Kitchen Paint, Cabinets and - oh my gosh!

The Builder and I had a conversation last night. There I was, drawing up a to do list for the weekend so we had a starting place, when out of the blue he said he didn't want to build the doors for the new vanity in the bathroom, he just wanted to order them and be done.

Apparently cabinet doors are a pain to make. (and while Ana White makes it look super easy to build cabinets, she bought doors to go with them - even my dad, Ultimate Builder, bought new cabinets for our kitchen reno when I was a kid.) We meed four for the bathroom vanity (that we are not starting for several more weeks) and one of the lower kitchen cabinet doors is badly damaged and my not be worth repairing (water damage - of course). 

Have you priced replacement cabinet doors? Surprisingly, they're fairly affordable. So I put what I needed in my cart and proceeded to check out. And then I stopped.  The shipping was $45. Umh. No way. There's no glass, they don't have a special finish that could get damaged in shipping (we were ordering them all unfinished), and they're not very heavy. There is no reason that shipping should be that much. Even when I took off the four for the vanity and just left the one for the kitchen, the $32 door had a $31 shipping cost. That's just stupid.

So we headed to my favorite treasure trove, ReStore, to see if we could find something that would match. They have piles of cabinet doors, but nothing that would work for our cabinet. We were headed out when the The Builder stopped at bin of doors, reached in, and pulled one out.

It was. The One.

Do you recall this post where we painted the door red? Because the door I really wanted from Lowes came in at almost $600. It wasn't in my budget then, and it's not in my budget now. But the red made me happy and I got positive comments from my neighbors, so it was a good solution.

But I wanted the one with the leaded star, similar to this

The star is what I really loved. And the one on display at my local Lowes was a rectangular window with the door red. For $569. Like I said, a budget buster for us given the renovations we have going on.

But there we were, at ReStore, and The Builder reached in and pulled out my red, leaded glass star door! In fact, it was actually a display door from Lowes and may have been the very same door that I admired for months, since Lowes is right down the street. All for the budget friendly price of $150!!!

Needless to say, we put a hold on it (had to check the dimensions to ensure it would work in our actual door!) and came back within 20 minutes to get it. And it is perfect! It did take some goo gone and a little elbow grease to clean off all the stickers from the Lowes display and the foam stickers from where it was mounted, but it was completely worth it. It also put a hamper on all projects that weekend as The Builder still had to do some frame modifications for it to fit properly, including building a new threshold.  Totally worth it though!

And a close up:

So, no kitchen updates for the last two weeks. But this door is amazing!!

Hmm, now we're going to need to paint the door trim too...

Thinking Fall...

Living in TX, fall isn't a season we really experience. Neither is winter (except when we have ice storms that shut down the entire city...) But I love fall.  The colors, the scents, the cool weather. Yeah, it's wishful think, today it was 85 outside. 

That hasn't stopped me from dreaming about fall. My living room has been recently decked out and so I was ready to put out the wreath I made last year. Only to find out it broke in the closet some time over the past year. So last weekend I set about making a new wreath. I'm pleased with final product.

For me, less is more. So as a rule, my wreath's don't have a lot of "stuff".  And I'm ok with that!

One more angle.

It almost makes up for having the ugliest door in the neighborhood.  But that's a post for another day...

When Last We Met...

It's been almost 8 weeks since my last post.  YIKES!  I wish I could tell you that all my projects are current and up to date...but I can't.  Here's where we stand on outstanding projects:

1. Upstairs bathroom - I don't have the new vanity built.  I have about half the supplies bought to build it, which is a good start, but it's not finished.  Neither is the mirror.  We built the frame and the first coat of paint is on it, but it's not finished nor is it on the wall.  Sigh.  No towel racks or hooks yet either.  But it is technically a functioning bathroom.  Yeah, that's all I have there.
2. The Teen's room - this one is 90% done.  I finished repainting her dresser, the nightstand, and all the new hardware is on the furniture.  The Builder got the sconces hung, but we discovered the chord is an eyesore so we're debating hanging it behind the wall.  Which means more drywall repairs.  Her ceiling fan and light are in and the electrical is done for the double light switch, but it needs to be textured, painted and the cover plate put on.  We also bought new outlets for most of her plugs since someone had painted over them (really, why do people do that?!) and I have all the artwork.  Oh which none is up on the walls.  A solid afternoon working in there and it will be done.

So in the face of two not done projects, what did I do this long weekend?  Yep, I started a new one!  In my defense, this one smacks you in the face every time you drive up to my home.  It's my yard.  Last year The Builder and I got in and put in fresh mulch, managed to get the lawn green and full again, and got our flower beds in order. We even added some new plants to add a splash of color, including two hibiscus trees and some decorate pepper plants. All of which died the three hard freezes we had this past winter (it's the tail end of the deep south, we're not supposed to have hard freezes in the winter, let alone 3 of them!).  In addition some of the other plants that were already there also died.  Of course, not the two ugly sego palms.  Those just won't die.  Our tomato plant that was in the sun room also died.  It was just not a good winter for plants! So Saturday morning we headed out to our local farmer's market to get some new herbs for our garden, and then Home Depot for potting soil.  Score on the potting soil, it was 4 for $10.  We bought 8 bags.  And an heirloom tomato plant, a heat tolerant tomato plant, and some flowers to start filling in the garden again.  Here's a look at the side of the garage that leads up to the house:

I refuse to pay the more expensive prices for bigger plants. It will take longer for these to fill in and we still plan to add more, but this section was completely barren of anything other than weeds.  We'll add some taller plants as these fill out a little.  We also go our salsa garden going:

There are two tomato plants (one heirloom, I'm super excited about it!) and two basil plants.  I love fresh basil in my food and these plants were $2.50 at the Farmer's Market.  I typically pay $3-4 for a small thing of fresh basil at the market, so this is an excellent savings in the long run.  I have plans to add a cilantro plant in another container, as well more herbs.  I need a jalapeno pepper plant too.  I'm very excited as fresh salsa is something my entire family enjoys.

We also took the time to inspect where the sprinklers are.  The good news is that overall, they work.  A few need new heads on them as they're leaking a little, but this summer we won't be watering by hand.  And yes, this is technically another unfinished project.  But it looks 100% better than it did  and that's it for this long weekend.

Fall Wreath

Just a quick photo of the wreath I made a few weeks back for my front door.  Because even though my thermometer says 84, somewhere in the US, someone is enjoying a lovely fall day....!

Holiday Decor

Do you decorate for all of the holidays?  Because I don't.  Christmas is The Big One for me.  My whole house goes Christmas.  I have neither the time nor the energy to do every holiday the way I do Christmas.  But this past year, I've found myself doing little projects to add a touch of the holiday.  Like this one:

You may have seen this wreath on Pinterest.  That's where I saw it.  And I instantly like it.  Completely different that both my Christmas and Valentine's Day wreath, and not...cutesy.  I didn't really want something overdone.  I wanted something more simple. 

The gottcha for me was that my inspiration wreath was small.  Very small.  The poster used a coat hanger for the form (side note, all of my hangers are white plastic - do people really just keep wire hangers laying around the house in case they need a project, and better yet, how often do they actually go to the dry cleaners to have said supply?! I digress...)  OK, maybe not small if you were putting it in the house, but I knew I wanted mine on the front door.  And as you may have noticed previously, I have a window in my front door.  Sometimes I use the wreath as a privacy screen (because it actually creeps me out that anyone can walk up and look into my house!) but other times, I want it to frame the window - the way it does with this wreath.  Also, my inspiration wreath used scrapbook papers for the color.  I loved this idea and even went out and bought the papers to do this.  Then I realized I needed double the number of clothes pins that were noted in the directions (double the size, double the clothes pins!) and realized that cutting all those TINY strips of paper and modge podgeing them onto my clothes pins was not something I really wanted to do.  WAY to much work for me!  So I headed back to the craft store and came back with bottles of paint in four colors.  Then I randomly painted clothes pins (that I had already attached to the wire wreath form!) until it was completely filled in.  If you are OCD, this would probably not work for you.  And while I am very OCD in some areas, this is not one of them.  

Currently I have two picks I got at Hobby Lobby.  I'm not sure they're working for me.  I bought ribbon that I can make a bow (like the inspiration) and I may do that too.  But for now, I'm good with this.

Supplies:

• wire wreath form 
• 100 clothes pins
• 4 colors of craft paint
• patience to space out the clothes pins properly!

Then There Was the Yard...

his post should be about my guest bathroom being finished.  I've written most of the post.  I know what it's supposed to say.  Except that would mean that I finished the bathroom this weekend.

And I didn't.  Well, at least not yet...

Instead, The Builder and I got up bright and early 8:45am and after a quick stop at Starbucks, headed to Home Depot.  The goal was to get the ceiling paint and the lumber for the projects he was going to make to complete the bathroom this weekend.  And we did get the paint (which is going up as I type) but we sort of got...sidetracked.  That's very easy for me us to do at Home Depot.

You see, this is the sad, sad state of my yard:

nd this is actually better than it was.  When we first moved in, it was late summer.  Our landlord had a gardener come in and mow and chop down the weeds, but the lawn was half dead because the house had been vacant for two months.  There were a LOT of weeds.  But it looked...acceptable for the most part.  And so the yard went dormant for the winter and we sort of just let it go.  I mean, it's been mowed several times.  But it kept just looking shaggy and overgrown.  The weed whacker we bought when we moved in was stolen after a little over a month after we bought it, and as I said, the grass was dormant, so it wasn't a huge issue.  Only now the grass is very much growing again!  And so are all the weeds.  My house is the blight of the neighborhood, in my opinion, and that drives me crazy.  

Friday night, while stopping at the mall to pick up something, we ran in to Sears to see if they had any edgers on sale. The Builder found one at a price he felt was acceptable, so we bought it.  Those photo's you see are actually better than it was because he couldn't wait to try it out Friday night, lol.  Still, everything looks shaggy and unkempt to me.  The weeds growing under the palm trees make it almost appear that there isn't another planter box in the middle of the yard.  My neighbors both have neatly trimmed yards, which I think makes my yard look even worse.  I don't want to be that neighbor.

So this morning, in addition to the much needed ceiling paint, we picked up some weed and feed fertilizer, two rose bushes, a package of calla lilly bulbs, and some weed killer (to keep the weeds from growing in the middle of the side walk).  Here's The Builder fitting the landscaping cloth down and the first couple of bags of mulch:

Thankfully, we did already have the mulch, so our trip was a smidgen more cost effective than it could have been.  We bought 10 bags in preparation for this project.  And apparently we still need a few more.  Oops.

And this is after we're mostly done!!

t really does look so much better.  The middle photo is the view we see when we open the front door.  And now there will be a nicer view when we sit in the kitchen at eat at the bistro table (the bay window is in our kitchen).  I have a couple of minor things to do, including planting some Calla Lilly bulbs in the upper flower bed, and two rose bushes we bought to flank the front of the garage, but overall this is done!  We did a good weed and feed too, so in a few weeks, the yard should look more lush and green.

A successful Saturday project!