New Ottoman?

Okay, so I recently saw a picture of a coffee table that someone turned into an ottoman. I thought it looked simple enough and I have been wanting one for a long time but was not willing to spend the money that they cost on one. I decided to give it a try and it came out wonderful! The kids are loving it and the corners do not hurt as much when they bump into it anymore! You will want two people to do this, it helps get everything tight and done faster. I have a wonderful sister in law that came over and helped me with this project. You will need a few things for this project...

- a coffee table
- 2 1/2- 3 yards of whatever fabric you want to use
- a glue gun with glue sticks
- foam (I used 2 1/2 inch, and got just over 2 yards of it)
- quilting batting
- fabric scissors
- heavy duty stapler with staples

Okay so, I did a good job and took a before picture, aren't you proud?! So here is what our coffee table looked like when I started.


First I took the foam and cut it to fit on the table everywhere that I wanted it to be softer and glued it down with the hot glue gun.


After all the foam was attached I rolled out the batting and stapled it in place. Make sure you pull it tight to give the ottoman a nice clean look.


The final step is to measure out your fabric and staple it on just like you did the batting. Make sure you pull the fabric tight as well. You don't want any lose fabric that can get snagged. Plus you want it to have a nice tight finished look. We thought it would look even better if you added the buttons like most ottomans have, but since I have small kids I did not want them to pull them off. So this is what our finished product looks like. We love it and so do our kids!

Chalkboard paint oh my!

So during our kitchen remodel and the way we are changing the bar our baby gates will not fit anymore. That being said I decided to make our kitchen more kid friendly. I painted our fridge with chalkboard paint and plan on doing the same to our dishwasher. First, let me show you a before picture. (I am horrible at remembering to do before pictures)

The paint for it was priced reasonably at Lowes. It came in a can big enough to cover 100sf of space. I prepped the fridge by scrubbing it with hot water with a little Dawn dish soap in it. I wiped it dry and taped off all the places I did not want to be painted. It took 3 light coats of the paint with drying in between each of the coats. I got some black spray paint to put on the spots I wanted black but were not going to be used for writing on, like the inside rubber sealer. All in all it took less than a whole day from start to finish. I let it set over night before I wrote on it as well. Now you can see my "tuxedo fridge" :)

It's a roller coaster of emotion...

Words from the emotional pregnant lady, DO NOT remodel your kitchen while you are pregnant. I feel like it would be an emotional ride when things go wrong for anyone, multiply that by 100 and that is what the situation was in our house today. I would like to think thus far in the kitchen remodel, I have been pretty good about keeping my emotions to a minimum. I believe they all caught up with me today! As I sit here and think about it now, I still feel like crying was the way to go. My breaking moment was at about 16:30 when we tried to put one of our drawers in with the new sliding track we bought and had spent over an hour putting in and they ended up not fitting. (not for all of you doing a remodel, test one before you do them all) It made the drawers to wide to go in the cabinets. My heart just sank. At that moment I just felt so overwhelmed. I knew I had to pick the kids up soon and that the reality was, my counters would not be going in. I also had to call and make sure Lowes would even take them back since they had all been opened and installed. Good thing, they did :) I really thought I was going to be a blubbering mess of a pregnant lady at the return counter, so I was glad when they gladly took them back! The one good think that came out of that, is the ones we needed were $5.50 cheaper and we needed 10 of them! So that was a little money that could be put somewhere else. It seems to be one small thing after another, either going wrong or just not matching up the way it should, and yes I am aware that this happens during remodels. Still does not make me feel any better as I am still washing dishing in the kids bathroom sink. I also know that this will be well worth it in the end, as of now, I am questioning that. I feel like an emotional train wreck at the moment. We have some amazing friends that helped us with what has been done so far, so I really don't want them to think I am not thankful for them being here or anything like that, because lord know we would not even half half of what is done right now finished. So thank you to those wonderful friends, they know who they are ;) So as of right now, we have no idea when these counter tops will be going in. They are decently heavy and Phillip will not let me help him with them so we will just have to wait until a few guys can come over and help him do them. On a better side note, our chalkboard fridge came out wonderful! I will be blogging about that and how easy it was, also how much fun the kids are having with it now :)

The difference paint can make!

This was a small little thing that made a HUGE difference! We just ripped out the wall paper, added some light texture and some new paint! Made a world of difference on our dining room. Here is what it looked like before...

You can just see it in the picture, but it is really the best one of the before that I have :/ Anyways, on to the how. For taking down the wallpaper I found the easiest thing was putting a cup of fabric softener in a spray bottle with a cup of warm water. I sprayed the entire thing and let it sit for about an hour, this allowed the wallpaper to just peel right off. After it all came off I lightly sanded the entire room, wiped it down with a damp cloth to get all the dust off. For my texture I used 1 cup of wall putty and 1 1/2 cups of water, mixed it together really well and used a sea sponge roller to roll it on. It is a nice a light texture, nothing to heavy. We let that dry for about a day then primed all the walls. I would recommend priming after doing texture because sometimes, depending on the color of paint, the texture can soak up the paint and you will have to do more coats. We painted about an hour after priming since the primer dries so quickly. Here is a picture of the after...

Here is a picture of what the texture looks like close up.

Dream house, or just good investment?

Most couples our age who are looking for their first home go out looking for something already finished and fairly new. If you don't know us, we are far from the "typical" couples our age. We like to joke that we are 40 years old stuck in bodies of a 25 year old. Anyway, back to the house. We went out looking for an older house that would need some work, not anything "major" (a lot of people would say what we have been doing is major) just some updating for the most part. We were at the point of giving up and just renting when we came across the house that is now ours. At first look, it was not a looker. It needed A LOT of updating. It was built in 73 and every bit of it showed that year. I knew it would take some convincing my husband because as soon as he saw wood panel walls, he would be out and there was a ton of wood paneling. This is what we stared with!

Big surprise, I talked him into it ;) Needless to say our first project was going to be taking down the wood panel and putting up sheetrock. Neither of us had ever worked with it before but knew we were not willing to pay someone $3000 to do it for us. So we researched it but still didn't feel 100% about doing it alone. Good thing my family has done professional sheetrock before! So we had some people come over and help us figure out what we were doing. We put up sheetrock, textured and painted the whole living room in about one weeks time. This is what we ended up with! Plus it only cost us about $400 in materials!!

We not only saved a lot of money but we learned something most people have NO idea how to do! We also had to replace the sheetrock in two of the bedrooms in the house due to termite damage. We did it though, for a very small price. Of course there were lots of sweat and tears involved. You always think during the process, "why didn't we just pay someone to do this?!" at the end though, we were always very happy we did it ourselves!

We also had an added room that was on the house when we bought it that we had to take down pretty quick since it was hurting the foundation. Go figure, they went cheap with it and did not do it right. We did however hire someone to do this. We felt like that was too much of a task to tackle and it dealt with the roof. However the guy underbid and decided midway he was not going to finish it, awesome right?! Luckily, my Dad has done that kind of work as well and came and showed Phill how to finish it up, including re roofing and all! So proud of him :) Here is a before and after of it!



The bottom picture is what it was before, the other two are the after shots. Sadly, we have not done anymore work to the backyard. After the kitchen remodel (what we are doing now) is finished, this WILL be the next project so the kids can play back there instead of in the front yard!