Projects on the go

A couple weeks ago I mentioned that I was a bit burnt out from the laundry room mayhem.  I'll be honest with you, we still have not taken a single step towards completion.  Instead, we have started a bunch of other projects which I'm sure will also remain ongoing for some time.

It seems to me that there are many blogs out there that whip through a project at record speed with reveal photos sprouting up moments after the project was undertaken.  Well that's nice for them (really nice) but I can't operate like that.  Weather, timing, budget and desire all play a part in getting my projects closer to completion. 

This is what's on the go at the moment (aside from the laundry room that I have listed here):

Backyard:  We've pulled out a ton of overgrown shrubbery that doesn't work for us and raked up leaves and dead plant debris that we didn't clear out in the fall.  We've stuffed 19 garden bags full of refuse.  We still have an enormous pile of bush and debris left to bundle up and we need to buy some plants for the gaps we've made.  Jason wants some fruit trees and I'm happy to take a back seat on this project.   It will be a lot of digging but I think in a couple years we'll be thrilled to have fruit from our own back yard (we currently have grapes, blueberries, raspberries, strawberries and rhubarb.  We'll also plant some cherry tomatoes shortly too).  We need to take out one of the raised beds at the back of the yard (it's an eyesore that holds way too much decorative grass).  It is also where lawn ornaments either come to mate or die or both.  We found no less than two dozen broken solar-powered lights shaped like various critters.  It is a true menagerie back there.  We're building a shed in its place so that we can clear out some garage space as well as some basement space.

My office space:  As you saw here, I've been working on improving my office-space as well (as in my real work office).  Today I went to Target and bought a couple frames and a piece of fake-but-beautiful coral to try to style my bookcase. 

The hallway:  I'll do a before and after post soon.  We stripped the hallway of its chair-rail wallpaper and discovered that the walls had never been primed, causing a lot of damage.  We had them scratch coated with plaster then primed, sanded, painted and replaced all the old baseboards and trim.  We still need to rip out the front hall closet (it was not originally part of the house - it juts into the garage such that you can't actually get a car in the garage on that side).  Install hooks, shelves and shoe storage for guests, paint the dresser I got from my grandma (below) and make a gallery wall out of gold frames that I need to scavenge from thrift shops. When we do this we'll likely also finish up the hooks and trim in the laundry room since we'll essentially be doing the same thing in the front hall.

Front yard:  Paint the bench, garage doors and front door.  Reuse the bricks from the raised beds in the backyard to make a big black-eyed Susan bed in the front. 

There's A LOT more on the long-term list, but these are the items we hope to get to by the end of the fall.  Aside from my office space, these projects are all intertwined:  to get our car in the garage for winter we need to finish the hallway and clear out space in the garage, hence the need for the shed and the backyard re-do. 

What projects do you currently have on your list?

Happy DIYing!

More than we bargained for...

It's early spring.  Way too early to see critters crawling around on our carpets and nosing by our garbage.  Unfortunately, that is what we're seeing.

More accurately, this is what we're seeing:

Black carpenter ants.  Curiously, they're creepy-crawling on the second floor of our home rather than on the main floor or the basement where they have a fighting chance at finding some food.

I did a bit of research on them and discovered that they like moist, soft wood.  Given the questionable workmanship we've seen in this house, we're pretty well convinced that there is some moisture in the attic and it has attracted a nest.  Ugh.  "Nest of ants" - doesn't that give you the heeby-jeebies?!  My skin is itching just thinking about it!

In the winter we suspected that one or more of our vents weren't properly installed and are blowing warm air into the attic (our friend who's a roofer mentioned it when he saw that parts of our roof had melted snow on it).  Warm air + cold air = moisture.

An exterminator is coming to check things out this week.  As far as I'm concerned, working with poisons in the home is not a DIY project when you have no knowledge of what to do and kids/pets that could be harmed.  This is money well spent in my books.

Wish us luck and happy DIYing!

Office organization upgrade!

I bought a large sheet of wrapping paper to cover the phone holder. I traced the interior and exterior shape then glued the paper on (my paper was handmade and irregular so I selected areas that appeared the best to me).  

I wanted prettier tacks but the Kate Spade gold bows that were oh-so-cute were also oh-so-steep at $24.99 for about 15 or maybe 20 of them. Considering the  phone holder is an old tissue box, plain white tacks seemed a little more reasonable. 

The good news was that I had extra paper so I also covered my cork board. 

I'd like to clean up the edges with ribbon but I'll deal with that later. 

For now it's a decent improvement. 

Happy DIYing!

DIY Office Organization

As I have alluded in the past, I am not the most organized person in the world.  I would love to live by the mantra "A place for everything and everything in its place" but my mantra seems to be "Stash it with all that other junk because it is momentarily convenient to do so."

In an effort to clear off some desk space I made a cute little cellphone holder.  If you can put a pushpin anywhere in your work-space (cubical or office) you can do this too.

I was inspired by this blog post / pin:

Avie Designs Stationary

But since inspiration struck me while I was sitting at my desk and not at home (where I actually have an ample supply of baby shampoo/lotion containers) I used what I had before me took from a co-worker's office (thanks Marni!).

I cut out the bottom half of an empty tissue box, leaving a large back edge high enough to reach the top of my phone.  I cut a hole in the bottom small enough to fit just the USB end of my power cord.  I pinned it up and by happenstance the pins were far enough apart that they snugly hold my cellphone upright without it teetering to one side or the other.

Beautiful it is not (the cuts along either side are not terribly even since I was eye-balling it - I have since trimmed it a bit better).  Functional it is. Some decorative paper and a couple cuter pushpins ought to do the trick but for now at least another cord and another item is off my desk.

Happy DIYing!

Laundry Room: Phase II

Here's the thing about my laundry room reno (and what I assume happens in any reno that involves a major inconvenience): you bust your hump to get to a stage where you can reasonably resume your normal activities (seven loads of laundry that piled up).  'Bust your hump' in my world means use every spare second between work and child care; stay up hours late to finish another step; ignore and deprioritize anything short of necessary-to-live.

What happens next?  You sit down for the first time in weeks and suddenly there isn't a rush to finish the other details, so they collect dust.  

For weeks now the transition piece between the laundry room and the hallway has remained ungrouted. We haven't sealed the grout. We haven't finished the trim work.  We most certainly haven't put the hooks up.  Our garage is still a disaster zone.  I won't even go into decor items (watching a 35 minute Youtube tutorial on making a roman shade nearly gave me hives)!

We lost our steam and we need it back!  The long weekend came and went and while part of me said "Get this done!" Another part of me wanted to sit on my duff and relax! A third part of my brain won the war - it was nice out and we had been cooped up all winter so our team of three went to the back yard and started the overhaul there.  

I've mentally moved on. That bench I mentioned in my last post has been calling my name.  The paint on the wood is flaking off and begging for a good sanding and a glossy coat of creamy yellow.  I'm eager to oblige but the weather isn't cooperating (I need a stretch of days with 15 degrees of warm and no rain .  

How do people actually finish a project without becoming tired or bored?  I would be delighted to know! 

Are rooms ever actually finished?  If you've ever felt like a room was finished let me know and tell me your secrets! 

I like free stuff!

My grandmother is moving and has had to pair down her belongings considerably.  She expressed very strongly that she wanted as many of her things to stay in the family as possible (she seem particularly eager for one of her five boys or her 11 grandchildren to have a twin sized mattress that belonged to her mother - ie: a mattress that would likely have qualified for a senior citizens discount at Denny's about 10 years ago). 

Among the mattress and several coffee makers still in their original packing, I found a few things that I could either use (hello eight-cup Pyrex measure!) or had some sentimental attachment to (a few family photographs).

These are some of the gems I scored:

This floor lamp apparently belonged to my great grandmother.  It's brass and has three candelabra style bulbs at the top along with a central bulb and shade that I removed for transportation / don't particularly care for.   The base of the lamp is really cool.  When I up-ended the lamp to go in my truck I discovered a small orange bulb in the bottom.  Apparently the base lights up and the frosted glass is illuminated too. 

I'm in love with this lamp.  I'm not 100% sure where I want to put it, but I just couldn't leave it behind.  I may put it in my living room and build the entire colour scheme around it.  You can't really see from this picture, but the glaze on the base is a bit textured as well. 

Lamps were apparently de rigueur to me on the day I went to grandmas because I also brought this baby home with me.  I'll probably wind up using this in our master bedroom.  It has one of those convenient foot peddle switches.

This small dresser was also my great grandmother's.  I love the pretty carved pattern on all the drawers.  It's going to need some heavy sanding/stripping and a bit of wood filler here and there, but it's otherwise in good shape.  We ultimately want to remove our front hall closet so I'm thinking that this piece will likely become part of the final styling of the front hall where we would have a bench on one side of the stairs and this dresser on the other to balance things out (not to mention a place for keys, cloth grocery bags and small seasonal ware). 

 

 Last but not least, I picked these two out-door pieces.  The bench obviously needs work but I loved how the iron has some green patina to it.  This is how the pieces look on our front patio:

A little petite looking, actually.  This patio is so large, it's difficult to really imagine what to do with it.  (Also, you can see a birthday balloon still hanging in our front window from the joint party we had for my husband and son this past weekend). 

Once the weather becomes a little more consistently warm we're going to paint the garage doors and shutters (which you can barely see at the top right of the house in this picture) Hale Navy by Benjamin Moore:

Hale Navy

 I want to paint the front door yellow (subject to your comments and critiques of course).

Stuart Gold

I was thinking about painting the bench a couple shades lighter than the front door.  I'll leave the iron as-is and just clean up the wood slats for painting.  

Western Flax

As a reminder, this is what the front of the house sort of looks like (the picture is from the real estate agent who sold the house to us)

  So, what do you think?  Too many shades of colour the front of the house? Give me your input!