The R wall is growing.

Our wall of R's in the spare bedroom is slowly growing.  The latest R is the only one I've actually ''made'', it was just a chipboard R that I bought at Hobby Lobby for $1.  

I intended on wrapping it with yarn because I thought that would be really cute, but it turned out to be really stinking frustrating.

I took a picture with my phone and it doesn't look too terrible, but it was bad and only getting worse as I went on.

 If our last name started with O or any easier letter I'd definitely do the yarn, but I was getting so annoyed.

So I decided to wrap it in fabric.   I still have a bit of extra chevron fabric from our curtains... and pillows...  I wonder how many more things I can make out of this stuff.

These pictures are not the greatest, by the way.  I didn't feel like switching lenses and we didn't have our good flash on.  I'm pretty sure no pictures were necessary of this process anyways, but oh well :)

I traced around the R leaving about an inch of fabric to wrap around the back.

Then used Elmer's spray adhesive and sprayed the top of the R and stuck it to the backside of the fabric.

I used my hot glue gun to glue the fabric to the back.

All glued on.

Done!

Again, forgive the picture...

I am still missing my other lower case R that I can't find and it's driving me INSANE.  The wall doesn't look cool at all in this picture, but it's getting there.  I am just completely randomly putting these on the wall so it is a little lopsided at the moment, but we'll get it evened out eventually.  

It is fun to find R's.  

Hobby Lobby and Michaels always have letters everywhere and it's hard not to just buy a bunch and call it good.  I'd rather stumble upon them randomly every once in a while... but so far most of them actually have come from those two places... Some day I'll find a really cool one with a good story behind it.  The one lower case one I have I got from my mom for Christmas, so I like that one.  I kind of want to start writing where and when I got them on the backs... but again, just writing ''Hobby Lobby, February 2011'' is bo-ring.  We'll see.  I've got big hopes for this wall.  I keep hoping I'll find letters laying around at a flea market or at Goodwill or something, but no luck yet.  Not R's at least.

I'm trying to get a couple other wall art projects done so we'll see how those turn out.

Dexter is driving me freaking bonkers...

 But he's almost too pretty to be mad at...almost.



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We have a nephew!

Owen was born Friday February 18th at 2:35 AM.

He is basically adorable... and I hear he has a pretty awesome Aunt and Uncle.

 

He's pretty awesome.



And Dexter got to sit in a cowboy boot...

He was not happy... and he looks so scruffy!  He just had a haircut, too.  Sheesh.

Valentine's Day

My big plan for yesterday was to decorate our dining room and set up an ''Ice Cream Sundae Bar'' for us.  

And also make some heart shaped pizzas.

I have made heart shaped pizzas every year for Valentine's Day and apparently Michael hasn't figure that out yet, because he kept trying to guess what I was going to make and he never once guessed pizzas.

I think he knows to expect it now though... he thought it was funny that of all the heart shaped foods he had guessed he never guessed pizza because that should have been an obvious guess... and I was like ''AND the fact that I've made it for the last 3 Valentine's Days''.

So, maybe next year he'll know what we'll be having for dinner... or maybe not.  We'll have to wait and see.

I made the pizza with cauliflower crust.  I had only made it one other time but we both thought it was really good.  This time I tried to flip the crust over halfway through so the other side would get nice and crispy too, but that turned out not to be a good idea.  It crumbled completely, so then I had two piles of half baked cauliflower that I had to re-form into heart shapes... It worked, but it definitely wasn't pretty.

It tasted good though!

And I cut pepperonis into hearts as well:

 They were deeeeeelicious.

I thought the dining room turned out pretty fun.  I wonder how long these decorations will stick around before I take them down...

 All of the toppings!  Reese's Peanut Butter Cups, Dark chocolate chips, Valentine's Day sprinkles, Toffee bits, chopped up Cherry Three Musketeers, Oreos and Chocolate syrup... I forgot to put out the whipped cream and didn't remember until we were done with our ice cream... boo.

 They had packages of little tongs at the Dollar Tree that worked perfectly.

 The Table decorated with confetti, Taffy and Cherry Three Musketeers... Cherry Three Musketeers are the most delicious candy bars ever...

 My ice cream concoction with EVERY topping that I had set out. Sooo good.

 Michaels was BORING and only had Chocolate Syrup, Oreos and Chocolate chips.

 Here are the treats I made for him to take to work... Is that normal for a wife to make husbands food to take to work?? I feel like I am sending a Kindergartener off to school with treats sometimes... And I have to email him to make sure he is sharing :)  

Dexter got in on a little V-Day action and at least got to dress for the holiday in his ''I Chew Chew Chews You'' shirt.  He loved it, obviously.

He looks like a little old man in this picture.  It cracks me up.

Also, I forgot to take picture of the Valentines I made for my nieces, so Kristin took a couple of pictures for me after they had already taken the suckers off.  It looks like she had Imrie stick her sucker back in after it had already been unwrapped so you can kind of tell what's going on.

I had pictures of Dexter developed, then laminated them and then slit two holes on each side of his mouth and stuck a sucker through it.  The picture I chose for Aubrey's was pretty perfect for the whole sucker thing because he really was chewing on something in the picture I took of him.

Imrie's worked out ok too though.

It's too bad Dexter doesn't know how cool he is.

So it was a good day.  I am ready for holidays to be over though so I stop having an excuse to bake things and buy candy...

I am ready for this warm weather to come so we can start going for walks with this little dog.  I wonder how far he'll make it before he refuses to go any farther.


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The Grammy's

I watched the Grammy's last night for the first time in YEARS.  I don't know why I even wanted to watch it, but I'm glad I did for this reason:

SO AWESOME.  That is some folk-y goodness right there.

And this:

And maybe a little Bieber:

Valentine's Day pictures to come tomorrow... I would post some now but I don't want Michael to peek at this before he gets home to see everything in person.

I wish he would come home right now so we can start eating.  Yum yum.

Coat Closet Makeover

I got the idea in my head on Thursday that I was going to re-do our coat closet.

I knew I wanted to paint it at the very least.  I have been wanting to paint stripes somewhere in this house and figured a tiny little closet might be a good place for some stripes/some good practice.

First off, let's take a look at this madness...

BLECH.

I was not planning on re-painting the entire closet first, but as I was clearing out the coats I noticed that it was not painted very well... so I decided to paint the whole thing.  

 

These pictures are not great, but you can kind of see that the paint job was pretty bad.

I had already been to Lowes to buy the stripe color when I realized this, and did not feel like going back.  So I made a trip to the basement instead.

The old owners of the house repainted EVERYTHING when they moved out and left all of the paint in the basement for us.  So that was awesome for us not to have to paint anything if we didn't want to... I still don't know why they chose maroon for the bathroom, but whatever.

In the basement was a quart of paint which they wrote ''Mis-tint'' on, so apparently it wasn't the color they wanted.  It had been opened, obviously, but it was a full quart of paint.  So I brought it up.

I have a hard time telling what color it really is.  It is kind of a greyish beighish color.  I don't know, but I liked it.

So the whole closet got painted.   I realize you can't tell the difference AT ALL in this picture... but trust me, in real life it made a big difference.

 

 After that dried I got to work taping the stripes.  I figured 6" stripes sounded good, so I measured every 6" up each wall and made a mark.  And of course they didn't line up as I started to tape.

I am the most impatient person EVER if you haven't figured that out yet, so I'm sure my measurements were sloppy.  Well, I guess that is pretty obvious since my markings didn't match up...  I got it figured out, though.  I had to basically just eyeball the whole thing.  I started off on the left wall with my mark there and then just tried to keep the tape as straight as possible as I went across the other two walls.

 I took a step back every few stripes to make sure they weren't crooked, and they were looking good, so I was really really happy.  My impatience was not going to put up with untaping and retaping those walls repeatedly.

Then came the paint!

Going into Lowes that morning I really didn't know what color I was going to pick.  I tried to stay away from green because that is always the color I am drawn to and I need to get out of that.  

I thought about a dark grey, but didn't want the closet to feel too dark since it is so tiny AND since there is no light in there.

So I headed towards the yellows and found one looked good.  I chose ''Golden Buff'' by Olympic.

Here it is after a coat of paint.

And here it is with the tape came oft after two coats of paint.

 

I was a little worried that doing this on a textured wall might not work out real well, but I made sure the tape was stuck down really well and it turned out pretty good. 

I did do a quite few touch ups with the greyish color which are still wet in these pictures so they stand out quite a bit.

Now...I am not putting the rod back in.  I hated it.  I want to be able to get my toes into this closet if I need to, but it is so tiny that there is just no room when you have SEVENTEEN coats in there.  Yes, between the two of us we had seventeen coats/sweatshirts in that tiny little space.

Instead of the rod, I decided to hang hooks along the walls.  This may or may not turn out to be a terrible idea, but I think I am going to LOVE it. And if we do hate it, we still have the rod and can very easily put it back into place.

We have other places in this house where old/out of season coats can go so we were going to have to just pick a few to keep in there.

Also, that shoe rack on the door??? Not my favorite thing in the world.  Again, we have wayyyyy too many shoes crammed into that thing.  I decided that putting shelves along the inside wall would be PERFECT.

SO...

Saturday we made a trip to Lowes to buy the wood.  If I had gone alone I would have just had the people at Lowes cut the boards to the size I needed... but I wanted Michael to come with to make sure I didn't pick out really junky wood or do something stupid somehow.  I think going into it he knew he was going to walk out of there with a circular saw but I did not have that plan in mind when this project was started :)

BUT he found one that he thought would be good, and I know he has been wanting one... so we left with wood that was NOT cut, a circular saw (and some other tools), 2 saw horses, clamps, and a couple other miscelaneous items.

Once again, if I had gone alone I would've walked out of there spending about $5 on wood... Let me just say that we spent FAR more than $5 on that trip.  Gross.

BUT, now that Michael has the appropriate tools I have many more projects that we can actually get accomplished and that is great news :)

So we came home, he started charging the batteries on his cordless circular saw and he got the wood measured.
 
I finished hanging the hooks in the closet and sat and waited for the boards to get cut.





As soon as they were done I got to painting.



He did a good job!



The brackets got hung while the paint dried.

The shelves got put into place:

Then we got to put everything back in!

SOME shoes got put onto the shelves (most got put in a spot that makes much more sense for a bunch of shoes that don't get worn very often)

(I am INSIDE the closet taking this picture.  I was amazed)
.
SOME coats got hung on the hooks (the rest of the coats went down to the basement)...

(There are probably still too many coats, but I can handle this amount!)

Remember what it looked like before??



And now:

It is not easy to take pictures of a closet this tiny!

 SO MUCH BETTER!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I know that de-cluttering the closet the way it was would have made a huge difference, too.  But I love it like this.  I love the hooks and the shelves and the stripes.  I love that we can fit inside the closet if one of us is trying to scare the other (or Dexter... which has already happened).

I am happy!





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