The Before...

Like most people, we get the most done on our house right before we are having an event. Our usual energy spurt comes right before Thanksgiving since we host it every year.

My husband informs me last night that he's gutting the girl's playroom. This is good and bad. It's good because I hate that room. It's scary because we are a having party at our house in 11 days.

He swears he'll have it done in a week and who am I to hinder progress? Strike while the iron's hot I always say (never). :)

So here are the befores:







The plan is to remove that rock wall and fireplace, raise the ceiling, install recessed lights, make that entire back wall built ins, and change the floors.

Obviously that won't all get done in a week, but he'll have the dry wall back up and the ceiling done.

That way we can move all the toys back in and get them out of here.



The girls were so sweet this morning. Before they left for camp they helped their Dad move all of the stuff out. They are excited.

(I) Just Wing(ed) It!

Over the weekend I went into Garden Ridge and was stunned to read that the store was closing. Boo! That's my go-to place for cheap crap. Ha, Ha. It's right near my mother-in-laws house and I always stop in when we are over there visiting. After I got over the shock, I was pleased to also read that the entire store was 25% off. Perfect.

I bought 10 different black frames for my gallery wall project. The plan is to frame some great pics I got on our visit to Charleston.

I always see on HGTV that when you hang a gallery wall the best thing to do is lay it out ahead of time on a big piece of paper. You then transfer the paper to the wall and know exactly where to put the nails.

Have you met me? I don't have time for that.

So I just went for it. I went one by one and eye-balled it and I think it turned out great. I still have the stock photos in the frames because I needed to lay it out first so I will know what size and orientation to edit each photo in.




So I lucked out this time, but I couldn't help thinking the whole time I was doing this........."if you don't have time to do it right, you definitely don't have time to re-do it".

I'll post the final pic when I get the real pictures in.

New Jutes

I have been looking for a rug to go under our dining room table for at least a year. This is how it has been looking.





My main issue has been the price. It's very hard to find a big rug on the cheap.

I read on here that Lowe's had 5x7 jute rugs on clearance. The color, material, and price were perfect, they were just too small.

I had an idea so I ran over there on my lunch break and grabbed the last two.





My idea was to tape two rugs together to make one 7x10 rug. It was a good idea until I tried to execute it. When I unrolled the rugs and tried to match them up I found out they were irregular. I was so disgusted that I didn't take a picture of this part. Ha, Ha.

Since I like the rugs and know I can use them somewhere else in the house I decided to just put them under the table for now. It's definitely not perfect, but I still kinda like it. They don't bother me.





Here are close-ups of the non-match-ups.










The funny thing is that I have a recipe binder on the dining room shelf that has the same color and pattern. It's like it was meant to be, even though it obviously wasn't.




Anyway, the rugs were $34 each, for a grand total of $68. If this would have worked better this would have been a really awesome and thrifty idea. That's a savings of at least $300!

I noticed after I wrote this that the rug is also the same pattern at the curtain panels I was eyeing. Man do I need to step outside the box. :)