An $89 Headboard

I know it has been forever, sorry about that. We have been super busy celebrating lots of family birthdays and the holidays. But We have also been busy doing stuff around the house. The most significant would probably be the new headboard I made with my mother in law and Parker over the Thanksgiving holiday.

I had been planning on making this headboard for a while. It was always a "When I find the right fabric, or time to make it I will". Well with MIL on hand and time to do it I felt it was go time in the house.

MIL and I headed over to a new fabric store and they just so happened to have the exact fabric I had been looking for. It is nice and heavy and fairly neutral so if I wanted to change the colors of the room or our bedding I could.

After buying 3 yards of the fabric, a bunch of extra thick batting, a piece of plywood (cut in half to fit in our car), extra long screws, nuts and bolts and some 2x4 pieces to be the legs we hauled everything back to the house and got started. Every one of the tutorials I read about said this was a super easy project and I was hoping to be done with it in just a few hours. Well, it was fairly easy but it took a lot more time than I had planned.

First we assembled the plywood and screwed the pieces together with a remnant to reinforce it. We then began to wrap the headboard like a present with the first and then a second layer of extra thick batting. Here is what it looked like after both layers were stapled onto the plywood.

Then we wrapped the whole head board in the fabric making sure it was laying flat and pulled tightly around the batting. We wanted to make sure it looked even and no pulling effect was happening so we took our time and used a lot of staples. Here is what it looked like without the legs attached and after about two hours of work. pretty nice right?

Then we began the next day with attaching the legs to the headboard. This is where we ended up having a problem. See the back of the headboard had become super thick because we had been folding the batting and then the fabric down and stapling it. so when we went to screw in the legs the fabric keept getting caught on the screws and the legs would not attach. To our horror we realized we needed to take the fabric off and attach the legs directly to the plywood and then re-wrap the legs with the fabric. After many hours of fussing with the legs and the MIL helping me figure it all our we finally were ready to attach the headboard to the bed frame.

After fussing with the bolts and getting everything even and attached we finally could see the fruits of our labor. I think it came out awesome! The whole thing cost me $89 not the close to $2000 I was going to spend on the bed frame I love from Crate and Barrel. Luckily now we have more cash saved up for the bathroom renovation we are plotting for spring of next year. Woot!

What am I supposed to do with this?

Apparently we need to get out trees trimmed!

I came home the other night to this in our front lawn! What the heck? Our neighbor told us that we had some high winds in the area. I did not notice that, but I guess he is right.

These trees are pretty large in the front of the house. We are very lucky that nothing happened to the house. There was no damage to the roof, and to the lawn really. I can't believe it! I am hoping Parker will write a post for you all about breaking down the tree and disposal. He even got to use a chainsaw!

Hope all is going well with you all! I will be posting about our Halloween decor and more later this week!

Master of Arts

As I mentioned to you the other week I made some home made art for Parker for our annaversary. I wanted to save money and be creative this year and I think I accomplished both! Two years is your cotton anniversary. Well since we did not have a met yet I did not want to get sheets wich is the obviousl cotton gift. I also did not want to get Parker any clothes as we are both working hard to loose some weight and I was not sure if it would fit him once he did.

So I came up with the idea of making art on canvas. I have seen a dew other blogs do the same thing and I figured I could pull it off. I used a coupon and bought two canvases on sale and Jo Ann's and then use paint samples we already had. In the end I probably only spent around $15 on the whole thing.

Once I gathered my materials I got to painting. I had seen a few ideas for what I wanted to paint but in the end chose the words from the long we walked down the ilse to at our wedding. The Beatles are my mom's favorite and I have always loved this song.

Here is how my first attempt at home made art came out. What do you think?

I know, it is kind of awesome! I love the whole look! The colors just happened to go well together in the room and they were free!

After Parker got his gift we decided to hang it up for the world to see. I like that it is right next to our bed reminding us of our special day and a good message to live by.

After hanging this artwork up I decided to hang other art up in the room. Hey, it's been 5 months I guess it is time. Next I hung up a map of Venice over Parker's new dresser. I also put out a picture of the family ad an eagle that his mom recently gave us from when Parker earned his eagle scout. I love the way this looks.

Above is a picture Parker's grandma painted and Parker's mom gave us just after we moved in together. I have always liked it and imagined having it in a special place in our home. I think it brightens up the muted colors in the rest of the room well.

So there you have it. We now have stuff to look at in our room. Things are slowly coming together in the house. It is amazing to me that even 5 months into living here I still feel like we are just moving in. I hope you like what we are doing with the place. We sure do! :)

Fit for a king

The evolution of our bedroom started a few years back when I found some great pillows at a sale at Dillards. Since then I have been trying to make our master bedroom feel less like a broker 20 year-old’s bedroom or like my mom’s house (no offense mom!) and more like OUR house. I have discovered this is the challenge for a lot of young couples starting out. Not only are you just getting started on your life together but then you have to cross the bridges of who gets to have what in their own bedroom. The fact of the matter is it takes time. That is what this post is about; the evolution of our bedroom’s style over time.

So with that let’s take a look back at the first picture I have after I bought some pillows on sale at Dillards just after we got married in January of 2011. We were using Parker’s bed and my old bed frame, and tables that I have had since college. Also know this picture was taken in our old apartment at night so it really looks super dark in there. It was much less cave like in person.

After a visit to my good friend Sarah’s house in Philadelphia I got inspired to get a more traditional quilt for our bed. After looking around a bit I found a really cute quilt at Marshalls for something like $30. I had the wherewithal to buy a king sized quilt knowing that we would eventually buy a bigger bed.You can see it on the bed in the picture below. When we moved into our new house, with a much bigger bedroom our bed looked very out of place in the space. It actually looked tiny! Here is a picture just after we moved in.

 After a few more months of sleeping on this bedframe and mattress in the house Parker and I decided it was time to finally upgrade. Between his back pain and my hip pain we knew that us wanting a mattress was not just about vanity but also comfort. We had actually been trying to wait until Christmas this year so we could give the bed to each other. We figured though, it was best to try and get the bed now instead of continuing to sleep on a mattress we no longer we comfortable on. So without further a due, here it is in all its glory!

Isn’t she pretty? We ended up going with a traditional coil bed after much debate about getting a foam mattress. It is a Beautyrest Elite king pillow top with individually wrapped coils. It was almost half the price of the memory foam mattress that we liked, and is super soft and comfy. For now, and for the next decade, it is exactly what we need. We had it delivered for free the next day and had our old one hauled away. We are pretty happy about it so far, but it defiantly needs to be broken in. It is not nearly as soft as the one in the store was. But the great thing with it is if we don’t like it after 90 days we can return it!

 Now, with a new bed comes the fun part (for me at least, Parker not so much) new bedding! We had actually saved a bunch of money from gift cards from our wedding two years ago, knowing that we would one day have to make this purchase. So it was fun to not have to hold back because of cost. We went with a duvet from Crate and Barrel. It is actually like their super popular one right now, so I had to special order it wich was a whole debachle. But now that it is on there with our new grey sheets and old quilt I am in love with it! What do you think? Here are some detail shots. As you can see, after all of this, I am still using those pillows I got on sale at Dillards years ago!

 Now that we have the bed all set up we need to make a headboard. I am going to attempt that this weekend. We also need to adjust a few more things in the room. In the end I think we have done a great job of combining our styles to make a room the modern and comfortable for both of us. Can’t wait to start on the next project! 

It gets worse before it gets better...

This week I got on a roll and decided to strip our kitchen table and re-finish it. This was a bad idea. I had no idea how much time it was going to take.

I began sanding it on Saturday and our neighbor saw me in the garage. Being a woodworker, he was intrigued so he came over to talk to me. He quickly noticed I was going to destroy the table. WOOPS. So he put me on the correct path of using a stripper and wood after wash product so I did not change the shape of the table.

I ran out to Home Depot and grabbed everything he told me to get. $75 later I was back in business. Sunday I began to use the stripper. This stuff is nasty and hard on the hands. So with heavy duty rubber gloves and goggles I proceeded.

Fist the stripper (Parker giggles when I say this) was applied using a "Chip" brush. This lifts up the seal and stain in minutes. I then would scrape it off with a shovel type tool. FYI if you wait too long it dries out and does not work, and if you go too soon it does not work either.

After a days worth of work I got most of the base done and the table top was next. This process makes the wood look horrible and destroyed. I was basically in tears while doing this thinking I had ruined this really nice table. After our neighbor came by to check on me he told me I was on the right track so I proceeded. I came to the conclusion it just had to get worse before it got better.

Here is what it looked like after the first and second and third round of using the stripper.

As you can see there were a lot of chemicals involved. Not very earth friendly I know.

As you can see here the wood looked damaged, and uneven. There was a lot of flaking and residue left after this first step.

The base looking nice from far away.

I will follow up with steps two and three later this week. I think you all will be super impressed with my skills.

Garage Sale!!!

Parker and I held our first garage sale this weekend. Not our first in this house but our first, ever. We had done some research about how to throw the proper garage sale event and we think the advice we found was super helpful. We thought we would tell you all about the sale and throw in some words of wisdom we learned from our experience.



First off, the whole thing was a huge success. We made a huge amount of money (but I am going to make you read this whole post before I tell you our final number)! We had several great stories from the day, and we met some of our neighbors which was super nice considering we had yet to even really see anyone outside of their houses. Thank goodness they are all super nice!



So here is the lowdown on how we had such a great garage sale experience:



The week before I advertised our garage sale on Craigslist.org 2 or 3 times. This was what I think was a huge factor in our success. We had people waiting for us as we were setting up our tables at 7am! We advertised starting at 8! By the time 7:45 rolled around we were already out of most of our electronics and "good stuff". I know no to get to garage sales early and act fast. We also advertised on the street with large bright readable signs so people would know where to head.



Here is a picture of parker an hour or so into it. Imagine about twice the amount of stuff out there to start off! You can see him waving at me if you squint!

We spread out. We used lots of tables and looked like we had a lot of stuff. We also kept putting new stuff out and arranging items to everything was easy to see and look at. I think this made us look "professional".



We did not set out trying to make money. The agreement was we were not there to make money, but to clean out all of our extra stuff and crate some space in our garage. This was our motto when people would negotiate us down. We figured 5 bucks was less than 10 but at least is was no ZERO!

We did not bring anything back into the house that we put out for sale. Not one thing we put out went back into the house. This was a huge feet for both of us but we really did feel great clearing out everything from our garage.



We did not take anything personally. We never got upset or concerned when someone did not want our stuff. The funny thing is stuff that Parker and I thought would go right away, never sold and all the weird odd and end stuff was gone right away!

At the end of the day this is all we were left with! Two tables full of little odd things and some old books. Oh and that bookcase sold to a former school teacher for $5!



Speaking of odd things we thought would sell, our sofa did not sell all day! We were so ticked by this! We thought that would be a big money maker for us and we had no takers. At 1:00 we were about to start packing up and a guy came by and asked if it was available. Parker jumped at the opportunity to not have to bring that sofa back into the garage and wait for Salvation Army to come by and get it and said we would sell it for $25! That guy got a STEAL!!!! Best part was right after the first guy offered to buy it these other guys pulled up in their burnt orange longhorn tuck. They wanted it too! We could have started a bidding war for it!



Guy number one was driving around in a BMW convertible and could not take the sofa right away. So he bartered with the buy in the truck and played him $25 to drive his sofa to his house! Not a bad deal for either of them. Here is Parker loading up the sofa:

I would also like to point out that I put out a few plates of my Chocolate Chip cookies and they sold like hotcakes! Hmmm maybe one day that could be my job!

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Loaded...

After we got the shelves all painted and installed we went over the cracks that the brackets and the shelves themselves created between them with some paintable caulking. It was tedious and messy but totally worth it. I think that it really finished out the look of the shelves.

After that dried we went ahead and loaded up the shelves with what we had lying around the house. This is a first attempt and for sure not the way it will stay. But we are working on it.

Top shelf has already changed pretty drastically, and we are going to add more cookbooks to the bottom self.

Here you can wee more depth of the shelves. We have a munch more practical stuff we should be putting out there but for now we are sticking to pretty stuff.

Now we have these finished I am going to move around the kitchen and see if we can empty out some of the cabinets we want to empty out so we can knock out the WHOLE WALL we want to knock out! I know we are nuts. I am hopping it comes out pretty though! More on the wall removal as we get to it.

So what you do you think? I think it is coming along okay for now.

Shelf the issue

As Parker and I get settled into the new house we are trying to take note of all the pending progects we would like to do and how we want to go about them. Out first large project will be renovating the kitchen. We have had lots of thoughts about how to go about doing that but for now we are just going to work with what we have and try and prepare our space for the upcoming changes.

To get started on making those changes we decieded we wanted to add more function storage space to the kitchen and what better or easier) way to do this but than to build the very trendy open kitchen shelves we have seen all over the place. We started out with a bare wall in the dining area of our eat in kitchen. The walls are a light grey so we thought white white white shelves would really "pop".

And here is what we ended up with:

What do you think?

We used the plans we found very well documented on younghouselove.com. I have been following their blog for years and I finally get to try out some of their great projects! We started with bare wood and stock brakcets from Home Depot. Sanded them down three times, then primed and painted them with paint we already owned. It really helped that we had all the painting stuff already otherwise I think it would have been better to just buy these shelves.

We wanted wide, thick and usable shelves that we could really load up so that they would act like really substitutes for kitchen cabinets. They are attached to the walls in the studs and then anchored into the wall in the middle with 75 pound drywall anchors. I don't think this babies are going anywhere anytime soon.

Our dishes and lots of other good stuff fit on these shelves. We don't like the gap between the bracket and the shelf though. We will be fixing that soon.

The sanding was well worth it but as you can see here they are not perfect. But I think they still came out great for our first fully DIY project.

Welcome from Alaska

About a year ago, my mom and dad sent me this cute sign from Alaska. We held on to it this whole time konwing that we could hang it up at our new house one day.

Well one day is finally here!

We hung it out by the fron door on the post leading into the entryway. What do you think? We like it!

Things are beginning cooling off

Last week we had our handyman come and install our beautiful new ceiling fan in our living room. This was not a tast for us beginer homeowners to try and tackle. It turns out it was hard for the professionals too!

He got to the house right at 9am and did not leave until almost 430. He also fixed several other small things around the house that we found on the inspection but for the most part all of that work was on the fan.

As you can see we have valuted celings in the room so there was no room for us to eaily feed the wiring in the attic. So he had to remove a can light that was awkwardly places above the fireplace and feed that wiring up to the fan. Once he did that we were left with three large holes in the drywal.

Here his is just getting started. He was cutting into the ceiling at this point. I tried to stay out of his way. Below you can see the other holes in the ceiling behind him where he removed the can light and cut a feeder hole.

Here is the fan up close. You can see the fixtured and the light bowl are both very light and bright. Can you see a theme here with our desgin elements!?

So after the 9 hours or fiddling around with the light we flipped the switch! Here is what is looks like all finished and installed:

Here are the two most handsome men in the world enjoying the new lighting in our living room. Can you tell how much brighter it is in here!?

Guess What?

We painted something else!

I know its shocking news.

We have this adorable built in linen closet in our hallway. We are not quite sure why but the previous owners never painted it white like the rest of the doors in the house.

So we got to painting.

First with a brush. But I quickly realized that was not going to work because it was all streaking. Not pretty. So then we used a roller. Much better!

Here are the before and after shots:

Ugly weird brown color. Not pretty.

Nice bright white color... Yes!

After Parker and I picked up our keys to our new home we were greeted in the kitchen with a wonderful bottle of bubbles and a fabulous orchid. Our REALTOR Molly was such a  huge help in this process and we could have never done it without her help.

Yumm! We had this and a pizza in the backyard as Harry played as our first meal in our new house!

We still don't have pictures of the whole house just yet so I am sorry for the odd and ends shots. But I think these pictures will help you all get a better idea of the house and what we are working with! We have already begun making big changes in the house so I thought I would give you a little sneak preview.

Here is the kitchen. It is going to be a big project we tackle later. We plan to rip out that door, and the counter tops and lay new flooring and knock out a wall. We are saving our pennies so we can do it right!

Parker and Cheryl got started on the giant red wall in the living room. As you can see the room does not have a lot of light in it, so we wanted to lighten it up as much as we could.

Here are the floors in the living room and hallway and office. Again very dark color, so we are trying to use lots of light colors to lighting up the house.

This is a shot from the kitchen looking down the hall towards the bedrooms. Again super dark. The plan is to change out the front door with one that has a window in it and also add a ceiling fan so that we can get some overhead lighting in the house. 

This is the office. Under the paint drapes there is some more of the dark wood floors. As you can see Cosette (Cheryl's dog) was going to help us paint. She actually was a very good girl and played all weekend with Harry in his backyard!

We wanted to lighten this room up and get rid of the bright blue. We tested out several colors as you can see. I bet you you can't pic out which one we picked!

Parker and I wanted to pick a light color that would show off his awesome movie posters in the office in a "super classy" way. We ended up going with a great color. I will do a post with the finished look later. We hope you all like it because we love it!

Cheryl and Cosette were a huge help once we got painting.

I patched up holes in the walls from giant anchors on the walls from shelves. I am becoming a master at this.

Parker, Cheryl and I were very busy that first weekend in the house. We have already painted three rooms and a whole lot of trim! My hand is in a claw shape still. We can't wait to start showing you more of what we have been up to!