Entryway with state love art...

I feel like I've been gone forever!  I feel totally overwhelmed by summer.  Anyone else?  It's so hard to entertain 4 kids and get anything else done.  The kids are having a fun summer though which is what is really important.  My house is all unpacked and I've been doing tons of fun projects I just haven't had time to blog about them yet.

This is the view right as you walk through the front door.  The beautiful watercolor art is from The Wheatfield.  LOVE her stuff!  It's so cheerful and inspiring.  The state/country art I made with my silhouette machine and is all the places we've lived the past few years.    The chalkboard I made with an old mirror.  The little bench is the Ana-White rustic bench that we made a while ago and I just painted it with Rustoleum Night tide gloss spray paint.

Read more »

Most adorable bench ever, Ana-White rustic bench

I wanted a bench for the kids craft table in the office  If you have more than one kid than you can understand the glory of a bench vs a chair.  No fighting or shoving about who gets to sit on the chair. Benches have a spot for more than one bum!  Yay!

I've had Ana-White's small rustic bench on my list for awhile.  So many ways to use it.  It would be so cute in the bathroom, entry or even on the front porch.  So cute in fact I had my husband build two.  It cost less than $30 for both of them and didn't take him too much time.  Just 20 minutes (which is what I say about EVERY project).  It will just take like 20 minutes don't ya think honey?  In fact it probably took about an hour or so for each bench but he used to build houses which is why I made he so lovingly offers to do most of the woodwork at our house.  If I built the bench it would have taken 8 or 9 hours.

Ta-da! I painted one of them my favorite pink, Behr's powdered blush.

Read more »

Ana-White Narrow farmhouse table...

I needed a sewing table for my new office/craft room.  I wanted something super sturdy since my old sewing table would shake when I was sewing!  I also wanted something that I could repurpose in a different house since my husband is a Marine and we move a lot.  Plus I am loving farmhouse tables lately. So I chose Ana-White's Narrow farmhouse table.  Love!  We used MDF for the top because I wanted a solid surface instead of the slats.  LOVE how the slats look but my two little ones are going to use this as a craft table when I'm not sewing.  You don't want slats on your art table because then your pencil will poke a hole in your paper and there would be much crying over your ruined art.

Ta-da!

Read more »

Corner desk for Mom cave...

So I've been working on redoing my Mom cave for awhile.  This is where I do most of my computer stuff as well as crafting and sewing.  The before was okay.  I had a corner dresser with a bookcase but felt like the dresser part was wasting space.  I wanted to have room to hide my external hard drives behind the computer (and away from the toddler) as well as have room for my printer and silhouette machine (that is still in the box because I have nowhere to put it!).  So I found this corner desktop from Ana-white.  Corner desktop plans  Perfect because I already had a table leg and two filing cabinets and just needed the tabletop.

Read more »

Ana-White ten dollar ledges...

My goal for January is to get my kitchen/dining room cute.  My goal for February might be to get the strangers taken out of the frames and put some of our family.  One of my kids was looking at the pictures the other day and even asked "Do we know them?"  But it's progress from the bag of frames sitting on the dining room table!  I got all the frames at Michael's on a big frame sale they had a week or two ago.  

These are the Ana White ten dollar ledges.  I LOVE these.  In fact this is what we made for Christmas for our siblings that we drew names for and our parents.  For about $30 in wood we built 5 sets of 3 foot shelves.  

Read more »

Cute pink play kitchen...

So for our toddler's birthday I really wanted a pink play kitchen for her. There was a really cute one at Pottery barn but it was like $800 for the whole set.  Cute inspiration kitchen.   Ouch.  Plus I knew I wanted a nice solid wood kitchen that we could keep forever and repaint whenever I get the whim.

So I found these plans:  Ana White kitchen plans.  And this gal who used the Ana White plans and added cute little curtains:  Crafty Chick kitchen with super cute curtains.  So those were our jumping off inspiration points and we changed a few things along the way to fit with the cute kitchen I had living in my head.  In total I think we spent about $200 including all the knobs, pulls, paint and curtain fabric and cute Ikea dishes/food.

It would be way easy to keep it closer to $100 if you just used cheaper wood.  The pink play kitchen is made entirely of pine with beadboard on the back.

Read more »