Tag: behr

Home Improvement, Life

Weekend recap

Jessica Smith

This weekend has been pretty awesome. It started on Friday when my stepdad came over to remove the toilet and vanity from our family room bathroom. Then the hubby and I got to pick out a new toilet, vanity and light fixture — oh, and paint! We went with Behr’s Silent Ripple.

It is a light purple, but in certain lights looks a little blue. When we got home from buying our paint, I immediately got to work on the bathroom — even though it was 10 p.m. Three hours later, I was almost finished. I just had to cut in around the edges. Fun fact: I didn’t use any tape in the bathroom and it doesn’t look terrible! Yay!

Saturday morning started with loud thunderstorms and a swim meet. After the thunder calmed down, I rushed out of the house to see Elliott swim two races at his swim meet.

I got there just in time to catch his first race — it was a relay and he did the butterfly. Man is he fast! He also did a medley race, but was pretty tired from the earlier race because not much time was in between.

My dad, who has always been very involved in our sports, is an official for Elliott’s meets sometimes. Check him out — so serious!

When I was younger, he coached my soccer teams and he refereed soccer games. Now it’s swimming. He’s awesome.

Once we watched his first two races, the hubby and I headed off to Lowe’s. We had found a toilet at Home Depot the night before, but wanted to see what Lowe’s had as far as vanities went before making our purchase. We left empty-handed, planning ordering a light fixture and vanity online when we got home. But when we perused the interwebs, we decided that the cabinet to go with was the cabinet we almost bought at Lowe’s to begin with. So we got back in the car and headed to Lowe’s again.

Amidst all of the Lowe’s trips, I got to go out to lunch with my momma and BOTH of my sisters — that never happens! Allie is in town from Colorado just for the weekend 🙂 What a nice treat.

We ended out Saturday having dinner with Brian’s momma, then attending a block party in my dad’s neighborhood. I used to go to block parties each summer in our neighborhood, but they died down for a while. The neighborhood is trying to bring them back, which is a fantastic idea because they are so much fun!

Today, the hubby and I are cleaning up the house, grocery shopping and just taking it easy. Allie is going to come see our house for the first time! And John is going to come back over tonight the help us install our new bathroom purchases! Hooray.

On top of this fabulous weekend, Hobby Lobby gave me a sweet shout out on their Facebook page that pretty much made my entire life!

 

I hope you all had a great weekend — Bathroom reveal sometime this week 🙂

Home Improvement

50 (minus 49) shades of gray

Jessica Smith

While it might not be as exciting as 50 Shades of Grey, my hallway is finally one shade of gray instead of yellowish-beige! Hooray!

I spent my Fourth of July holiday painting away and am happy to say I’m finally finished painting our house… Well, sort of. I will paint our last bathroom whenever we redo it and I might have to paint our laundry room from sheer boredom and a lack of walls to paint! But for now, it feels great to be done.

Before (I locked the pup out with chairs… he was not pleased):

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After:

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Doesn’t it look so much nicer? It was a pain to prep because we have five doors down our short hallway. Not to mention, there’s a part at the top of the stairs that was oober tricky. We had to lean the ladder against the wall using the stairs as the ground. Kinda scary.

It was worth it. Now off to Home Depot to buy a new air return grate! Hope you all had a great holiday!

Craft Projects

Ombre picture frames

Jessica Smith

My dad went to a yard sale in his neighborhood a few weeks ago and bought the hubby and I a coffee table and a piece of art for our house. The coffee table is great. I want to refinish it so it matches our existing furniture, but until then it’s a great piece for our family room.

The artwork wasn’t so great. Well, it would have been great had we bought a house at the beach… but at our house in suburban Maryland with no beach theme whatsoever, this piece didn’t fit in so well. It’s the thought that counts, though 🙂

While the hubby wanted me to chuck the beach frame trio, I held onto it because I had a hunch I could turn it into something we’d like to have hanging in our home. Then it finally hit me… this trio frame would be perfect for displaying the Love prints I designed.

I ran into a few problems with this project. First and foremost, the frames had no glass. So I had to find away to put “glass” into my non-standard sized frames. So I removed the beach scenes, printed my Love prints, and started trying to figure out how to make my frames look like they had glass when they didn’t. My solution was to take sheet protectors and cut them down to size so they’d fit perfectly in the frames.

The frames also had no back to hold my artwork in. So, I traced the outline of the frame onto cardboard and cut it out to work as the backing for the frame.

With all of the pieces of the puzzle solved, I assembled my frame trio…. but I still wasn’t crazy about it. The off white of the frames looked rather bland next to the white of the Love prints. I decided to paint the frames gray. Then I decided it would be fun to do an ombre effect on the frame trio.

With that in mind, I pulled out the gray paint leftover from our dining room and my wooden trunk project. I painted the top frame this gray, then diluted the color with some white paint.

I painted the second frame a shade lighter, then added more white paint for the last frame.

Once all three frames were painted and dry, I popped the prints back in. I think they look fabulous in the gray frames and even more fabulous hanging in our bedroom!

I designed five Love prints total, but I picked my favorite three for the frame.

If you like the hanging frame trio but don’t have one already hooked together, you could create your own using twine or thin rope and a staple gun to connect your frames. You could also get extra fancy and connect your frames with decorate chain. Oh the possibilities!