Bold(er) & Beautiful(Ler)

Calm down, calm down.  I know beautifuller ain’t a word.  Well, unless you ask Anna because she definitely tossed the term of endearment at Elsa without a fuss being raised so…

Switching gears and stories…

Once upon a time, I bought some secondhand furniture, like I often do.  I nabbed a pair of end tables and matching coffee table off a secondhand resale sight for $30 for all.  I added some fun to the coffee table and sold it and the end tables have been living here ever since – one out on the screened-in porch and one on the front porch.  You can see one in the upper corner of this shot post-stenciling the porch floor:

Rewind a couple of years to a Goodwill trip whence I stumbled upon this set of four bamboo chairs for $40 and grabbed them as quick as I could:

DIY Grommeted Curtains

Hallelujah!  I got to do something “fun” whilst getting ready for this sell-our-house thing!  I’m tired of painting the kitchen ceiling, touching up loads and loads of trim paint, cautioning the kids against touching anything (“Do NOT drag your toys along the walls pleeeeease!!!”), washing siding and trim, etc…

I got to make curtains!

If you’ve been a long-time reader, you might remember that once upon a time, I scored a long curtain rod at Dirt Cheap and flanked our living room’s french doors with some long curtains to make the room feel more “homey”, as I put it.  I started out with some sheers and then later made some tan and white, geometric-printed curtains that I loved for a long time.  Well, I wanted a change in pattern so I sold those and found some plain white, thick fabric remnants that I thought would be a perfect medium to do knock-off these curtains from West Elm with…but then I decided that I wanted the curtains to be more subtle and blend into the walls a little more so I just kept them white.  There’s still a chance they’ll look like those West Elm curtains someday but right now, I am loving them as-is.  Phew.  That all sounded like a mind-making disaster, didn’t it?  If you’re looking for someone to pick a design and stick with it, don’t look here.  The winds of change blow quite frequently in this casa. 

The parts I love the most though, are the grommets at the top.  I’ve always used rings to hang curtains because it was the easiest to just sew a big rectangle and hang it up.  But then a good friend of mine put grommets at the top of her living room curtains and told me how easy it was and I just had to.  I mean, look at how they fall!  I toyed with them a little before I took pictures but really, for the most part, the grommets create those big folds that go from top to bottom and they hold them there.

I bought these grommets at Walmart.  They’re the exact same grommets sold at the fabric stores I looked at, only without the coupon mark-up (I’m convinced stores that always have running coupons mark their items up…these are $12.99 at JoAnn Fabrics.)  You can also find them for a little bit more on Amazon.   

So, let me tell you my grommet story.  It’s so easy.  You’ve gotta make some grommeted curtains.

A Grand Entrance

We haven’t been doing much house hunting lately (yep, we’re moving soon-ish, in case you missed it) because we’re still spending every free minute finishing up some big projects at our current house. But there has been a little bit making this post possible.  This next house I’m about to show you, we didn’t really even physically see at all.  It was on our list of houses-to-see but was already under contract when we found it so we were just keeping an eye on it in case that contract fell through.
I loved it based on what I saw on the inside in pictures – good-sized bedrooms, a big kitchen, a big entry way, a double car garage, and ugly as heck.  Every single room had wallpaper.  The fixtures and cabinets were all dated and the curb appeal was non-existent.  But, unless a home inspection proved otherwise, it looked like any updates that needed to be made were just cosmetic and therefore, DIYable and fairly inexpensive.

Its only downfall was the small backyard.  It was on a corner lot and the so the attached garage extended into one corner of the backyard leaving a small corner of grass (maybe a 15’ x 15’ space in) the back far corner.  I was almost willing to overlook that though just because I loved the house so much. 

Floor Score

Hey!  I’m just popping in to let you know we did NOT fall off the face of the Earth but our living room floor did…well, kinda.  You see, we had some water issues (you might remember me blabbing about the chimney leak and a water influx on the patio-now-screened-in-patio) that are now solved but that left some of the planks of our laminate wood floors in the living room warped.  Well, since we’re about to sell our house we reckoned yesterday was good time to replace those.  Unfortunately, the previous owner didn’t leave us any extra planks BUT something crazy happened, while waltzing through our local ReStore last year, we spotted a box of the exact same flooring and swiped it up quicker than quick.  Fast forward to yesterday morning, when we pulled that box out of the closet to finally repair the flooring and guess what?  The new planks are ever-so-slightly different than the existing.  They’re from the same company and look exactly the same to the naked eye but the tongue and groove were about a millimeter different.  WOMP, WOMP.  So, this was the scene in our living room yesterday evening:

(old floor on the left; new on the right)

One Year With Gianna

Also known as “The Year Parenthood Kicked Our Butts”.  Right after Gianna was born I thought, “Hey, this isn’t so bad, this having-four-kids thing.”  And now, looking back I realize I was naively basking in the sleepy newborn stage, soaking in life with the big kids getting more independent, only having one in diapers, and spending hours of “free time” nursing on the couch…  But now?  Now we have a one-year old and for this particular one-year old, that means being on your toes and on top of your game allllllthetime.  I don’t remember the twins or Sebastian being as busy as this girl is and, for the twins sake at least, that’s saying A LOT.  Girlfriend seems to have been born with a seek-and-destroy/eliminate/rough house/erradicate/obliterate motto and also a lemme-taste-test-every-tiny-thing-I-find-on-the-floor mentality.  Her favorite things?  The slightly open dishwasher, toilets, drawers, cupboards, toilet paper and any paper which she loves to pick to shreds (and then eat, of course)…nothing is safe.  In short, we get nothing done when she’s awake unless, and this is a big UNLESS, we turn on Moana.  She will sit and watch that movie and let the world crash down around her. 

Technically she’s now 13 months old but we’re going to go back a month and celebrate this girl who, for all her crazy business, brings all the smiles and laughs to the other five faces in this little fam bam over here.  Gosh, we love her something fierce.

Let’s skip down memory blevard, shall we?

First, you might feel like skimming the story of her birth or back even farther to when we found out she existed.