Here is another reason we chose our home, the dining room. We had just come from living in a condo, that the dining room was almost non-existent. As well we wanted something close to a formal dining room so we could play around with different styles in it. I've already painted the dining room table and buffet. There will a post coming soon for those.
 
   Things are not staying the same exactly in this room. Keep your eyes out for future posts!

I love our kitchen, I hope you do too. I love how big it is, and it can fit sooooo many people when needed. And less when we have our island in the middle. I love everything about the kitchen. We spend a lot of time in there and love that it goes through to the dining room as well. We are painting soon and will update photos again.

Stay tuned for all the updates!

       This is our current living room. We are about to paint and are so excited for all the new colors we can bring in to the space. As well hopefully one day we can get a different couch, since the current one is about to retire.


    One specific reason we chose this layout for our home is the huge living room window. I grew up mostly in Colorado and so many homes there have the living room front and center when you come in. I wanted a big window to showcase my favorite time of year, Christmas. I absolutely love seeing Christmas trees in front windows, and couldn't resist this home. I love it.

    There is going to be so much changing soon. I will update as we go.

   I haven't posted anything this week, because I am super sick. I caught a cold from my nephew, who I love so much.  I knew I shouldn't have given him all those kisses and hugs, but I can't resist. Look at this face!

  He started daycare a few weeks ago, and caught the first timer's cold. And  I have an immune deficiency, which makes me be able to catch your cold just by looking at you.

  Every time I felt like I could do a project this week, I got it started. Got halfway through, and had to quit. I do push myself sometimes though. If I always sat out and never did anything because I felt a little under the weather, what would I get done? Well I did that this week, and it didn't really help me. We accomplished two major projects and I got to work on a smaller one too. There are several posts to come, but if you can hang in there until next week; I promise it will be worth the reading!

   And one last note, as I was in a pretty awesome theraflu coma on the couch, my hubby surprised me. I am sure that I never looked hotter than sleeping with my legs and arms everywhere, mouth open, probably snoring. So he went out and got me some beautiful pink roses. He had cut them and put them in a vase for when I woke up. He is such a sweetie, I can't believe I got him!

I am pretty excited here. Actually more than excited, I am bouncing off the walls. And why you may ask, I am going to take on quite a few projects soon I have been dying to do.

  I am not sure if you all have heard of the new Glidden Trim & Door paint, but I have. I have heard lots of it, and every time that commercial comes on I get jealous. Jealous that I don't have that awesome paint yet, I have though of six things already to use it on. And boy am I excited. This painting adventure will totally transform my rooms in my home by one simple step. Painting!

   I will update as soon as I get the chance on what I am going to paint, and as it happens too.  In the mean time I am sprucing up this chandelier for a friend. Pretty excited, I will post step-by-step instructions soon.

yes this photo was taken on a white sheet, I was trying to use Photoshop to envision things.

  I am in a pickle. I want to re-arrange the living room. Right now I feel like it looks a little frumpy and needs some updating. Yet needs to be done on the cheap side. So here is the living room right now.

      Do you ever walk by something and say "I HAVE TO HAVE THIS!"? Well I do, a lot, and especially in my favorite store; Goodwill. I spot things that I know have never been loved very much. Things that were thought to be so ugly that no one would ever want them. Well I do! I want your ugly stuff, even if it's covered in pink and neon green yellow plaid, with some flowers and polka dots mixed in there. Making old ugly things beautiful again is my thing. It brings me odd amounts of joy to re-furbish furniture, frames, mirrors, whatever you can find.

    So when I walked into Goodwill, the one that is a good 40 minutes from my house, I saw this beauty. It was love at first sight.
   Yes, I fell in love with this awesomely almost hideous piece. Thankfully my hubs had been through this with me already, and didn't fight me on it. Thankfully we still had our small forester, so we paid the $50 plus 10% off with my goodwill card, and packed that sucker up. It is super heavy too and was very unstable.

   It only sat for about one day before I started it's makeover. We needed another dresser, and bad. I was taking up all the space in our drawers with my copious amount of clothes. It was perfect, look at all this organizing space!

That is a drawer under the cubbies too!

    I had to clean this sucker down several times with the vacuum, pledge, and some Lysol too. I was dirtier than dirty. I found some change behind the drawers , which I guess means it paid me to clean it out and love it.  I started painting a little to see if black was going to be the right color for it. I wanted something that would go in every room, if it ever had to move out of our room in the future. I found out that it was only partially real wood, the doors are made of wood and a plastic backing resembling wood. Probably because the doors are so dang heavy, any more would make it tip over. I didn't sand it down like I normally would with these things as there were too many cracks and crevices. I used black lacquer spray paint for the front of the doors and drawers. Then used a lacquer black paint with a brush for the side.

    We needed a desk, a bigger desk with more organization and style. So instead of trying to find a cheap desk that wouldn't fill our needs, we decided to build one that could hold everything and would also be easy on our wallet. By no means are we professional contractors, at all. But thanks to a lovely lady, Ana-White, we were able to fulfill our dreams!

   I found an awesome plan for a desk that had plenty of room to stash almost all of our things, plus some. I was so excited, and thinking about all the money we were going to save was even more exciting. So we went over the plan and customized it a little for ourselves and what we needed. Here is the link to the original:
Cubby Desk Plan.

   Quick word about her site; it is the best! And I mean it. It totally makes you feel like you can do anything, and she empowers you with photos from other non-builder, normal, everyday people. Every plan has a run down of what you will need and how many of each. Check it out for sure!

    Now, back to the desk buildin. We decided to do this at the beginning of the year, which may have been a bad idea. What should have taken only a few days to build, took us about a month. First due to the fact that it was terribly cold in our garage, and second because we had a blizzard. Now if Oklahoma didn't have such atrocious wind, the just being cold wouldn't have bothered me. I mean I grew up in Colorado, lived in Alaska once too, it's no biggy. I LOVE the cold , but not the wind pulling our garage door out and blowing straight onto us like an air conditioner that just had its freon replaced. And eventually when the blizzard blew in, we had to take a week hiatus because even 5 minutes in the garage was terrible. We even got a little bit of snow in there as well, with the door closed.

All the pieces laid out in the garage after cutting, it looks very intimidating.

The desk top and in the process of building the keyboard slider.

      I have a new love....Yarn Wreaths! I just can't get enough. I love them, even if they are tedious work. I feel so accomplished after the fact. The whole process can take a couple of hours, so start this when you have nothing else going on. I took to my couch and Netflix for a few hours.

First what you will need:

• Yarn, in the colors you like. I got mine at Jo-Ann's and Walmart. They are only about $3 for more than you need.
• Felt Sheets, they are at Hobby Lobby, and Jo-Ann's for a couple of cents each. 
• Foam: Either you can buy the foam wreaths at craft stores or like me, I bought several tubes of foam from  Home Depot for 97 cents each. They are 6 feet long and do the job. They are skinnier though and I wrapped mine around each other by cutting a slit down half of one and wrapping it around the other half. It can look a little jagged though sometimes. I might just not be so cheap next time and buy an actual wreath.

   Those are the 3 main staples, as well you will need a glue gun and plenty of glue sticks. I ran out of clear ones and ended up having to use glitter sticks. It's pretty though, so I didn't mind. I taped used tape to keep the whole wreath together after I wrapped it. Also you will need some good scissors.

supplies all laid out.

Wrapped with tape, a little jagged. But perfection isn't everything!

Tie a knot anywhere on the wreath.

I used a dab of glue to keep things in place.

By keeping the yarn tight to the roll and wreath, it is much easier to wrap it. Otherwise if it is loose, it just goes everywhere.

   After wrapping the whole thing, I added a little section of black yarn too. I used that to tie a loop around it for hanging. Then I went on pinterest and found a few sites for flower tutorials. This is a time to let your inner crafter come out. Use your imagination!

Edited version of my front door, since there are numbers on it. I love it!

     Before our lovely abode was even finished being built, I had plans brewing of every design aspect I wanted to accomplish here. First thing on this list was the garden, and finally seeing if I could keep something alive and growing. Oklahoma dirt is not kind, as I have learned. This stuff is just red clay basically, and it will not have anything pretty growing in it. I didn't realize how in over my head I was right away.

     Now the garden they supply for you, is well just a simple garden, nothing too fancy. Some bushes that will end up growing over your sidewalk and look straight out of Jumanji. Ones that we have contemplated removing completely at times, then saying to ourselves  "what are we going to do with it once we have it out?". As well they give you not what I would call monkey grass per-say, but something in the family that has weird spiral things and something resembling a cat tail growing out of it. We do not question this plant, and I try to stay away from it as much as possible, as it has cut me a few times before.

     We got moved in and slightly unpacked before I grabbed the shovel and was "digging" away. The digging shortly turned into scraping the top of the earth just enough to lay some soil down. I didn't get to dig the usual 12" trench that you should for growing pretty things here. We went to Home Depot and spent an unearthly amount of money on annuals and small monkey grass plants for ground cover. As well as several bags of mulch, that not realizing our front yard gets an obscene amount of sun during the day. This mulch has been replaced several times since, no matter how much is says it won't fade; it is no match for this dry Oklahoma sun we have.

    I was so excited to get started on this project(second day we were here), that silly me forgot to take pictures before I started. Woops! Here is a mock up of basically what it looked like when we moved in first.

I don't know why I cut off our roof. I promise we have one. As well, our poor tree has been through a lot. I think he finally died this year after 63 days over 100 degrees.

Update: In that corner where the weird dead monkey grass type plant is, we replaced it with a  small rose bush. It does pretty well there now.

The framing is finally up! This seemed like it took forever to get to.