Console-ation Prize!

I’m joining up for Metamorphosis Monday with Susan at Between Naps on the Porch to show off my new console table! I have a cool Metamorphosis slideshow at the bottom of this post, I hope you like it! 
Disclaimer: I did not make this table. But I could have, if I had at all the patience it takes to work with wood. (Jay assured me that this was the case.) Wood is kind of a bummer because if you screw up you can’t just add more cream or attach an extra ruffle. But my hubby is just amazing and recently became excited about building furniture. And I got excited and started jotting down a list of things I’d really like! And he has TOTALLY come through for me!

We found this table on Knock Off Wood. Ana is AMAZING! She’s got a ton of plans for Pottery Barn style furniture and it’s all free. According to Jay, the plans are easy to build and she’s done all the measuring for you. This is her Tryde Console Table. (Jay added an ‘apron’ around the edges to give it a little more width.) I painted it in Creamy by Sherwin Williams. Miss Mustard Seed recommended it in a post ,and since she has beautiful taste I just walked straight into the store and asked for that color. Didn’t even bother looking for the paint chip. (I could probably spend an hour agonizing over which shade of white to buy. I’m fine picking out a color, but white is a challenge for me. Have you SEEN the options for white? Seriously.)




Oh yeah, please excuse the bad lighting. It was a bad lighting kind of day. This table goes in front of a window in my dining room that looks out onto the sunroom. So all the light coming in the sunroom confused the heck out of my camera and I had to cover those windows. Which led to poor light in the dining room. I’m sure someone with an ounce of photography skills could have fixed the problem in a jiffy, but I’m just fumbling my way here and ended up with yucky light.




So, here’s my table! It really is the most delicious shade of cream. And the table is just the right shape for the big empty corner of my dining room! Love it! I’d love to shelf books on the bottom, or set a big basket there for extra linens, but I have a toddler and that is sooooo not happening right now!


  

I’ve been collecting blue transferware dishes lately, I’m getting quite a hoard! Amelia actually snagged the teacup and saucer for me at an Alice in Wonderland tea party we went to. (She’s got great taste for an almost four year old! lol!)  My mom found the teapot in an antique shop and brought it when she came to visit. The wire bowl used to be an awful shade of rust (not actual rust, just painted to look that way.) and my personal painter (Jay) brightened it up with a coat of Heirloom White.





My mom gave me most of a set of blue transferware plates and I’ve been picking the rest up here and there at yard sales, thrift stores and antique shops. I have 24 plates right now in about 9 different patterns! I love having a whole mismatched set on the table, it looks very ‘country’ to me. I know some people have hang-ups about ‘pre-owned’ items. I completely do not. If it’s pretty and I like it, I’d almost rather have something that someone else loved too. Something with more history than a piece off of a Big Box Store shelf. Not that there’s anything wrong with that either, I own plenty of that as well. But it’s fun to make up stories about what kind of food was served on this plate and who came to tea when that tea cup was last used. Besides, I’m finding out more and more that I really like the mismatched, country look. Like bed sheets, I love mismatched bed sheets! And towels. And silverware. I could go on and on. . . .

I made some white muslin curtains for the dining room, you can see them in the slide show below. I loved making them! I love muslin, the feel and the smell of it, how it hangs, and the barely opaque look of it! These curtains have an old fashioned feel to them that I just love. I didn’t want to block much light, but I did want there to be some privacy if we needed it! 24 windows on the main floor make for a bit of a fishbowl effect! Also, muslin is really inexpensive, I made curtains for three windows for under $20!
So, here’s my slideshow! I had fun making it, I hope you like it!

Now you can go check out all the amazing before and afters on Metamorphosis Monday at Between Naps on the Porch. I love Mondays!

Picture Collage

So, there’s this wall in my living room. It’s going to be one of two ‘usable’ walls because of windows and furniture, etc. I love having lots of pictures on my walls and I finally decided that I would just fill this whole space up with framed photos of the kids.

So I used some string and tape and measured the space and repeated it on my floor. Then I rounded up all my picture frames. . . .

They totally don’t go together. I have a thing for picture frames, (geez, I have a ‘thing’ for lots of things, don’t I?!) and I pick them up when I find them on sale. Some are gold, some are silver, some are cream rubbed with gold, wood, painted wood, rhinestoned, bejeweled, you get the idea. I did use to have most of them displayed on my bookshelves in our last house. But they really don’t go together. I read something once about unifying a collection of things by painting them all the same color. That seemed like a good idea here! I’ve been seeing Rustoleum’s Heirloom White used all over blogland so I trusted other bloggers and picked some up. Now I know why everyone is using it, It. Is. Awesome. It’s a great creamy color and it covers SO MUCH BETTER than the other cream spray paint I had lying around.

So, I set everything up and got my handy dandy paint guy (hubby) to paint them for me. I did try to help, but Jay suggested I leave it to him. Something about drips. Hmph.

 

I didn’t get a ‘during’ pic, but here are some of my frames now. 

 

This frame turned out so well! It used to have a sort of funky/ethnic feel. It had turquoise and red and orange and yellow stones in a dark background. Totally not my thing at all, but I always liked it. Now I love it. It looks so unusual!

This one had sort of a faux wood finish and those dots were topaz colored stones. Not a very good color choice, actually. But the painted rhinestones give it a pretty cool texture now!

 

That large frame was really pretty. It was already cream and had a faded gold finish on the raised parts. It was hard for me to decide to paint it, but it really did turn out well! I’m really glad I did it!

 

More of the frames. You can see how they are all different textures and styles.

 

I love that one of Reese! That frame was hard for me to decide to paint too. It was really pretty. But again, I like it better this way too!

 

Ta da!!! (Please excuse the blue ‘devil box’, it’s on my list of things to do and I needed somewhere to put the satellite box. Oh, please excuse that too.) Looking at this picture, I can see I need to go straighten a couple of the frames with a level! I used a sticky mount adhesive on all of them to help keep them in place. Not all of the frames are meant to be hung. I affixed picture wire on them, but they still have that thingamajig that holds them up on a surface. That stupid thingamajig makes them not hang perfectly. But that foam adhesive helps balance them out and keep little hands from messing with them. I decided to use sepia photos. Some of those pictures have really, really great color, but it was just too chaotic looking. The big one of Amelia is a gorgeous blue and green and the one of  Reese shows the breathtaking colors of fallen leaves in New England. And there’s quite a bit of pink in most of the other pics. So I again went with a unifying color and printed them all in sepia.

One more time. . . .

And after. . . .  

Thanks for stopping by! I’m linking up with Susan at Between Naps on the Porch for Metamorphosis Monday! Can’t wait to see all the other great transformations!

Oooga Booga!

I’m linking up with Susan at Between Naps on the Porch for Metamorphasis Monday to show off my scary closet.



Eeep, scary! This is the closet in our dining room. Poor thing just had a heap of problems. There’s that board down on the floor that was covering a hole, just a hole down to the basement. Eep. So that closet (and anything inside it) smelled, um, not good. That musty, damp, funky ‘old house smell’ you sometimes get. The 2nd and 3rd shelves were each made from two boards that weren’t joined together, so if you put something heavy on those shelves it would tip forward and you’d risk it toppling down to the floor when you open the door. It was covered with two kinds of contact paper that was just barely hanging on and the whole closet was covered in spiderwebs and mouse doo. And it even had a resident Black Widow. Eep!!!

I had the super fun job of cleaning it out. I removed all the contact paper, took out the shelves, pried the shelf supports off, vacuumed it out and washed the whole thing down. Then Jay made custom shelves for it. I came out  to the garage to talk to him while he was working and had to do a quick check to see if he was drunk or something. Just kidding! The shelves he was working on all had funky angles and each one was different. This is an old house and the closet isn’t precisely square anymore. So each shelf had to be measured individually and cut to fit. Poor Jay, it took him most of the day.

He finally got them installed and after a light sanding I got to paint it. I put on a Book on CD and went to town! And, 3 naptimes and one evening later, here it is. . . .



*le sigh* Aaaaaaah, clean, simple, and even though it doesn’t look it, perfectly square and stable shelves. Makes me happy just looking at it! Now if I can keep it tidy and organized for more than five minu. . .
 

Shoot. Well. what can I say? Maybe I’ll post another picture when I finally get all my craft supplies organized! At least they’re not taking over my dining room anymore! Thanks for stopping by! And now you can head over to Between Naps on the Porch to see all the other amazing transformations! I could look at before and after pictures all day! (and I sometimes do!)

Here’s one for the road. (I just can’t stop looking at it!)

 

Kitchen Transformation

Oooh. That was a mean thing to do to you. Show you my horrid mess with no warning whatsoever! Hehehe. That was the kitchen about 10 days after we moved in. Scary, huh. I didn’t take very thorough pictures so you won’t be able to see the lack of dishwasher. But the lack of counter space is pretty evident.

 

This blurry shot is from in the kitchen looking toward the dining room. We inherited that watercolor when we moved in. And just sort of left it up for a couple of weeks! 

Anywho, I knew before we had even rented the place that I wanted Jay to build me a simple worktable for the kitchen or I wouldn’t survive. Well, a couple of weeks ago he whipped one out! Then we had Reese’s birthday hoopla, so I didn’t get to paint it. I tackled the painting the next week. I gave the whole thing one coat and liked it so much I decided to leave it like that :) I did give the top and the shelf a second and third coat. Then Jay brought home this awesome epoxy stuff and smoothed that over the work surface. It took f.o.r.e.v.e.r. to cure!!! 4 days!!! 4 days when I could see it from the kitchen (it was in the sunroom so it wouldn’t end up with little fingerprints in it.) and couldn’t use it. 4 days is a long time, people! Finally Jay said I could bring it in. I couldn’t wait to see it in place and get some appliances on it and off of my tiny countertop!

Okay, are you ready???

 

 

 

 

It really does look awesome!

 

 

 

 

 

Ready?

 

 

 

 

 

TA-DA!!!!!

Awesome, right???? A little reminder. . . . . before. . . . .

AFTER!!!!!

I know, I know. That’s totally cheating. In one picture everything is just trashed and there’s junk lying everywhere and in the other everything’s all unpacked and tidied up and cleeeeeeeeaned and the picture was taken in the morning in the gorgeous light. Cheating.

 

Here’s a closer view of the table.

Here’s a tidier view of the stove and dishwasher. Jay is still going to build a little panel to enclose that empty space, and he’s going to fix the sagging drawer.

Here’s the other part of the kitchen. Jay installed some shelves for me. . . .HALLELUJIAH!!!!!

And that’s my little 3 dollar answer to the ugly utilitarian shelves that hold my spices.

Yep, cheating again. Messy ‘before’ picture.

And a tidied up ‘after’ picture!

Man, oh man. I love my kitchen!!!!  I’m linking up with the gracious Susan at Between Naps on the Porch for Metamorphosis Monday. Thanks for stopping by!

Metamorphosis Monday and Beignets!

These have got to be the saddest before and after pictures ever. My only excuse is that my house is a disaster because I have a mountain of sewing that I've been concentrating on. I have to get it done this week, so of course my sewing machine spazzed out and is now recouperating at the sewing machine spa. Grrrr. So let's just say it's been a busy weekend! And this is one of the fruits of Jay's labor this weekend. Amelia no longer has to sleep on the floor!!!


He's been working on her bed (from scratch!) since February, but I got impatient. So when I spotted my little sister's old headboard in my parents sauna attic, I snagged it and brought it home! He spent the weekend building the side rails and supports for under the mattress and then painted the whole thing! He's still planning on making the headboard and footboard, but at least the mattress is up off the floor until then!

Before

After

Here's her new bed! I'd like to say 'ta da' but this picture is sooooo not 'ta da' worthy! I still have things to put back and then I'll post a nicer picture.



I've been thinking about beignets for a while, yum! Here's the recipe I've been using for years, in my recipe file it just says, 'New Orleans Beignets', so I have no clue where it's from. I was talking to my mom as I was making these and she suggested that I add nutmeg or something to the batter. Unfortunately for me I was too far into the recipe for that to be an option, but I highly recommend you try it, it would be amazing!!!

Ingredients

Work Area

Heat the water, butter, sugar and salt over medium-high heat.

Bring to a boil.

Stir in the flour.

Stir until mixture leaves the sides of the pan and forms a ball. Remove from heat.

Add an egg, stir to incorporate. (Here's where you earn yourself a few beignets. Your arms will ache by the time you're done. That's gotta be worth, what? 3? 4? 12?)

Repeat with remaining eggs and vanilla.

Stir until smooth(ish).

Check oil to be sure it's at 350. Any lower and your beignets will be soggy and greasy.

Drop batter by tablespoonsful into hot oil.

First round of beignets!

Babysit the temperature!

Drain on paper towel lined plate.

Sprinkle with powdered sugar and enjoy!

By the way, I used my electric wok (I love that thing!) but you can use a dutch oven or a deep skillet.

New Orleans Beignets

1 cup of water
1/4 cup of butter, cubed
2 tablespoons sugar
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 1/4 cup flour
4 eggs
1 teaspoon vanilla
(1 teaspoon of nutmeg!)

oil for frying
powdered sugar for sprinkling

Heat the oil to 350 degrees.
In a medium pan, bring the water, butter, sugar and salt to a boil over medium high heat.
Add the flour and stir with a wooden spoon until it pulls away from the sides and forms a ball.
Remove from heat and add the eggs, one at a time, incorporating fully after each egg.
Add the vanilla and stir well.
Check the oil temperature to make sure it's at 350.
Drop batter by tablespoonsful into the oil.
Fry until golden and delicious, turning occasionally.
Remove to a paper towel lined plate and sprinkle with powdered sugar.

Now, hop on over to Susan's Between Naps on the Porch to see all the metamorphosing fun!