Archive for November, 2011
October Superlatives
It’s that time again! When we take a moment to look back on all that we’ve done in the past month at a glance (and gather all the links in one handy place for ya). And of course we tossed in some never-before-seen stuff to spice things up. This month we were all over the place as usual, from doing a bunch of kitchen things to dipping into a few office projects, some landscaping tasks, and even a few Halloween crafts. So let’s take a walk down memory lane, with yearbook-esque superlatives (you know, just for kicks).
Most Destructive: Demoing out our fridge cabinet, which officially kicked off to the kitchen makeover madness.
Best Timing: Our long-awaited appliance purchases, which allowed us to save nearly 1,400 big ones.
Best Moves: Swapping the location of our fridge and pantry by moving them to opposite sides of the kitchen to improve the flow (look how intense Sherry is when she moves big things).
Best Removes: Taking out our wall oven, its cabinet, some counters, and our cooktop to make way for our new appliances.
Thriftiest: Fun secondhand finds from our road trip to Brevard, NC for my cousin’s wedding.
Cutest Couple: Clara and her BFF Gee (she named him herself) all packed and ready to go on our little weekend road trip. Sidenote: Good thing the cabinets are keeping an eye on them.
Cutest Couple (Runner Up): A tie between Sherry & Katie’s very giggly performance and me & Jeremy’s Sprite-tastic cameo in this Q&A video from the Bower’s visit to Richmond.
Worst Looking: Our kitchen in the midst of some electrical work so that our new appliances had a place to plug in.
Most Killer: Stenciling the walls of our office, which took Sherry three 4.5 hour installments to finish. A killer process, but we think it’s a killer result.
Most Likely To Include Ceramic Animals: The “Curator’s Collection” that we had the honor of creating over on Joss & Main (it’s completely normal to get hyper about dog lamps and map art, right?).
Cheekiest: Our office chairs, which got a few coats of green paint and bold new upholstery.
“Gone To the Dark Side” Award: The bottom half of our office walls, which look a lot more grounded now that we painted them a darker grey color.
Least Likely To Take Themselves Too Seriously: The personal, bright, and sentimental art solutions that we made for our office, which provide a nice visual break from the daily grind (and only set us back $13).
Sloppiest: Clara’s finger-painting skillz on our psychedelic kid-friendly Halloween pumpkins.
Spookiest: Our mildly creepy Halloween decorations, including bloody candles, white wooden snakes, and green apples and gourds.
Most Hair Raising: The spider that tried to thwart our quickie mum upgrade to our front porch. I’ll spare you guys the close up pic of our girl “Charlotte” again.
Most Open: The view of our front yard, now that our bush fence is gone.
Most Open (Runner Up): Outlining a few of our kitchen decisions (and indecisions) including the addition of some open shelving.
Most Grounded: The new flooring that we’ve chosen for our kitchen – some dark cork purchased on sale at Lumber Liquidators.
Most Well Rounded: The penny tile that we chose for our new kitchen backsplash (so glad Clara approves).
“The White Stuff” Award: Our decision to forgo granite and use white Corian counters in our kitchen.
Deal of the Month: Saving over $300 on cabinets by getting them at the ReStore instead of the home improvement store.
Most Likely To Catch Flies: KB & SP as they announced the return of the Pinterest Challenge, open mouths and all.
So there’s our October at a glance. Can you believe it’s already November? What did you guys knock out last month? Have you ever made a list of accomplishments to look back on? If not, feel free to use the comments of this post to break down what you’ve done. It’s so nice to take a break from adding things to The List while appreciating what we’ve completed. Just for a second. Then it’s back to the kitchen. By this time next week there should be a giant 8′ opening into the dining room. Raise your hand open your mouth if you’re excited.
Psst- You can check out July’s superlatives here, August’s here, and September’s here.
Pssst- We announced this week’s giveaway winners. Click here to see if you’re one of them.
Reader Redesign: One Hexy Table
Will we ever grow tired of seeing a piece of furniture that has been completely transformed with a little bit of paint? Probably not. At least not as long as we’re getting emails like Jesse’s. Here’s an excerpt from his blog about the whole hexagon-tastic transformation of this coffee table that he sent our way:
You can see in the photo that this was one of those over-lacquered tables that was pretty beat up. But the curves are all there, and they are nice!
The top had really pretty woodwork, a nice diamond inlay. So, continuing with my recent love affair with wood AND paint rather than one or the other, I stripped this table to the bare wood. I stained the top “dark walnut” and then went hexagonal with it. Here’s the after:
I love the dark wood flowing in between those hexagons, and then the contrasting turquoise underneath. It’s actually a light turquoise that I spotted in the mishap aisle (so I can’t be sure of the name).
Didn’t Jesse do an awesome job? You can check out more pics and details here on his blog. We love the play between the traditional shape of the table and the modern color and pattern. I’m sure we’ve walked past many a similar table at thrift stores or yard sales before. Now we might give them a closer look!
Psst – Got your own awesome before & after project? Send your story, pics, and related links to submission@younghouselove.com to be considered for a possible Reader Redesign feature. You know we love a makeover.
Psssst – We don’t always tell you when we have a new post up on Young House Life (they just go up every few days – even on nights and weekends – so clicking the Life tab under the header or subscribing is the best way to see all those behind-the-scenes posts). Couldn’t let our Halloween night pics go up without a little shout out though, so feel free to check them out here.
Feeling Testy
Duuude. We painted our house. Clarification: we painted a few tiny test swatches. The creamy color wasn’t exactly hurting our eyes, but there are a few gorgeous homes in our neighborhood with gray hardboard siding + brick and we love the look, so we decided to give a few swatches a try. Having such a light creamy color on the hardboard siding (it’s solid wood) and all of the trim isn’t doing the trim any favors (it’s not popping at all since it’s all the same color). And the pairing of the light cream with the darker richer brick is sort of jarring – like it’s two houses. So we thought by going with a more mid-toned color (but not reddy-brown since that would be too much of a good brick thing) it might feel more cohesive. Like one unified house instead of a brick house with a big cream box in the middle.
First we held up around 25 swatches and picked three that we thought looked the best next to the brick (which has some pretty great gray undertones – especially in the mortar). Then we got three two dolla (holla!) paint pots from Lowe’s and made three test squares (right above the brick part of the house so we can see how things look when they touch). Note: why yes I did wear my shirt inside out when painting them, thankyouverymuch.
The winner?
The guy on the right. You can see from the photo above that it’s a warm taupey gray. So it shares a lot of undertones with the brick. We feel especially confident about how compatible it’ll be since it’s nearly the same color as the mortar.
It’s Flagstone by Martha Stewart, which we’ll get color matched to some sort of high quality exterior paint – hopefully with some built-in primer (more deets on that when we actually pick up the paint and pin down what brand/type it’ll be). As for the one in the middle, that’s Mushroom by Martha (which we thought was too dark), and the one on the left is Bedford Gray also by Martha (which we thought was too icy and blue).
Of course the photos aren’t the same as the real life effect, but we love the guy on the right because it’s not too icy/cool/light and it’s not too dark. Don’t get us wrong – we love a dark house (with white trim that pops = amazing) but we thought a mid-tone would look best with our black roof, existing brick, yellow door, and the bright white trim that we’ll be adding (black roof + dark gray house = too dark for our little ranch). So we hope our pick is a nice balance of not-too-dark-and-not-too-light (the roof can be the dark element and the white trim can be the light one). Here’s a poorly photoshopped version of the last pic to give you an idea of where we’re hopefully headed:
Speaking of the to-be-white trim, it’s actually really out of order of us to test paint on the house because we still need to demo out the scallops on the porch and paint the trim (painting the hardboard and then demoing the scallops could lead to some paint damage that we’d then have to retouch). So although we’ve pinned down our paint winner, we hope to move on to scallop-demo and then we’ll get to painting the hardboard gray and the trim white (along with framing out the curvy columns to make them look chunky and square like our future scallop-less header).
Hope we can tackle that before it gets too cold for exterior painting (especially since we’re also juggling the kitchen redo). Oh man, but can’t you just picture our happy yellow door with white trim and gray hardboard with that gray-undertoned brick? Hope it’s as lovely in real life as it is in my mind. If not… guess I’ll be repainting (we have gallons of the current colored house paint in the basement).
I did find this house plan rendering with a brick exterior, gray hardboard siding, and a black roof like ours (sadly no happy yellow door though). Of course those peaks are a lot cuter than our house but it’s still good for trying to picture it before we get ‘er done.
We like how the red and the gray in the rendering sort of have the same value. There’s not one dark thing and one light thing (like we have going on with brick + cream) and the trim pops nicely since it’s a few shades lighter than both the gray and the brick tone). Should help with the whole “cohesive and unified yet defined” thing that we’re going for.
In the meantime, have you guys painted the trim or the siding of your house? Did you do the whole paint-a-few-test-swatches thing beforehand? Were you nervous? It’s amazing how not nervous I am. Usually I’m indecisive and happy to wait a while while thinking things over, but this time I’m all over it. Seriously, can’t wait. So here’s hoping the colder weather + the kitchen don’t make this a spring project. Come on fall, hold out for a while longer!
Psst- House rendering found here.
Fall Pinterest Challenge: Ornaments A Plenty
It’s Wednesday the 2nd… so it’s time to share this season’s (completely unofficial) Pinterest Challenge (not sponsored by Pinterest or anyone else, just dreamed up by Katie to make us stop pinning and start doing).
I actually tackled ornaments (since the winter edition of our little Pinterest Challenge won’t be until January), which I mentioned last Wednesday when Katie, Ana, Erin and I issued our little get-off-our-bums-and-make-something challenge.
I know, I know – it’s not even Thanksgiving yet. I’m one of those one-holiday-at-a-time peeps too. But it was actually oddly satisfying to feel so “prepared” for the upcoming holiday season. And I’m kind of in love with all the happy little ornaments I squeezed out. I actually ended up making 38 ornaments! Here are just a few of the things that inspired them (all found thanks to Pinterest, but originally from here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here):
As are the rules, I took inspiration (or Pintspiration, har-har) from the above projects and then I did my own spin. Which added up to those 38 aforementioned ornaments that I whipped up. My method? Good ol’ trial and error. I just played around and made stuff up as I went along. Here’s what I ended up with:
- 12 faux ceramic animal ornaments (inspired by the A stuff above)
- 18 colorful swirl glass bulb ornaments (inspired by the B stuff above)
- 3 patterned ceramic ornaments (inspired by the C stuff above)
- 4 faux antler ornaments (inspired by the D stuff above)
- 1 skeleton key ornament (inspired by the E stuff above)
Here they are now:
And here’s how I made each type:
FAUX CERAMIC ANIMAL ORNAMENTS -
- Purchased a pack of small plastic zoo animals from Michael’s for $4 (with coupon)
- Primed them all with white spray primer
- Use small drill bit to start a hole to screw small ring hooks into the top of each one so they could be hung
- Painted 4 of them white, 4 of them lime green, and 4 of them navy (w/ acrylic craft paint from Michael’s)
- Added colorful string (the kind used for friendship bracelets from Michael’s) for hanging
COLORFUL SWIRL GLASS BULB ORNAMENTS -
- Purchased three six packs of glass ornaments (in small and large sizes) from Michael’s for $9 total (with coupons)
- Removed the ornament cap and poured a decent amount of 99 cent craft paint in one of three colors into the ornament (exact colors I used: “Limeade” by Apple Barrel, “Metallic Emerald Green” by Folk Art, and “Magenta” by Folk Art Shiny)
- Slowly swirled the ornament around to spread the paint and create a nice “spun” effect (I aimed to cover 50% of the glass with paint for a not-too-much-and-not-too-little effect). Here’s a video to show you just how easy these babies really are:
- Allowed each ornament to dry overnight
- Reattached the ornament caps in the morning after the craft paint dried
- Added colorful string (the same kind used for friendship bracelets from Michael’s) for hanging
PATTERNED CERAMIC ORNAMENTS:
- Purchased three ceramic ornaments from Michael’s (for $5 total with coupons) along with three Sharpie markers in navy, magenta, and plum (also from Michael’s for another $5 with coupons)
- Drew magenta and plum chevrons on one ornament, hot pink continents on another (for a modern globe effect), and nested starbursts on the third ornament (in navy, plum, and magenta)
- Switched out the stock red ribbon for colorful string (yup, the friendship bracelet stuff from Michael’s)
- Oh and I’m planning to paint the gold cap of the globe ornament someday (white or orange or navy or pink… not sure yet)
FAUX ANTLER ORNAMENTS -
- Purchased one square of Premo Sculpey clay in lime green from Michael’s for $2
- Sculpted two small shield shapes and two larger ones
- Used a needle to create two holes for hanging and a stick to create two indents where each stick antler would be glued
- Baked according to the Sculpey directions to permanently harden them
- Used crazy glue and sticks from the front yard to create faux antler trophy
- Added colorful string for hanging (more of that friendship bracelet stuff from Michael’s)
SKELETON KEY ORNAMENT -
- Grabbed rusty old skeleton key (a sweet gift from a friend)
- Used spray primer and white craft paint leftover from faux ceramic animals to paint it white
- Added the friendship bracelet string for hanging
As for where I’ll display the not-so-Clara-friendly ornaments (well, they’re all super friendly for looking, especially all the zoo animals – just not so friendly for touching when it comes to the glass and ceramic ones), I’ve always loved the idea of a half-height tree on a round pedestal table like this – so we might get a real tree for that (and plant it in the backyard when the holidays are over). But on to the money stuff – here’s the budget breakdown:
- $4 for plastic zoo animals (from Michael’s)
- $2 for ring hooks for animals (from Lowe’s)
- $3 for spray primer for animals (from Lowe’s)
- $3 for acrylic paint in navy, white, and lime (from Michael’s)
- $2 for friendship bracelet string for hanging (from Michael’s)
- $9 for 18 clear glass ornaments (from Michael’s)
- $2 for magenta & teal acrylic paint (reused lime paint from animals)
- $2 for Primo Sculpey clay for faux antlers (from Michael’s)
- Total: $27 (so each of the 38 ornaments was 71 cents on average)
Oh and don’t forget to check in on Katie, Ana, and Erin to see what amaaaaazing projects they whipped up (they’ll be sharing theirs sometime today as well)!
And now here’s the part where we invite you to share all of the fun Pinterest Challenge projects that you guys have tackled in the last week (right along with us, well at least virtually with us). If you’ve already blogged about it, just:
- click on the blue “Add Your Link” button with the odd cartoon head at the bottom of this post (you might have to do some scrolling, depending how many projects are added)
- add a link to your specific blog post about your project in the url field (not your home page)
- where it says “name” write a descriptive name for your project (ex: “38 DIY Ornaments”) as opposed to your actual name
- we’d also love if you could quickly link back over to our project posts within your own (here’s Katie’s, Ana’s, Erin’s, and ours) – it’s also nice to link to your inspiration project on Pinterest as well as to directly link to the original project/site, just so they get some love too.
And if you’d rather just link over to your project in the comment section, feel free to do that – or even add a link to a free photo sharing site like Flickr with your pics if you don’t have a blog (remember to set the gallery to public so we can all see it). We can’t wait to see what you’ve been up to! Geeked out doesn’t even begin to describe it.
The Mailmum
You know this little online diary of ours is all about keeping you posted on the little stuff along with the big (and the bad and the ugly along with the good). So file this under small but good. Remember our little petunia-fied mailbox? Well, it went from this in June…
…to this in August…
…to this in October:
Wop- woppppp.
The petunias were annuals so they weren’t gonna last forever. And between rain washing out a lot of the mulch and the flowers thinning to a scraggly looking vine mess… yeah, it was ugly. But wait, we’ll get to the “good” in a minute.
Fortunately I was able to pull them out with virtually no effort. Note: Some of these pics were taken before we removed/transplanted a bunch of bushes here – you’ll see why we waited to post about this a few photos down)
We had actually just received a Home Depot coupon in the mail for “Buy 2 Mums, Get 1 Free” (we signed up for some free garden club a few years back so we get random coupons every once in a while). Sadly we didn’t get that coupon before purchasing our porch mums a few weeks back, but oh well – we decided to put it to good use in another place. The mailbox o’ tumbleweeds. So $14 later we had three sunny yellow mums out front. And yes, Sir Squirrel is chilling out right in the middle of them (more on him here).
Even though the mums are perennials, we’re so happy with how the petunias filled in the space over the summer that we’ll probably plop some of those back in come springtime (and just transplant these guys so we can enjoy them somewhere else). But we’re loving the autumn look for now.
What weren’t we loving? The washing out problem that we’d been battling after every big rain. See the weed blocking fabric that’s completely exposed next to the drainage grate on the right? In the words of my wife: reeeeal claaaassy.
The drain worked well most of the time, but heavy rains overload it and, well, you get the idea. So I borrowed some stones leftover from the patio project (they used to line those rows of liriope that we removed here) to build a little stacked stone wall beside the mum-bed. Things are looking up, right?
We have since had two big rains (we waited to post about it to be sure it wasn’t an epic fail) and we’re happy to report that it kept the water from whisking away the dirt with it. So… victory!
It doesn’t look half bad if you ask me. Although of course those mums could use some filling in, sort of like our petunias back when we planted those. Heck, now that we have the little stacked stone wall, maybe we’ll add more plants to really fill it up come spring. And hopefully we’ll straighten and paint the wooden mailbox post then too.
Did anyone else do any quick outdoor updates for fall? Were they mum related? Or stone related? Or ceramic squirrel related?
Oh and Sherry promised more pics of the feather wreath that some of you noticed from afar on the door in this post, so here we go. It’s just an old black feather wreath from JoAnn (picked up after last Halloween on super clearance- maybe it was $8?). Sherry lazily placed it over the door knocker (didn’t even bother hanging it) and called it a day. That’s my girl.
Sherry also meant to toss the three remaining black spiders that we had (from this post) into the yellow mums for more black-on-yellow action before snapping these pics but completely forgot. But she was sure to do that before those cute little trick or treaters came a-knocking yesterday evening. The ones who noticed seemed to love spiders as much as Clara (more on that here). So yeah. Good times going on at the mailbox and the front door. Although we could definitely use a new doormat (or at least a new stenciled paint job over our current one). How about you?
Psst- You can check out how we painted our front door yellow here and ORBed the handle & doorknocker here.
