Tag: behr

Quick and Easy Crafts

Love note bookmarks

Jessica Smith

Today is our first wedding anniversary — I can’t believe it’s been a year already since we got married. My how time flies.

After spending a year married to my best friend, it was easy to come up with a lovey-dovey paper gift for our first anniversary.

In fact, I made him two paper gifts! The first was a digital scrapbook of our honeymoon to St. Lucia. It turned out great and I know he is going to love it.

Then, I bought him a set of four computer programming books he really wanted (so boring, but he’s gonna be so pumped!). So, to go along with his book, I made him a set of love note bookmarks.

I’m sure you’ve all seen the paint chip bookmarks trending on Pinterest — I decided to do a take on that and play off the fact that we just bought our first home in our first year of marriage — so what better than paint chip/love note bookmarks?!

I stopped by Home Depot to grab a bunch of paint swatches, but they don’t really carry any of the “typical” paint swatches (vertical with multiple squares of color per bar). So instead I grabbed a variety of colors of Behr swatches to cut down to the perfect bookmark size.

First, I had to cut these over-sized swatches down to appropriate bookmark size. Behr has this cool feature on its premium paint colors — a punch out in the bottom left corner to hook all of your swatches together. This was the section I cut off.

I then rounded the freshly cut corners using a scrapbook tool (thanks, Mom!).

Once the corners were rounded, it was time to cutesy up my bookmarks… but not too much. I want Brian to use them, after all.

I borrow a heart punch from my Mom to make these bookmarks a little bit more lovey. I chose the smallest heart option she had so as not to make them too girly.

I finished making a bunch of bookmarks and got to jotting down cute notes.

I used a sharpie so my messages would show up nice and clear. I think they turned out great. Hopefully the hubbs likes them!

Happy anniversary to the most wonderful husband a girl could ask for. You’re the best, babe. I love you to pieces and am so happy to spend forever with you. You are my No. 1 Husband, fo sho.

❤ Your wife of the year

Happy Monday, and have fun making your own paint chip bookmarks. So easy, so cute.

Craft Projects

Smith sign project

Jessica Smith

Hey blog world, heyyyyy.

The hubster and I had a lovely weekend at the beach hanging out with some of our best friends, but today it’s back to work and back to crafting 🙂 Oh darn.

I’ve been slowly working on a project, revamping a Smith sign my mother-in-law gave us that she had hanging out around her house. It was pretty ugly — the font is just horrifying — but I figured I’d give it a go.

 

Um yeah, talk about not matching much that we own. So, I primed the whole thing with white paint, which took a few coats. I then stopped my project altogether because I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do next.

When I was finally inspired to take the next step on this project, I started taping off stripes horizontally on the sign. I then painted every other section Behr’s Contemplation, the same color we have in our family room. I had to be really careful around the edges of the word, which I left white.

When I started this part of the project, I figured this would also be where I left it. But sometime was definitely missing. So again, I let my project sit until I had more inspiration.

Finally I figured out what I wanted to do. I’ve been playing around with EnviroTex Lite, which is a gloss that hardens on whatever surface you pour it on. I really like the way this stuff looks (wait until you see the other project I’ve been working on!), so I decided to fill the letters of our last name. So, I mod podged a single line of beads in every letter, then poured on the EnviroTex and waited for it to dry.

In the meantime, I ran over to Super Hobby Lobby World Land (that’s Brian name for it) and picked up some sweet ribbon with a silver accent in it. I pulled out my glue gun and started striping the ribbon in between each green and white stripe.

 

 

 

Once it was all on my sign, I let everything dry overnight. Here’s the finished product:

 

I hung it right by our front door. It looks really nice against our gray walls.

 

Quite the improvement over the ugly brown sign I started with, wouldn’t you say?

 

 

Home Improvement

Family Room Bathroom Renovation Reveal

Jessica Smith

Our bathroom is finally finished! I say “finally” like it took ages, but it really only took us about a week to do — not too bad!

I decided to tear down our bathroom about a month ago when I just couldn’t take it anymore. The rest of our house looks pretty nice, but the bathroom was just yucky. Not to mention it was especially gross compared to our beautiful new family room. So I tore down the ugly brass fixtures and the old mirror.

Then my step dad came over to help us remove the vanity and the toilet since we had no experience with plumbing at all.

Afterwards, the hubby and I went shopping for a new vanity, toilet and light fixture. After shopping around, we found what we wanted for a decent price and scooped them up. Then I got to painting.

I stayed up until 1 a.m. painting our bathroom a light purple, Behr’s Silent Ripple to be exact.

Then the boys got to installing our new stuff! So exciting.

Doesn’t he look so hot with his headlamp on?

It felt so great to have our new stuff installed, but the bathroom still wasn’t complete. I needed a vanity mirror, but the hubby didn’t want to buy one. We also needed a new towel bar and shower curtain. I got those at Wal-Mart.

For the mirror, I had two options: First, I could redo a mirror my best friend gave me for Christmas. It was big and bulky and kinda ugly, but it could work. Or, I could use the builder-grade mirror that we took out of our master bathroom when we installed our medicine cabinet.

I figured to give the bulky mirror a try before resorting to an ugly, frameless mirror. So I taped it and took it out back to spray paint it with primer. I broke the top part off so it would actually fit in between the vanity and the light fixture. Then I taped off the mirror and sprayed with Krylon Primer. I barely beat the thunder storm before pulling the mirror inside to paint it white.

Three coats of white paint later…

I loved it! Bye-bye, builder-grade mirror!

All of the pieces were ready to go, so I installed the towel bars, hung up my new shower curtain, popped some curtains into the window, hung some artwork and placed our new mirror. I’m in love.

And for the final reveal… **drum roll, please**

Now if that’s not a cute bathroom, I don’t know what is! I love the dark espresso of the vanity against the light purple walls. I love that the curve of the white mirror meets up perfectly with the faucet. I love the bright white accents and the subtle bird theme in the bathroom. Love. I love love love it. It is SO much better than before!