Bunch of Ingrates

Again I found inspiration over at Tip Junkie.

A few days ago Laurie posted 20 Thanksgiving Crafts To Make.  I loved the concept behind crafts 1 - 4, to decorate for Thanksgiving with something that would cause the kids, and the hubby and I, to think about what we are grateful for.  Sometimes I think we all get so caught up wanting things we don't have (and don't need) that we forget to take stock of our blessings.

A trip to JoAnn's last night and a trip to the Salvation Army store this morning
yielded the items needed to make my board.

I worked on it for hours.  Mostly because the chipboard letters were on the smallish
side and I wanted to Mod Podge them with fall scrapbook paper.
Tracing and cutting out all the letters took forever.

I finally finished it and invited the kids to come write what they were thankful for.

Tiffany is thankful for her family, shelter, and bananas.

Kimberly is thankful for mommy and daddy's love & yummy muffins.

Aimee is thankful for all the wonderful people that I love and all the love we share.

They drew some interesting pictures too.

After I took this picture the hubby came over and added that he was thankful for whoopie cushions and added to the art fest with a drawing of a dude wearing sunglasses.

I think they are missing the point.

Or they are mocking me.

Either way I'm really proud of my board.

Halloween Craftiness

Today is Halloween and this past week I had the chance to use my creativity to make some treats for Tiffany's classroom and decorations for my front porch.  

I was so excited that Tiffany's class was having a Halloween party, she was getting to wear her costume at school, and the whole school was having a costume parade.  After living in Arizona for the last six years, where every holiday was either completely ignored by the school (like Halloween) or rendered completely non offensive (like the winter party and winter concert that didn't have any holiday songs or references to the fact that anybody might celebrate anything in the upcoming weeks of December), it was nice to be in a place where the kids can just have fun being kids and enjoy dressing up and eating candy.  I decided that to celebrate, I needed to make awesome treats for her class party.  The fact that I could make awesome treats was special too.  Arizona only allowed store bought treats to be brought to school, BOO.  I decided I really wanted to learn to play with chocolate, so I went to Michael's, bought candy melts, sticks, sprinkles, and lollipop bags, then hit up the store for some marshmallows, and made these.

They came out great.  I was a little surprised by the thickness of the candy melts.  I had envisioned drizzling the orange across the white, but there was no drizzling going on.  I took a break and Google'd chocolate covered marshmallows and Wilton candy melts and found that most people recommended a dip and spin along the edge of the bowl to remove the excess technique.  Realizing that drizzling wasn't going to be an option, I gave up trying that and just did some white with sprinkles, some orange with sprinkles, and some white and then dipped partially in orange.  They came out amazing and her class loved them.  

Then, while surfing in blog land last week I came across a super easy craft using milk jugs, and I forgot where I found it, so unfortunately can't link to it, but since that person mentioned seeing the craft on Family Fun, I know it's not an original.  The whole craft only cost me 29 cents since I had the rest of the materials already in my stash and only had to buy one piece of green felt..  I used 3 milk jugs, one strand of orange lights, three pipe cleaners, a sharpie marker, and one piece of green felt, and this is what I came up with.

Pretty cute huh?

Tiffany made the albino spider while I was busy making these 

so he needed to be in the picture too.

Have a Happy Halloween!!

Giving credit where credit is due

After writing yesterday's post, I realized that I may have exaggerated ever so slightly about the fact that my husband claims he can build stuff and yet has only ever built me a mantel.  The mantel was part of a complete living room remodel.  I've got some pictures, but you're going to have to use your imagination for some of this story.  Unfortunately I wasn't so good about capturing this whole process on film.

This is what we started with.  A cute little house that we rented for three years before we purchased.  See those two floor to ceiling windows in the front.  Yeah, I hated them.  My couch backed up to them so I could never open the blinds without showing the neighborhood the back of my couch.  Plus they were drafty.  For three years I said, "If this were my house, I'd take those windows out and put in one (dual paned) window that doesn't go all the way to the floor"

Three days after we closed escrow on the house, the neighbors were invited over, beer was purchased and within a few hours those windows were gone, and in their place was a beautiful eight foot wide by four foot high dual paned window set inside brand new framing.

Now we needed to put up new drywall, texture, and paint,  

but we couldn't do that to just this wall,

 it wouldn't match with all the others in the room if we did.  

The entire room and adjoining hallway were re-textured and painted.  

By my hubby.

We said goodbye to the 1970's style popcorn ceiling too, courtesy of my hubby.

Then he brought the room into a more modern age by installing recessed lighting, 

a ceiling fan, and crown moulding.  You can kinda see part of the fan and one

 recessed light in the picture above.

He had never done stucco before, so he called a friend that had, and the outside got finished too.

Here's a picture I took before the final color coat of stucco went on.  

Somehow I never got a picture of the end result.

I found this picture from the following Halloween where you can see just a smidge of

 the decorative moulding and ledge that the hubby built around the new window.

Then there was that mantel that I referred to yesterday.  

Here is it's before picture.

This was the crappiest mantel ever, and another thing that I had said for three years 

I would fix if it were my house.  It was made out of 4 x 4's for the pieces that surround the 

brick and then sitting on top of that were two warped 1 x 4's.  Anything I tried to set on top

 would tip over either because of the warped condition of the boards or the gap between

 them that ran the length of the mantel.

Utterly useless.

I personally got to use a sledgehammer and a crowbar to remove this.  

Oh my was that fun.

I sketched out what I wanted the mantel to look like and my hubby built it for me.

It was perfect and looked just like my sketch.

Do you think I got a picture of it?

Sort of?

Here is a picture from the following Christmas.  You can see a corner of it.

The last step in the remodel was ripping out the old grey carpet and installing laminate

 flooring in the whole house.  As soon as the hubby did that, we decided to sell the house 

and move to Arizona.  I never got any pictures of the laminate floors.

Thinking about all this reminds me of how much more fun it is to live in an old house.  

I like to build stuff.  

And break stuff with sledgehammers. 

 I need another old house. 

And some wood.

And a new saw for the hubby.

Squirrel

Maybe it's the changing of the leaves, or the fact that I can tell that each day has less daylight than the one before, but I've never been so aware that winter was coming.  Our work pretty much comes to a dead stop in winter.  This is the time of year I need to prepare for several lean months.  I stock the freezer. I try to put aside enough money in the bank to pay the bills for at least three months.  I don't spend money on anything that isn't a necessity. I feel a bit like a squirrel trying to hoard nuts.

Now it just figures that this would be the time I would be inspired to create things too.  While everything is dying around me, I want to make things.  I want to pretty up my foyer, I want to re-finish my dining room table, I want to build stuff.  Oh my goodness how I want to build stuff.  Yesterday Jen over at Let's Make It Ours wrote this about how she needs to learn how to use power tools so that she could build all these awesome creations byAna at Ana-White.com.  Now I want to learn how to use power tools too!

It seems like Ana and I have a lot of the same taste in furniture.  The expensive Pottery Barn type stuff that I have lusted after for years but would never buy, because I just can't justify spending $600 - $1000 on a cabinet to collect all the crap in my entry way.  But I want it, oh how I want it.  I've even spent hours looking online for something similarly awesome without the Pottery Barn price tag.  No luck.  Until yesterday.

See there's Ana with the cabinet I've been lusting after for years, that she MADE herself, and tells me and YOU how to make here.  So I'm all gung ho to go buy some wood and start making a cabinet, but crap, just like Jen, I need to learn to use power tools, oh and theres that little thing about not spending any money that isn't absolutely necessary.  I do, however, have a husband that is pretty handy and knows how to build stuff.  That's what he tells me anyway.  We've been married for fifteen years and I can't tell you how many times I've looked at a table or bookshelf that I've wanted and he's told me he could build it cheaper.  Except he never does and I end up buying some POS bookshelf made out of particle board at Walmart.  Well he did build me a new mantel once, and it was awesome, but that's it.

So today I called him out on it.  I said, "For fifteen years you've told me you can build stuff and I've been dreaming of a cabinet like this for almost that long.  You MUST build me this cabinet.  Oh, and teach me how to use the power tools because there's about  15 more things on Ana's site that I want to build too."

He smiled at me (because I'm so adorable when I'm being demanding), then he told me that he didn't think that saws and I were a good combination. Remember last week when I told you about the ladder rule.  Yeah, that totally extends to anything I could maim myself with.  He may have said something to the effect of "I've seen you walk".  So what if I trip over air, I insisted that if he taught me how to use the the power tools properly I could be safe and retain all my appendages.  Finally, he relented and told me he would help me build my cabinet..  Only, in order to do this, he'd need a new saw since his was stolen years ago.

So I can start building stuff as soon as I can find extra money to buy wood and a new saw.

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