My New Mountain Home

I finally found a new house! Since my old home sold in a week, not even on the market, I have been looking for a place closer to my parents and sister. They live on the mountain but it is very tough to find an affordable house up there. Enter an as-is for sale by owner on Panorama:

The structure of the home is quite beautiful and it is nice and big for me and the three. It was built in the 60s and added on to at least twice I think. I actually know one of the previous owners and plan to quiz her about its history.

Once you go inside, there is lots of character and charm, but there is also much updating and fixing needed. There are areas that have some water damage and things that are dated or just not my style. I plan to show you all things over the coming days/weeks/months/years.

For now, a brief overview of the high points:

 A knotty pine kitchen. It's so dated, but quaint. There is also a dutch door! I hope it doesn't let it too much cold air in the winter. I already have thoughts and plans on painting the cabinets to make them last until I really upgrade the kitchen.

 The dining room is off the kitchen and what you don't know yet, is I have already torn out those two closets to open up the view of the living areas from the front door...

 The living room, with new hardwood floors in the addition is actually perfect for the most part, but I am getting new windows to help with heating and air efficiency. You can see the one on the right is fogged up and condensating.

 The lovely master bath. :-)

 The lovely master bedroom... with a loft. I have also already made some big changes in here!

 There are a few more rooms to see, but I will update this later with those. What is awesome and amazing and part of the reason this house is now mine is the great backyard for the kids. I love it and I am really hoping we can be moved in before the weather turns too cool.

Maternity Pants Rehash

When I was pregnant, I found a really cool pair of maternity pants from Target that I loved! I had never bought colored jeans before and I didn't realize how many different colored tops you could pair it with.

I loved them so much, that I thought I would buy the non-maternity version once I wasn't pregnant anymore. Not so much... I couldn't find any!

So I decided with Della to try to make them

 Even though Della found a great color match on the RIT website, I was worried it would be too light, so I bought a plain teal dye to test that out since it looked better on the bottle.

 Our little helper!

 We used test strips of cotton to see how the color matching was turning out

 The website said to use 1 teaspoon aquamarine to 1/8 lemon yellow. We tried to measure it out perfectly...

This was such an absolute blast to do. And it turned out perfectly!

I can't believe that it turned out so close to the actually color! The newly dyed pants are a little more brilliant than the original, but I am sure it will fade a bit with washing
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Cost:

White pants from Goodwill - $5
Dye for pants - $15

Total - $20

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Mermaid Tail Side Table Rehash

Latest Rehash - Side Table

Mom and I found a chipped and peeling side table in the trash on the mountain the other day. It even came with a glass top!

I let it sit in the back of my car for about a week, since I am kinda homeless right now, but finally brought it in to my parent's garage.

I saw a blog the other day (here)that used a pretty blue on a piece and felt brave to go blue in painting this. Black or White are usually my main furniture color choices because of the fear of regret or things looking dated or color clash. Looking ahead to a future home, it might be a pretty accent piece.

There are so many chalk paints on the market now and I found a pretty color with Debbie's DIY chalk/clay paint in Mermaid tail and just got a tiny tub (~13.00)

Debi's Design Diary Mermaid Tail Paint

After a really stressful day of feeling not in control of anything, I started painting the table, in hopes of feeling accomplished once it was done.

Not so much....

Even though I sanded lightly the top and shelf, there is a bleed through of something. I tried several things to overcome this issue but Kilz worked best. I had a can of Upshot lying around and used it liberally all over the legs and top...and drawer...several times.

But it is looking great! Next I need to wax it or seal it so it will stay pretty. I can't find my Annie Sloan wax, thanks to the move, so I got some of this for pretty cheap.

The Waverly wax turned out to be a liquid wax, different than the Annie Sloan solid/paste wax, but was very easy to spread on. I let it set for 24 hours and buffed it a bit with an old sock. It turned out great!

I love how the legs show some of the original finish through. It looks much better than I thought with that, almost like I planned it!

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Table - $0
Paint - $13
Wax -  $ 5
Total - $18

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Now to find a house to put it in...

Have a great day!

Salvaged Dog Bed

 Lately I have not been very motivated to do any projects. I am a stay-at-home mom to my (almost) 2 year old daughter. I have the time but my daughter can sense when I am trying to do any craft or art project. She comes running to “help” me in that adorable floppy way toddlers run. This usually ends in me putting up all the “fun toys” (i.e. scissors, sewing needles, etc..)  and giving up. While it’s frustrating I keep telling myself that it’s just a season and the other cliche sayings people tell you while living with a toddler. I was just whining to telling my husband last night how frustrated I was and unmotivated to be productive because I couldn’t finish anything.

                Apparently the family dog (Atlas) overheard me. Today was great weather to wash all of his bedding. So I threw the dog bed guts in the sunshine while the covers were in the washer. Atlas is an inside only dog but I let him out to pee for 5 minutes. When I came back he was gleefully lying in a bunch of stuffing that he had torn from the flimsy inside covers. =( When I brought inside this is what it look like... 

                Initially I was shocked. Atlas is almost 7 and he is not a chewer, barker, nor digger. I guess he was just scratching up his bedding to make it fluffier. The idea to cry crossed my mind but really it’s just a dog bed… not the end of the world. So I bagged what I could and brought it inside.   

                And after my little sweetie went to bed I looked through my fabric stash and found a print that I probably got in a grab bag from a yard sale or when a friend was cleaning out her craft room. There was a lot of it and it was somewhat homely. The moral of that story is: never throw away large yardage of fabric even if it’s ugly.  Maybe that is borderline hoarder..ish but it saved me money today. =)

                I flattened the bed cover and measured. I didn’t account for seam allowances or anything fancy. 

I knew the inside cover would have to be smaller anyway to fit into the outside cover.

 

Then I sewed it like a classic pillow from home economics class back in the day. Leaving a hole on one end to put the guts back in. I did flatten the corner and sew across to make it more like a box. Again nothing fancy, I just eyeballed the first corner and sewed and then I cut off the excess and used that as a guide. (It wasn’t perfect… it is just a dog bed after all.)

               

  During the stuffing process the fabric ripped a little because the stuffing hole was too small. But I was still able to sew up the end to keep it all in there. 

  

Now the dog will have a bed for his crate tonight and he had better not complain if it is a little extra lumpy. Hopefully sewing this dog bed was just crafty enough to help wake up my inner muse. If she hasn't died already. ;)

 

DIY Baseball Heels

The Look for Less - Thrift Store Edition

DIY Baseball Pumps

Welcome to our blog! Today I would like to share an upcycle that I did for a friend whose son plays little league baseball - baseball pumps! This was so much fun to do. She wears heels everywhere and we saw some ideas of shoes like this:

 



Pinterest link

 Very cute, huh? But over $100. Boo... So my friend showed me some of the shoes like this that she liked and I ran over to one of the thrift stores in town to see if there were any size 6 shoes that would work and I found these: 


 Aren't they adorable? Who am I kidding, all size 6 shoes are adorable. But what I really liked about these is that those stripes kinda look like stitching and I might could follow their lines for baseball stitching.... And they were only $5!!!

I needed to get them one uniform color to begin with so I taped off all the parts that were solid and found a can of antique white spray paint and went to town. 

 After 2-3 coats, it became clear that the raffia was absorbing the paint and they were never going to be one solid color. I tried a couple of different ways to fix this and what ended up working best was a grey primer paint. 

 They look nice just all one color, don't they? The next step was to create the baseball stitching. I used fabric paint pens for precision and even created a line down the middle to make it really look like the material was separated. This was so fun to do!

 One of the things that I really liked about the original picture was the red soles, so I painted the bottoms red and it turned out really well. The final step was a quick clear coat to set everything and that worked great.

    

I really love how these turned out! I need to get a picture with them in use at the ball fields so you can get the full effect. :-)

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Supplies: 

Cute shoes ($5)
Antique White Spray Paint (Free!)
Pack of Fabric Paint Markers (Free!)
Can of Clear Coat (~$3.50)

Total Cost - $8.50


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