Friday I’m in Love

Happy Friday!

Two things…I totally forgot it was time for ‘Friday I’m in Love’ and I had no clue it was the last one of the month! Thank you Kendra for reminding me!

Now…on to all the LOVE!

~one~

We bought a sewing machine over the weekend and the girls and I have been itching to use it. I found this simple pattern for a reversible headband and stitched one up while the baby napped. Come to find out, it actually is pretty easy. My sewing skills need a bit more practice but the kids LOVED them! I’m looking for some blogs to follow that include easy and kid friendly sewing projects. If you come across any, send me a link!

~two~

I cannot believe I’ve admitted this in my latest post with Orlando Moms Blog but I did. Click here to read all about what I do in car line. So embarrassing…but it’s the truth. Ha!

~three~

My daughter’s kindergarten class was responsible for the school mass this week. And oh my! It was beyond adorable. To hear the kids sing, pray and recite scripture just melted my heart.

~four~

If you have kids, then I know you have a ton of crayons. I’ve always wanted to do this Melted Crayon Heart craft but I was pretty sure it would be a #Pinterestfail. My friend and fellow Orlando Moms Contributor, Heather, tested this craft out for Valentine’s day and it was a #PinterestWIN! Go check it out and put those old, broken crayons to good use.

~five~

I love these crazy people! Also known as…my siblings! They celebrated Erin’s 23rd birthday last night at one of those fun painting places. Happy Birthday Erin! I LOVE you!

Tell me…what are you in love with today??

Painting Is Easy. Choosing a Color Is Not.

The day we walked into this house, I knew I wanted to paint the kitchen. It took me months to finally decide on a color. Some days I wanted to stick my head in the sand and hope and wish someone else would do it for me. No such luck. My husband is a smart man. He would NEVER pick a color and paint without my approval. He would hear about that (and not in a good way) for the rest of his life. #happywifehappylife 😉

I had to think of the house as a whole. I like for the rooms to blend or compliment each other. I wanted a bold color but also one that would blend. Talk about a challenge…for me. I’m not good with that kind of stuff. Give me a recipe book and I can cook for days. Give my an empty room and tell me to decorate it…insert head in sand! Or better yet, I may just run away!

Here’s what I knew…I knew what I liked. I knew what kind of bar stools and kitchen table we were getting. I also knew that I’m always drawn to the beach and all of those beautiful shells! Now, how to bring it all together and have it look nice.

Like I wrote in my last post about painting the kitchen, I googled & pinned for days. After much ‘research’, I finally decided on a blue, a nice navy blue. Great! The hard part is done, right? WRONG! Try going to the paint store and picking out a nice navy blue. Ugh…

I narrowed it down to ‘Inked’ and ‘Very Navy’ but ‘Very Navy’ scared me. It was really dark!

These swatches stayed taped to the wall for a few days but I’m sure if you ask my husband he would say a few weeks. One morning over coffee, I took the plunge and chose ‘Inked’. That’s it. It’s only paint. If I don’t like it, I’ll just repaint it a neutral tan color and be done with it. Gotta keep moving forward…

In the process of choosing the color, I did start painting over some of the painted on brick. And of course, every session of nighttime painting begins with a glass (or two) of my favorite red wine!

Before…

And the after….

Woohoooo!! Brick be gone! Now, let’s get going with that blue!

#icrackmyselfup

Stay tuned…

Change the look of your kitchen with just a little paint!

It’s no exaggeration to say that I spend ALOT of time in my kitchen. I’m a stay at home mom with 3 kids, 4 if you count the husband, and they require to be fed on a routine basis….like every 10minutes, no lie!

When we were house hunting, finding the perfect house with the perfect kitchen was a bit on the impossible side. I almost nixed the idea of putting an offer on the house we are currently living in because I HATED the kitchen. I hated everything about it…

the old cabinets

the white appliances

the cream color formica counter tops

the light colored tile, the red paint, the gold sponge paint on top of the red paint and the painted on faux brick on top of the red paint.

Don’t get me wrong, I LOVE the color red. I really do. But it was too much for the kitchen. It wasn’t my style and it made me not want to be in the kitchen.

I firmly believe that the most memorable family memories are made in the kitchen. Any conversation or story that I tell my kids from my childhood, always has us in the kitchen. So I was determined to turn this kitchen around.

I pinned, I googled and I browsed Home Depot. I knew what I wanted but I couldn’t get the husband (or the checkbook) to go for it, no matter how hard I tried. Deep down, I knew it was unrealistic to redo the entire kitchen so I opted to work with what I had. I still pinned and googled but this time I added a few key terms to help with my search…oak cabinets, white formica, white appliances. I wanted the internet to show me what color paint would work best with what I had because I knew I could get the husband on board with that and he would love it too! I could change the look without draining the bank account. I was determined to LOVE my kitchen again and a little paint could bring me that love…right??

Stayed tuned for Part II…

I Should Have Saved The Template…

Right before my oldest was born, we bought a wall photo collage to hang in the hallway. It was beautiful! But it sat on the floor in the boxes for months collecting dust. It was a project I thought I could do while I was on maternity leave. Ha! Talk about being a naive first time mom. I remember thinking…”I’m going to need to do something since I won’t be working.” Hahahaha. OMG. I’m laughing now as I type this. I won’t let this post go there though. That needs a post all on its own!

My father and step mother came down from New Jersey to meet their newest granddaughter (grandbaby #3- they now have 10 and the oldest is only 6!). While they were here my step mother insisted that my dad hang the pictures for us. I have to be honest, I don’t really think he wanted to. I’m thinking he didn’t want to drill holes in another man’s walls. But I proudly dusted off this template that I bought with all the frames. All you needed to do was pick the design you liked, tape it to the wall, make sure it was level and then drill on all the X’s. Now hang the pictures and VOILA! Easy peasy!

Well, at that time I never in a million years thought we would MOVE! So…I threw it out the template once we were done. Four and a half years later…we moved. Yep. And we LOVED our wall collage. I was determined to get it on the wall in our new house, our forever home. Come to find out, the template is no longer available. WHAT?!? You’ve got to be kidding me. I know I can find it somewhere. Michaels.com. Google. Amazon. Nope. Nope. Nope. No where to be found.

{insert many, many, many curse words here}

Like I said, I was determined to hang this in the new house so I had to find a way to create my own template. I picked up a roll of brown paper from the Home Depot (the girls and I made it a #CampRoemer adventure!) and traced each frame with a sharpie on the paper. I then cut each one out, as accurately as I could and after, I flipped the frame over, placed the cut paper on top and rubbed a crayon on the nifty, little hangers on the frame. This way after I taped them on the wall, I would know where to drill the holes.

Not only did I have to create a new template, I had to add another 16×20 frame so that each child would have their own. That got a little tricky.

I sketched it out the best I could, trying not to let my perfectionism take over but getting very close.

I used painters tape to tape the brown paper to the wall. I have to be honest, this part was awful. I was running out of patience and it was getting late…so sorry for the dark pictures. This was a project I could NOT do with the kids awake. I was measuring and leveling and drinking wine…not a good mix. Ha!

The next morning, I rechecked my measurements and my leveling and gave the go ahead to the husband to start drilling!

We excitedly hung all the pictures and then I remembered…I needed to get 2 more frames! One broke during the move and one was an addition. Oops! Off to Michael’s! And what perfect timing we had! The frames were BOGO! Woohooo!

The B&W pictures of the girls are from February so they will stay but I’ve got to pick out some new ones and replace the original photos in all the other frames. That may take a while! Ha! I’ll be sure to post a new picture once I have all the new photos in and I promise to take a picture in the day time. It didn’t come out ‘perfect’ but it looks great and warms my heart to see my babies!

Do you have any tricks when hanging multiple pictures?? I would love to hear them because I still have a bunch on pictures, frames and art to hang up.

Katie

xoxo