Toothpicks and painting trim

In that last few weeks of my maternity leave I decided that a week of it would be spent painting the trim and built-ins in our dining room white.  It sounds simple enough, right?

Wrong!

Painting trim is never easy, and if you say that it is than you are either lying to yourself or have never painted trim.  There is cleaning, sanding, patching, more cleaning and wiping and maybe more sanding and more cleaning.  You get the picture, don't you?

Here is our dining room before. (sorry about the bad picture but all of the pictures are taken with my iphone)

Please don't mind the mess, I am not a neat home improver, plus I was working on this while driving back and forth to daycare to nurse baby E, so time had to be spent painting not cleaning.

Our house is very small, I think it is around 1100 sq feet, and the dark wood trim just isn't working anymore. The trim makes every room feel like it is evening time, even when it is bright and sunny outdoors.  Believe it or not, the dining room gets the most sun.  I also think the windows are too skinny, but buying new ones does not fit in our budget.  But painting ALWAYS fits in the budget!

Now on to the first window.  Toothpicks and trim...bet you never thought you'd hear those two words in the same sentence.  My man is the one who had this idea, he read it in one of his handyman magazines.  Once you take off all the curtains, curtain rods, and nails, you are left with very sad looking trim.  What you want is happy trim, after all it deserves it!  The solution...toothpicks!

Here is sad trim:

more sad trim...

   Here is spiky trim

Here is trim getting happier

Here is very happy trim: (for some reason I can't find the close up picture I took of the corner...or maybe I forgot to, so this will do for now. This is a sneak peak to the built-in also)

The steps are simple, place a little dab of wood putty in each hole.  Then take a round wooden toothpick (very important, do not use plastic!) and place it in the hole.  Try not to move the toothpick around very much so the putty stays in place.  Let the putty dry.  Then take a razor blade, being extremely careful, and try to place it as flat on the trim as possible and cut the protruding toothpick.  You may need to add some more putty to fill in any gaps that may have occurred. Let the new putty dry. Then sand and wipe clean with a clean cloth.  Now it is ready to be painted!

Til next time!

Happy Thursday Everyone!

Getting creative for Christmas

Our daughter was born in August and last week was my first week back to work.  I don't know what I was thinking going back the week before Christmas!!!  It wasn't until the weekend before I went back to work that I even started on my Christmas gifts.

Why? you ask...

I really don't have an answer for you now because now it seems like I had all the time in the world, but I am pretty sure I have been exhausted the past 3 1/2 months that I have been home with a newborn and a 3 year old.  I started taking both kids to daycare to get them back into a routine before going back to work, but that still didn't help with my exhaustion-all I wanted to do was go home and go to sleep after dropping them off.

But I did start them and did finish them....at least for the local relatives, still have at least one (maybe two) more to make.  I saw these hand trees a while back and put them on my Pinterest account, and I LOVE the way they turned out.

I used old canvases that Nolan painted on but have been laying around waiting to be used for something.  I covered the fronts with burlap, wrapping it around and super-gluing it on the back.  Then using scrap fabric I had on hand, I cut out both the children's hands to make the trunk of the tree and bush.  I used Mod Podge to glue the "trunks" on the burlap, then cut out leaves and flower buds out of more scrap fabric I had.  Basically this project didn't cost me anything (except for time...which is a hot commodity with 2 kids) and I had so much fun making them.  I can't wait to make a bigger one to put up in our house!

Here is the before canvas painted by my son:

and here is the finished project.

Hope you enjoy.  Have a great Tuesday everyone!

Diaper Bag

While pregnant I stumbled upon a diaper bag like no other.  It wasn't pretty or chick, but I thought it was fantastic.  It is made from recycled truck canvases, with probably some other fabric added because I can't imagine a truck having bright colored flowers anywhere on it (unless it was for Starbright or Strawberry Shortcake).

I couldn't get a hold of any truck canvas, but I have a lot of fabric around the house that I could use.  I am not great at the sewing machine, yet, but wanted to try to make a diaper bag with all different fabrics.  I started the base of the bag and the sides with an old pair of jeans, and then just picked from the array of fabrics I have.  My bag looks nothing like my inspiration piece but I like it.  It is a bit bigger than I probably need but for now it will do.  I will call it a success!

Inspiration piece:

 and here is my creation:

  (without a pattern I think I did a good job, my next one will be much better!)

Happy Tuesday!

Stovetop cleaning.

Cleaning the kitchen...one of my least favorite chores.  It is very time consuming and can get messy very quick.  If you are like me and do all the cooking, it is nice to have some shortcuts to cleaning that actually work!  I don't know if I would call this a shortcut exactly, but it does wonders for saving some of that elbow grease to clean another part of your house.  I am talking about the stove top people.  All of the baked on black crud that accumulates on the burners and liners when you keep procrastinating about cleaning it.  I am that kind of procrastinator, and I did not want to even attempt to scrub the stove top in the despicable state that I had let it get to.  So off to the internet I went to find a magic potion...and I actually found one!

Ammonia!!

Just put the burners and liners in a XL zip lock bag with about a cup of ammonia and let it do its work overnight.  If your burners are anything like mine try to leave them in for at least 24 hours.  Some of mine could use another overnight since I use one side 90% of the time, but I am absolutely amazed at how they stove top looks!

As I am uploading these I realize that I don't have a picture of the entire stove-top done.  But it looks amazing!  I will post one soon.

I hope this helps some of you out that dread that task of cleaning the stove top like I do.

Happy Monday Everybody!

Pumpkin Muffins

Holidays are definitely a time for family, for being thankful, and for eating plenty of goodies made with pumpkin.  I read the book "Too Many Pumpkins" to our son the other night and it got me thinking.  I needed to make something with pumpkin in it.  Although I am not a huge fan of pumpkin pie I love pumpkin.  I make an very tasty pumpkin soup (don't worry, it doesn't taste like a pumpkin pie), and as a bonus with a few tweaks to that recipe it turns into a yummy pasta sauce. Since it is holiday time I decided on some pumpkin muffins.  I don't know if I would call them the best, I just think these are easy to make.