The Plan

Good Afternoon my few and faithful! 

Today I want to share with you my planning/thought process when I'm planning out a home "redesign" project.

The room I'm working hard on at present is the Kitchen. I recently finished - pretty much - my home office and am just waiting for a final touch or two to finally share it with you. I need a handful more of little items to be able to call it a wrap on that room. But now I'm turning my near full attention to the kitchen.

If you read my Kitchen Evolution post you will know it's been through it's ups and downs. When we first "took possession" of the house and started renovating we painted the cabinets a dark chocolate brown with a very expensive oil based paint. The cabinets are old, from the 1960's, and are a flat panel door. I don't particularly care for flat panel doors, period, but this house is full of them, so I'm living with them. We also chose to paint the walls a sage green color. A very pretty color, but as my home evolves, it's becoming the odd man out. We even went ahead and had the counter tops replaced.

I ended up going with our dark counter tops because granite was unavailable at the time, because of money, and there was nothing else in the store that I liked, even remotely. Plus is went with dark cabinets and green walls. It was the most evasive thing we did when working on this house, and I'm still glad we went ahead and did it. 

As these 5 years have worn on, my house has undergone some big changes and for the most part, the kitchen has always felt ok to me. The decor started leaning more toward the country style, with floral curtains and floral china pieces being displayed over the cabinets, and then we introduced the big new table into the room and that pushed it even further country. But as the house turned blue around it (comment below if you would like to see a tour of everything aqua in my home) the green kitchen started feeling like the loner kid on the playground. 

So, what do I do? I start by thinking about it. For the longest time, I felt the fault was with the cabinets, so I started thinking of ways to lighten up the cabinets, and had even settled on buying white contact paper and covering them, in their entirety. But one afternoon I was cruising Pinterest, like I do, and saw a photo of dark cabinets against a light beige wall. And the light bulb in my head not only came on, but it started flashing.

You're doing it wrong! Don't paint the cabinets! DON'T contact paper the cabinets! Paint the walls!

It was pretty clear the direction I needed to go after that realization, so I had to start to hatch my plan, by listing what is important to me in the project.

• It cannot cost a whole lot of money - and I must unload some of my "sellables" in order to fund such a project. Perhaps the "Bank of Husband" would work finance a loan haha!
• I'd like the walls to be a light beige color, to flow with the rest of the house and to work well with my aqua accent color. I would definitely be going with a paint color from Lowe's Allen+Roth line because it is only $30 per gallon.
• (as with the office) Paint, or DIY as many accessories as possible to save money.
• Contact paper the nearly black counter tops.

After making out the list (it's usually a mental list) of the things I want to accomplish in the room, I go to Pinterest and create an inspiration board to help me visualize how it will turn out. Check out my "Kitchen Spruce Up" board HERE. I determine, from there, the style I'm going for and what will work in my space and what won't. It always helps that I have a creative mind.

Then I add the things that "speak to me" from Pinterest onto my list. 

• New curtains (or re-purpose some I already have) for both windows. (One set will go to the floor)
• new artwork - DIY I love this giant "EAT" from sweetpickinsfurniture.com.
  
  This could be accomplished by either buying the letters from Michaels (around $2 a letter I think) or I could have my father in law, wood craftsman that he is, cut them out for me, but then I decided that cardboard would be the easiest route to go. A little cardboard, some paper mache and a little aqua paint and we are in business. Completely free because of my left over aqua paint from my Front Door Makeover!
  I also like the idea of simple kitchen art, like this Mason Jar print from printabledecor.net
  
  

  

I find I am much more satisfied, and proud, of my end results when I do things myself. 

hookedonhouses.net

 I know that I want whatever the end result to be to work well with Aqua accessories. So I find photos like the one above to help me visualize how much aqua is too much or not enough. BTW, if my kitchen was this size, I'd never leave it. Are you kidding me? I love it!  Plus, if you go into Kohl's now they are offering so many fun, bright colored kitchen products. They will probably be going on sale soon to make way for Christmas things! I can't wait for that! (I want the aqua blue little cow shaped figurine so bad!)

After I've got my Pinterest board set up, I head over to Amazon, to check out their selection to see if I want to buy, or to DIY and re-purpose. In this case, I already know I want a counter-top looking contact paper to cover my counters. Originally I thought I would go with something just for the back splash, but after I started looking, I found this.

And yes, I screen-shot this for ya'll to see. (My pink polka dot theme came from Firefox's add-ons page, in case you were wondering.) Here's a link to the Amazon Listing. As soon as I saw it, my brain shot to an image of my brown cabinets, beige-y walls and aqua goodness sitting on top. I knew it was the one. I ultimately decided it'd be safest to go with the 75ft roll for $30 to be on the safe side.

The only other thing I knew I might want to spend a little cash on was some curtains, and I've been lucky on finding inexpensive sheer curtains (my favorite style) on Amazon for about $8 for 2 panels. But what color did I want? I was afraid if I went with an aqua color I'd end up getting this insane bright neon blue color, and I didn't want that, at all. Best to stick with a neutral if you ask me. I could do with a set of "ivory" sheers for $8 per 2 panels, as I'd expected. But after thinking about it for a while, I decided against buying new curtains. I got creative again. The sheer curtains on our big living room window were just hanging there, and we already had a set of drapes hanging there, so the sheers were just adding bulk to the window coverings. And that window is huge, I mean huge. So I thought about it, and decided to re-purpose those sheers. It will save that $8, and I can put it toward the paint and/or contact paper. The windows in this house (except for the big window in the living room) aren't exactly "pretty" but my "cover it up" attitude from 5 years ago really sucks now because of the lack of any natural lighting. I'll clean the fire out of the windows and the ledges and deal with the cracks if it means I can have a light and bright room to hang out in,


A lot of this project will be the de-clutter of my over the counter shelf, using the bare bones of decor - my large dark brown "R" will stay, for sure, my "Blessed" from Hobby Lobby will stay and a few other little knick knacks will stay. I will add in a few items - I have a gold basket weave star shaped box my Dad got me years and years ago (I love stars) that I am planning on slapping a little aqua paint on. I also have a star shaped box that has the world "believe" written on it that I will probably add as well as some other things I have laying around the house. My floral china pieces I think I will tuck away in a box for now, because until I have a proper china cabinet, I just don't feel like they will 'go' with the new look. I also really like the idea of a few photos up there. I've got some cute ones of me when I was a baby "cooking" with my Mama, and then a couple of cute ones of Aaron when he was a lil' tyke... especially the one of him with his face covered, ear to ear, with chocolate pudding. Adorbs. So that's an idea too.




OK. After I decide for sure what I want to do, I go to Lowe's and look at my paint options - we are going tonight. If I am dead set, I'll go ahead and purchase it, but if not, I'll take a sample home and check it out with the surroundings to see if i like it, I would specifically check to see if it "went" with our counters. But since I am changing the counters too, I will probably just go for it and buy tonight.

The middle of September will start to be super busy for me (I'm doing another play!) and so I won't have that much time to devote to home redesign. So I want to get this project done soon, very very soon. Like, next week soon. I'd like to start it tomorrow but I don't have my contact paper (unless I miraculously find it at Lowe's tonight!), and I'm the type of person that likes 1 day transformations.  Pretty much all my redesigns are done in a single day.

So now that I've got my plan pretty much in place, I clean the room, thoroughly, and get it ready for it's makeover!


In short (too late), here's The Plan!

• paint the walls
• contact paper the counter tops
• paint accessories
• diy some art
• diy "new" curtains 
• redesign over the cabinet decor 

I'll update you all when the project is finished. I will also post photos of the office as soon as those final touches are in place!


Here I go, again!

Thanks for stopping by again today! I love you all! 

 

Downey Unstoppables in Your Wax Warmer!

My Wax Warmer. The Simple Life © Please excuse the brightness.

Why didn't we, as the human race, think of this before??

A lot of you are probably familiar with my post on my Better Homes & Garden's Wax Warmer (See the post here) and in that post I raved about how much I loved my warmer.

The warmer I was raving about had been a gift from an old girlfriend of mine for my birthday and was the white version of the warmer shown in the blog post.

Sadness struck not too long after that post was published. The warmer got knocked off the shelf and broke into two pieces. Because I loved it so much, I glued it back together and continued to use it.

 One afternoon I was in Wal-Mart with my Mom and we wandered over to the warmer isle and I saw one I just had to have, on sale for $10, $5 off the original price. It now lives on my piano, next to a picture of me and my Dad when I was a baby. (My big brother had dressed me up like a wild Indian at Cracker Barrel one afternoon and thought it was hilarious. Brothers.)


Here's the tip! And it's been going around for a while now, but I thought I'd mention it because it really does work and I love it! You can find lots of pins on Pinterest in regards to putting Unstoppables in your warmers, so you may want to check some of those out as well.

Instead of spending the $2.00 for a package of the warmer wax, use some of your Downy Unstoppables in your warmer!

Downy Unstoppables.

I use the kind with the blue top, in the"Fresh" scent. It fills my house with the smell of cleanness and I love it. I just pour out a cap full and dump it into my warmer and in a few minutes the little blue dots melt together and the smell starts floating through my home.

I find that I don't have to change the wax out hardly at all, because the Unstoppables have such a good staying power to them... if that makes sense.  This is a great trick that everyone should try! I haven't used a single square of my wax since I started using this tip! 



Ok, now for a funny story!

On occasion I will ask my Aaron to run by the store on his way home from work and pick up some household items that we need. Paper towels, toilet paper, laundry detergent etc. Whenever I ask him to get Downy Unstoppables, I ask him to pick up the one with the blue top. It's easy enough for him to understand and we have no problems with it. He always gets the right one.

Well back in December I was laid up (for the entire month it felt like, I'd be sick a week and better a week and sick a week and so on...) with the stomach bug that swept through our community. I was vomiting a lot and making a general mess out of my clothes, so I was washing a lot of nasty clothing and I ran through my "try me size" bottle of Unstoppables (the only size offered at Dollar General at the time) within a couple of days. One Friday afternoon my Mom was heading to our house after work and stopped by the store to get me a few things to try and eat. She asked if I needed anything household wise and I told her yes, I needed some Downy Unstoppables, the kind with the blue top, like I always tell Aaron. "Ok, no problem," she says. A few minutes later I get a text message from Mom with a picture of the Downy Unstoppables shelf, with the blue top one front and center, and it says:

"They don't have one with a blue top, They have Light Pink, Dark Pink, Purple and this Aqua type color. Which do you want instead?"

I start laughing and tell her that the Aqua is the one with the blue top and she starts laughing and grabs me a bottle. When she gets to our house about 10 minutes later, we are still laughing and I tell her that next time I'll be more specific with her, and that just saying "blue" usually does it for Aaron. I'm not used to having to state the specific shade of blue! That's the difference between men and women folks. Blue works for my hubby, however I have to specify that it is Aqua for my Mom to understand it! HA!

We laugh about it every time we are in a store together and see the Unstoppables. "No blue!" she'll say.


Ok, so there's your tip (and funny story) for today!


Hope you have as much success with this as I do!! Have a great rest of the day!

*I am not being perked by Better Homes & Gardens, or Downy for mentioning their products, I just love them!

Quick Tip: Go Green, Save $$, DIY Pledge

My bottle of DIY Pledge. Practicin' what I preach!

Let's get honest here. I hate the smell of Pledge. I hate it so much that for years I didn't use Pledge to dust my house with, I just used a multipurpose cleaner, or Windex to dust my house with. And that's all well and good, I suppose, but when I stumbled across this recipe for a DIY Pledge/Dusting Spray and saw that you could add your own essential oils - basically your own scent - I knew I had to give it a try. 

Let me get even more honest... I hate dusting. It's time consuming, and I have to handle a damp, stinky rag and then my hands dry out and get crusty and dust goes flying everywhere and I start sneezing and then the dog starts sneezing... it's a mess. And we live in an old house, so lots of dust accumulates very quickly, especially recently when it's been too warm to run the heaters but not hot enough to run the air conditioner, so I've had the windows open every day with the ceiling fans going... yeah.

I cannot take credit for this recipe, I'd love to, but alas, cannot. I'm going to share with you my biggest secret weapon... my YouTube subscription to a channel called "DoItOnADime." Her name is Kathryn, and she is probably the most amazing youtuber out there. She is my absolute favorite, and I get all excited like a little kid whenever I see a new video from her.  Seriously, she will change your life. 90% of my tricks come from her. She's changed my life. Click the link above and go meet her, her husband Charlie, their son Carson and their doggie Luna! You'll love her, I promise!! She has so many wonderful cleaning tips and organizing tips and recipes and she's a Goodwill/Thrift Store queen....she's amazing. I can't praise her enough. She's a nice enough person that when I message her to tell her I've tried another one of her tricks, she messages back! Big deal for this girl!!

Now, when Kathryn said she used this, I knew it had to be like liquid gold. 

All you have to do is mix:

2 tablespoons of Olive Oil
1/2 teaspoon of essential oil (whatever scent you like. I use lavender, but you could use citrus, or whatever floats your boat!)
1/4 cup of white vinegar
1 1/3 cup of water. 

I just mixed everything in a bottle I already had, and because I have everything on hand that I needed to make this, it cost me absolutely NOTHING.  Money Spent: Zero Dollars and Zero Cents. Now THAT is how you save money!

Give her a good shake and spray away. I use a regular cotton cloth, like an old cloth baby diaper (clean of course) or one of my husbands old undershirts (over time they thin out and he can't wear them anymore, and thats when they become phenomenal cleaning rags), or a nice microfiber cloth (you can get them at the Dollar store). I have found that since I've been using this, dust doesn't go flying around so easily, I don't sneeze when I'm dusting, neither does my Tabby girl, and the best part of all, it seems like I don't have to dust as much. Like it used to be an ever other day thing having to dust my furniture. Honestly, hand to the Bible, I dusted on Friday (we had friends over) and haven't touched my furniture with a dusting rag until today, and really didn't need to. And I have DARK furniture scattered all throughout my house. I love this stuff! Thank you SO MUCH KATHRYN for sharing this on your channel!!


I hope this works as well for all of you as it does for me, and for Kathryn! Give it a shot, and let me know how it goes!!

Thanks for stopping by The Simple Life again today!! Don't forget about my Home Style Evolution series, new posts every Transformation Tuesday! 

The Power of Spray Paint at 2am

I tend to be a very impulsive person. If the notion strikes, I go with it. If it doesn't, tasks that I think I may want to do get put on the back burner for an indefinite period of time, which also classifies me as a procrastinator. (As if my shameful lack of posting on this blog wasn't enough evidence for you.)

Yes, I've got a chandelier in a box sitting in the corner of my kitchen waiting to be put up. Yes, it has been sitting there for a week. Yes, I've got two light bulbs out on my car port that I've been meaning to change for a while. Sure, I could probably stand to clean out my office closet.... you get where I'm heading with this? Yeah.


So here's a quick little backstory for ya! For the past 4 years, in our bathroom, I've kept all my daily used products in a mirrored tray sitting on the vanity. Things like my night time face routine and my eye cream, my BB Cream lived there along with our can of hair spray and my daily lotions. But it always felt cluttered and not very well organized to me. I'm an OCD clean freak and I was constantly having to clean the tray and what was on it to keep from stroking out. Plus in the mornings my husband would use the hand towel and, instead of hanging it back up, he'd toss it down on the vanity, on the tray, and therefore knock everything down into a big jumble. I hated it. We have limited cabinet space in the bathroom, and I've used every method of organization I can think of in there in the past 4 years, but there was never a good place for me to have my every day things that wasn't on top of the vanity.

This is an old photo from when we first repainted the bathroom, like the paint was probably still wet here. You can see the tray on the vanity. Also, be aware that now we have a green  curtain hanging over the window and a pink and green floral shower curtain for spring/summer. We use the brown in the fall/winter.

Until....


So about a week ago, it's 2am - I'm an extreme insomniac, I don't sleep more than 3 or 4 hours nightly. - and that's usually when I'm forcing myself to get sleepy. My husband is in bed, and I'm in the living room with the iPad going through Pinterest. We'd been to my sister in law's house that night for the SEC Championship Basketball game (our team lost, we were devastated), and she had just finished redecorating her kids/guest bathroom. It had been a lime green beachy paradise with surfboards painted on the walls and tiki style accents. But now that her kids are both teenagers, they wanted something more adult, so they chose to paint it all a really nice blue.  Long story short, she had only a large picture frame and a tall candlestick with a blue candle sitting on the vanity top. I loved it. In fact, I went upstairs to use the bathroom during the game instead of using the one downstairs where we we all were, just so I could look at it again. ;)

So at 2am, I'm looking for a large candlestick and nice decorative picture frame like she had, because I simply loved it, and the idea struck!! I knew I had an old, yucky gold picture frame somewhere, so I quickly dug it out.

 

Ah, yes, most hideous. This was maybe $5 from Family Dollar a while ago. But I love the scrolling around the edge of the frame and just knew it would look good painted! 

So next I dug out my candlestick. I bought this in a set of two from Big Lots in 2009 before we got married, and I don't remember at all how much they cost, but they were super inexpensive.

Excuse my copy of Wuthering Heights to the side. And my Germ-X. ;)

 Next I came up with a game plan. The look my sis in law had was very distressed, and I looooove that look. My personal, home decor style has evolved so drastically in the past for years, it's funny to think about it. When we moved in everything was crisp and modern and dark colors, and now I'm all about light, and floral prints and "old stuff," as my other sister in law once called it. The good thing is, spray paint works on almost anything!! I decided against actually spraying the paint, 1) because I was working on my kitchen counter tops, and 2) I had better control over the "distress." Just so happens, as well, that I keep a stash of spray paint in our utility room for when a 2am craft session erupts. 

I chose Krylon's Ivory in a satin finish. So I just sprayed a little on top of my Frog Tape container and used a little paint brush and started dabbing away at my picture frame and my candle stick. No sanding, just step one, dab.

And here is the frame after one go-round. I put two layers on it, just to be on the safe side. Now, instead of an ugly gold frame, I have a cute, scrolling farmhouse style frame! And I didn't have to spend a blooming nickle.

Below are the finished products after they were placed. The paint dried SUPER quickly, so I had them set in their new homes before I went to bed that night-- ok, that morning. All it took was a little creative thinking on my part and I found a home for everything on the tray, inside a cabinet, drawer or closet in the bathroom, making way for my pretty new additions on the vanity top.

The picture of us was taken a year before we were married in October, 2008! We were newly engaged!!

Also, while I was at it, I decided to paint my accent lamp that I keep in our kitchen. I miss my Mom's under-counter lights. This lamp was a wedding gift, and I'd always LOOOVED the shape of it, and how tiny it was, but it was the same color scheme as the candlestick, and it simply didn't "go" with my house anymore. I'd been wanting to paint it but I'd kept putting it off and putting it off. For this one, I did actually spray the paint on. I just rigged up an old bath towel across my step-down into my utility room and sprayed away. No overspray on ANYTHING. The lamp was dry in minutes!

 

Shop whatcha got people! I'm so proud of my handiwork every time I walk into the bathroom or turn the little lamp on! Instead of spending any money, I put a little thought into it and turned things I already had into what I wanted. Do it yourself, you will love it all the more when you are done!

Happy DIYing!

Missy

Thank you, KRYLON, for making spray paint!