Merry Christmas 2012

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{A little Christmas}

So this year I just did a little bit of Christmas around our house.  I spent a week decorating someone else's house and then did another 2 days doing a entry and wreath for another lady.  Not sure how I got roped into that, but it left me a little tired of Christmas decorating, so I'll show you the few things that I did around my house.

My grandmother has collected TON of pinecones over the years, so a few weeks ago my sister and mom and I had a craft day and had fun glittering them for the holidays. They really turned out beautiful and cost us next to nothing!

 We made about 50 in all different styles but kept them all silver and gold and I have loved using them in different ways around my house.  The kiddos even got into the painting and glittering.  It was a fun afternoon project.

 Of course, Christmas is not complete without a tree, so that was the most important thing to get up.  I love filling the tree with all of our collected ornaments.  There are so many memories throughout the years and we love talking about each of them as we put them on the tree.  The star on top is very special because it represents the star that the wise men followed leading them to the Son of God.  I just reminds me of that night long ago and what that meant for us as humans.  I am humbled by the gift of salvation that was sent as a baby on Christmas night.

 

Some of my favorite ornaments are the ones that I've collected on trips with family, great girlfriends (like the Chicago one below) and the ones that mark achievements for our family.

 Parker got the ornament last year to represent her first year of dance.  I love that little ballerina!

 This was Hayes's from his first Christmas.  Oh how that felt like yesterday, but he's about to turn 4!!

And of course the tree is filled with Crosses, because in all this we want the real reason for Christmas to always shine through!

 

The stockings are hung on the banister with care (because we have no fireplace in this humble abode).

 

After Christmas this year I plan on bedazzling these puppies to give them the sparkle that I remember from my stocking when I was a kid. I tucked a little greenery and berries in them to give them a fun full look until they can be filled with goodies.

 This little tree was just stuck in a silver wine bucket and decorated to give some holiday to the other side of the room.  I love the little vintage angel gift tag I tucked on the top.  I found it in a box up in my mimi's attic when I was getting down her Christmas decoration.  It is probably 50 years old. So sweet!

And then to round it out, I made a new red and white mattress ticking pillow from about $6 worth of fabric and paired it with a garage sale pillow.  It's down filled and beautiful.  Perfect pillow for Christmas!

That's about all I did this year.  Life's too precious and busy to spend much more time on the decorations.  I can feel the rest of 2011 just slipping away and I don't want to miss one second!

Plus, I have some fun projects that I've been working on that I can't wait to share!

{A few more pictures but no after}

So, I've been sharing with your pictures of how we have slowly changed the look of our house which has been such a fun, long and challenging experience.  I have also been working on a few projects in the kitchen too that I will share with you today. 

Here is the kitchen when we moved in.  I don't have a formal before picture but this gives you an idea.

Happy 1st Birthday Hayes...This was the ONLY before pic I could find!

The owners had the brightest colors in the whole house.  It was like a rainbow.  The kitchen was red and the living room was yellow and the dining room was bright teal! I lived with the red for about 6 months and just had it one day and decided to give it a more neutral palette.  I did what I always do when I paint and went to the garage and found something that would work and started painting away.  I'm pretty spontaneous like that.

Here was the kitchen a short year ago when I started my journey.  It too was dark (but not as dark as the red walls) which is surprising considering every surface in there is WHITE! I love the paint color I painted the walls.  It shows up pretty dark here but it's actually pretty neutral.

First thing I tackled in this room was I removed every single red, black, or dark accessory.  I took down all the curtains I had made when we moved to this house about 3 years ago. 

This is what it looks like today...
**please excuse the dark pics.  Of course I took them on the cloudiest day we've had!

I purchased a Dash & Albert rug in a blue/light brown trellis pattern for the floor (which I despise...the floor not the rug, that I love). I also hung some white plates above my window.  The white curtains you see in the back window are full panels from P's nursery that I draped over the rod so that I could live with them for a while to see if that's what I wanted for that window. 

 The doors removed from these cabinets is new to me.  I am not sure yet if I like the look, but again wanted to live with it for a while to see.  It needs to be thinned out and reorganized, but I have always loved the look of open shelves/cabinets in the kitchen.

You can also see over the sink where I have literally thumb tacked up some fabric for the curtains.  Don't worry, these will not stay this way, but again I wanted to see what It would look like. 

 This old piece was refinished by my talented mom and is one of my favorite pieces.  The mirror goes with P's bedroom furniture, but wasn't being used so I carried it down and set it on the dresser.  The lamp is a favorite and was from Home Goods.  That glorious place!

So you can see with those simple things, I have completely changed the look of my kitchen for under $130.  Of course I have lots left to do, but it's a start in the right direction.  You don't have to wait until you can completely change the entire room to make a difference.  Just remove the things you don't like anymore and add more of the things you do like.  (almost) Nothing is permanent.  Just step out there and do it!

I'll share tomorrow about the sweet, lantern light that you got a sneak peek of that only cost me $8!  Seriously!! It's one of my favorite parts of the kitchen!

{Just living in the moments...}

I will be back soon to finish my progress on our living room, but for now I am just living in the day to day moments that I just don't want to miss.  It is always put into prespective when you hear of a tragedy that is just a little too close to home.  Not anything that affected us directly, but praying for a sweet friend from church who lost her mom unexpectedly.  I'll be focusing on the things that matter most the next few days and hope you will too!

{Changing the look of your house - Part 2}

So yesterday I shared with you a little about my goal to change the style of my house on little to no budget.  If you didn't read it you can here.  The first thing I did was remove all decorations from my room including couch pillows, curtains, accessories, dark pictures, etc.  I instantly felt better just having this stuff removed from the room.  Let me insert a note here...I did not get rid of that stuff.  I kept it because I knew there were many things I could repurpose and reuse in the room with a little bit of tweaking.

As I began to look around for inspiration for my new look I was drawn to these pictures...

thenester.com

hollymathisinteriors.com

www.theinspiredroom.net

I love, love, love the look of white couches! I so wanted a slipcovered white couch because I knew step one to changing the look of my living room as getting rid of the red (dark) floral couch.  I had to find another couch or another solution to that piece of furniture.  I went back and forth on what to do.  I thought of sewing a slipcover for the couch.  I had previously sewn a slipcover for an armchair that I love. I thought about buying some slipcover, but those never fit just right.  Z and I finally decided that we would invest in a piece of furniture so off shopping we went.  This part was agonizing!  I was drawn to light and soft and he was drawn to dark and leather.  We went to the store twice and I realized we weren't going to come to a conclusion.  I knew that realistically having a white couch was not the most logically seeing as we have 2 kids that are 5 and under but I SO wanted that white couch!  We finally decided that we would go with the leather for pratical reasons and I have to say I am happy for a few reasons including the mess of kids, but I also so wish I would have gone with what I truly wanted because I still want those silly white couches.  I know I will have them one day....

The decision was made and it felt like were were going to the wrong direction, but I pressed on and decided I would make the most of it.  Step 2 was to do something about our wall color.  It was way too dark and really wasn't a neutral that would open itself up for other colors to be introduced.  This was a HUGE undertaking because we have a very large room that needed to be painted not to mention the 30+foot entry way and all the way up the stairs.  Painting is the easiest and one of the most inexpensive ways you can change the look of a room.  IF you do the work yourself.  I love to paint so it didn't seem like that big of a deal and I knew I could tackle it a little bit at a time. 

Remember the greenish color before.  Very dark.  I decided to go very light and wanted a neutral that could go with a variety of colors.  My super talented friend, Candice, has a great grey all throughout her house that I love and she suggested that I use it.  I got a few samples (which I highly suggest) and painted them throughout the room in different areas and lived with them for a day.  It made my decision pretty easy and I went with Versatile Grey by Sherwin Williams.

It was the perfect shade for my living room and I am super happy I went with it.  Now started the painting.  It was a tedious, time consuming project but I estimate we saved over a $1,000 doing the work ourselves. 

You can see it was a lot of ladder work and took about 2 weeks a little at a time to finish, but we did it during a huge snow storm so there was nothing else we could be doing anyway!

Here is a pic I took after the couch had arrived and the paint was finished.

Much brighter and you can tell I threw some white pillows on the couch to distract from the darkness.  More on this tomorrow!

{Changing the look of your House}

This thought or idea started for me about a year ago when I quit my job to stay home full time with the kiddos.  As I was sitting around thinking, what am I going to do all day?, I started looking at my house which I had neglected while I was working and thought about all the "projects" I wanted to do.  If you know me very well, you know I'm a project girl.  I love having a million projects going at once.

I stumbled upon this website and more specifically this post.  If you haven't ever been introduced to The Nester consider this your lucky day.  I was so intrigued and excited to read this post because it gave me hope that I could change things around my house and I wasn't stuck with the direction I was going.

Let me talk briefly about the direction thing.  I was married about 10 years ago and my husband and I joke that everything in our house was given to us.  I know that sounds like a rough problem to have, but it really didn't lend us to creating our own style and honestly 10 years ago I didn't know what my style was or what that even meant.  I only knew what everyone around me did and so that's what I did too.

Fast forward to about a year ago when I'm now home looking for things to do.  I realized around that time that I wasn't thrilled with the look of my house.  I was craving lighter and brighter.  I wanted to eliminate the dark browns, the reds, the golds and move to the cooler colors.  Here is what my living room looked like as I started to play with this idea.

It's not bad at all, but much darker than what I was wanting and really not at all the color palette I was going for anymore.  The couch was my parents and it was obviously driving all the colors in the room.

Also, the wall color was much too dark and didn't allow light to bounce off the walls causing it to always look so dark in there and we have 6 of those tall windows you see.

Lots of browns and reds, not what I was wanting anymore.

Remember when I told you I quit my job during this time to stay home with the kids? Well, that really didn't lend itself to a huge redecorating budget, so I was challenged to think of what this room could look like on a very, very small budget.


I did some very simple, but dramatic things to instantly lighten up the space.  I first threw a white sheet over the couch and threw in some big blue pillows from my bed.  I also removed the heavy red drapes from the kitchen windows. 

Here is a look at the before one more time.

 It made a big difference and I started to get excited.  As my mom says, I instantly saw the vision.  And once I saw that vision there was no turning back, I had to continue on my journey to lighten up my house and change my style!  I immediately removed EVERY single accessory in my living room and put them all on my dining room table.  I just needed to see it as a blank palette, so I could see what I was working with!  It was so liberating!! 

Tune in tomorrow to see what I did next on my journey!

{BIG Weekend at our house!}

This weekend was a big weekend for our kids! I feel like they are all too quickly growing up and I want it to slow down!  Hayes was able to go "hunting" for the first time this weekend with his Daddy.  It wasn't a real hunting trip (for all of those thinking, who is the lady...first she lets them play with knives and now they're hunting??).  Our friend has some land just south of here and we have a new puppy.  Have I not mentioned her? She's sweet and puppyish and soft and loves to chew.  She's kind of a mess.


Here she is when she was a little puppy.  Now she is HUGE and still a puppy at 10 months old. 

Warning, if you're weak in the stomach skip to the next picture...
Let's get back on track, Mazie will be a hunting dog so Zac took her out to our friends farm to see what she could do.  To spare you all the gross details, Z shot a quail, Hayes picked it up and then ripped off the head.  I guess that's what you do?? That's why I don't go on those outings.  Here he is in his proud moment when he was telling me all about it. And yes, that's the head.

It really does warm my heart to see them have something that they can go do that they both love.  How cute are my boys??

I'm terrified that he is going to go around telling his friends and teachers that he pulled the head off of a quail.  It just doesn't sound right coming out of a little boys mouth, but man is he proud!

In less disgusting, but no less exciting news Parker learned to ride her bike this weekend without training wheels!!  And she literally taught herself.  Story there is, after Hayes returned from hunting he asked Z if he would take off his training wheels so he could learn to ride his bike.  He's only 3.5 but heck why not? So when P and I returned from our errands and she say her little brother riding his bike her face was like "oh no, he's not going to do that faster/better than me". (Our kids are SO competitive and I just don't know where they get it). So she hopped out of the car and Z took off her training wheels and she took off down the street.  There were a few moments that she struggled getting the bike going, but she did amazing and rode up and down all day.

I love the look of concentration!

Here is Hayes giving it a shot...He really learned too but I'm still too nervous to not run beside him in the crouched running stance.  I kind of want him to stop growing up because he's my baby! (And by that I mean I want to push him down so he can go back to being a little baby...what is wrong with me?!?) (I kid....kind of)

{Halloween Has Finally Arrived}

My kids love Halloween!  I'm sure it's because they love to dress up and love to eat candy, but whatever it is this is a much anticipated day in our house.  They count down the days until they get to wear their costumes!  The night before Halloween, we were tucking Parker into bed and she said "I can't believe Halloween is tomorrow! I'm just not ready for this!" The anticipation was too much.  It was hilarious!

Parker the cowgirl and Hayes the shark!

Hayes was trying to "swim" on the skateboard!

I love this little guy!!

She was so proud!  She picked out all of her fabrics for her costume and then her BG and I made it.

GG and Papaw with the kiddos.

And they're off!  What a beautiful night for a little trick or treating!

I mean, how cute is that little tail fin!

Hope you all had a happy Halloween!