You Might Just Get a 2-fer

Maybe... {If} I can get going on the project I have planned for today ~ we'll have to see how that goes.

For now, just wanted to share that I'm linking up the Blanche lamp to another party! This one is at somewhat simple ~ but I can't get the button to work for some reason, so there you go! Hope to see you all again later on today.

Just a Quick Note...

To let you know I'm linking up yesterday's post to a par-tay....




Head on over and check out the {ka-ton} of fun stuff Roeshel's blog (and her friends) has to share!

P.S. Old Peachy has been affectionately re-named Blanche. Rue (I actually thought her name was Ruma Clanahan rather than Rue McClanahan for the {longest} time) always was my favorite. :)

Meet Peachy

Check out this little beauty...



Doesn't it look like it should be sitting on Blanche Devereaux's bedside table in an episode of Golden Girls? It's such a lovely shade of 80's sitcom {peach} don't you think? And, hey, if any on you lovely reader people live in my area, you can swing on by the DAV thrift shop and, if you're quick and lucky, you might just be able to scoop up it's twin! Don't lie...I know you're tempted. ;)

Anyhoodle, peachy here is a glass lamp. Because I'm not well-acquainted with the use of spray paint (yet) I googled to get some tips on spray painting glass and the information I found suggested that I rough up the surface, either with sandpaper or with glass etching cream. Now, I realize that my blog title can be easily shortened to SNDR....which looks a lot like what might pass for "sander" on a {vanity} license plate....but this girl doesn't hand sand. It makes my teeth hurt. So off I went to Lowe's in search of etching cream. That went well. Lowe's dude said he'd never heard of such a thing, they don't carry it, and hey...if he were me he'd skip the sanding and use an all-purpose highly bonding spray paint primer that he knows adheres to ceramic tile, so why not glass too? Awesome. Works for me. And it did! A couple of coats of primer, and then I busted out the main event. Here she is all pretty...



I painted the base {espresso} and the color I used on the lamp is {paprika} ~ both in satin. Of course, peachy didn't come with a lampshade, so I had to make a trip to find one. I'm pretty happy with what I chose, and I think she looks nice sitting in the corner of my living room.



Happy, happy, happy! :)

A Different Kind of DIY

Lots of things on the go right now. I've got the bed/bench project that I'm going to be working on (come h-e-double-hockey-sticks or high water) this weekend, I'm still trying to figure out what to do with that lovely dresser and where in the world I'm going to PUT it, I hit the thrift shop this afternoon & found a lamp in need of some spraypaint...and a shade. But my favorite of all the {DIY} projects on my plate is the one that involves the tiny people.

This weekend we're having a {lemonade stand} to raise money to help the animals that have been affected by the oil spill in the Gulf. The tiny people saw some of the pictures on the news ~ and then saw mama crying because of the pictures on the news ~ and so we had to have a difficult and not fun discussion about how we use too much oil....and so companies have to drill for the oil we need....and how this company did so without a plan for what they would do if something went really, really wrong....and that something {did} go really, really wrong....and it's a big ugly mess that is going to be very very hard to clean up.

The not quite as tiny person is 5 now, and it's the perfect age for teaching that, no matter how small you may be in this big big world, you {can} make a difference. SO....we're doing what we can to help by selling lemonade and rice krispy treats and hoping to raise a respectable amount of money (which will be matched by me, and by my mom, and by our {awesome} next door neighbor who absolutely loves the tiny people...and they her) to send to the National Wildlife Federation.

Wish us LUCK!

Even A {Blind} Squirrel...

Some people are born with a true {gift} for finding amazing deals. They score ridiculous deals on everything from toilet paper to tires, and manage to walk away from a garage sale or flea market with the exact item they set out to find...for half of what they were willing to spend.

I am not one of those people.

Which is why I'm so {thrilled} about my finds from last weekend. And by thrilled I mean that, truly, if you were anywhere in the great midwest there's a good chance that you actually {heard} me squeal in delight when I found this...

Even better?

Yep, you read that right...{$10}!!! An antique spindle bed for TEN BUCKS! I nearly wet my pants. The plan is to make a bench for my front porch (and maybe a 2nd bench for my mom's house). Mom is concerned that I maintain the integrity of the peices so that it can be used as a bed again down the road. She also doesn't think I should {paint} it, but hey...it's my ten bucks...and a painted former headboard being converted into a bench is far better than a broken up headboard going into a landfill or ~ heaven forbid ~ a fire pit.

And my good fortune didn't stop there. I also got my hands on this...

And the price on this one is a real stunner. It was {free} to a good home. :) WOO-HOO! I'm not sure what I'm going to do with it just yet ~ maybe a new stand for our television? Or I could put it in the guest room (in our basement) to hold the extra bed linens. Hmmm...

Can't wait to get going on these projects!

The {Reclamation} Project: Part 1

I marvel at people who manage to maintain the public areas of their homes as {grown-up} spaces after having children. And I'm not just talking about the people who make unrealistic furniture choices (HOW can someone have a white couch with young kids in the house!?!?!? Or, even more alarming....pets...) ~ I'm talking about people who simply have things displayed in their home within reach of tiny hands. Such has not happened here with much success.

The tiny people just cannot seem to leave things alone. It's not always on purpose, granted, but the few decorative items I have in our living room frequently get knocked over in the course of their play. The {Keep Calm and Carry On} sign that sits on a display easel on our half wall has dented corners and a black small black smudge (no idea what caused that) from being knocked off the wall so many times. And it's not just limited to things within easy reach. There are finger smudges on the family portrait that hangs in the hallway. Keep in mind that a chair had to have been moved to the area for either of the tiny people to actually {reach} said portrait. And my favorite example? Here you go....

The tinier of the tiny people apparently took it upon herself to flip the personalized art work in her room {upside-down}. How exactly she managed to do this, I'm not entirely sure. My mother noticed it when she was here for a visit ~ I truly have {no clue} how long it was that way before she pointed it out to me.

So you can see why the majority of my decorating takes the form of hanging photographs or decorative ledges like the one from my last post (which, with the increasingly daring feats the tiny people are performing lately, is apparently no longer a safe option, either!). It's getting a little old...and now I'm on a mission to {reclaim} my home for the grown-ups. I had already moved all of the toys into the tiny people's bedrooms, so that's one battle down. Now onto the next thing....the living room...one corner at a time...

Clearly it's not finished ~ it just seems to need something more. I'm thinking maybe a table lamp ~ something to add a bit more height to the table and kind of tie it in more with the subway art on the wall. Any thoughts you have on what might work well there are appreciated! It's a {small} step, sure, but a step is a step!

(Tutorial on the frames ~ even though it's {so} easy you can probably all figure it out with no help from me! ~ coming soon!)

In Search of the Mojo

I apologize for my absence from blogland. Between the cold, blustery, monsoon-like weather and the arrival of the cold from {h-e-double-hockey-sticks} I have been suffering from a sad lack of motivation. I only have one teeny little project to share for all my time away...

I had seen this quote in a few different places & it was just {begging} to find a place in my home. So...off I went to the dollar store to find a frame so I could start the project.

The frame is an {off} size ~ it was originally meant to hold three 5x7s ~ so I had some figuring to do. I measured the opening, then opened a new blank file in photoshop using those dimensions. Creating the word art was pretty quick & easy ~ just a matter of choosing fonts & colors. Once that was done, I went to the Costco photo lab website and found the closest print size available that was {larger} than the size of the word art. I opened up another new blank file in the size of the print I'd be ordering, and used the paint bucket to turn the background grey. I then sharpened and flattened the word art, and moved it onto the grey background, so it looked like this....

I uploaded the finished file, ordered the print size I needed, and an hour later it was ready to go. All I had to do was trim off the grey part & pop it in the frame.

Less than $5! Not bad... I'm hoping that this little project will be the springboard for more projects. I so want my {mojo} back!

Told 'Ya...

This week I managed to go grocery shopping, take the tiny people to the library, get both tiny people to and from their respective schools on time and not leave either of them anywhere where they weren't supposed to be left. I also changed the sheets on all of the beds, kept the kitchen reasonably reasonable, vacuumed the living room 2-3 times, got the tiny people to clean their rooms, helped the Hubband keep up with his workload, watched ridiculous amounts of baseball and hockey....and completely {forgot} about anything laundry-related.

Don't believe me? Well, here we have Exhibit A: Our Laundry Chute.

When the Hubband, while waiting for the water to warm up so he could take a shower this morning, opened the linen closet to find it completely devoid of fresh towels....then grumbled his way to the basement and emerged moments later with a clean and folded {beach towel}....yeah, then I kinda knew it was worse than I thought.

See for all the {shockingly} idiotic and interesting home-improvement methods used by the previous owners of our home (my favorite example? drywall as a substitute for sub-flooring in the kitchen. can I get a WTH!?!?!) they did do one thing that I find to be {brilliant}. When they were having the basement finished, they had a closet built around the area where the laundry chute empties. (insert sound of singing angels here...) Smart, right? No one has to see our dirty clothes when they go downstairs ~ it's all hidden away behind a closet door....which is great, except for one small side-effect known as "out of sight, out of mind". Oops.

And now you all have photographic proof that I chose the title for this blog very wisely.

Now *This* Is Exciting Stuff!

Take a little lookie-loo at what I found at {Michael's} the other day...

Tulip Fabric Spray Paint

This stuff comes in a ton of different colors ~ which made it reallllly difficult for me to just pick up white and walk away, but I did! ;) This is a great {alternative} to using bleach. With the bleach t-shirts, you have no control over the color that you end up with on the area where the bleach is sprayed. Go back a few posts and take a look at the navy t-shirts that were bleach-sprayed...you'll see that the bleached areas are a purple-ish color. Green turns kind of a yellow-ish, red would turn pink. I wanted to make myself a Red Wings shirt and I didn't want pink ~ I wanted red and white ~ and the white spray paint worked {perfectly}. I used the exact same method with the freezer paper, etc. and it turned out great. SO, next time you're at the craft store grab yourself a bottle and try it out!

An Imperfect Improvement

When I upholstered the {fugly} headboard ~ which I'm still in love with, by the way ~ I started really looking at the rest of the bedroom furniture (b/c of course it was a full matching set) and trying to figure out what I could do to it to make it...better. After a great deal of inspection and an exploratory mission involving a screwdriver, I discovered that the drawer fronts on the nightstands and dresser could be very easily removed from the actual {drawers}. Hmmm... I thought about making new drawer fronts and then I thought ~ {why}? The existing fronts are, obviously, the right size ~ and they're {free}! So I decided to flip those suckers over & use the backs as the new fronts!

I forgot to take a {before} pic, but here you can see what the original drawer fronts looked like. Obviously, there was no way to just slap on some paint & new hardware for a fresh new look.

I decided to experiment with the nightstand that the tinier of the tiny people has in her room (we had to split the set so we could fit a stand-up chest of drawers into our {small} master bedroom...she got the extra nightstand) so that if it didnt' work I wouldn't be faced with figuring out how to fix it and make our bedroom set match again.

So I took off the drawer fronts, filled the screw holes with wood putty, and sanded all the surfaces I planned to paint. It took a few coats of paint, with sanding between, to get the finish nice & even. I know a lot of people love their {spray paint} but I'm a can & brush kind of girl, and I used white paint we had on hand.

The Hubband came to my aid in measuring, drilling, reattaching, etc. Good thing, too, because otherwise I'm certain I would've made an enormous {mess} of things. It's not perfect, but it's a definite improvement!

The Hubband did say that the measuring was a bit of a pain...but when you consider that the only thing I {bought} for this project was the hardware, I think it's well worth it! Less than $10 total for a new look...that's not bad!

We're still debating about doing the same with our own bedroom furniture... I'll keep you posted!

Little Girls are Sports Fans, Too!

You wanna know what's really {frustrating}? Trying to find "team apparel" for little girls that isn't grossly overpriced or pink. I mean, really ~ if our team's colors are blue & orange...or scarlet & grey...or red & white...why in the world would you slap that logo on a pink t-shirt? So earlier this week I took matters into my own hands and made some lovely bleach-spray t-shirts that have been floating around in blogland!

I searched online for the {Detroit Tigers} logo ~ gotta love the good old-fashioned {English D} right? I found a printable version on the Tigers' website, but it was made to be used as a template for pumpkin carving (how cool is that!?!?) so I kept looking. Lo & behold, I found exactly what I needed on Wikipedia of all places. It even had the logo in 4 different sizes, which was perfect as I knew the tiny people would require a smaller one than I'd need for my own shirt! Now ~ this might be considered copyright infringement....but the logo was made available by the official site, so they can't be too picky about what it's used for, I would think. Not to mention that I'm not using their logo for profit, so I'm okay with taking my chances. ;)

I printed the logos out on {cardstock} then cut them out and traced them onto {freezer paper}. This was the first time I'd ever used freezer paper and I was thrilled that it really does stick to the fabric when you iron it ~ AMAZING! Next, I took a spray bottle of bleach and went to town. **Don't forget to put something inside the shirt to keep the bleach from soaking through to the back ~ a plastic grocery bag works well!** Quick, easy, and {cheap} ~ as in $5 for each of our shirts ~ and we've got t-shirts for game day! WOOT! I showed them to the Hubband and his immediate response was, "Where's mine?" So...I'd better get on that!

Spring Broken

Ahhh, Spring Break. I had no first-hand experience with any such thing until I went to college. No, really ~ we never had Spring Break when I was in high school....let alone elementary. Both of my kids are mid-way through SB right now & it's wiping me out. Their little schedules are totally {jacked} and I have a feeling they're looking forward to school starting back up just as much as I am.

We just got back from 2 days in Ohio, visiting my mom...and tomorrow she'll be coming up here for the weekend. :) Should be fun. We're going to see {Straight No Chaser} on Friday night and I'm probably a little too excited. We'll also be celebrating the tinier of the tiny people's birthday on Sunday, so it's going to be a weekend full of excitement!

I left for my mom's on Monday afternoon with one project about halfway done, so hopefully I'll be able to finish it up this week at some point. Should be interesting with my very willing {helpers} at my side. Anyway ~ all this to say that I'm not sure how much I'll be around for the remainder of the week but I do intend to try...