space in their rooms. Now that the closets are done and the dressers are gone I am even more pleased with the results!

Here is the before of the chick’s closet:

And here is the after:

The kids were in charge of picking out the paint color and this chick picked out this lovely icy blue and it looks awesome.

We only put 3 rods up in her closet, leaving the right side open for her as she grows and needs the space for longer dresses and skirts.

This chick is not the best at putting her things away so I opted to add some little labels for the boxes in her room. I don’t have one of those fancy cutting machines so it was just a little iron on fusible webbing, a pencil and some creativity and voila…

Overall, I am ecstatic we did this (and thankful for friends who brought these back from Ikea for us!). Yeah for organizing!

Here is one last look at the before and afters…

before & almost after {our house remodel)

Posted on 2012/06/23 by daisyeyes

If you’ve followed along on this little blog you know that we (well actually my husband) are in the process of painting our 1950s house. The story goes..
giant hailstorm damages horrible aluminum siding
crazy husband gets the idea to remove said horrible aluminum siding to see if it’s true that the original wood siding remains
crazy husband starts to remove aluminum and low and behold…beautiful white dutch lap siding remains
(for the most part)

Last summer he spent ripping it all off and repairing the many spots where there wasn’t any (the amount of crazy big holes was amazing). We uncovered a little bit of history in finding the original door to the kitchen plus windows and many other crazy things.

After spending all winter hemming and hawing over colors and buying more samples than I would care to think of, we finally hired someone to help us. She ended up picking pretty much the same color we had picked as our first sample. Isn’t that the way it goes?

So here is a picture collage of where we were and where we are now.

Here’s a little description:

1. This is how the house looked when we bought it and with the original aluminum siding and shutters.

2. This is what we found under the aluminum. Not bad!

3. After all the aluminum was ripped off, we discovered the outline of the original back door, 2 kitchen windows and some holes for lights.

4. A little paint and some window trim.

5. This is a close up of the trim that my husband made. It’s pretty darn awesome. When they put up the aluminum siding, they just hacked off the original trim, so he is having to rip all of it out and basically recreate it. He’s pretty amazing I must say.

Next up, finishing the trim around the second story windows and painting the second coat. Then on to the front.

before & after {boys closet redo}

Posted on 2012/06/16 by daisyeyes

We live in a house built in the 50′s which means, while we do have a great amount of storage in our house, the closets in the kid’s bedrooms are teeny-tiny. One of my 2012 decorating goals was to redo their closets. When I saw this pin on Pinterest I knew that this is what I wanted to do.

(The original post can be found here at i heart organizing)

Source: iheartorganizing.blogspot.com via aimee on Pinterest

Here is my son’s closet before:

Oh. my. goodness. Horrible. Stacked up junk on the top (which was nasty dust covered when I did the demo), clothes that were stacked on shelves off to the left side (and hard to get to) and just one rod for clothes.

Here is his closet AFTER:

We used an expedit shelf just like the example on pinterest, the boy got to pick out a closet color (um, green.) and then we put together a shelf on the top using some leftover shelving we had and then bought a dowel rod for the bottom. All together this closet probably cost us around $90.

And I’m in heaven. Can’t wait to get going on closet number 2 for the girl.

before & after {tulle table}

Posted on 2012/06/09 by daisyeyes

The inspiration:

Source: Uploaded by user via aimee on Pinterest

The supplies:

4-5 yards of tulle
thread
hot glue
a small table
lots and lots and lots of patience

The process:

Use your sewing machine to sew 2-3 basting lines of stitching. Then gather the tulle. Try not to cuss every time the thread breaks and you have to start over again. Then hot glue along the line of basting threads onto the table. Again, try not to cuss when you continue to burn the tips of your fingers and you have 18 layers of hot glue stuck to them. Then go to the store to buy more tulle to make a third layer because one layer just wasn’t enough to cover all the mistakes you made. Then add a pink ribbon over all your mistakes.

The result:

One very pink and very girly little table
and one very happy little girl who now thinks it’s the perfect place for her imaginary unicorn to sleep. She is currently making “furniture” for the said unicorn and I’m staying downstairs for fear of what she is really doing!