Trunk Table

The project I have to show you today was almost an epic FAIL! It was super frustrating and I almost quit and cried in the middle of it. I didn't end up sitting and crying about this, but I did walk away from it for a day before I came back to finish it. Sometimes that just what you have to do to prevent yourself from hitting things with a hammer.

See this trunk....

Let me give you a little back story on this thing. When I was around 13ish I needed one of these trunks to take to girl scout camp. My parents bought this trunk and let me decorate it. They were both trying to convince me to stain it so I could use it after camp and wouldn't ruin the wood. Did I listen to them? HA! Does any 13 year old listen to their parents??? Not me. I wanted to paint it. So they let me. {Love my artistic skills? lol}

Fast forward 10 years or so -------> The trunk now lives, abandoned, in my parents basement......where their cat goes to puke. See where this is going?? Yeah, she puked on the lid. Right under the "M" towards the front edge. My dad did his best to clean it off, but there was still a slight stain. Um, gross.

Fast forward another 6 or 7 years ------> Dad brings this trunk to my house because he doesn't want it in his basement anymore. Great, just what I need. A child painted, puke stained trunk sitting in my spare bedroom.

And there is sat for months. I've been wanting to turn it into a little table. It's been on my project list for a long time, but it just seemed like such a pain. Plus I wasn't really sure how to add table legs to something. Anywho, I went for it anyway. First I had to sand all that paint off. Thank goodness we have an orbital sander!! I would not have made it through the sanding without it. Here it is all sanded down. Looking much better!

After I sanded it down I stained it with some stain my dad gave me. Lucky for me, the stain wiped right off the hardware so I didn't have to remove any of it. Win!

Then I added these cheap 6 inch table legs I bought at Home Depot.

Here is where my project went down the crapper in a hurry! I should have googled how to do this before I started. I must have lost my mind that day! I'm going to spare you all the details, but warn you to google this, or ask an experienced man or something before trying to attach table legs to anything!! Seriously.

{Insert pity party for 1}

Day 2:

Figured it out/rigged it to work my way. And now I have this cute little table to set in my front window with my chairs. So happy :)

Slowly but surely this room is coming together. Now if only I could remember to water that plant....

And if you are new here, here's some other projects in this picture you may have missed:
DIY Faux Nail Head Trim
Bow and Flower Pillows
Tea Dyed Curtains
I thought I had blogged about that little magazine bowl, but I can't seem to find the post...hmmm...

Have a great hump day!!

Kitchen Island

Did you see my kitchen remodel on Wednesday?? What did you think? Hope you love it like I do!

Today I'm going to talk a little about the island we built.

Lovely right??

To refresh you, it is made from a desk and hutch I bought on Craigslist for $20. Score!

Now, I didn't take very good pictures of the process because we were doing it mainly at night, in the garage and quite frankly, I was busy and tired. Let's take a look...

First we cut the bottom off the hutch to make it the same height as the desk.

Then we Mr. Perfect screwed the desk and the hutch together

And we attached a base.
We also added a shelf in the space where a chair would slide under the desk side.
The whole thing was put on locking casters.
Caulk it all.
Paint it all.
Add a countertop.
And you have a kitchen island.

Told you my "process" pictures suck! HA!

Let's look at the after pictures instead, shall we...

 ...that's our recycling on the bottom shelf, in case you were wondering...

With the same hardware and paint as the rest of the kitchen, it looks like it was here the whole time. A match made in heaven...kitchen heaven that is...

I don't mean to brag, but we did a pretty AMAZING job on this island!!!!!!!!

LOVE
LOVE
LOVE IT

Kitchen Remodel

Right before Christmas we decided to finish remodeling our kitchen. See, we half did things 2 years ago and never got around to the rest. We talk about what we want to do with certain spaces and then never get around to doing it.

This is going to be a lengthy post with picture overload so bear with me, mmkay?

So here's what we started with over 2 years ago...

These pictures were all taken before the previous owners were completely moved out so their junk is still sitting around everywhere. But seriously, don't these pictures make you want to puke?!? I do {gag}.

When we first started working on fixing up this revolting mess, we removed those weird decorative barrier wood things on top of the bookcase. And the heavy cedar beams that run around that opening to the kitchen. Buh bye! I mean, what are those things away? Hideous! So if you look at the cabinets, there is this weird braided thing running down the inset on all of them. Those were barely stapled on so we popped those off too. And we also did away with all the ugly scalloped trim along the top of the cabinets.

Ok, so after we did that destruction, next came paint. Painted the cabinets, the walls, trim, painted that bookshelf, got a new dishwasher and fridge and all new hardware.  And then we stalled out. About a year later I couldn't stand that awful lemon yellow tile. We put up a faux tin backsplash. Then another year went by. We had talked of putting a bar top on the top of the bookshelf and adding a kitchen island, but never did. And lets not forget that we still had the old fake butcher-block laminate countertops. I LOATHE those counters. They are the same ones my parents had growing up, ugh, gross.

Now that you are up to speed on what we did in the beginning, let's talk about what we completed this Christmas....

I want a kitchen island. Mr. wants the bar top. Are they both going to fit and still have walking room?? We don't know. I found a desk with a hutch on Craigslist for $20 that I wanted to convert into the island. It was solid wood and in excellent shape. So we brought it up into the kitchen and put an old door on the bookshelf to see if this was going to all work.

Yep! Looks like it will work out just fine :)

When we were doing this, we were shocked at how perfect that door was. Right length. Right height. And free! I'm totally giving Mr. Perfect credit for this idea...it was all him. Saved us from having to buy wood. I LOVE the fact that we recycled a door that had no use in the basement. Win Win!

Let's get to the good part....the REVEAL!!! YAY!!

It's a breath of fresh air in here. I absolutely love how it all turned out!

Our kitchen has been so much more useful since adding the island and bar. See the laptop over there on the end of the bar? Yep, that's where I sit to do all my blogging and blog stalking and pinning :)

Let's look at the before one more time...

PUKE! And the after...

AHHH..

Friday I'll show you the process of making the island so watch for that.

Bathroom Remodel

Seeing as how our house was built in the 70's, we have 2 of the ugliest bathrooms EVER! No joke, they make me want to barf. I'm going to apologize in advance, I don't have very good before pictures. This remodel was not planned and took over a year, working on it all bit by bit. The bulk of it was actually done before I even started this blog. I never blogged about it because we never replaced the floor...it was hideous. I finally convinced Mr Perfect over Christmas to put a new floor in. I love it now!

So here's what we started with...

 This picture was actually taken when we were doing our final walk through before signing on the house in 2009. It seems to be the ONLY before picture I have :(  Sad story. As you can kinda see, there are ugly, nasty shower doors {I hate those things}...a marble countertop complete with flecks of gold, and a sink to match...dark ugly dated vanity...gray-ish, blue-ish, white-ish walls...and lets not look passed all that lovely yellow/camel colored tile. It pretty much covers the whole bathroom.

 And here is a cell phone picture of the new tile we put down for the floor...but you can see the beautiful linoleum we had before. Gag

So here's the deal...we aren't made of money so gutting the bathroom and starting over was not an option. We had to work with what we've got. The yellow tile had to stay. But it's ok...I went with the yellow/gray color scheme! The vanity also had to stay, and the countertop. But that's ok too...paint is my best friend. And thank goodness there are countertop paints out there now!

Ok, so I know you are dying to see it...

if the colors vary, blame it on the fact that there's no natural light in a bathroom :( 

I don't usually put my shower curtain up so high, but the kiddo broke the tension on the rod...it won't stay up now unless it's above those tiles...and let's face it, that's an expensive rod and I'm too cheap to buy another one. Thanks kid

Ignore the lower right corner where a couple tiles are missing...they popped off when the floor was installed and Mr Perfect hasn't glued them back on yet.

To see my project involving that little shelf and the vases, go here

I pretty much love it! I did all the painting and Mr Perfect tiled the floor....not too shabby for his first time!

Your thoughts??

Planting Flowers is Hard Work

This is the first house I've owned.

The first house I've had to maintain a yard.

The first time I've cared about my "curb appeal".

And the first time I've planted flowers.

As I've mentioned before, our house was built in the 70's, and the landscaping reflects that.

This is our lovely bushes when we first moved in

 Beautiful, right?

No?

Yeah that's what I thought.

So Mr. Perfect cut them all out.

Once all those bushes came out we found massive rocks, in size and quantity, under them.

So we built a flower bed with the rocks.

FREE landscaping!

Now the really great part...

Our city has the most UH-MAZING city services

We have huge recycling bins, they pick up all our yard waste, I love it.

I recently found out they use the yard waste and turn it into compost.

They also use the logs and turn them into mulch.

Great right?

The best part...

As a resident, we can go fill truckloads of compost and mulch, for FREE!!

Pretty sweet deal if you ask me! That stuff is not cheap!

1 truck bed filled with compost and mulch + $50 in flowers = One super cheap, beautiful new flower bed!

YAY!

This fall we will lay grass seed on the exposed dirt and next year it will be even better!

I'm pretty happy with it :)

Much Love~

Meredith

Can I write on my door?

The answer is YES!

I decided to try my hand at using some chalkboard paint. 

When we bought our house a year and a half ago we had super dark, crappy doors (my house is a 1970-something house, yikes!). So I painted all those doors (and the trim) white....except one.

Don't ask me why I never painted this one door, I do not know why.

Maybe because I'm lazy?? 

YES! Probably.

Anyway, this one lovely door I neglected is a door in my family room that leads down to the laundry room and out to the garage. So I thought this would be the perfect door to use the chalkboard paint on so we could leave notes to each other, or reminders for the next day....like "don't leave your camera batteries plugged into the wall"...yeah I've done that oops!

So I took the door down, gave it a coat of paint and now it doesn't stick out like a sore thumb in my family room. Hoorah!

For the chalk cups, I used some hose clamps I got in a multi-pack for like 2 bucks at Walmart, then nailed them to the wall and slid a cheap $1 votive holder in the clamp. Voila!

And of course we had to draw some super crazy things all over the door. I can't say I didn't have a beer before we did this craziness *wink*

Do you have a chalkboard in your house? 

Well, you totally should!

Much Love~

Meredith