Tag: awesome

Christmas, Holiday

Wooden Reindeer

Jessica Smith

Today I have got to show you one of my favorite Christmas gifts of the year. Our neighbors made us a wooden reindeer!!

OMG SO STINKING CUTE! (Imagine giddy screams when you read that…)

Reindeer

1. Is this the cutest thing you have ever seen? It i officially one of my favorite Christmas decorations.

2. They made this themselves! So impressed.

3. What is even more impressive is that they made A TON of them. Yeah, we weren’t the only lucky ones to receive this gift this year! What a thoughtful gift.

Reindeer Pieces

Another perk of the reindeer — he disassembles into four easy-to-store pieces! #Winning

Thanks you, Allie & Chad. I love my, errrr our reindeer. But for real, he is mine. And I need to come up with an awesome name for him.

Happy Thursday! (Read: Is it Friday yet? Sheesh!)

Home Improvement

The Nest

Jessica Smith

Hi Blog. Long time, no write. Life has been busy and my blog has suffered a little. OK… it has suffered a lot. Things are crazy in the DC area with the government shutdown. The hubby is a government employee, so things are really stressful. Work has been busy, and we’ve been non-stop adventuring on our random trips to Chicago and then New York City. My neighbor and I also decided about a month ago to make exercise a priority, so instead of coming home and crafting, she and I get together almost every night to walk! It has been wonderful and I miss her dearly this week because she’s away for work.

So long story short, my blog has dropped a few notches.

Having said that, I do have a fun home improvement project to share that the hubby is just tickled by. Right before we went to New York, we bought a Nest! In case you don’t know what that it, it is a smart thermostat that learns your patterns and supposedly saves beaucoup bucks. It is also totally fancy looking and can hook into your phone! Brian is pretty enamored with it, which I find to be both amusing and adorable.

To install the thermostat, we had to remove our old one. It worked just fine, bu it wasn’t fancy enough for us. Oh la la!

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Once we removed the old device, Brian marked the wires so he could attach them to our Nest.

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Then I patched and painted around the old thermostat. Honestly, the wall was pretty jacked up and I didn’t do a fabulous job. But that is something I can fix later. We didn’t want to wait hours to install the new thermostat because it was hot.

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Once the paint was dry, Brian hooked up the new Nest and got it synced with our wifi and our phones. Now we can adjust the temperature no matter where we are, which has been really great while we are away on trips.

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Not only is the Nest pretty and functional, it is Brian’s new favorite thing to show off.

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Here he is bragging to his buddies about his cool thermostat. We are such dorky homeowners.

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If you are still sticking with me even with fewer posts, thanks for hanging in there! I do have several projects in the works, including a refurbishing of a jewelry box that I desperately need to be done so I can use it!

Life

Flea Market awesomeness

Jessica Smith

Who has seen HGTV’s Flea Market Flip!? It might be my favorite HGTV show because, to me, it is the most relatable  Some people simply cannot afford to remodel their homes or don’t have the know-how to DIY their gardens — but I imagine most people can find a treasure at a flea market and make it into something cool. Or just treasure their treasure!

I totally dream of being on Flea Market Flip. My girlfriend Carrie and I talk about how cool it would be to be on it together. So when my aunt, mom and I were driving home from an outing in New York and we came up on the Super Flea, I pretty much died with excitement when my aunt asked if I wanted to stop.

{A Smith of All Trades} Super Flea

I’m pretty sure I screamed, “THIS IS THE BEST THING THAT HAS EVER HAPPENED TO ME!” Sorry husband, but our wedding is second to the Super Flea.

Just kidding…

… kind of.

The Super Flea is intense — vendors are everywhere, inside and out. It’s sort of dirty, but that makes it even more authentic and charming. Plus, that’s what hand sanitizer is for. Between the Super Flea and the two thrift stores we visited, I think we probably drained my aunt’s supply of sanitizing hand wipes.

Within minutes of walking around I spotted an awesome, old ginger ale crate. I’ve wanted to do a project with a wine crate for months now, but can’t bring myself to buy the fake ones at Michael’s. It seems like cheating. So when I saw the ginger ale crate I made a beeline for that vendor’s table. She was asking $10, which was close to all I had in my wallet. So I walked away.

After perusing more and more, I decided I wanted to go back and buy the crate, so I forked over $10 (which is a steal) and grabbed my London Dry Ginger Ale crate. SO COOL!

{A Smith of All Trades} Sweet wooden crate from Super Flea

I am not sure what I am going to do with it just yet, but I was thinking that it would be cool to turn it into a storage ottoman with casters on the bottom. We’ll see what I decide on eventually.

My mom and aunt also had great luck at the market. My aunt found a few beautiful rosaries and my mom scored a beautiful vase and a porron (the porron was marked $15 and the vendor sold it to my mom with her vase for $5!!!! TOTAL STEAL!!!!!!!). We also found a few pretty, inexpensive dresses that they bought for my sister and cousin.

It was so much fun and now that I have some flea market mojo, I might go to one this weekend and try my hand at haggling! Woot!

And in case you couldn’t tell from the earlier picture how I excited I was, here’s another picture of me TOTALLY cheesin’ it at the Super Flea. I am thinking this needs to be a new family tradition.

{A Smith of All Trades} Cheesin' outside the Super Flea