Remodel Before & After Pictures!

Okay now just to preface the pictures I have to give a little background...we started working on remodeling our office and bedroom the weekend of Valentines. We JUST BARELY finished! Haha. Anyways, we are so glad it's done & I swear I am never painting again.


So what did we do? Well, if you are familiar with older homes you know what a lath & plaster (sp?) wall looks like...basically the walls had cracks running up and down them. It looked pretty bad. Luckily, Jon is really good at doing drywall stuff--so he fixed the walls and made them nice and flat! There are no more cracks! It looks so good! Then we painted...which was terrible. And we also had new carpet put in & switched out a few light fixtures for something new. We are very happy with the finished product!


This is our bedroom. Now, granted, if I had made the bed and stuff before I had taken these pictures I'm sure it would have looked better...and now I am embarrassed to put them up, but for the sake of being dramatic...


Did you see the Chinese looking outdoor lamp on the picture before the one above this? I hated that lamp...it was so horrible...It wasn't even centered on the wall. I was so glad to get rid of it!

And here are the after pictures:



We should have more pictures of the Office next week.

Oh Christmas Tree, Oh Christmas Tree...

This is really exciting for me...ever since Jon and I have been married we have NEVER gotten to have a Christmas tree. Either we were going to be out of town, or some other reason, it has just never quite happened. Well this year I was determined to have a tree. Awhile ago my Grandpa called me up and asked if I would be interested in one of his old artificial trees, this was probably the best part because I had planned on purchasing one & it would have put me out at least $100 bucks or so... It already had lights wound around all the branches so that cut out another step for me too, and all I had to do was decorate it!

Of course, I tried to do it as thrift-aly as possible, and so I just tried to use things I already had. I did have to buy the poinsetta stems and the red and gold balls, but all I spent was $15. I had the gold ribbon already and just tied a big bow for the top and wraped the rest around the tree, I had the pinecones and just tied a ribbon around them so that I could hang them & that's all I did!

P.S. Sorry the pictures are so blurry...I had to turn the flash off and aparently I couldn't hold very still.

Merry Halloween To Me!

Wow. I am so excited today. After I did my chores I decided to go out and just "look" and see if I could find something cool I couldn't live without. And geuss what? I DID!

First I went in this Halloween Bootique. I thought it was going to have all kinds of cute Halloween decorations and maybe some costumes, etc...Nope-skanky Halloween outfits. Well, no thank you--I don't think that's going to work out for the ward trunk-or-treat. So I go next door and there IT is. A quite large Apothecary Jar...it gets better...for $12 bucks!!! WHAT? Okay, MUST HAVE. Well then I start feeling guilty because then i'm going to have to buy some sort of thing to put in it and that's going to cost, but then I had a cheap idea and voila-here she is:

It's okay you can hate me.

I'm already imagining all the things that I can put in there. She will be a seasonal decoration...

So then I was feeling so good about myself I ate the last 2 cookies:

I feel accomplished.

Oh, and I wanted to show you my updated door mistreatment. It looks 10 times better if I do say so myslef.

Recent Happenings...

Today my Grandma helped me make some yummy Peach Jam!! We ended up with over 20 cups of it (the picture doesn't show all of it obviously)...but at least we won't be buying jam anytime soon! One other cool thing, Ball the company that makes the glass jars now makes these cute little plastic ones with different color lids...maybe you have already seen them...I just think they are cute.

Afterwards I had to have some toast!





One of my favorite blogs is Nester. She always has easy ideas for decorating and so I took a hint from her and mistreated my bathroom window. Here is the before: And then after:And then after I hung my clearance hand towels:It still isn't perfect, but hey, it's better than it was before! (Also it only cost 3 bucks to do!)


Well that all turned out okay and so then I mistreated my door because we needed a little more privacy. (Sorry no before pictures)I really liked the fabric and I got a pretty good deal on it so this is it's new home for now. I would really like to get some ribbon and make some little runners to go down the mistreatment, but i haven't gotten that far yet. The best part is that I could take it down and cut it up and make some pillows out of it or something... Anyways, it's not perfect at all, but at least we have some more privacy and it's covered with something cute.

Doors....

This is our house:It's an older home. I suspect originally built in the early 1900's? It obviously was renovated some time after the 70's (nasty!) and then some things were done before we moved in (and we are still slowly working on updating the rest of it). I do like our house, but at the same time, I already feel like we're growing out of it. Because of it's Boxy-ness it's not very open and it seems MUCH smaller than it is. There are doors to EVERYTHING. The entrance to the hallway even has a place for a door or two--who puts a door to the entrance of a hallway? Anyways, they removed many of the doors so that it would appear a little more open. This actually has some benefits! They are the original solid wood doors that the house was built with. But I am lucky because now I have a room in the basement filled with old doors and I'm thinkin' there might be somethin' crafty I could do with them.

(This is a picture of one of the rooms in the house when we originally looked at the house while it was on the market. You can see an example of one of the doors...)

My wheels are turning, but now my question for you....

What would you do with them?

I've decided that I'm going to make a headboard out one of them...

Oooo!! Check this out!! ---http://joysofhome.blogspot.com/search/label/furniture%20I%20a-door

Being Crafty

As you all know by now, we have 2 MASSIVE dogs. One thing we seem to go through like crazy, besides dog food, is dog beds. They are soo hard on the beds--plus, Thor chews on everything! Dog beds are EXPENSIVE and we are so sick of forking over money to buy another dog bed that will be destroyed. Well, I have been saving the stuffing that the dogs pull out of the dog beds and today i finally made some new beds! All i spent was 20 bucks and I got 2 dog beds (instead of buying 2 beds for 40 bucks each--i think the reason they are so expensive is because we have to get such HUGE beds). Anyways, I was proud of my accomplishments!

Look how much he is enjoying them! He's my Baby.

OH!! And possibly the best part--I had some left over material and used it to make some pillows for my living room! My Grandma helped supply the machine and the smarts of the whole operation, but you should know that i DID sew everything MYSELF. THanks Grandma!

The Red Wall Problem Solved?

Okay so I have been struggling with what to do on my Red wall. It is very big, and because it's Red it just makes everything i put on it look itty-bitty. Well I finally found a mirror a month or two ago at my ultimate FAVE place, Real Deals, for $68 bucks!! I thought that was pretty good considering how large it is. -I was at a furniture store today and found something very similar to my mirror and it costed $259 so i feel like i got a "real deal" (haha, get it?--okay not funny, i know).- Anyways, I needed something to go on either side of the mirror and so I have been looking around.

Last week I found these triangular flower canister-ish things at another store for $7 and then the wheat stuff for $3! They look pretty good-ish, I think? So now I am done...hopefully.

(Try to ignore my flashes reflection in the mirror-also the lighting is really bad. And i just noticed the couch is off-center)

The family room...

So for awhile now i've been working on trying to finish up the living room. This following part in parenthesis is what Jon has added: ( and my husband has been super helpful and wonderful!! He got me this kick butt mirror and he even hung it up on the wall! Isn't he great! I don't think anyone could have a husband as good as mine? Right? I mean he is just the best.
I know what all of you are thinking, share the wealth, well ya can't have him!! He's mine, all mine! He buys me lots of things cuz he loves me. Shoes, phones, clothes, mirrors, ha ha!! I'm so funny and cute. He calls me his little kitten bub's and smothers me!
Well thats all, for now. )

Now here are the pictures:

(Try to ignore the gate in the picture)

Anyways, it's coming along pretty good. We will still probably fine tune some things, but overall not too bad. Thanks to Mom Nielsen who helped me paint!!