New dining room table

**Edited to add to Thrifty Decor Chicks Before and After party.**

The other day I was out running errands and I saw a Pier 1. I have to admit, I don't know if I've ever been in Pier 1 before. I have always thought of it as a store with overpriced decor items. However, I read on another blog how Mikael found a great deal on a dining room table at Pier 1. I decided to stop in and see what I could see... and... I found a table! It was on clearance, but one corner of the table was smashed in, so I got an extra $100 off. Grand total? Just over $200! Yeah! So, here's a before and after.

My parents bought this table for us when we were first married. As you can tell, it badly needs to be refinished. The biggest problem though is that it's only 3 ft by 4 ft and there are 5 of us now. Can you say, tight squeeze?

Here's our new gorgeous table! I fell in love with the legs and I have to admit, that's a BIG reason I bought this table.


With the leaf in, it expands to 6 1/2 feet, so it'll comfortable seat 8, but we could squeeze 10 around it if we had to.

And another shot of those gorgeous legs. I told my husband that when/if we wear this table top out, I'm keeping the legs.
And, I just have to say, I love my minivan. I was able to fold all the back seats down, move my kids up, load up the table and keep running my errands. It was great!

We still don't have chairs for our new table, but I'm planning on making benches using this great lady's awesome furniture plans and possibly refinishing two of my old table's chairs to match. Before that though, remember my old table up top? Here it is again:
It's getting a makeover! I can hardly wait. It's going to be my work table in my craft room! Woohoo! I'm so excited!

Powder room progress

I've been wanting to get a few projects done lately. Just as I was going to haul our computer desk outside for a new finish - the weather got rainy. So, I shifted gears and painted my downstairs bathroom this past weekend.

This is the closest things I have to a before picture. I was taking the back of the tank off the toilet.

Here's my finished-so-far bathroom. It's a light purple (Sensitive Tint, I think, from Sherwin Williams color matched at Home Depot). I picked the color out of the sky in the painting below.
My little "iron man" I bought at Panama City Beach, FL my senior year of high school on a band trip. The painting came from a friend. She'd pulled it from a dumpster (the glass was broken) so she could have the frame and when I told her I'd take the picture, she gave the whole thing to me. My husband replaced the glass in it for Valentine's Day a few years ago. The little dresser came from Overstock.com. It holds extra toilet paper and hand towels and will eventually hold small bottles of the cleaners I use to clean the bathroom.

I'm not finished with my bathroom yet. I'm planning on putting a scripture verse in gray vinyl around the top of the wall, like a wallpaper boarder. I'm thinking John 8:12. I headed out to Joanns this week and got another Thomas Kinkade lighthouse and a frame for over the toilet. I also have a basket for the back of the toilet to hold lotions. I'm still looking for something for across from the toilet, too. I'm looking forward to seeing it all come together!

Work in Progress

We're working on a few projects around our house at the moment.

Our boys got a swing set for Christmas. We decided to do a kit and buy the wood separately. It's our first DIY project with power tools (which we bought just for this swing set). Here's my hubby measuring the boards for cutting. We've been working on this every weekend. Hopefully we'll be done this weekend.
We have a lot of blank walls in our house at the moment. I decided to get three canvases and have each of my boys (age 4, 3, and 1) paint them. I pulled these out yesterday and painted them a nice off-white base color. My boys will be painting them this afternoon!

I finally decided it was time to start tackling our bathrooms. We still haven't painted our bathrooms and our bedroom. We started last night in our downstairs powder room by taking the toilet tank off and getting everything off the wall. Hopefully, I'll finish prepping the room and taping off today. I'm hoping to get the first coat on this evening. I'm going with a light purple, but I'm starting to wonder how I'm going to like it. We'll see how it goes.

Organizing and other things

I've been working on organizing my house. You know, the whole, a place for everything type thing. It's a slow process since I can't just go out and buy a ton of cute storage containers. Here's what I've got so far.

We have a coat closet in our house, but it got turned into a food storage closet, so I had to come up with something else for hanging our coats. I bought and stained these peg boards years ago, but never really used the, so I painted them brown and hung them in my entryway for our coats. (The red peg board is now black, but it didn't fit where I had planned to put it and it hasn't found a new home, yet.)
It is so nice to have a place to hang our coats!

In my quest to find creative ways to store/organize toys, I came across a website that had some great ideas. One was a new way to store our growing collection of board games.

Before

After

We put all the small pieces in various sized ziplock bags so they won't spill all over the place and put the boxes on their sides. I told my husband we have room for more board games now!

I'm planning on implementing more of their great ideas in our toy rooms soon. I can hardly wait to have that disaster of a room cleaned up!

I started hanging all our art and pictures and things. I put this little plaque I made in my 9th grade art class on the wall and thought it needed a little something more. This scripture came to mind, so I headed down to my vinyl cutter and cut it out. My parents gave me a ton of leftover tile from their house remodel back in May so I had the tiles. I used Gorilla Epoxy glue (thanks Shanty2Chic for the idea!) to attach sawtooth hangers to the backs last night and hung them up this morning. I think it makes my little plaster mold look more complete, don't you think?

Also with my quest to keep things neat and orderly, I recently bought two baskets. I found them at Big Lots of $5 each. Once I get done painting them (I ran out of spray paint yesterday), and I get a liner made for each of them, they should help keep things on the right level. I plan to put one at the top of the stairs and one at the bottom to keep things that end up on the wrong floor organized, and then we'll swap them at night and put things away. I'll show you the finished project when I get done with them soon.

Vinyl decorating

Here's a couple of vinyl signs I did recently. This one below is located at the bottom of my staircase so I can see it each morning and throughout the day to remind me to read my scriptures. So far, it's working well. That and my three-year-old loves to have me "read the letters, mom." I took this picture standing on a step above the words, so the angle looks a bit odd. Sorry.

Now, if only I could find a cute quote that would inspire me to clean my house...

This next one, I saw in a friend's house and I liked it so much, I repeated in mine and in the same spot - over the sliding glass door to the back yard.

My husband helped me put these up the other day after the kids went to bed. Let me just say that putting vinyl lettering on a textured wall is NOT fun. It looks good now and that's all the matters, right? As a side note, you can see where I was spray painting my bed frame against the back of our block fence.

I also put "Welcome" on my front door again and I did a "No Soliciting" sign on our side lite. I was getting tired of all the door-to-door sales people that come through our newly built neighborhood.

I put a sign above my pantry door, but I don't like it, so I'm going to take it down and try again sometime. Hopefully, I'll get a before and after.

Ice Cream "Snowmen"

My younger brother and his wife had an ice cream 'snowman' on one of their weekly dates recently and it sounded so fun, we tried them at home.

I was planning on making one for each of us (5), but decided that two was enough since it takes a lot of ice cream and I didn't really want to eat that much. We let our two older boys have the snowmen and pick the "hair color" (aka. ice cream topping) although the redhead looks more like he got a major head injury.

We used graham stix as toothpicks to hold the snowman together since the balls of ice cream just wouldn't sit on top of each other. Frozen blueberries were the eyes and nose. Son #1 picked red hair (strawberry sauce) and Son #2 picked brown hair (chocolate sauce) for their snowmen. They were very much enjoyed, as evidenced below:

This was a fun way to make snowmen since we aren't likely to see snow here in AZ.

Been Busy

I've been out of the blogging loop for a while now. With the move, my in-laws coming for Christmas and everyone getting sick at our house, I've had to focus on the necessaries... and blogging just didn't make the list. Sorry.

I thought I'd come back with some pictures of things we've been up to around the house and join the Thrifty Decor Chick for her Before and After party.

Here's a few things we got finished up right before Christmas and something I finished last night.

We changed out all the sconces in our house. Finished up Christmas Eve.

We mostly finished changing out doorknobs before the move, but we finally got the front door knob installed too. Sorry, no picture of that one.
We also changed out our front entry light.
And the dining area chandelier.
I love the difference the light fixtures and the doorknobs have made to our house. It's a small, almost unnoticeable difference, but I love the change.

This next one I'm pretty proud of. I forgot to take a before picture, but if you look in the picture below (just before Son #1's 4th birthday party), you can see a small red clock on the left side. If you click on the photo, you'll see it better.
This is a during photo. I found some spray primer for plastic for the clock so I could change the color. The can said to wipe down the plastic with paint thinner to make it stick, but I didn't read the directions until after I'd started (and I don't have any paint thinner). It seems to have stuck pretty good though. I tried scratching the paint off last night and it didn't work.
Here's my finished clock! I love having clocks in every room of the house. This one went in my red laundry room. I chose yellow for the color because our loft (just outside the laundry room's bi-folding doors) is yellow. I had some red cardstock that was almost the exact color of my laundry room, for the back and I used some white vinyl I had lying around for the numbers. The clock went back together rather quickly. The hands of the clock are still black, so I might take them off and paint them yellow sometime, but for now I'm happy.
I have a small blue clock I'm planning on doing the same thing with, once I figure out which room I want to put it in.

And now, because I'm so proud of it, my guest bed.

I found this bed frame on Craigslist. It came with the mattress and box springs and a dresser that I turned around and sold on Craigslist the next day. All told, I spent less than $100 for this bed. It was originally a pretty brown with black flecks, but the finish was peeling off, so I washed and primed it and painted it with Rustoleum's Hammered Black paint. I LOVE it! I got it done just before Christmas so my in-laws would have a place to sleep.

As I get more things done, I'll be putting them up too. This week, I'm hoping to get started on a furniture project and get some things up on our walls, finally! The holidays were nice, but it's nice to get back to 'normal' life and start crafting again!