Make it BLUE!

I mentioned this a while ago (read about it here), but sometimes home improvements happen because a repair is needed rather than an upgrade.  It was sometime earlier this fall that Jason leaned over a baby gate and used the wall for support.  Sadly the wall just wasn't up to the challenge and we were left with a wall to repair.  There's a whole long story about termite damage, but I'll say that it's amazing the wall lasted as long as it did. To repair the wall, the first thing we did was to excavate a bit.  Because the wall busted due to termites, we knew we should see how far the damage went.  Little by little, Jason chipped away at the crust of plaster until we had a hole that was about 3 feet tall and probably a foot and a half wide.  It was a HUGE mess.

Jason cut a piece of drywall and screwed it in place.  He used mesh tape to seal the seams with the existing plaster walls and then started in with a first layer of joint compound.  

Now one thing to notice is that the plaster & backer board walls are a lot thicker than the drywall, so a lot of joint compound was needed to make the patch flush with the wall. A.  Lot. The first few courses of compound took a few days to dry fully.  It was ok though.  He did one after work, then one a few days later.  It's not a good way to go if you're in a huge hurry, but by investing 20 minutes here and 20 minutes there, he could get it done. The patch was officially complete midweek last week!  YES! 

The finishing touch for a patched wall is generally to prime & paint the patched section.  We were out of the green paint, and really I was over the color so I picked out a new one and sent Jason to Home Depot.  Here's a progress shot after I did some cutting in -- 

I don't know if I'm a very slow painter, but it took me about 4 hours to cut & roll out the whole room.   At the end of the day I was sore, tired, but very satisfied with the color and how it looked.   (the color is Basin Blue - Finneran & Haley).  When the color was being rolled on, Jason kept saying it was purple.  It isn't purple.  It's grayish-blue.

Yes, the curtain needs to be re-hemmed.

So there we have it - this marks the 3rd color we've used in this room since moving in way back in 2007.   How often do you change paint colors?   Do you agonize over the choice or do you just pick something and go with it?

Snowflake Ornament - Christmas Craft

Woot woot!  I got to do something crafty again!  After quite a long time where I was busy with school stuff, I finally got to shift gears this week back to some holiday related stuff and, of course, crafts!

I signed up for an ornament exchange about a month ago, and I'm super excited to have finished this up and pack it up for mailing!  By the time the post is up, the ornament will be in the mail on it's way to it's recipient!  And I figured, if I'm making one to send, why don't I make another one for here?   Materials

• Wood snowflakes - various sizes 
• White paint (already had this)
• Wire 
• Beads
• Glitter
• Sequins (optional - I had some snowflake ones)
• Glue/ModPodge
• Drill with a tiny drill bit
• Paintbrush
• Needle-nose pliers

So here's how I did it!  

• Paint the snowflakes on all sides & the edges, letting it dry after each side
• Mod Podge both sides and add glitter, letting it dry after each side

• Drill holes in the center of each shape, and one at the tip of a point on the big guy

• String one bead on to a length of wire and twist it so that it's secure - this is the stopper!

• String up the whole ornament in this order:

sequin

small snowflake

bead

medium snowflake

bead

big snowflake

bead

medium snowflake

bead

small snowflake

sequin

• At this point you're ready to finish it, so string on the last bead, and keeping the wire as tight as possible, wrap it around the bead like you did for the first one and secure it

• Cut off excess wire
• Use another length of wire (and beads if you want) to create a loop for hanging, and you're done!

Ready for the tree!

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Beagle Shaming #1

I'll be honest and say that I certainly hope that this won't be a long series of beagle shaming posts.  I fear it will be. *sigh*

OMG A Craft?

That's right! A Craft!!!
Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but soon!
Ok, enough of the vague statements.  I'm not all about mystery.  I am participating in a handmade Christmas ornament exchange!  It was organized by the folks at Creative Headquarters (blogs like Chase the Star, Becoming Martha, Create Craft Love and Wait Til Your Father Gets Home).  The exchange uses an online service called Elfster to assign everyone a recipient and we have until WEDNESDAY this week to get the ornament into the mail.  
I'm not going to say who I'm ornamenting for, but I'll say I hope she likes snowflakes & sparkles. 
I'm currently about 1/4 finished with the craft, but should have it wrapped up tomorrow sometime.  I'm pretty excited about it.  I haven't done anything crafty in quite a while and I'm glad to be back at it!
Hopefully there will be a post by the weekend on this thing, so stay tuned!  

Unplanned Projects.

Thanksgiving is over.  Black Friday has come and gone.  Now is the time when we should be decorating for the upcoming holiday season!  I love Christmas.  If I didn't have a destructive toddler, I'd decorate Thanksgiving weekend and leave it all up until a week into January.  That's not happening.  I'm really not sure I could handle all the "don't touch that" and "NOOOOOO!" comments that would come along with it.  So we'll decorate little by little and may not put everything up. My sanity is worth more to me than having a picture perfect Christmas.  I still have a ton to do this holiday season.  Shopping, baking, crafting, etc.  One thing I hadn't planned on was a wall rebuild in the dining room. 
Yes, that's right.  Here we are, 4 weeks before Christmas and we have this:

A little backstory here...

When we purchased this home in 2007, the home inspection indicated termite damage.  And there was a lot of termite damage.  Termites eat from the ground up, and they apparently LOVE the fiber board that's behind the plaster in the walls.  We replaced the interior front wall of the house from the dining room all the way past the front door and under the window in the living room.  We reinforced the floor joists.  We tore out window trim.  It was a mess.  And there was a hole in the floor - the hardwood floor.  Like you could see into the basement if you peeled the carpet back.  And we still bought this place.  

Anyway, it was about 3 weeks ago that Jason put his hand on the wall to steady himself when bending over to pick something up off the floor and his hand went through.  Turns out this wall has termite damage too.  Yuck!  So basically the hole in the wall was evidence of a problem we still had to take care of.  And so now here we are, just a few weeks away from Christmas and we're repairing a hole in the wall, and I guess we'll paint the place too!

I hope to have a final reveal of this in 2 weeks!