Make It Monday

Well, not only am I in decorating mode, but I'm officially in organizing mode too. I've been pinteresting cleaning schedules and checklists and then scrapped a schedule/checklist for myself. I've framed it and use it as a dry erase board. I love it! I only spend 30 minutes on the weekly things and it's amazing how much gets done in 30 minutes. I usually have to split that 30 minutes up into 3 - 10 minute cleaning sessions because a certain little boy doesn't like being away from mama for much more than that. I must say that so far I'm in LOVE with this system and am really happy I finally put this together. It's been something I've been envisioning for quite a long time. It's been pretty dark and dreary lately so I don't have a picture of it framed but here's what it looks like before printing.

Falling For You by Kristin Cronin-Barrow and Shawna Clingerman

Scrapper's Toolbox: For The Love Of Banners by Dani Mogstad

Fonts: Holy Guacamole by Lisa Sisneros and typewriter scribbled

i {heart} faces Photo Challenge - A Touch Of Sun

I'm excited to get back into taking better photos and photos with intention, so I figured I'd start by getting back into the photo challenges at i heart faces again. This week's challenge is "A Touch Of Sun" and this is my entry of my sweet baby boy.

Make It Monday

I've been working hard on decorating this house with some fun stuff and trying to get a little bit organized in the mean time. Recently I've been inspired by Pinterest and found the idea of using an oil drip pan for magnets for the kids. YAY!!! I've been wanting to get those things off my refrigerator FOREVER!!!! I added some Contact chalkboard paper to it and I'm loving how it looks... I just need to figure out where I want to hang it up. It was $12 at Wal-Mart and I got the contact paper on Amazon. I can't wait to use it in the school room for spelling and stuff like that.

I still had some leftover contact paper and decided to figure out what I could do with the rest of it... so I put it on the glass of an old frame that was just sitting in a box. I spray painted the frame and then hung it up in the kitchen for a message board... YAY!!! I've been wanting a message board in our kitchen for awhile now and it was so easy to do.

Yes, I know... we still need to paint this house LOL... I'm so tired of looking at the garish wall colors. Mark promises me this fall they will be done, YAY!!! I can't wait to lighten up the house with some warmer and 1000x lighter walls. Check out the smears in both pictures from the dude, LOL... always has to get his hands into everything! Gotta love him!

I've also done a couple projects and I've just posted one of them to the scrappy blog, one was a ridiculously easy project... another took a little bit of time, but really it just took longer because of the kiddos... plus, by evening, I'd rather crash and browse the internet than work on projects lol.

Make It Monday - more projects complete :)

I'm feeling really good about how much I've been able to accomplish lately and feeling so energized by fixing up the place and making it more "us". So my new finished project is updating our TV cabinet. Yes, we live in the 20th century and still have a tube TV, LOL. Anyways, here's a couple pics of the newly updated TV cabinet.

I spray painted the cabinet a satin espresso brown and then bought some new cabinet pulls. Weird thing... one cabinet door is shorter than the other LOL. I never noticed it before, but I couldn't figure out why I couldn't get the doors to line up right. After the coats of spray paint dried I sprayed on 3 coats of satin Polycrylic... with three kids, I knew the paint would get scratched if I didn't have some kind of finish on it. For the panels, I used some leftover fabric from the curtains in our family room and stapled it to the panel and then put them back in. I love how it turned out, and glad I was able to save my cabinet w/o tossing it to the curb because I didn't like it anymore.

Check out the before picture... I had to go all the way back to April, 2004 to find a picture of it. I was really into log cabins at the time and faux painting too LOL. I had done a crackle paint on it and then stamped some pinecones on it. I will say that I don't have a before before picture though since that was pre-digital camera for us LOL. This picture was one of the first pictures I took with our brand new Kodak digital camera.

Stayed tuned (pun intended) for next week when hopefully I'll have my kitchen chairs and bar stools finished.

Make It Monday

So... this holiday weekend I've been "laboring". I'm having a blast working on some decorative things for the house instead of the much needed fixing up we've needed to do on the house. We bought some chairs at the Habitat For Humanity Restore this weekend and I've been working on fixing them up, along with some bar stools that were left by the previous owner. Here's some pics of what I've been working on this weekend.

This is a conference chair we bought at the restore and I'm thinking I may go back and buy another one because I like it so much and there were tons of them.

These are the barstools that were left by the previous owner and I decided to bring some fun color to the kitchen hoping to cheer it up a bit.

They had 2 of these chairs at the restore and we bought them both since we desperately need new dining room chairs.

I'm also thinking I'm gonna paint the TV console and put some fabric in the "windows" but I'm not sure I'm gonna have time for that this weekend... I have to go back to Hobby Lobby and get some more paint to finish up the chairs, since we ran out on Saturday.

I {heart} Pinterest!!!

So... have you ever heard of Pinterest? If you haven't, you must check it out! It's like FB married my inspiration board and you have Pinterest. So, instead of bookmarking everything into a million folders or tearing things out of magazines, I can just "pin" things I find inspirational onto this board... and then all my friends on Pinterest can see them too and pin them if they like it... or I can pin some of their things too. At first I thought it was a total time suck, and Mark used to make a sucking sound every time he'd see me on it, but now I actually use it for what it's for. I've been able to come up with some great scrapbooking projects from some things that I've found on Pinterest, like this owl I made last month.

Or I've been able to do some meal planning by picking some interesting meals I've found like these skinny meatloaf cupcakes which were sooooo yummy!!!

Last night we also had brown sugar and balsamic crock pot pork, which was also delicious!

I've even found color inspiration and ended up painting the bar stools aqua, because of this picture! Remember this post from almost 2 years ago when I couldn't figure out what color to paint them? Well, it took me this long to finally decide to paint them and once I finish painting them I'll post a pic!!!

I've also started a "homeschool" folder to post some fun projects to do with the kids... I love that when you click on the picture you get the blog or website address to the tutorial or recipe or shop. So... what I originally thought was a total time suck has turned out to be really helpful and motivating to get things done like decorating the house, meal planning or working on homeschool stuff.

Do you love Pinterest?