the picture ledge is up....

The other weekend, Kinsey and I finally got around to putting something on the space above our bed.  We have two fabric panels on each side of our bed for a few reasons.  The previous owners' had a floor to ceiling curtain along this entire wall and they left that massive curtain hook in place.   I didn't like the whole wall being covered, but it did bring a major focus of the otherwise large and long room to the bed wall.  We also have a built in air conditioner unit to the right hand side of the bed.  We both hate how this looks and haven't used it in the 2.5 years we've been here.  I suppose we have either a high tolerance for heat or it hasn't really been super hot.  Or we might be crazy.  (It has gotten rather uncomfortable upstairs a few nights a year and we opted instead to set up camp downstairs in the living room.  This might seem crazy to some, but it's actually a fun change.  And our cooling bill in the summer is quite low.  We aren't full on crazy though, we do have a portable tower fan and a ceiling fan in the living room.)

Anyhow, the curtain panels serve mainly to block the unsightly air conditioner unit.  The large empty space in the middle has always bothered me a little.  

We purchased two of the Ribba picture ledges probably over 6 months ago or longer.  They just sat to the side of the bedroom waiting to be used.  We initially wanted to have them stacked two high behind our bed, but realized that we didn't have enough room to do that.  So we opted for just one.  (The second Ribba ledge still sits, waiting for its turn.)

This took all of about three minutes to hang.  Of course, it made us wonder why we've waited so long.

I just randomly threw some objects up on the ledge for now and will probably frequently change things out.  I was thrilled to finally have somewhere to properly display my fabric plush trees I got for Christmas a few years back from Kinsey.  The print beside the trees, is of Maymont Park in Richmond (one of our favorite places!)  by Art Shark.  

The lion/man/eskimo type print is from the wonderful company, Sukie.  The little bear card is from laura george.

O Christmas wreath, o Christmas wreath....how little did you cost me to make

We put the tree up, decorated our house so me, have been opening our advent calendar everyday, and making ornaments.  But I had yet to make a season appropriate wreath for our front door.  We've had this everyday wreath up since the summer.  I love it, but it doesn't say Christmas and winter goodness.  So this past weekend I made one that does.  Oh and it cost nothing.

All that's needed is:

* wreath form (I used an extra flat one I had leftover from last Christmas for this recycled milk cap wreath)

*yarn

*felt

*ribbon

*hot glue

*scissors

First, I started out by tying a knot with the yarn through one of the wreath form holes.

  

Then, I just kept wrapping the yarn around and around and around until it was completely covered.  This is really easy and the yarn stays in place without any glue.  This would've been even more easier if I wouldn't have chosen yarn that was in one huge tangle.  But the color was just right and was worth the extra effort of untangling.  

Green!

I only went around once, but you could do multiple layers with the yarn if you wanted.  I don't mind a faint bit of the brown form peeking through in certain areas.

Next, I made some felt flowers.  I have loved this technique since I found a tutorial online and used it in my previous wreath.  (For felt flower how-to, see this summer wreath post.)  I made a bunch and then hot glued them in place.

I chose to go with grays, creams, and a hint of blue for the flowers.  I didn't want to make a completely literally red and green Christmas wreath that I'd have to take down in 2 weeks.  Instead I wanted something a bit more winter season than December 25th.  

After all the flowers were securely in place, I still thought it needed something else.  So I found some brown ribbon and tied a bow to the top of the wreath.  I then glued a red felt flower to the center of the ribbon.  

Perfect winter wreath for $0.

I love felt and making an easy summer wreath

I recently made (or actually upgraded) a wreath for a front door.  This weaved twig wreath has been on our front door since winter.  Back in the holiday months, it sported some festive ribbon and tiny glass balls.  After Christmas, I removed the decorations and just kept the bare wreath up.  Everyday it seemed to be saying to me, "Cloth me!  Decorate me again!"

I finally listened.

 And one of the best parts is, I already had everything I needed for the project!

The supplies needed are very few.  Felt (any felt will do really, even the cheaper sheets available at craft stores are great for making these flowers, so there's no need to buy the expensive felt.), glue gun, and wreath.  That's it.  I already had the wreath and a glue gun and felt are pretty much staples in our house.  So the total cost of this project = $0.

 First step is to cut out circles of felt.  Then, cut in to the circle making a spiral shape.  At the beginning, cut a normal strip and gradually have the strip get thicker.  You'll end up with a little circle "knob" in the middle.  It should look something like this:

Starting at the narrow end of the spiral, roll the felt up.  Be sure to keep the bottom of the felt lined up straight.  

As you keep going, little "petals" will form.  It will start looking a little something like this:

 Here's where the glue gun comes in.  When you roll up all the felt and get to the center, put a dollop of glue on the felt right before the spiral gets to the center "knob".  

The last step is putting a few more dollops of glue along the flower back and then pressing the center down.  

Hello finished felt flower!

Making these flowers can be very addicting.  It's super easy to do and you can make them in all different colors and even in multiple tones.  If you're like me, you'll make more than enough for your wreath.

Next, comes placement.  I recommend laying them on the wreath before gluing to get the design and composition that you want.  

Once you're happy with the placement, hot glue the flowers on.  You can always add things like ribbon or buttons to the wreath, too.  

And the finished wreath hanging:

A lovely and incredibly easy summer wreath.  You'd be foolish not to make one yourself!

garden destruction

Before we bought our house in 2009, we had a vegetable garden for a few years at my parents house.  Their house is situated near farmland and isn't fenced in at all.  We grew a variety of tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, melon, eggplant, peas, beans, and other edibles in the garden and had a pretty good success rate.  We'd harvest pounds and pounds of tomatoes during our twice weekly visits during the growing season. 

When we were looking for a house, we had a lot in mind for our backyard.  The major thing was a fairly decent area for a garden.  Our house had a nice size backyard for our area, but it was on a slope.  We set to making raised beds and bought in nice blend of soil and made sure everything was healthy.

Our first growing season (2010), was off to a good start.  Our tomatoes shot up and grew tall and prolific.  

Then, one day we noticed the leaves started to curl up and wilt.  The next day they took a yellow and brown appearance.  The flowers stopped blooming and no more fruit was produced.  We picked maybe 8 tomatoes from those plants before they died off completely.  What was the cause of this?  Blight? Wilt?  

We took a leaf sample and went to our local nursery to talk to the experts.  While they couldn't say for sure, they did ask us if we had any Black Walnut trees close to our property.  We did.  Our neighbors have two Black Walnut trees which are maybe 7 feet from where our tomatoes were.  Evidently, these trees have a chemical called juglone that can be toxic to certain plants, especially tomatoes.  There wasn't much that could be done at that point as we were told you'd need to plant the tomatoes 25 feet away from the trees and even that might not work.  

Despite all this tomato devastation,  we planted a new round this summer.  We love the idea of growing fresh vegetables right outside our door and decided to plant them in a bed even further away from the Black Walnut tree.  Everything was going well until a few weeks again, we noticed the "Walnut Wilt" reappearing.  We didn't panic, we could still get some fruit off the plants if they succumbed again to juglone.  

However, we didn't plan on animals attacking our tomatoes constantly.   The other day, I walked out to check our garden and found this:

This tomato was about the size of two golf ball and we were eagerly awaiting the day to pick it.  But something else got to it first.

So we decided we needed to fence the bed in.  We had some chicken wire left over from a previous project so we used that.  The holes we a little bigger than we wanted, but we figured it would still keep out the critters eying up our produce.  

We were feeling good about this until the following morning:

Obviously we were dealing with a smaller animal or a bird.  We have a family of chipmunks that live in our neighbors yard (or ours it seems), so I leaning towards chipmunks.  (They dig holes all over our flower beds and we can't seem to get rid of them.)  We have since bought new chicken wire with incredibly tiny holes, so nothing can possibly get in through the holes.  So far, so good (fingers crossed).  However, we did witness a hungry squirrel running around the fenced in bed trying to figure a way to get up.  Luckily, he got frustrated and jumped around frantically before running his usual exercise course along our fence and taking off to another yard.  

If only critters and Black Walnut trees attacking our tomatoes were the only gardening problem we have.  

On Friday morning, after Kinsey got back from his morning run, he checked on our garden and everything was fine.  Less than 40 minutes later, I went out to water before we left for work and was met with complete pepper massacre:

In all, our two tallest and most flowered pepper plants were snapped in half, two more were pulled straight up from the ground, and the remaining six were fallen over and trampled on.  We have no idea what happened.  A little chipmunk (our usual garden suspect) couldn't have done this massive work.  A squirrel doesn't seem likely either.  A rabid raccoon?  A skunk?  A bear? (We haven't seen any of these in our yard ever.  I doubt the bear, but there have been bear sightings in the boro we live in about 5 times in the last 18 months.)

So we're down to 8 peppers still in the ground (we started with 13 at the beginning).  I'm not sure how damaged these remaining ones are, but hopefully we get a pepper or two.  This bed will obviously be fenced in immediately.  

living room in with the new and out with the old (table, that is)

We're in the process of rearranging our living room (more on that later!) and needed a new end table for one side of the Klobo (our Ikea loveseat, incase you have no idea what we're talking about...see this post for our re-do of the Klobo slipcover.)

We decided to visit one of our favorite local vintage housewares stores to see what they had to offer. 

We found this little side table with really nice detail.

Here's a close up of the detailing.  

We purchased it for the mere price of $22.  The table itself was painted a really light pink color which didn't quite fit too well in our living room.  So we knew we'd have to paint it.  I was leaning towards a super bright color, but didn't want to overpower the orange wall which it would be in front of.  So I looked around at what leftover paint we had and found a sample color we got for the kitchen.  (Which didn't quite look as we thought it would in that room.  It's actually still on a patch of the wall...we're still figuring out what color we want.  Another work in progress.)  Anyway, the color is called Carolina Inn Club Aqua and is a blue/green color.  

Here's a process shot.  I'm still deciding in this picture if I like the color or not for the table.  

In the end, we ended up really pleased with the overall table and color.   It adds just enough color to not be overwhelming and fits in to the colors of the room well.  Actually the color is pretty close to our lining set of curtains.  

Here's looking down.

I don't think I've talked about our new lamps we got a few months ago, but here's a close up.  They're by Thomas O'Brein for Target.  I love the crackled glass circle shape of the lamps.  I've been looking for lamps similar to these for a while, but never found anything really affordable.  I actually saw a very, very similar style of lamp, only blue glass, in a recent issue of County Living magazine for over $300!  Needless to say, these were much, much less than that!

One of the major things we wanted in end tables were a shelf or drawer to put things on/in.  Often drawers can seem a bit heavy, so this shelf is really nice and open.  The side detail is really interesting here, too.  Just big enough to hold things in place, but not too boxy.  

This is the hot mess that used to be our living room.  Actually it usually wasn't such a mess.  We were in the process of moving things around when I took this quick shot.  The table to the right of the Klobo is the one we replaced.  I love the table (Kinsey actually made this table in high school!), but it's destination in life isn't to be used as a side table.  It's much too big and as you can see, it was often used as a dumping ground for mail and other non important things when we came in the door.  This picture looks so crazy now that we rearranged everything.  (More on that soon!)

New Shower Part II...The Finale

If you've ever tiled before, then you've probably have grouted (or at least should have).  Our night of grouting fell on a Wednesday evening (Day 4 of the Renovation) beginning at 7:30pm.  We knew that this step may take a little time.  

If you've never been acquainted with process, essentially you mix up the grout and using the grout float, spread the sandy mixture into the spaces between the tiles.  You leave this set for a few minutes and then the fun begins.  The grout leaves behind a white film that you need to wipe off with a clean, damp sponge.  You keep doing this until the white film stops reappearing.  

We figured on maybe needing to wipe over the area three times.  Foolish thinking?  Yes, most definitely.  I honestly don't know how many times we wiped the tile, but I do know we started around 8:30pm and ended finally just before midnight.  Yes, midnight.  Almost three and a half hours of this.  

I don't know why exactly it took this long or even if this is normal, but I do know this:  If you're grouting, after wiping the tiles a few times with the sponge, use an old T-shirt and rub over the tiles.  The white film fades away and you aren't a slave to the shower for the entire night.   

So after we successfully got the film off, it was time to wait for 48 hours to seal the shower.  We sealed after work on Day 6 and this was by far one of the most simplest tasks.  Just brush the sealer over and wipe off the excess. 

 Great!  Done!  After waiting another 24 hours, we could finally shower (at home)!  (Please note-we were showering during this time!)

Welcome to Day 7.  The expectant finish the shower day (well, night that is).  We were all set and ready to go when we realized.....the shower handle valve and diverter pipe were too short.  And the lower faucet pipe was too long.  By a lot.  This was going to need replaced before we could hook the fixtures up.  Obviously, this was not going to be as easy as we thought.  

 Luckily, Kinsey's uncle knows about plumbing and pipes.  Unfortunately, he was out of town until Tuesday.  

Day 10- Kinsey's uncle comes and replaces our lower faucet pipe and attaches the fixture.  He also uses his mighty tools to pry off the old shower handle valve setting that wouldn't budge for us.  At this point we were getting pretty excited and felt the end was in sight.

I'll spare all the minor details of "why doesn't this pipe fit?", "the pipe isn't long enough", "do we need a plumber" "various trips to local home improvement stores and plumbing specialist" scenarios we encountered in the last few days.
Let's just say we were beyond thrilled when we had attached the new fixtures and turned the water back on for a test run.

This was all that remaining of our old shower. 

And the finished product: 

 

 We picked up a new shower curtain, hooks, rug, and various other accessories at Target.

I love our new shower head.

We didn't raise the plumbing at all in the shower, but the new head is probably a good 18 inches or so higher than the old one.  The old head was just a stationary one that sloped down sharply.  The new hand held one is high enough that I almost think it's like this one that I've always wanted.

These shower hooks were purchased as well.  I love the little glass ball on the end of the hook.  Our old shower hooks were the circle kind that snapped closed.  It was always a hassle to un click each one and then re click each one to change the curtain.  Does this sound lazy?  Probably.  Does it look a whole lot better? Yes.

And another shot of the shower curtain because I love it so:

Shower all done, now it's time to move on to the sink/vanity and the floor.