Merry CHRISTmas!

I wanted to take this time to wish my readers (hello, friends) a Very Merry CHRISTmas. May you find Peace this holiday season that can only be found in our Lord.

In wishing you Christmas cheer, I thought the friendly thing to do would be to have you all over for dinner. Now, most of you probably know, that I am a terrible cook. In fact, I really only have a kitchen because it came with the house.

However, since it's here, I thought what the heck, might as well decorate it! Decorating, I can do. Cooking...well I generally require assistance.

Anyway, without further ado, My CHRISTmas table:





A good bit of this stuff, I already had. The table cloth and all but 2 placemats, I've had forever (well, not really but probably 4 or 5 years) and I still love them to pieces!



The white square plates are our everyday plates. I got them YEARS ago from Pampered Chef. We are talking I was still in college and had a PC party to get free stuff and got these plates. And I still love them so I guess I made a good purchase. :)

The red luncheon plates came from Target this year. $7.99 for a set of 4. The holley bowels were from Target too. $9.99 for 2. Thank God for Mommas that work in other towns (with Targets) for saving the day on these new dishes. For my Target was grossly under stocked for my needs. :)



Now this is where the new stuff comes in. The tray I got (and one just a tad smaller) at TJ Maxx, $25 for the pair.



One of the big mercury glass candle holders came from The Maxx this year too; I think $6. The other one I won at Patty K's in California, MO last year at the Christmas Homes Tour.

The little votives on top are nestled into Southern Living at Home cups. I love them because they look like Candlewick crystal...except not as fragile or as expensive. The whole set has a serving tray and 3 votive cups.



The big chunky Christmas tree was from The Maxx this year too. It was under $10.

I also got the mercury glass balls at The Maxx too. I think they were around $4 each. I would have loved to purchase everyone they had! I love them so so much. The down side is they are very heavy so I'm not sure they will be very tree worthy. But beautiful? YES!!!



The taper holders I got for $1.50 at an Estate Tag sale a couple of weeks ago when we were visiting my Parents in Tipton, MO. And! They came with the tapers. Lucky me!!



The pinecones, I got (an entire shopping bag FULL) from a sweet patient of mine.



Chose your seat. And my all means, bust out my pretty cloth napkins. Have I ever mentioned to you that I adore cloth napkins? The really soft kind. Or a vintage flower sack tea towel will do too, in a pinch. But it's CHRISTMAS!!!

Merry CHRISTmas to each and every one of you. I sincerely appreciate you stopping by my corner of the interweb (Jj's word) checking to see what I'm up to. This blog is fun to me and a nice outlet for my schenanigans!

Here's to another blessed, bountiful year. May we have all that we need and be careful not to expect all that we want!

Man Worthy Christmas Tree

In our downstairs, I wanted to have some more Christmas Cheer. Jj vetoed a big Christmas tree. Which I guess was fine considering I didn't have a big Christmas tree anyway...

On Pinterest, my friend Shelly pinned a great little Christmas tree! And it got me to thinking...I bet Jj would go for an unconventional Christmas tree! Because while he likes to pretend he's a Scrooge, I really think he does that just to give me a hard time. :)

Since I've never had much of a vegetable garden, I was fresh out of tomato cages. I put out an APB on facebook and my good friend Margo came through!!!

She brought be 2 tomato cages that were in a perfectly used condition!!!!

Thank you, Margo!!!!!!! (Picture taken at my Mom's house)

I clipped off the tags and bent the tops (actually the real bottoms) together to form the top of my tree. I also had to add some vertical wires to the tree. Otherwise, when I wrapped the lights around, t basically turned into a 3-D triangle rather than cylindrical. (Of course, I didn't take a picture, I was too excited about that I was making.)

I stacked up a couple of wooden soda flats, I had out in the garage, and put the tree on top!



I love it! And Jj doesn't hate it = DOUBLE SUCCESS!!

Since I doctor'ed that photo so much, I took a few more so you could see the actual tree better.





See that blue man on the toilet in the background?



I got it from my Dad for Christmas. If you pick the guy up, his hiney is a magnet and the toilet bowl stores paperclips. Funny!!!

While we are down here, I'll show you around!
We've done quite a bit of decorating down here and making it just so. This is probably one of the areas in our home where we spend the most time.



This is our little bar area. This is our first time having a full-sized extra refrigerator. It has came in handy with our family Thanksgiving and Christmas hosting!

Did you see that "God Bless the USA" sign over the sink? The Girls got me that for my Birthday! It's made from license plates. I love it. It's so so me!!



I love this little setting. Simple, pretty and oh so wintery! (Bonus, I had all that stuff in my stash so free!!!)



This is looking from the bar over toward the TV side. And that's our helper, Janie. She's about 16 months old. She's a boxer we adopted the beginning of November from Columbia Second Chance. We love her bunches!!!



This little area is also on the bar. I'm really liking mini-Christmas trees this year. And, I've committed to trying to have a little piece of the beach in every room of our home. Enter: Brass crab. He's actually an ash tray but...we won't be using that.



Here's standing in front of the TV looking back over the furniture, into the corner...with the bar in the background. I'll have to tell you about my smokin deal on that lamp another day!

Have you had any thrifty finds lately? It's not really the season for such but I'm still stumbling one a few once in awhile.

Oh, And Merry Christmas to you!!!

Cricut Expression = Cricut Cake??

So I was reading through my blog roll a couple of weeks ago and stumbled across a post from Lena @ Scrapbutterfly. Click on her name to read her post.

She said the Cricut Cake is the same as the Expression except with stainless steel moving parts (because the Cake has to be food safe). AND she also said they were on sale on cricut.com for $49.99.


WHAT!?!?

I quickly commented on her blog to double check that I was reading correctly along with, did a quick google search.

HOLY COW, SHE WAS RIGHT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I emailed the link to Jj, we opened some of our Christmas presents on Saturday morning with my family...and I got a Cricut Cake Expressions!

I'm super stoked!!!! And it was a good deal!!!

Looks like right now, Cricut.com has them for $119.99. Still a good deal. Click here.

Mine looks pretty much just like this...except RED! (My favorite color anyway.)
(from photobucket)

Here's mine exactly:

And it came with a "cake" cartridge that has some really cool borders.

Thank you Monster! I love you.

Buh-Bye Sassy Brassy!

Remember when I told you about my Stevie throwing dust rags in the fan?

Remember this fan?

Don't you just love that brass?
That's ok. Me either!!
Remember that I have been spray painting lately?

Did you guess what I have done??

Yep, I did it! Dad & Jj took down the fans...which was a Circus in itself!


Jj brought a 12' ladder home from work. They quickly decided that one on the balcony and one on the ladder wasn't going to cut it.

So, we had to rent a 16 foot ladder! HOLY COW!!!!! It was tight quarters maneuvering that baby around in our living room.



Removing the globes helped a ton with elbow room.



They took a few blades off for opening more space too.



Then they repeated the steps for the other fan.

Prior to beginning, they turned off the breakers and checked (however they do that...I am a bit scared of electricity) to make sure they did in fact have the juice off!

SIDE NOTE: I warned Jj that if he left me a young widow in a big house, tons of miles away from our family and friends...I'd be upset! Basically, I insisted they use the breaker as an off, rather than just the switch. Let's be smart about electricity.

**And now I'm off that soap box**

Once the fans were both down, I started to take them apart.


Basically, I wanted to separate the blades because they weren't getting painted. Then, I wanted to take the main part apart as much as I could. Which basically consisted of taking off the light kit (you just unscrew it) and the blade holders (above picture).

I could have sworn I took pictures of this next part...but I guess not. I ran a light sand paper across all the surfaces just to be sure. I was using something like 220 grit; not much at all.

I laid all the pieces out on my drop cloth and commenced to painting! I dusted them with a spray paint primer (Rustoleum) because I had it and then went to Rustoleum Oil Rubbed Bronze. I did 2 coats, loosely. I say loosely because I didn't really do 2 complete coats but the second coat was more to hit the spots I missed.

After having completed the project, I would recommend priming. If nothing else, it changed all the surfaces to white so I could easily see where I needed to add a little paint.

We let them dry over night and put the fans back together. We left off 2 blades, the bulbs and globes off for ease of handling.





On to fan #2


And that's a finished project!

What do you think?







Thanks for stopping by.

What's your latest finished project? I'd love to hear all about it!
Leave me a link in the comments. I'd love to see all about it too. :)

Drawer Pulls

So, you know that I am working over my kitchen drawer pulls at the moment. You can read all about it here.

For the drawers, I wanted something different (from the pulls I rehab'ed for the doors). I've been in love with domed cup pulls forever! In fact, I had purchased these cuties for my kitchen at our old house...but I never got brave enough to drill into the drawer fronts!


Imagine my excitement...FREE PROJECT!!!!!!!!!!

Enter second fail!

My pulls were 2.5" for my 3" drawer spacing. RATS!!

No big deal, I have 10 drawers in the kitchen so to purchase new won't be devastating. Off to Lowes and My Home Depot (so named my Jj. Maybe I go there a lot, maybe I don't :) ) we go! What do you know, 2.5" whole spacing must be the norm for drawers and the person that built our house went cheap? easy? and made all the whole spacing the same.

So...To the Net I went. I ended up finding something I liked for a good price on Amazon. The seller tuned out to be AMAZING!! One of the pulls had an odd defect with the screw threads/spacing. This seller, Cabinet Hardware 4 Less, sent me a new one, no questions asked! The postal service lost it somewhere out in Kansas (according to tracking) and the seller send me another new one! Now, you don't get that kind of customer service often!!

Anyway, I love the way they turned out




You didn't notice a couple of door pulls missing did you?
Oh good! I was hoping not.
They accidently took a little trip to the burn pile, still attached to a cardboard box. I have a little work to do on them before they are show worthy. :)
It's always something!



Are all your kitchen pulls the same or have you mixed and matched too?
I'd love to hear about them.

Thanks for stopping by!

**I was not compensated for this post.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO ME!!!

(from photobucket)

That's right, Happy Birthday to me, today!

Thank you for stopping by my blog on my day! I generally take myself shopping on my birthday for my to me-from me presents. :) This year we are hanging out with some sweet friends of ours: George & Leslie. And shopping we may! We haven't made up our minds just yet.

What's your birthday tradition? I'd love to know!!

Let us E-A-T!

A long, long time ago, in the days before Pinterest and other smart ways to keep inspiration organized, I once saw a kitchen adorned with big letters...and I loved it.

I promptley went to HobLob and purchased my self the same letters...E...A...T! And fully planned on painting them black RIGHT THEN and putting them up in my kitchen.



Well, that never happened. Now, 3 kitchens later, I have no idea which wonderful blog I was stalking but I have my letters done and I want to show them to you!

Hold on! After some quick googling, I found my source. Thank you Beth @ Home Stories A-Z for being so memorable!

Ok.

I learned that you must prime cheap particle board letters or use better paint.

Here is after one coat...I know! Can't even tell:




..Terrible!!!

Plan B: (I'm getting good at plan B lately.) I primed them and painted I-don't-know-how-many-coats! I got a little heavy handed on one coat and had to do a little light sanding but after the next coat, you couldn't even tell.

My idea was to lean them above our pantry...I thought it would look cool just up there...willy, nilly and random- Just like me! Jj vetoed that idea.





And since he doesn't do that often, I got these little 3-M things so that I could hold them to the wall without messing up the wall surface since I wasn't sure how I would like them. The holder things are velcro...one part of the wall and one part on each letter.





I love them! Jj does not. He actually asked me to take them down...My plan was to respect his wishes as he almost never says anything about our decor.

But then, we were at a local steakhouse, The SmokeHouse in Lee's Summit, MO and we saw this:


>> You still with me? I do have a point. I promise! :)





I wanted you to get the whole effect...





Just one more...



Point ahead:

I think it restored his faith in me because he hasn't said that he doesn't like them anymore. However, I have mixed ideas...my good, good friend Leslie said she like them (after I asked her) but I think she was being nice. :) I asked my friend Nicole, she LOVED them. I asked my step-Mom, she said they looked just like something I would love. I'll take that as a vote in my direction.

So, the score is 2-2. What do you think?

Should they stay or should they go now?

How do you like that? Slipped in a little song lyrics on you now didn't I?

*Linked up to Best DIY Project of November over at Beneath My Heart. (I hope Traci doesn't kick my out because my post date is December 1. I really did complete the project in November.)