I don't think I've been THIS excited about showing y'all a project in a long time. The reclaimed wood ceiling in our kitchen and dining room is finished and it is just SO GOOD.
It's cozy and warm and I just love it. The house feels so much less like an unfinished white box and more like the home I have always pictured in my head. Also, the whole thing only cost $322. That's a deal in my book.
A wood ceiling in the kitchen and dining room was on the "must have" list from the …
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State of the House, 2017 – Main Living Areas
Alright, who’s ready for an interior house tour? Fair warning, this is not some beautifully staged, perfect house tour that you find all over home blogs, this is a very unfinished and unpretty tour so you know exactly where the house stands. Today I’ll show you the main living areas (areas in red below), and in the next post we’ll do the bedrooms, bathrooms, and loft.
Just as a recap for any newbies, this is a custom home that my husband and I designed. We hired a builder to …
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Rustic Picnic Style Dining Table
Well....my husband built another dining room table. It's been over two years since he built the last one and I think he was starting to get a twitch. A table building twitch (or a lack of table building twitch, more like it).
If you remember, our first dining table was a simple farmhouse table made out of pine.
We sold that table to friends in order to build the second table, a beautiful pecan table with X legs.
Recently we sold that table to different friends, since they needed …
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Why You Should Always Listen to Pottery Barn (a bench story)
In my last post I told you about how I bought the galvanized metal chairs I have been lusting after for years. Today we're talking about the other side of the table...the farmhouse benches.
These are the complete opposite of my metal chairs... their homemade, cheap, and NOT sturdy. And even though I spent ridiculous amounts of time stalking my metal chair prey....these were way more of a pain. What I'm trying to say is that this is not a tutorial. More like a story of failure, failure...and …
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That one time I actually spent money
Happy 2014! It's my first post of the year....and I don't have some awesome, creative, one of a kind project for you. I have seven projects that are about 80% finished, but I just can't seem to get them to the "ready to photograph" stage. I also have about 14 hundred ideas floating around in my head and I just want to drop everything I'm working on and dive into some new stuff. But I will pace myself, because finishing stuff is very important. Because finally finishing projects makes my …
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Pecan Farmhouse Dining Table
Surprise! We built another dining room table. That kind of came out of left field, I know...after all, we just built our current pine farmhouse table last year. Allow me to explain...
Adam is a wood snob.
Now Adam isn't snobby about much. He will gladly drive old crappy cars, sport goodwill t-shirts, go waaay to long between haircuts because I don't feel like cutting it, and use the same towel for the tenth time without complaining. But show him a piece of cheap furniture and you can watch …
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Farmhouse Kitchen on a Budget – The Reveal
(Update: I hadn't really intended for this to be my kitchen reveal post, I really just wanted to show y'all how I "decked out" my new floating shelves. Anyway, it has become fairly popular as a kitchen reveal post so I went ahead and added the prices for everything we have done so far in the kitchen to the end of the post.)
Well, my internet is working again and it's time to show you my shelves! They are decked out, colorful, and oh so functional. This post doesn't really have a story to go …
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Sometimes I Give Terrible Advice – A Plate Wall Update
I mess up a lot of DIY projects. In fact, I mess up nearly every single one, though usually I am able to fix my mistakes before I blog about it and give y'all terrible advice. That was not the case with my plate wall though (original post HERE).
After hanging the plate wall I waited a couple of weeks to blog about it to make sure all was well. Then about a month after that, things went south. Quite literally. (That is if you are assuming the sky is north and the ground is south, which I know …
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Kitchen Command Center
So this whole command center project started one day when I was at World Market...I saw this one and thought "man I could really use a command center in the kitchen".
I kinda sorta liked this one, so I looked at the price tag...it was nearly $80 bucks! It's just some plywood, chalkboard paint, trim and a basket. I bet I could make it for $15... probably less since I have most that stuff on hand.
So, I (of course) decided to make my own, more original, more useful and more unique command …
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Dining Room Windows – Done!
I'm slowly working my way around the dining room, finishing one section and then moving to the right and finishing the next. It feels pretty good, since I usually don't finish something before I move on. I call it 'new project enthusiasm'...my husband calls it something very different. So far I've finished the chalkboard, the pantry door, the plate wall, and now the windows. I have one more area to finish after this and then we will have nothing left to do besides actually finish the kitchen. …
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Make Your Own Plate Hangers & My Dining Room Plate Wall
I've been wanting something fun for the big blank wall in my dining room. Something colorful, something cheap. I wanted a plate wall. I excitedly told Adam my idea...and he seemed confused.
Adam : "A plate wall? Like dinner plates, on the wall?
Me: "Yes."
Adam : "You mean like grandmas have in their house?"
Me: "Ummmm....well, yes...kinda."
Adam: "Okayyyyy, but if I come home tomorrow and you're wearing a muumuu I'm gonna nix this whole idea."
I promised him I wouldn't be wearing a muumuu, …
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DIY Screen Door For The Pantry
Way back in February, when I organized my pantry, I mentioned that I was looking for an old screen door to replace our current pantry door. I looked for an old screen door for a while, then a new one...but then realized that finding one in the size I needed was a pipe dream. Our pantry door is so narrow (24 inches) that screen doors in that size pretty much don't exist. Which is okay, because new screen doors cost about $150 - $200, and the one we built cost us a whopping $18.
Here is the …
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Painted Plank Walls, Finally
Who knew that painting the plank walls would turn out to be the major project of the month? Seriously, painting the walls was more labor intensive than actually putting up the planks. Okay I may just be saying that because installing the planks was completely done by my husband, but still...painting these suckers took forever. And if you're wondering what the heck happened to the whole whitewashing thing, I'll get to it, don't worry. First though, let me show you some before and after pics, …
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How to Make A Plank Wall
Update: If you're actually looking to follow this tutorial, then please read this planking tutorial as well. It uses the same technique but turned out much better and was a smoother process.
I'm so excited to be writing this post...it means we're working on our kitchen again! The last significant kitchen post I did was nearly a year ago.... which means that most of y'all didn't even know that we are remodeling our kitchen. So allow me to do a super quick review of what we have done so …
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Indian Inlay Stenciled Table
Bone inlayed furniture is really popular right now...not with people like us, cause we're cheap, but with people that have money to throw around.
The first dresser (the little black one) has a price tag of....hold onto your britches....$2,999! Holy cajoles...most of the cars we've owned have cost less than that. Do people really pay that much for furniture? I'm sure some do or else these companies wouldn't be in business...I'm also sure that those people wouldn't be caught dead reading my …
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{Awesome} Paisley Stenciled Table
Let's talk stenciling.
Now, I've done my fair share of stenciling, but it's always been with a homemade stencil and it takes F.O.R.E.V.E.R. to do. Plus the final product always looks kinda wonky when you get up close and the design is very simple. Also it takes forever....that's worth mentioning twice. So when Cutting Edge Stencils sent me a stencil to review I was super excited. I just so happened to have a spare dining room table sitting on my front porch (what, you don't?) and it was begging …
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Slipcover Fail
My newly built farmhouse table has been begging me for some new slipcovers. The greenish ones were never my favorite and they don't fit well at all - the backs are too tight and the bottoms are too loose. Most of the time they look like this....
I bought the chairs on Craigslist, I want to say it was $80 for five of them. One turned out to be broken beyond repair, which was okay because I only needed four. The other four I ripped apart, pulled off the broken springs, added plywood, foam and …
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DIY Farmhouse Table and Bench
Look what now resides happily in my dining room...
Yeah, I'm pretty much in love with it.
Here is how the dining room has looked for a while now.
Okay, that's not totally true - it's rarely that clean and usually includes a particularly messy high chair. I bought that table for $50 about seven years ago. It even came with chairs, but we had to leave those in New York when we moved, since we ran out of room in the moving van. I'm sure your familiar with it, it's pretty much the backdrop …
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DIY Bay Window Curtain Rod & Back Tab Curtains
Bay windows, though beautiful, can be a problem when it comes to adding window treatments. The main problem is that hardware can be crazy expensive, if you can even find any to work for your particular window. But I found a way to my windows go from the bare before to the much better after for only $100 (including the curtains!).
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Here is what you will need to make the bay window hardware -
Materials
Electrical conduit (one for each window …
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