One drawer at a time

You are about to notice a trend with my posts.  We are adopting and are in the waiting part of the process which has made me go into a bit of an organizing/purging fit.

Today's task was super simple and only took me about ten minutes from start to finish.  We have this cute little table in our entry way and hubs and I each have a drawer to keep stuff.

My drawer has gotten cluttered and full of all kinds of junk that didn't belong there.

First step, trip the dollar store. The nice people at the store are going to get sick of seeing me,  lots of my recent projects have included Dollar Tree storage. These two little sets were on an end cap and I didn't actually know what I was going to use them for when I grabbed them.

I cleaned out my drawer and these fit great! 

Now the fun part, putting back only what needs to be in the drawer.  Starting at the upper left and going clockwise. 

1. Some of my Scentsy smells and my extra phone screen protectors. 

 2. More Scentsy smells

3. Battery charger (I'm trying to switch over to all rechargeable because we go through them so quickly with little man's toys)

4. Batteries

5. Chap sticks

6. Gift cards (these get misplaced easily in our house)

7. Hand cream

The battery charger cord is run through a hole in the back and plugged in behind the table. 

Now I feel kind of guilty though.  I may need to make a trip back to the dollar store to get some bins for hubs drawer...

One last look at the organizational goodness...sigh, this makes me happy.

XOXOXO

Jeannie

Linen Closet Organization

Clever title for this post huh? 

I'm still on my nesting tangent that I mentioned here so I'll share another one I just finished.

Do you ever feel like one project will snowball into another...or in my case fifteen?  That is the case in our home right now.  I randomly decided to finish up painting the trim and ceilings in our hallway (after four years of procrastinating) and that lead me into clearing out this closet.  It used to hold random boxes of things and our board games and whatever else got shoved in at some point.  This wasn't planned ahead so I have no before pictures, sorry.

I cleared it out because, like our trim and ceilings, it hadn't been painted in a very long time and was an awful, dingy, off white color.  I painted it a crisp, clean white.  Ahhhhh so clean and simple. 

I knew I wasn't bringing the games or shoe box organizers back.  I wanted a real linen closet for once. This closet is placed between our two upstairs bathrooms so it makes sense to store toilet paper there.  I already had the basket and just changed its purpose. 

I'm going to go off on a rabbit trail here, stick with me for a minute. 

Notice the quilts?  We are very blessed to have a Grandma who quilts.  I love quilts!  I think they are the perfect weight for a nap or to snuggle under on the couch.  A bonus with all of our quilts is that they have memories attached to them.  I have the quilt Grandma made my mom when my mom was sixteen, the Strawberry Shortcake one she made me when I was little, the one she made my Grandfather before he passed away, each of my kids have a quilt from her and the list goes on.  Each time we snuggle under one of these it reminds us of my Grandma.  I have recently been pinning lots of beginner quilts because I really want to learn how to quilt and I want my kids and grandkids to also have memories of me that are warm and snugly.

Sorry about that, back to the closet.

I made another (one of many recently) trip to the Dollar Tree for these baskets.

The labels are chalkboard paint so I can erase them and fill the baskets with some thing new if when the mood strikes.  The baskets are for hand towels, dental stuff, soaps, first aid items, nail polish, and one for misc shampoo's and hand soap refills.

So simple but also effective.

I had visions of putting up wrapping paper or something fancy on the back wall but I just painted it so I'm enjoying the crisp, newness right now.

XOXOXO

Jeannie

Burlap Art

Don't you love it?!  The walls in our half bath were pretty empty and it's always bothered me.

Hobby Lobby had a set of two of these canvases for around seven dollars.  I didn't really have a plan when I bought them but figured one out pretty quick.

I had some burlap already because I stocked up before it was officially fall season when it would be hard to find.  I am a huge fan of this method to cut burlap when you need a straight line.  Measure to where you want it cut, snip it about an inch,

pull one of the threads in that snip and start pulling.  You will be able to pull that one thread all the way out

leaving you a line as a guide so you can cut with scissors and be sure its straight.

I cut my burlap a little bigger than the canvases.

 

I laid out four pieces of contact paper leaving a small line open where I wanted to paint the wire.  I used fabric paint for this but because the paint doesn't need to be flexible when dry I probably could have used anything.

Here it is with the wire done.

I found a bird online that I liked and printed and traced it onto paper.  I used a sharpie to trace around my stencil.

I wanted them slightly different so I just made the second bird a little shorter and fluffier when tracing and also changed the tail feathers slightly.

Painted inside the sharpie lines and let it dry.

I knew I wanted the words in the upper corner and was worried that they wouldn't be straight or positioned wrong so I went ahead and stapled the burlap to the canvases before painting the words on.

I used my silhouette to cut out the words on the contact paper.

I went back over the words with the black sharpie to touch up areas that were to light.

One more look at the finished project.

 Jeannie

New Dresser for Little Man

I am starting with a picture of the finished dresser because I am just about giddy with how it turned out.

Over a year ago I came across these two tall narrow dressers at a garage sale and snatched them up for $20 total.  Then they sat in the garage and collected junk on and around them until I finally got motivated to tackle this project.

Once I decided what we really needed for our family, furniture wise, I decided to sell one of the two dressers on craigslist.  This is the one I decided to keep for HB's room.

Yes, those are Winnie the Pooh handles, you are not seeing things.

If you can get beyond the paint job and the character hardware it has a wonderful shape to it.

I hauled the drawers outside and sanded, and sanded and sanded some more.  Let me tell you, had I known how hard it was going to be to remove every last bit of the paint in order to stain it, I probably would have chosen a different finish.  I also would not have taken this on in mid summer in Arizona. We'll chalk those decisions up to learning experiences.

Finally done sanding!

I used a Minwax dark walnut stain and love how they turned out.  The stain looks different on different parts of the drawers which turned out to be a happy surprise.

Now for the dresser body itself.  I knew I was going to be painting it so I wiped it down really good and then primed it with Kilz.

OK, I admit it, I forgot to take  a picture of the dresser during the painting process but you get the idea, paint, dry, sand with brown bag, paint, dry, sand edges to get that distressed look, finish with wipe on polyuerethane matte finish. I used Valspar, Ultra in Night View for the paint color.

Keep in mind that I painted the dresser for how the room is eventually going to look, not how it looks now.  In other words the next project for this room is new paint on the walls.

I also found some Spiderman wrapping paper and used spray adhesive to line all his drawers.  When shopping for liners I was drawn to the graphic print ones but this is for my three year old, not me so this is perfect for now and can always be changed later.

We got the hardware from Lowe's.

One final look because it makes me happy.

Jeannie



Let me introduce myself...I'm Jeannie, #2, Middle Child and a Brooks Girl

I am the second oldest of the four of us and am a very blessed woman.

This is an old picture of us but still one of my favorites.

 I am always amazed that I get to be married to my best friend.  Matt is someone who understands me completely and loves me for who I am, annoying faults and all, and I can honestly say I feel the same way about him.

One of the major hats I wear is mom, within that title, I am a bonus mom to a sweet and lovable ten year old beauty named Aubree

  and an adoptive mom to our adorable, funny, and full of life almost three year old son Hildon.

  I can’t tell you how amazing it has been to watch God put our family together, I feel like we are a puzzle that has been spread out but once together couldn’t be more perfect.  I get to be a stay at home mom and all that goes along with it.  I love, love, love all things crafty and am always adding new types of crafts to my repertoire.  I am excited to share some of my random projects and recipes with you, alongside my extremely talented and inspiring sisters.