Reach

My sisters and I had a step stool when we were kids that we all loved. It stayed in our bathroom long after we needed it - it served the purpose of CD player stand in high school. When my sweet niece Victoria was born in December, I knew I wanted her to have one like it. Even though she won't need to use it for a while, I went ahead....

I started with a basic wooden stool bought with a coupon from AC Moore.

I painted the entire thing with leftover paint samples from Behr.
The base is the pink from my craft room accent wall, and the stripes are from various other projects.
I created the stripes using painters tape.

I created the poem template using my cricut cutting machine. This could also be done by printing and then cutting out print letters with an exacto blade.

I used painters tape to affix every other line to the stool, and then used a foam brush to tap the paint in. I followed up with a detail brush and cleaned up the lines.

Here is the poem:

This little stool is mine
I use it all the time
To reach the things I couldn't
And lots of things I shouldn't

I think I liked the line about shouldn't most when I was growing up. It was almost like my permission to not be perfect all the time and have fun.

My Name Is Earl (Gray)

A neutral color for our living room works really well because we have color in our furniture, curtains and rug. Gray seemed like the best way to go, and would pull nice tones from our new tile fireplace.

Chair rail was installed in our living room before we moved in, it got in the way of our furniture layout and seemed to shorten the room. We decided to remove the chair rail before we painted.

Wall patches drying and paint samples on the wall

We went with a color called Cathedral Gray by Behr. 

I had a puppy helper!

 

Finished!

Shine!

It is amazing how much of a difference a new light fixture will make in a room.

Pierre pointed our our "eyeball" living room lights soon after we moved in. At first, I couldn't understand what the problem was with them. Of course, soon that is all I could see in the room and agreed we should switch out the lights. What I didn't know was that you can leave the actual light fixture alone and just switch out the "trim" - this is WAY less expensive than replacing the entire light.

Left - eyeball light                                                        Right - low profile light

We also wanted to replace our standard dome light fixture in the center of the room.

(the dark gray circle is one of our built in speakers)

I never like rushing into buying something like this. I was looking for something fun, something with a little whimsy but also grown-up and modern. Surprisingly, places you may not expect have some very original lights. I found THE light at Pottery Barn Kids on clearance!

We decided to install a ceiling medallion before we installed our new light fixture - this solves the problem of a potential size variance from an existing light cover. 

Pierre shut the power down to the house before working on any of this, and proceeded from here to the installation of our new light.

            

We played around with bulb type but settled on an LED light, we won't have to change this bulb for a while!

Hearth of a Home

The summer brought us an unwelcome surprise - new duct work and a new A/C unit. We have been up to a lot of home projects since recovering, here is our latest!

We have a funny tile story in our house, in that the tile in both of our bathrooms is also the tile on our fireplace. My best guess is that the guy who flipped our house (more on that later), bought one box of tile for the house.
Black marble tile is fine for some people, but for us, it is just that... fine:

Pierre had been talking for a while about demo-ing the tile and re-doing the mantel. I was in the midst of planning an in-house baby shower for my sister so told him we could think about it after the baby shower.

Well, I guess my words were taken literally because the day after the shower, I woke up from a nap to this:

 

Here is the damage to the living room....

Once we start something, we don't stop until we are finished. So, we finished the demo of the tile and mantel and then went shopping for tile with a visa gift card we had been saving for a house project. We looked at Home Depot, Lowes and The Tile Shop. We looked specifically for 2"x8" tile because once we discussed the design, we knew we wanted to do subway tile on the fireplace and a herringbone pattern on the hearth. We found a marble tile we loved and bought one box in a matte finish. Pierre designed the trim pieces and mantel. We hired a friend to do the mantel and tile.

Step 1 - Smooth out the surface

Step 2 - Install new trim

Look at the new (standard) mantel height

Time for the new tile!

        

The living room was a big job, we removed chair rail, installed four new lights and painted... more to come!

Now you see it, now you don't...

When we bought our house (in November of 2009), our kitchen was exactly what we wanted - hard wood floors, white cabinets and stainless steel appliances. Of course, when you are buying your first house it is hard to know exactly how much all of those big cabinets will actually hold - I would never have imagined we didn't have enough cabinet space. After about a year, we realized we needed a dedicated space for food storage. In doing so, we hoped to free up some cabinet space.

Our kitchen soon after we moved in

A living room closet was closed off and made into an opening for the refrigerator by previous owners

We didn't mind the refrigerator where it was, but it completely eliminated the kitchen work triangle and the refrigerator was such a snug fit, the door dug into the wall every time we opened the refrigerator

Pierre has such great ideas: he realized we had plenty of room on the wall across from our stove/oven for our refrigerator (which would also establish a work triangle), so we moved it out of this too small home and Voila! the perfect space for a built-in pantry

Pierre designed the space and asked a friend to help install a new door and drywall to close in the wall opening.  We had a few "mystery" switches in our kitchen and he asked how to re-use one for the pantry at the same time. Since we knew we would have to paint the new drywall, we decided to take the opportunity to paint the kitchen.

Sample paint color and brand new pantry door 

Newly painted kitchen and finished pantry

The pantry got a coat of paint and a "new" light fixture my dad had lying around

A wall mounted pot rack saves a lot of cabinet space too

We used Elfa from the Container Store - they have a free design service which helped us get the most use out of our space

An over the door unit keeps small things like spices at easy access

"oui"

Our save the date cards really set the tone for our wedding - we kept them fun and whimsical but also very simple and to the color palette we wanted to use for the wedding.

We printed the address labels on the 2.5" circle labels from Paper Source and used clear ink for an embossed bumble bee on the front of the envelope. We used an address embosser stamp for the return address on the envelope flap.

One of the reasons we chose to make our own save-the-dates was because half of the people invited to our wedding live in France. Instead of doing two separate cards, we took the opportunity to introduce our guests to an important part of our Wedding Day.

Sorry for the poor quality photos... these images were taken after I framed our save-the-date for display. I will pull an original out of storage for some better pictures...

please save the date for the day we say "I do"

"oui", we did it .... two years ago.

I am finally getting around to blogging, I have been wanting to do this for a while. I thought I would start off with one of my favorite projects, the process was really fun and the end result is too. 

Pierre and I got engaged in May of 2008 and got married in April 2010, so since we had a while to plan we decided we could dedicate ourselves to making our own save the dates - not only was this going to save us money (right?!), we could make one card with both french and english (which is sort of hard to find). In the end, this honestly didn't save us much money but we had a lot of fun making these.

In all of my projects I am usually just waiting for the creativity to strike, either that or to find the "inspiration" that I can work a whole concept around. In this case, our save-the-dates were inspired not from an object, but a store: Paper Source was my best friend during this process! We live in Maryland, so the best options for us at the time were Georgetown or Annapolis, and yes....we are those people who will drive further if it means avoiding the parking/chaos of DC traffic. We ventured to Annapolis many weekends, two years later there is a Paper Source down the road from us in Bethesda but we had many more adventures and have many more memories from our Annapolis trips.  

We knew we wanted a simple, clean design - perhaps a little vintage. I fell in love with the "brown paper bag" color at Paper Source and went with their square envelope and square folded card. The color we picked for the card no longer exists at Paper Source (which we discovered while attempting to purchase the same color for our wedding invitation supplies - another fun adventure to tell later), but it is a very pale pink. I also fell in love with a typewriter font available on HP computers called Batik, we were using Pierre's computer from his Architecture school days for this process since he has PhotoShop. 

We chose the wording (making sure to have Pierre's mom spellcheck the french) and designed the layout on PhotoShop. We used 8.5x11 luxe cream paper (We not only saved money on paper cost by doing this, but on printing as well since this is usually charged on a per sheet basis) and laid out each section using grid lines. We found a printer who agreed to use our PDF and used a print method called thermography so the wording would be embossed and become more typewriter like. I asked for advice on the cutting process and the printer said he could use his weighted cutter and would have each section individually wrapped when we picked everything up (he only charged us an additional $10 for this). 

We made our save-the-dates whimsical with our paper envelope liners and picked a photo for the front. Pierre and I both enjoy photography and so made it even more "us" by adding in the photo corners. Now for the photos:

    

new paper scissors for this project!

     

  

I loved how the photo corners laid out with glue dots looked like a sea of fishies

we complete this entire process on my sewing desk in my bedroom at the time - at my parent's house

tape guidelines helped us uniformly lay out each piece 

King and Queen of heart stamps - the square envelopes required extra postage

I will add another photo tomorrow with our final product, I somehow didn't take one at the time and I need to charge my camera battery :)