Playroom, New Friends and Art Shows

I actually attempted to take clean up the playroom before I took this picture. However, whatever I show "interest" in, my kids are right behind me and want to do it too. I sweep, they want the broom. I empty the dishwasher, they want to stand on the door. I go to the bathroom, they want to watch me. I want to check the mail, they run straight for the road. In this case, I just touch a toy to pick it up and they automatically want to play with all of them. So, this is what you get. At least you can see it in it's practical glory while it's being used.


I have leftover yellow fabric from the kids bedroom curtains that I would love to use on a cornice board in here although I'm not sure how that would work. It seems kind of long to do one across 3 windows so I might have to resort to a little valance. I really don't want to cover up much of the windows view at all, but I do want to hide the blinds while they're up, especially the annoying one on the right that refuses to be cinched up all the way. If you have any thoughts or advice, let me know. I'm all ears!


The adorable little alphabet cards are from Land of Nod. I originally ordered them for baby shower gifts. For a great price of around 20 bucks for the box, I would take the baby's initials and frame them in 3 separate picture frames. It worked for about 2 people before I started running out of letters. It would've been perfect if I knew a baby named Quinn Xylophone Unevercall. Plus, being flowers and fairy's I was somewhat limited to girl babies too. Anyway, the leftovers found their way into the playroom and I plan to replace the missing ones with modpodged letters from the craft store.

NOW, onto one of my original reasons of this post...did you notice the beautiful circle rug in the playroom? It is so incredibly soft and fits the space perfectly with it's multi-colored goodness. The best part? It didn't cost a dime thanks to these two people below on the left.

Chuck and Glenda, some new friends of mine and old friends of my in-laws (pictured on the right,) invited us to their house nearby to give us some things that they weren't using anymore. One of those things was that gorgeous rug. They've been following my blog for some time and could appreciate the house renovation since they were in the middle of their own! They had a beautiful house filled with distinguished furniture, a gorgeous wooden curved staircase in their entryway and meaningful artwork. That last one was my favorite and Glenda shared a great tip with me about it. I wish I had taken pictures of them now, but 2 pieces of artwork that stood out to me happened to be painted by high-schoolers. She used to work in a school and approached the art teacher one day to find a talented artist in the class that needed some encouragement or a nudge in the right direction. She showed the selected student a picture she had taken of a nearby river and asked if they could do it in the style of Monet and then gave them whatever specification she wanted: size, color, etc. When the product was finished, she got a large beautiful oil painting to the tune of $25.00 and the high school student probably made his first ever sale. Both parties win!

And speaking of student artwork, I was asked to judge a local Christian school's art show last week to which I responded with an enthusiastic, "Are you sure?" Of course I love any art show, but as to my qualifications, I wasn't sure they had the right person. I was paired up with another local school's art teacher to co-judge with and I went about judging from the "appreciation" point of view and for her's, it was more technical. We made a good team. I can tell good art when I see it and I thought I'd show you some of their stuff.
This was some of the 5th graders work. Amazing stuff, huh? They made their designs on the paper using glue and then once it dried, they oil painted the rest. I'm a sucker for anything birds (as is the case with much of the blogging world it seems) so I loved that little bird on the bottom right.

I also loved this bouquet of flowers created by a 4th grader! I thought it looked very "Van Gogh."

This was part of the high school exhibit and we kept looking at it saying, "This is not high school work." It was a tough competition, but this piece was one of my favorites and ended up winning 1st place. It was a collage of painted paper cut out to create the image on the print. I so want to hire this girl to do a collage of my house.

The same girl also did this church (bottom right) which was also so very impressive with the shading. I seriously felt as if I were standing on the front lawn watching the sun rise over the steeple.

So there you have it! You never know what kind of talent could be in your neighborhood. Might be worth checking out sometime!

Kitchen Island

I haven't shown you our kitchen island yet, but here it is uncovered in all of its natural untouched glory. It's been sitting in our outbuilding covered by a tarp for a couple months until we were able to take some time to paint it and bring it inside. Isn't it beautiful? We paid Adam's old co-worker from Raleigh to custom make one for us and he did an awesome job! It even has a place for a microwave with a hollowed out leg for the cord to run down through.

This picture below is the very first one I saved in my "inspiration" folder as a color palette for my kitchen. Love those muted neutrals, striking black and that pop of red.

And I loved this rug I had picked up last summer in Raleigh at a garage sale with it's grays whites and muted pinks and greens.

So after bringing home a gazillion sample cards of red home from Home Depot, we came up with this!!
I just love it. It's just the perfect pinky red that I was trying to achieve. I wanted something to tie in the brick fireplace, but not be too dark or dreary and give us that pop of color from my original picture. I mulled over the colors for days wondering if I should do the awesome-ly distressed gray that people are doing or a striking black, but when I got stumped that's when I pulled out my inspiration folder and remembered what I really wanted initially.

I can't wait to get my microwave back too! We've just kept ours in the box until we could put it in its rightful home. I don't know about you but stirring around leftover mac n' cheese in a frying pan to warm it up gets kind of old...

Oh yeah, did you notice my cows on the wall. Here's a close up.

I love them too. But what I love even more is hearing my 17 month old do his best cow impression, "Ooooooo," every time we pass them. :)

We plan to top it off with butcher block too.

2 Frying Pans and a Coat Rack

Since we've moved in January I have been missing 2 frying pans and a coat rack. Well, being the kind of family to walk in and throw your coat up on the rack, we couldn't do the formal coat closet much longer. It's nice to have for the winter coats and rain jackets, but everyday stuff had to be easy to put away and easy to find with two little ones. Using this picture as my inspiration, I decided to give up on the missing coat rack and start fresh.


Lucky for me, I found these hooks soon afterwards at Hobby Lobby at 1/2 price! I took them home and sanded them down to give them a distressed look and let some of the silver metal shine through the white paint.

I did love that white on white look from the magazine, but I had an old naturally distressed shelf in the outbuilding that was too weak structurally to keep as a shelf so I took it apart and used it for mounting my hooks.

And there you have it! It fits perfectly!

Easter Shrine

What do you get when you combine an old entry way table and...

a thrift store mirror...

and a can of black spray paint?

An Easter shrine of course! Well, er, not really a shrine...but it's a hall table decorated all Eastery and really doesn't serve any other purpose but to just let me get creative in a small amount of space. So, check it out because that's the only reason it's there.

(l-r) African violet in my Ikea lemon planter, crate found in the attic that says "to Charlotte via Charleston" and has something about pansies printed on the side, a stack of metal tart tins I picked up for $1.50 at Habitat ReStore, stuffed chick on Easter clearance last year at Target, old flashlight found in pansy crate in attic holding Dollar Store daisies, decorative sconce that I acquired last month at a home goods swap (have you been to one of those?! They're awesome!).

And let's get a good look at that flashlight. What else do you do with an old flashlight that looks to cool to throw away but serves no other purpose in it's current state? I was pretty proud of myself. :)

Happy Easter everyone!

Romans 6:5-11

For if we have been united with him in a death like his, we shall certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his. We know that our old self was crucified with him in order that the body of sin might be brought to nothing, so that we would no longer be enslaved to sin. For one who has died has been set free from sin. Now if we have died with Christ, we believe that we will also live with him. We know that Christ being raised from the dead will never die again; death no longer has dominion over him. For the death he died he died to sin, once for all, but the life he lives he lives to God. So you also must consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus.

I know. I'm weird.

I walked into my local Goodwill and saw this sign glowing at me as I approached the lamp section. Without hesitation, I unplugged it and put it in my cart and 10 bucks later it has since found it's way into our sitting room on the piano. I love all of the subway art and old signs now that you can create, but even better, mine lights up. And yes, it says "digital cameras". No sentimental meanings behind this except that I liked it and described it to my mom as an "antique sign". My dad who was visiting at the time rolled his eyes and said it's probably from the 90's. Adam just laughed when he saw it. I love it. What do you think?

Spring Mantel in the Sitting Room

Inspired by this mantle series by The Lettered Cottage I finally got a vision for our sitting room mantle. I took the first step by completely removing everything on the mantle except for the AK painting that you may remember back from this post.
Everything else came from stuff that I already had and after playing a while and mixing it up until it was just right, I came up with this!

Being Spring and Easter time, I knew I wanted to work my robin's eggs in there somewhere.

My honeysuckle bush is blooming out in our yard which has added to more than one bouqets around the house. I love bring it's scent inside.

One thing I learned from the mantle series is that you can never go wrong with papers and/or books. I had an old childhood Bible that was pretty tattered and another old yet New ;) Testament I had found in the attic here. So I put those in a tarnished silver bowl I picked up at Goodwill the other day along with a book Adam's grandfather wrote, Darkness is Light, and ta da! I'm done until summer when I get to re-decorate my mantle all over again.

Shameless

I "borrowed" an idea from The Lettered Cottage yesterday. I love their decorating styles and a couple weeks ago she posted a specific post about her wall grouping of photos in their guest bedroom here. I've had a bunch of photos that I've been waiting for Adam to make me ledges for to look like this PB inspiration below in the living room, but after reading TLC, I realized I had a few photos to spare to do a grouping in our bedroom and still have a lot left over for the ledges in the living room later.

Unfortunately, the photo ledge has to take a back seat while snooty guest bathroom and bannister get the drivers side and passenger seat. So a couple days ago, I got busy shamelessly copying Layla and Kevin creating my own original idea and doing a dry run layout of the photos on the floor.

And using this wall in our bedroom to the left of the door. Pay no attention to the bajillion loads of laundry peeking out from the corner of the bed. I have priorities people! (Don't worry Mom, I folded them during American Idol)

Layla says if all else fails, start from the middle and work your way out. Well, I liked my practice run enough to take a couple pictures and just referred to that a lot of times so I knew exactly what picture went where. I still worked from the middle though.

Ta Da!

I'm really happy with the final product. Now, I just need to add and update some photos...

Decorative Ledge

The other day I texted Adam a picture of my ledge in the dining room that I had proudly worked an hour on. I anxiously awaited his response which never came. When he came home from work he explained he never replied because he thought I had just sent him a picture of a pile of stuff I put up there to just get out of the way. Think again bud. You can see the ledge in the upper left hand corner of the dining room.


After closer examination he said he did in fact like it and in he couldn't really tell what was what from the picture, but he liked it better in person. :) My favorite part was everything was free! I found almost everything around our house or out in the outbuilding.

From left to right: (nestled under the dough bowl) a birds nest that was on our front porch on top of our light fixture, the dough bowl found in the attic, the glass jug found in the attic, circle wire thingys found in the outbuilding, candlesticks- wedding gift, potato looking things found outside (At first glance I thought it was a snake egg! Obviously I don't know what snake eggs look like, but you never know. ;) After careful examination it's a pod from a tree of some sort with seeds that shake around inside. Mirror- found in outbuilding, "Home" sign-already owned it, beach grass- already owned, old window weights (far right) used to level windows back in the good ol' days. We found a bunch as we took out walls and Adam thought I was crazy for saving them. They're heavy, but perfect for a Macaulay Culkin "Home Alone" defense with their location over the back door in case we have any bad guys. ;)

Wow. That was rude.

Man. I am so sorry about that. So, apparently when you don't have the internet for 2 weeks you aren't able to use the internet to tell people you don't have the internet. Well, at least you get things done around the house when you don't have a blog to keep up with. Here's a pictoral update of what we've been up to.

I'm also not to proud to post my "not so pretty" areas. There's a garage sale pile in the corner of the sitting room, the hallway in all it's glory and let's not even mention the dresser in the bedroom. Yes, I've heard of photoshop, but this is real life people! :)

In answering a few questions of some commenters:

1. Our living room color is Croissant by Sherwin Williams. Love it and we get a lot of compliments on it.

2. Lady in Arkansas renovating a house- we did in fact go over some existing flooring with the concrete, but we pulled up some vinyl parquet tiles before that and laid down some plywood and some metal screen before the concrete was poured. I'll be in touch. :)