Easy Update: Jewelry for Your Furniture

I have an old dresser that was given to us by my grandmother- inlaw. She graciously gave it to us when we got married and had zero furniture. It's so old and cool! It lives in our living room and houses our DVD's.

The wood is beautiful and in great shape.

It has a marble top.

Check out that dovetail joinery!

I really love it. But I felt bad for it because when she gave it to us it was missing a drawer pull. And during our last move another one fell off. Despite glueing it back on it has fallen off once again.

So I thought I'd give our dresser a little TLC with a simple update- some new Drawer Pulls! Of course this was an excuse to make the trek over Fancy Drawer Pull Heaven (AKA Anthropologie).

There are a ton of awesome drawer pulls there! I spent some time sorting through them trying to decide which color and style to go with. And trying to not fall in love with the $8 or even $12 (!>@#!) ones.

Green to match the curtains?

Blue to match the accent color in my new rug?

A mix of both?

I finally decided on these guys. They are kind of antique-y looking like my old dresser and had both the colors I was looking for.

I  unscrewed the old ones and put the new ones on. Quick, easy, and I think it looks great!

Hooray for easy updates! Have you done a quick update that makes a big difference?

Work It!

The weekends are usually when I get a long run in, but this past weekend I spent most of my time painting and didn't get a chance to. But I figured I got a pretty good workout anyway with all the bending and stretching painting involves. DIY'ing is a lot of work!

I've seen lists on how many calories you burn vaccuming and dusting, but I wanted to know exactly how good of a work out I got painting. I did a little research and came across this website: http://www.nutristrategy.com/activitylist4.htm There is a list giving calories burned for many activities including painting!



So according to the list Painting walls for 1 hour: 266 calories burned! Wow!

I started to wonder about other DIY activites and how they affect calorie counts. Here's a run down:

Welding: 207 calories

General Carpentry: 207 calories

Electrical Work/Plumbing: 207 calories

Tailoring/ General (like sewing I guess!) 147 calories

So what are you waiting for! Go DIY it up and Burn Baby Burn!



Master Bedroom RePaint

This weekend the hubs and I tackled painting our Master Bedroom. I often neglect doing anything in our bedroom since no one sees it. It tends to be the place I toss all the mess when company comes over and shut the door. I'm trying to change that little by little and I started with our ceiling fan update and now we finally repainted the dark brown paint in our bedroom.

Before the dark brown was on the walls and ceiling. It absorbed a lot of light and made our room feel dark.

I was also anxious to cover up some eyesores in the room. Like this space leftover from when we closed in the door to the kitchen during our Kitchen Remodel. I tried to cover the new gypsum board with leftover paint the previous owners left us, but it was so old it was discolored and gross.

And this beauty, our electrical panel a nice addition to any bedroom I'm sure...

We began by priming the walls and ceiling for paint. I didn't do this when we repainted our living and dining room and regretted it, the dark brown would show through and we ended up painting 3 coats! 

Painting any room in our house is a daunting task because of the crazy texture we have on our walls. On a scale of 1 - 10 our texture is an 8 at least. It's really hard to get into all those nooks and crannys.

But it's all worth it in the end when your bedroom is light and bright! We went neutral because I'm thinking about switching up our bedding and I wanted the room to feel as bright as possible. We used a satin finish for the paint to reflect light around the room.

And that electrical panel is barely noticeable anymore!

Anyone else tackle some projects over the cold weekend?

Whoa Snow!!

We had SNOW in San Antonio TX!!! This has not happened here in almost 20 years! 

Some of you who live a little farther north than us might not think that the 1/8" we got is a big deal, but it was for us. The Hubs still had to go to work but the Con-Man and I took full advantage of our day off.

Poor Gracie wasn't sure what to think, but the day off gave me a lot of time to think about painting our bedroom. I'm seriously thinking about tackling it this weekend sometime in between all the Superbowl festivities.

Wish me luck and stay warm everyone!

You Only Thought You Knew....

Hello Everyone! I thought I'd get away from the DIY for a minute and share a little about myself with you all. I just made 250 "followers" (thanks Rachel Sill!) and saw that over at one of my favorite blogs, Liz at Bons Temps Beignet wrote a post on "Things You Don't Know About Me".

I thought it was cute and since I haven't really posted any info about myself since my First Post Ever, I thought I'd tell you a little more about myself.

I'm an Interior Designer and work for a Commercial Architecture firm in Texas. I love what I do and I work with a lot of great people. I started my Blog so I could share with others my love for making things with my hands and my obsession for fixing up our house.

I have a wonderful husband who serves in the Air Force as a Pediatrician. We met on a blind date! He is always (well most of the time) understanding of crazy ideas I get for things to do around the house.

Then of course there is The Con-Man! Our 18 mo old son. A lot of the things I've made are for him and lately he's been trying to help me out with a lot of my projects.



And last but not least our two pets (and first babies) our dog Gracie and Kat C.C. Gracie was a Katrina Hurricane rescue and I got C.C. from the pound when she was a baby. Here they are in a rare moment of togetherness:

Some Random Facts You May Not Know-

- I like to sing but am not very good at it. Only a select few have witnessed my vocal talents.

- I also like to dance but as with the singing it's not one of my special gifts. I'll usually only do it in public if it's dark enough. So really only the Con-Man gets to enjoy my dancing skills.

- I used to run the hurdles in High School. The 100 and 300 meter. I was pretty darn good at it.

- Also in High School, one weekend I thought it would be a good idea string a ton of Mardi Gras beads together and then proceed to hang them from the ceiling. Since the ceiling in my room was 12' tall it was no small task. I'm sure my mom was thrilled.

- I can make my eyes shake back and forth really fast, like Really fast so it looks like they are vibrating.

- I LOVE chocolate! Nothing is to rich or chocolately for my taste. I have to chew gum at work to keep myself from overdosing on Hershey bars. This makes me wonder why they don't have chocolate flavored gum. That would be helpful.

- I only drink out of plastic Mardi Gras cups at home. When we make it down to New Orleans for Mardi Gras I could care less about catching beads, it's all about the cups. I may or may not have knocked small children over for plastic Mardi Gras cups.



- But I will drink out of a glass when I drink wine. Not a wine glass though, a regular drinking glass. Not sure why, but it might have something to do with my clumsiness.

- I can burp the entire alphabet and even burp words on command. Special right?

- My favorite book is Pride and Prejudice. I own the A&E movie version which is like 6 hrs long. I've watched it a few times.(Woo young hot Colin Firth!)

- I would really love to go sky diving one day. Would anyone like to join me?

- The furthest I've ever been from home is when I went on a trip to London in College.

- I've lived in 3 different states- Louisiana, Texas, and California. I loved living in California and love living in Texas currently, but will always think of Louisiana as home.


I hope I didn't bore you to death or scare anyone off with my little tidbits of information. Welcome! to anyone who is new around here, thanks for reading. And to those of you who have been around a while thanks for sticking with me!

Ugly Lamp Revamp

I've been updating some areas of our house, and one area I've been neglecting for some time is the light on our front porch.

Ya, isn't it fabulous? Not only is the fixture old and pretty ugly it's also shot. We had an electrician look at it and he said the fixture is broken and needs to be replaced. I've been looking for a new one for a while so we can have some light on our front porch and finally had some luck!

I had gone to our local Habitat ReStore and found this:

The flower top piece isn't exactly my taste, and the color doesn't exactly go with our house color. But for the price I can work with it. I had some left over Rustoleum Brown Textured spray paint from my curtain rod project I thought could work. So I set to work taking the fixture apart and spray painted it.

Once that was all finished up it was time to hang it. I thought this post would just be about spray painted a new fixture and hanging, but our home was built in the 1930's and a lot of work has been done to it over time. As we've lived here and done work we've found a lot of things have been not been done correctly in the past.

This for example is not what you want to see when you take a fixture down. There was a small hole drilled in the bead board and the wires run up through it into the great unkown (AKA our attic.) There should be a junction box here, I should be able to rewire the fixture outside. But there's not. So it looks like I'll have to make a trip up to the attic and see what is really happening here. Typical old house adventures, my simple light re-hang has turned into a large project!

Ok, up in the attic I find this. Now I am not an electrician but I know this isn't exactly correct. (I did an internship at a lighting store so I think I'm pretty hot stuff when it comes to rewiring things but as the Hubs can attest to this is not always a good thing.)  Whoever lived here before ran a line off the original junction box to the center of the ceiling of the porch. It still works but is not the best solution. For the time being I went a head and rewired the new fixture in the attic. Our handyman is coming out later this week to do some exterior work and I'll ask him to double check it for me.

 

Here it is all hung up and ready for a test run! I think the brown complements the paint of the house much better than white would have.

Success! We have light!

And an overall shot. I am so thankful to be able to come home at night to lit porch and be able to see the keyhole to get in the door! 

Have you ever had any unexpected surprises while working on your home or on a project?

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