Christmas Plate

Our local grocery store, Fry's sells dishes and they recently put out their Christmas stuff. I bought 3 plates, one each in green, red and white. I've only had time to do the green plate so far. I used beige vinyl since I don't have white and I really like how it turned out. I'm planning on doing "Happy Holidays" and maybe "Tis the Season" on my other plates and giving them as gifts this year.

Progress Report

We've been making progress on the painting. The pros got in on Monday and Tuesday and did a great job! I was so excited when I saw our walls and really pleased that I didn't have to do all that work!

Here's some pictures of what we've gotten done so far:

My red laundry room (Cherry Tart? Behr paint). It's a bit darker in real life, not so much the Christmas bright red color above. I've seriously debated whether or not to finish the red or prime it and start with a new color. After seeing the loft color with the red (when the door's open) I decided to stick with it. This is 3 coats and I'm thinking I need one more. The edges might need another coat after that. We'll see.

Question: Why is it that my laundry room looks like I need an extra coat of paint on the edges like that? What am I doing wrong? Any ideas/suggestions/tips would be appreciated. I'm a novice painter!

Here's the fan my husband installed in our 10 ft high ceiling last week! It looks really nice. You can also see the color we chose for the main parts of our house, up and down. It's called Jersey Cream from Sherwin Williams.
I asked my husband to put on one light fixture last night before heading home. He did the front entry. Wait... Let me find a before picture. Here it is:
I think the new one looks much better!

And here's our downstairs. You can see a bit of the green we're doing in the kitchen. Still needs another coat, so it doesn't look the best yet, but we still love it! I think that chandelier in the kitchen will be coming down tomorrow, so I'll show you the new one soon. Actually, it's sitting in the middle of the dining area in the picture below!
I also finished up the nursery/Son #3 bedroom. We chose Lemon Sherbet from Dunn Edwards. It goes well with the green paisley fabric that I picked up this summer for the curtains in his room. Sorry, no picture. I forgot to get one.

We took a break today, but a nice long weekend (with a New Moon break for me!) is ahead of us, so we're hoping to get lots done. Hopefully, we'll finish painting the kitchen and laundry room and get another bedroom or two started.

Choosing colors

We've started painting! It's kind of exciting to see the different colors on the walls. My boys kept asking me, "You're painting the house?!?" when I started. They've only seen white walls at our place and they've never seen anyone paint a room before.

We've been trying to decide what color to paint our living room/loft area. The painters will be starting that on Monday. So, I picked 5 colors, got samples at Home Depot and painted by number on the wall. I couldn't tell what color was which in the jar, so I numbered them and then painted the number on the wall.
We were leaning towards number 3 or 5, but I had another sample I'd picked up a while ago for something else that I wanted to try. It's called Humble Gold by Sherwin Williams. I painted that the next day and thought one shade lighter would do the trick. Back to Home Depot, I picked up Jersey Cream (one shade lighter than Humble Gold) and every other color for all the rooms in the house. Since I couldn't tell the difference between a couple of them, we ended up with about 9 sample colors on our walls! I lost the camera in all that, so no pictures. Sorry! We did end up deciding on Jersey Cream. I think it'll look great with our green kitchen (which we started painting yesterday!). So far, we've got a red laundry room and a green kitchen and my paint shirt looks rather festive. My husband's halfway through installing all the ceiling fans and we still have light fixtures to change out. It's been a busy week and we've got a couple more weeks like it coming up!

I'll be able to blog a little more once we've finished some more things. We've been heading down to the house (it's 40 minutes away) after breakfast and getting back home around 10pm each night. It's exhausting but it'll totally be worth it!

Starting...

We closed on our house yesterday! Last night we headed down and had pizza on the floor in our empty dining room. The boys loved running around and going up and down the stairs. A highlight for them was throwing a toy over the loft wall and down the stairs. They loved it!

Before leaving for the house yesterday, I threw all our new doorknobs in the van and changed out a couple of knobs last night. This afternoon, we got a babysitter (thanks again, Emily!) for our two oldest and headed down to do some more work.

We chose antique pewter for the finish on our doorknobs. It was a compromise that we are both very pleased with. I like the dark, brown finishes. My husband likes the more silver colored ones. The picture on the Schlage website shows a much lighter color, but they turned out to be a dark finish with silver undertones. So, our doorknobs went from brass and levers (that's just asking our boys to leave the house!)
to beautiful and much harder to get out!
It looks almost black in the picture, but it's not that dark. I'll have to try to get a better picture sometime. I still need to change out our front doorknob and the garage doorknob. I had them rekeyed to match at Lowes today. They did it for free since I bought my knobs through their website.

We also got started on installing ceiling fans. Here's my hubby, working hard.

And our Son #3 holding the ladder for Daddy! What a good little helper!
We'll be heading down soon to get some more things done. We discovered that we need to get a few new tools (like wire cutters) to install our ceiling fans (seven of them!). So, I'll be heading out to get those before our next trip down.

We finally made a decision about painting. We're having the professionals do the main part of the house (the hardest part to keep the kids out if we did it.) and we'll be doing the rest. We still aren't sure what color we're painting the living room/loft area, but the painters will hopefully be doing it this week! I bought the paint for our laundry room today, but we didn't have time to get started on it. Lots to do and little time. We're hoping to move in just a few weeks!

Vinyl looks good on anything!

I picked up this plate the other day at Home Goods. It was on clearance for 50 cents. I was looking for a square plate since I'm a little partial to square tiles for my vinyl. But I thought, for 50 cents, I couldn't go wrong!

This was a fun one to design. I bought my vinyl cutter back in May so I can use it to decorate our home (we're closing this weekend! Yea!) but I haven't done any challenging designs with my software yet. It was fun to figure out how to get the words the size I wanted and laid out in a circle.


I told my husband when he got home last night that now I just need to find a plate hanger so we can hang it in our kitchen after the move. And whatdaya know? I found the perfect solution over at Shanty2Chic, posted yesterday! I'll be picking up some of these plate hangers in the near future for sure.

* Someone asked me recently if I have a Cricut that I cut my vinyl with. They are super fun. I have several friends who have a Cricut and I've used one, but I chose to get an actual vinyl cutter so that I could do bigger vinyl projects than the Cricut can do. I have read that a vinyl cutter can be used like a Cricut, aka used to cut paper but I've yet to figure out how. I'm still exploring the fun things I can do with just vinyl. I have been getting excited about various projects I've seen in blogland using scrapbook paper so I'll probably be figuring that out soon. I'll let you know how it goes. If you're interested in a vinyl cutter, I got mine for a fairly good price at this website. I've also bought all my vinyl from them. Hope that helps!

Play Kitchen to be!

Jane at Out of the Crayon Box is having a "Build With Me: Cute and Thrifty Play Kitchen in just six weeks". Once I saw her great idea of turning a nightstand or cabinet into a toy kitchen I knew I wanted to make one for my boys. So, when I saw her party, I headed to Craigslist for a great find. I've been looking for the perfect nightstand for a while, but nothing has jumped out at me. This morning, I found it! This is the picture I took from the listing. I'm going to get it tomorrow! I can hardly wait to start and I hope my boys love their new toy kitchen come Christmas time!