Charming Glass Jar Bank + Goodwill Treasures

If you're like me, you're always discovering spare change in the couch cushions, under furniture, or in pockets while doing laundry. I've never really been quite organized enough to collect and save found coins in a sensible fashion like most folks do, I'm sure, but a couple of months ago I thought it would be fun to have a special place to "bank" any change that we find lying about the house. So with a glass jar, some scrapbooking paper, buttons, and little bit of decorative trim, I made a sweet little coin jar to keep in the kitchen. The kids love depositing money into it and I like feeling a little more organized!

It is that time of year again - "going back to school" time. This past week we were busy doing all of our school shopping and now I'm in the process of getting the house ready for the new school year...things like cleaning out the kids' dresser drawers and closets, culling old clothes, and cleaning out the laundry room and fridge and other areas that will stay quite "hopping" throughout the busy school year. With all the activity that homework, projects, and school events adds to our schedule, I like to get the school year off to a fresh start here at home. Also, (and many of you have been asking me), I do still plan to get my faux dessert business off the ground before December and feel like I am so close to being ready here. But home and family have always come first so I've been waiting until I feel like I can in good conscience move forward with the business without neglecting other duties...and I'm almost there. I have a lot of fun ideas that I'm really looking forward to trying...stay tuned!

I will probably be scarce here for the next couple of weeks as we get ready for the new school year and as we get accustomed to a new routine all over again. We've also all been sick here and I think between cleaning and organizaing, I'm going to try and rest up so I can fully recover. Poor hubs has a coughing fit every time he moves...but fortunately, the kids were the first to get sick and the first to recover, so they are now enjoying what's left of their summer break.

Before I sign off, I thought I'd post a few photos of some Goodwill finds... Goodwill hunting is SO much fun!

Mostly vintage cookbooks....



Baskets...(you can't tell from the photo, but the largest basket is BIG!)


Metal plant containers with text about gardening...


An oil painting (I'm not sure if I like the frame or not, but the painting itself is sweet!)



Thank you for your kind comments about the painted trivets and the chocolate chip cookies! I'm glad you enjoyed the photos! Until next time... Have a great rest of the summer!

Life Comes at You Fast

Isn't that the truth?! I have to admit, I've been pretty bummed as of late because this year (so far) hasn't gone at all as I had planned. Our 13 year old van finally died. We knew it could happen at any time at this point, but we were hoping it wouldn't be this year. Afterall, we had big plans for this years tax refund - lots of home renovation projects to complete! Instead, we ended up purchasing a (new to us) van to replace our old one...there was just no getting around it. So I've had to spend a little time readjusting my attitude and reminding myself that all good things are worth the wait:).

One thing that I've noticed about myself, and I suppose this is a good thing, is that when things get tough, after the initial "Wow, this really, really stinks", I somehow manage to pull myself up by the bootstraps and try to figure out what step to take next. If I can't do anything about A, what can I do about B, C, or D? Now, sometimes it takes me a while - days or even weeks - to come to the realization that I haven't actually lost control of every single aspect of my life (as my overly dramatic inner self leads me to believe sometimes). But eventually I do come to the sensible conclusion that I've only hit a bump in the road and that I can either pull over and bemoan the bump or I can just keep driving and see where the road leads me. Or I slap myself silly while yelling "Pull yourself together, Woman!!! That works, too.

So we've been working on B, C, and D. We still had a few of our pine doors to install and so that is what we've been working on over the last couple of weekends. Oh how I love a solid wood door! There is nothing in the world like it (there goes my overly dramatic side again). The sound of a wooden door closing shut, to me anyway, is just melodious. One thing you don't know about me is that when no one is watching, I'll stand in the hallway and just open and close doors just to hear them shut. Ahhh...Does anyone know what I'm talking about? We have one more door to install and a couple more to order, and in the meantime we can be adding the little wood appliques to the door like we did in the door above.

One non-remodeling project that I've been wanting to get around to for a couple of years now is cleaning out our "attic" space. It's not actually an attic, it's really an unfinished bonus space above the garage, but either way, it's crammed to capacity with S T U F F. Clothes, toys, yard sale finds, old games, junk...you name it. There is so much up there and I've just been overwelmed by it all and have tried to ignore it, but it's just getting worse. So in my campaign against excess, I'll be tackling the bonus space (and the sunroom where lots of stuff seems to land) and having a yard sale this spring. I feel like these spaces have been holding me back in other areas of my life - when we're in the middle of a big renovation project or I'm thinking about pulling out my crafts, I can't help but to think about what I *should* be working on instead, namely, the junk spaces. I would love to just go ahead and get those areas cleaned out so I don't have to worry them anymore. I'm really trying to just get rid of things that I either don't have the room for or don't love as much as I once did. Why not pass them along for someone else to enjoy for a while? I sold the antique and vintage collection pictured above on Ebay last week and will be shipping it to it's new home tomorrow. Ahhhh - feels nice! I'm not impressed, though, with Ebay's fee increase and think I'll keep things local from now on with Craigslist or post a few things on my blog if I think I have something cottage lovers would be interested in.

I've also been really busy working on trying to get things in order for my little "Sweetest Treats You'll Never Eat" (faux desserts) business . I know, I was suppose to be on the ball with this last fall, but I'm realizing how I just don't function well without all my ducks in a row first. Clearing out space in our bonus area is part of the process because I'm quickly running out of space to store materials and products. But ohhhhh...I have so much planned that I can hardly sleep! I'm in the process now of taking photos of all the treats I've been working on over the last couple of months and I'll soon post them here and on my shop blog and make them available for purchase for those that are interested. I keep bouncing back and forth between using Etsy or my own website (even though my own website is 98% complete at this point!). I really need to move some of my inventory to make room for more - and let's face it, reclaim our kitchen island and use it for it's intended purpose, namely *real* (not faux) food preparation! I'm so pleased with what I've put together so far and my head is spinning with more ideas --- I can't wait to see them come to fruition!

How are your spring projects coming along? Hope you all are doing well!

Five Day Home Improvement Marathon

There is nothing like the thought of company coming to get you motivated to work on your house. My mom and stepfather will be arriving either Thursday night or Friday morning and that means we have about five days to tackle *a lot* of projects. We've been incredibly busy for the last two days and there is no end in site. I spent an entire day working on the kitchen alone - cleaning, decluttering, giving our farm table legs a makeover, and so on. Every room and closet needs a good going over and I'm about halfway there. Here is the list of things that I want completed by Thursday.

-Mow the yard, weed and mulch landscaping beds, prune a few trees

-Prime and paint the gutted bathroom subfloor, make the space temporarily "cottage cozy" (a gutted bathroom cottage cozy in five days? Stay tuned...) The only working part of this bathroom is the tub, our *only* tub, so our guests will have to be in there.

-Paint hallway and living room floor white (yes, folks, we're living with subfloor here at the moment. I stare longingly at our beautiful hardwood stacked in the garage dreaming of the day that we can finally install it! )

-Install cabinet doors

-Finish putting lattice skirting around deck

-Paint a small exterior portion of the house (deck area)

-Clean, declutter, clean, declutter!

Don't laugh, for all things are possible in the mind of a crazy woman:)

Come Out, Come Out, Wherever You Are!

Hey all you faithful visitors, I have an invitation for you at the end of this entry:)

In the meantime...

Tuesday's cleaning spree turned into my quarterly spring cleaning escapade (or as close to spring cleaning as one can get in a "house of projects"). Somehow things here seem to quickly multiply in all the dark places like the closets and dresser drawers and toy baskets. It drives me batty. Why does the road to simplicity have to be so complicated and tedious, lol!?! I've hauled out of the playroom several garbage bags full of unused toys and now I'm working on clothing. Next? The art/coat closet and the master bedroom closet. The laundry room needs to be tackled yet again because it seems to be the catch all for all kinds of things...

Not ten minutes ago, I neatly and carefully put away the girls clothing in their dresser drawers. I pulled all their clothing out a few days ago to sort through them and they've been in a pile in my bedroom until now. Zoe has already come to me twice in the last five minutes to show me two different shirts she's going to wear tonight. That means there are about eight shirts on her bedroom floor now. Multiply that by three daughters...This is why a mother's work - and laundry - is never done. So I'm going to take a few more days to finish up my spring cleaning and spend some time with the girls while they are on spring break, which begins the week after next and ends March 31st:)

Until then, I'd like to ask - beseech - plead - implore - BEG (lol!) all of you visitors to drop me a line here. I know all about lurking and I'm quite good at it myself. I realized today when a good friend commented on her own last entry..."Does anybody read this???" that we all like to know when others stop by to "visit" with us:) If you're really, really shy, feel free to drop me an email at twilightmama@hotmail.com. Otherwise, I'll be looking forward to "meeting" all of you for the first time right here!

First Kitchen Cabinet Painting Mistake & a Clean Garage!

I'm just glad we're painting the cabinets in small sections so it shouldn't take long to go back and fix our error. What happened?

Well, when I bought the red paint, I asked for a tinted primer that would closely match the paint. The lady behind the desk told me that that there wasn't enough room in the can of primer to add enough pigment to get it close to red, but that blue primer would work just as well because red would cover it easily. So I ended up going with blue primer. What I didn't take into account, however, is that we're going to be slightly distressing the panels of our cabinet doors by sanding the edges. When I tried a "test" distress on one of the three cabinet doors that we've worked on, the distressed edges revealed the BLUE primer. I had to sand really hard to get it down to the bare wood, but then the door was distressed more than what I had in mind.

What to do? Fortunately, we only have one coat of red paint on just three of the doors (and the blue primer underneath). My plan is to just go over the red with a coat of the creamy colored off-white paint that we're using on the inside of the cabinets (Homestead Resort Parlor Taupe it's called...it's like an antique white) Then we'll proceed with two or three coats of the red. After that, I'll carefully distress the edges to slightly reveal the off-white paint. Whew! And from here on out, I'm just using WHITE primer on the cabinets, lol. The blue (or any other color) would have been fine if I wasn't going to be "aging" the doors a bit.

Yesterday was a big work day for me here at home. After painting some cabinet shelving, I finally did something that I've been putting off for months and months: I cleaned out the scary garage. Actually, I don't think the garage has ever been completely cleaned out since we moved here 2 1/2 years ago. But it absolutely *had* to be done yesterday and not a day later. When we picked up our boxes of wood flooring on Tuesday, we barely had enough room to stack them at the front of the garage near the doors. The front of the garage was not a good place to keep them because sometimes when it rains really, really hard, water from the driveway seeps under the garage doors. Not a lot, mind you, but if anything is sitting a foot or two from the doors, it may get wet. And our new flooring was stacked a foot from the door...SOOOOO...this is why it was so important to clean out the garage yesterday - we needed to make room for the flooring to be stacked near the back.

It took my about 7 or 8 hours to put things back in order. Not bad! I got rid of tons of stuff, organized hub's tools and supplies, and swept. Now we have a huge workspace when the weather is too wet or cold outside! Why didn't we do this months ago?

We didn't move the boxes of wood flooring...at first. I told hubs we could just move it Friday evening. We knew it was suppose to rain within the next couple of days but we weren't expecting it so soon. At midnight - just a few hours after I declared the garage "clean", it started pouring down rain. At 12:30, I checked the garage doors and sure enough, a little water was starting to make it's way in. I didn't want to take any chances with the flooring, so I woke hubs up and he came out and moved all 32 boxes. I am so glad that I cleaned out the garage when I did or else we would have been in trouble, lol. Talk about good timing!

This weekend, I hope to add the beadboard to the sides of the kitchen cabinets. I'd also like to get some trim around a window or two. We'll just have to see what hubs decides to work on. We're adding hardwired undercabinet lighting, so he may decide to play with electricity tomorrow instead. We shall see!