Are any of y'all familiar with a little magazine called Country Living? Yeah, I thought so...in this crowd that's like asking a toddler if he's heard of something called "blocks". So a few months ago I received an e-mail from Country Living asking if I'd be interested in working with them and Minwax on a project for the magazine.
Now most of the time it takes me a few days (or weeks, even) to respond to e-mails after I receive them. This one though...I was all over this one like white on rice. …
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Why You Should Always Listen to Pottery Barn (a bench story)
In my last post I told you about how I bought the galvanized metal chairs I have been lusting after for years. Today we're talking about the other side of the table...the farmhouse benches.
These are the complete opposite of my metal chairs... their homemade, cheap, and NOT sturdy. And even though I spent ridiculous amounts of time stalking my metal chair prey....these were way more of a pain. What I'm trying to say is that this is not a tutorial. More like a story of failure, failure...and …
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Pecan Farmhouse Dining Table
Surprise! We built another dining room table. That kind of came out of left field, I know...after all, we just built our current pine farmhouse table last year. Allow me to explain...
Adam is a wood snob.
Now Adam isn't snobby about much. He will gladly drive old crappy cars, sport goodwill t-shirts, go waaay to long between haircuts because I don't feel like cutting it, and use the same towel for the tenth time without complaining. But show him a piece of cheap furniture and you can watch …
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Front Porch Reveal and a History of Clutter
Oh, our porch. Those of y'all that have been following for a while know what a blessing and a curse it is. We love our porch...it's HUGE, shady, and pretty much amazing. It is also our dumping grounds...it's where most activities happen (like projects) and it is normally looks like a disaster. AND it is right out there in the open and the first thing people see. I want it to be a clean inviting place for people to sit, chat, and enjoy a drink. It's never been that place.
Until now.
Now I …
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Three Tables
Today I have a random post for you about three random tables. Just stick with me, it will make more sense soon.
Let me introduce you to the tables...
This table might look familiar, it's been around for a while. I bought it at a garage sale about five years ago, and since then it has been an end table in the living room, a nightstand in out bedroom, and a porch table. It even held miniature our BBQ pit for a while. This table gets around.
That is a seriously terrible before picture. I …
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15 Ways to Give Your Furniture New Life
Let's face it, buying new furniture is expensive. So expensive, in fact, that I've never actually done it (besides couches, because I'm not awesome/crazy enough to DIY a couch). There is also the problem that new furniture is, well... boring. To me it all looks the same and basically has zero personality. A great (and super cheap!) solution to this is to redo old furniture. But what do you do with your ratty old thrift store furniture once you get it home?
1. Paint it a fun …
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How to turn a Dresser into a Bathroom Vanity
Dressers are super versatile, you can transform them into a host of things. I've seen them made into media centers, changing tables, buffets, benches, bookshelves, toy storage, and last but not least, bathroom vanities. When we decided to start renovating our bathroom last month I knew I wanted a dresser as my new vanity. I liked the idea of the vanity looking like a piece of furniture and I wanted the storage.
I've written a few posts about the process so far, but this post has all the …
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White To Green – A Dresser Before & After
I'm slowly chipping away at my boy's room renovation. I've paper bagged the floors and were about halfway done with planking the walls. My next victim was this dresser/changing table.
It's really feminine, plus it's slowly turning from a nice crisp white to more of a muted yellow. Wait though, that's not the actual before picture. Get ready for the worst before picture of all time.
Yes, that is our master bedroom circa 2008, a few months after we bought our house. It literally hurts my …
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Kids Step Stool (with Yardstick Steps)
I do projects around here when there is a need. Or a want, wants are project-worthy too. In this particular case I needed Elijah (who's in full potty training mode) to be able to turn on the bathroom light by himself. Enter - the need for a step stool. Or the want, cause I don't want to stop what I'm doing every twenty minutes to turn the lights on for him. So perhaps the motives behind the step stool were actually selfish. Whatever, I'm okay with that.
I told Adam my selfish desire for a …
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$5 File Cabinet Makeover
One of my "loose goals" for 2013 was to buy a real file cabinet and finally take control of paperwork in our house. Why is it that it is sooo easy for paperwork to get out of hand? My command center has helped a bit, though only in my kitchen and only with recent paperwork. The rest of it is still a mess. My current "file cabinet" is too small and stuff comes busting out of it and then never makes it back in. Exhibit A:
There is also an exhibit B, C, D & E, but I'll spare you.
So the …
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The Mystery Table
A few days ago I showed y'all my new command center and asked for guesses as to what color I painted the small console table that sits below it.
Well, 98% of you (let's not check that math, mmmkay?) thought I chose green. Two of you said orange, and one lonely intuitive soul guessed correctly (Yay Molly!).
What color is it now? Yellow!
Wait, yellow? I know, yellow seems really random. It actually started with my plate wall...
See that dark yellow plate at the top? I really liked it …
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Built-In Outdoor Bench
You know how everyone has a spot in their house that just seems to collect stuff? That place that is everyone's dumping ground? Perhaps it's your entryway, mudroom, kitchen counters or your garage. Ours is our front porch. Yup, right out there in the open.
Let's just pretend for a second that I'm not a giant redneck who stores all her stuff on the front porch. Let's pretend this is a normal home decor blog where I don't show you horribly truthful pictures. Are you pretending? Okay then, …
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Updating The Updated Barstools
So you probably remember last month when I took my uber brown craigslist barstools and lighted them up.
I love them, they look great...but they needed something. Nothing crazy, just...something. A reader suggested numbers and I knew right away that's what I wanted to do.
I also knew that I did NOT want to hand paint them...I can see that going very very wrong. I've seen some tutorials for freezer paper (some tutorials call for wax paper) stenciling floating around and figured I'd give that …
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Upcycled Porch Entry Table
It took me forever to come up with a title for this post. The one it ended up with isn't that great, but its better than "Antique Dumpster Vanity Mirror Holder Thingy Turned Faux Outdoor Entry Table", or a variety of other things I things I came up with.
So a few days ago I showed you this broken old vanity top that was found near a dumpster...
and how I turned the mirror frame into this chalkboard.
I wanted to use all the pieces of it (what can I say, I like a challenge) and when I …
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Drop Cloth Barstool Makeover
Two years ago we bought our barstools off of Craigslist for about $40. I wasn't particularly in love with them, but they were cheap, tall, and there were three of them. And they were brown, and we all know how I love brown.
But it was time for a change... after all, I am still working on debrowning the living room. I wanted to lighten them up and reupholster the seats and backs. Normally I would have gone for a fun print fabric... but Adam requested that I not do any patterns, since the …
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The Wobbly Old Shelf (And A Chalk Paint Review)
A friend of mine lives in an old farmhouse. One day she went into the attic of said farmhouse and discovered this really old shelf.
She asked me if I wanted to redo it and I asked her what she had in mind. She said "I don't know...just do something." Do something...I can run with that.
First thing I did was remove the little corner doo-dads. Two were broken so I thought that ripping them off would be easier than attempting to fix them. Luckily I know someone who thinks tools and destroying …
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Indian Inlay Stenciled Table
Bone inlayed furniture is really popular right now...not with people like us, cause we're cheap, but with people that have money to throw around.
The first dresser (the little black one) has a price tag of....hold onto your britches....$2,999! Holy cajoles...most of the cars we've owned have cost less than that. Do people really pay that much for furniture? I'm sure some do or else these companies wouldn't be in business...I'm also sure that those people wouldn't be caught dead reading my …
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DIY Chalk Paint Fail & The Bed That Almost Killed Me
So unless you've been living under a rock, you know that chalk paint is all the rage here in crafty blogland. As a member of crafty blogland, I felt as if I was my duty to give chalk paint a whirl. Annie Sloan makes the stuff everyone raves about, so I went online to order some....that's when I saw that it is crazy expensive. Like over $40 a quart expensive. Now I might have ponied up and paid it if I wasn't going to catch a ton of flack about it from the hubs, who already thinks my paint …
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End Table? Dog House? Both!
Remember when I gave this old 70's table a makeover?
Well, that table has an ugly step sister that I never told you about....
I decided that I didn't want to put this one in my house, so it has just been hanging around in the furniture pile on my front porch. So when my (one day) sister-in-law said she needed a large end table, I jumped on the opportunity to get it out of my pile.
By now, I'm sure y'all know how this process goes...sand, paint...blah blah blah. But this time, while I was …
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The “Dirty Cowboy” Treatment
Ahh, the Dirty Cowboy...a great way to give your furniture some personality. That's right... furniture. Is that not what you were expecting? What kind of blog do you think I'm running over here?
So I didn't entirely make this technique up, it is really just dry brushing... or antiquing, or distressing with stain, or a variety of other names. I've tried to dry brush furniture a few different ways and this is the way I found worked the best, was the easiest and gave me the best result.
First …
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{Awesome} Paisley Stenciled Table
Let's talk stenciling.
Now, I've done my fair share of stenciling, but it's always been with a homemade stencil and it takes F.O.R.E.V.E.R. to do. Plus the final product always looks kinda wonky when you get up close and the design is very simple. Also it takes forever....that's worth mentioning twice. So when Cutting Edge Stencils sent me a stencil to review I was super excited. I just so happened to have a spare dining room table sitting on my front porch (what, you don't?) and it was begging …
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