Beige Wash

Hello everyone. Welcome to the mansion today.

I have mentioned before, several times, that I live in a "cave" house. By "cave" I mean DARK. When we moved in, the walls, floors, and ceilings were all dark wood planks. Husband loved it, I did not. So...I have SLOWLY but surely changed the dark to less dark.

One of the ways I tried to key down the dark was to beige wash a few walls. I put one part paint to three parts water and stirred it up real good. Then, I brushed it on the boards and quickly wiped it off. This gave me a much less dark wooden wall. You can still see the grain, but no brown. See.....
Ahhhh. So much easier on the eyes. The finished product came out like this...

This process of "washing" was super easy and free. I used the paint that I had from painting other parts of the house.

Well....I must not be the only one with the "washing" idea. I pulled my new copy of House Beautiful out of the mailbox, and what do you know? There on the cover was a wonderful room with paint "wash" all over it. See.....

So...pretty.

I have been thinking of how you could accomplish this look if you live in quarters. Here are my thoughts...You could nail up one by eights or something like that and wash them. Then, when you move out, just pull down the boards. This would leave some holes to fill, but that is nothing new. You could also put up 4 by 8 paneling and do the wash on it. This would leave less holes. Not as attractive, but an option. I have actually lived in quarters that had half wall paneling already up. I could have washed that. Wish I would have thought of it then.

There you have it. "Washed" walls. Hope you enjoyed the pics and the info. Come back again when you get a chance.

Head on over to The Shades of Pink for more Room A Month ideas.

Check out Between Naps on the Porch for great Metamorphosis.

Look to A Silly Little Sparrow for other Tuesday Toots.

It's Talented Tuesday at My frugal Family.

Laura

Grosgrain All Around

Hi everyone. Welcome to the mansion. I wanted to share a quick and easy decorating idea with you all today. As it is a frugal decor idea, I am linking up to a new blog that I found...Finding Fabulous. There you will find tons of frugal ideas for Frugalicious Friday.

Grosgrain ribbon all around your room!

Our walls are really tall in this house. I keep trying to think of ways to break them up in the different rooms. On one of our trips to see the in laws, I noticed that my mother in law's "decorator" had attached grosgrain ribbon to the tops and bottoms of the walls in her kitchen. It looked great. The professional had secured the ribbon with wallpaper glue and the professional had charged a great deal of money to do the job. I am "anti-glue" and "anti great deal of money!" So, I promptly bought some grosgrain ribbon at Hobby Lobby (50% off) and got myself a jug of liquid starch. I LOVE liquid starch.

This is what I did with it...
It is difficult to take photos of a large portion of the walls at one time...sorry. But, I starched the strips of ribbon to the tops and bottoms of the walls. I left two inches of painted wall above the ribbon which is also two inches wide.

Here are some on the bottoms of the walls...



And one more top...



The key to success with this project is to buy your ribbon in one long piece. ( so you can cut the exact length of each wall) After you cut your wall length of ribbon, dunk the entire piece into the liquid starch. Then, stick it to the wall. Smooth the ribbon out with a sponge. Wipe off the excess starch. After the starch is dry you can clean up the wall with a damp sponge.

When you get tired of the ribbon border, just pull it off. Wipe the walls with a damp sponge, and it is like it was never there. NOTE: don't do this on flat paint....it doesn't clean up like satin or semi does.

And that is that. I have also seen this done in a little girl's room with wide pink grosgrain ribbon around the center of the room. Cute!!!

For other DIY wonders...visit A Soft Place To Land.

You can also see some super metamorphosis ideas at...Between Naps On The Porch.

Toot YOUR horn over at ...Silly Little Sparrow.

Yall have a great day.


Laura

Dollar Store Wreaths!

Hello ladies. Welcome to the mansion this fine Sunday. A few days ago I posted some wreaths and asked which you all like the best. (Check that out here.) You all chose the bell wreath. It was indeed gorgeous. See?
Well...I decided to try the bell wreath. I trotted myself down to the dollar store and loaded up on some wreath items.... I got some floral wire, a roll of gold ribbon, and 4 boxes of bells. My friend Judi ( Hi Judi!) also gave me some silver bells she had leftover from a project. I used the items to make two wreaths. So...that averages out ot 3 bucks per bell wreath.


I made a circle out of the floral wire and started loading the bells on the wire. I put one big bell and then five small bells and repeated this until I was done. Then I had a solid circle of bells. Next I tied a big gold bow and attached it to the wreath. At first, I hung the wreaths from the door knobs like "Martha." But, upon further thinking I decided that my kiddos would be too tempted to yank them off...over and over again. So, I attached them to the tops of the doors...

I really like the way they turned out. The gold and silver go well with our Christmas decor theme this year.

Thanks for stopping by the mansion to take a peek. I will be posting more wreaths and holiday decor in the days ahead. Have a great week.

For other crafty ideas hop on over to Its So Very Cheri.
And to see some super metamorphosis projects try Met Monday at Between Naps On The Porch.

Cottage Instincts is also hosting Make it Monday.

The Porch Bathroom

Hello ladies. Welcome to the mansion. It's Metamorphosis Monday at Between Naps On The Porch. I am joining in.

Have you ever had a room in your home that is just WEIRD? We do. When we bought our house several months ago we did the purchase via computer. Although we had 60 or so pics of the property, there were a few things that could not be fully appreciated from a photo. One of these things was our porch, turned sunroom, turned office, BATHROOM. Yep. Several owners before us had enclosed the back porch to make a sunroom. The next owner used the space as an office. The owner following that decided that our 1923 farmhouse needed a second bathroom... So...they removed the desk and "threw" in a toilet, tub, and sink. I am not kidding. It kinda looked like they threw the toilet, tub, and sink up in the air and where they landed, they stayed.

OK...so we got over the placement of the stuff, but we just couldn't get over the 10 windows with ill fitting mini-blinds. You couldn't do any sort of "business" without flashing anyone outside.

Here are some before photos.

The bathroom had no storage, a mirror that was too large for the vanity, and a dark green color paint. And....those awful mini-blinds.

Our first thought was to take most of the windows out and wall the bathroom in a bit...too expensive. Our next thought was to have shutters made for the windows...too expensive. After much debate we decided to purchase ten sets of outdoor shutters, paint them, and hang them ourselves. We added some new paint, a new mirror, and some furniture for storage.

This is what we ended up with...

Yeah....no more gaps to see through. We can still open the shutters when we want sunshine. The furniture helped to balance the room with the small vanity. The color change warmed everything up a bit. Still a few things to do, but we are loving the updates.

Thanks for stopping by the mansion. Come back soon.

Also posted at Transformation Thursday over at The Shabby Chic Cottage , Get R Done Friday at Expressly Corgi , and Room a Month at TheShades of Pink.

Posting for the first time at It's So Very Cheri for It's So Very Creative .

Fleur De Punkin'

It's Metamorphosis Monday at Between Naps on The Porch. The mansion is sharing a Pumpkin Metamorphosis.

Skip on over to www.songbirdtiff.blogspot.com to see some Frugal Fall Decor ideas.

Hello ladies... Welcome to the mansion!

OK....all you GRITS (girls raised in the south) out there can feel my pain on this one....if you live down here in the heat and humidity, you can't carve a pumpkin for display until Halloween morning. If you attempt the impossible and carve anyway, your work becomes a big mushy molded mess in a few days. So starts the never ending search for great "carveless" pumpkin decorating ideas.

I saw some neat ideas on BHG this week...

All of these pumpkins involve painting. Very nice, but I am not a great punkin' painter. Then I came across this one... This one is great. Decoupaged leaves. I was inspired!

So...Aunt Kathleen and I got out some black paper napkins, some punkins and some mod podge and got to work...
We cut some fluer de lis shapes out of the black paper napkins. We also cut out a "T."

Then we mod podged the shapes onto the pumkins. This is what we ended up with...

And here is the final resting spot for our carveless punkins... No mush, no mold, no mess, just pretty cajun fleur de lis pumpkins.

Take a quick trip over to http://www.twiceremembered.blogspot.com/ for Make your Monday.

Groundbreaking Experience

Hello ladies. Welcome to Metamorphosis Monday. For all of the great posts go on over to http://www.betweennapsontheporch.blogspot.com/

We recently had a groundbreaking metamorphosis of sorts. It was groundbreaking AND back breaking. We did an overhaul of the driveway and the flower beds near the house. We started with a gravel drive and zilch for landscaping. See.....There is the yard. Not a lot going on there. I don't have a before of the gravel drive, but...not a lot to look at either.

First we marked the beds with spray paint. Then, we started digging. We dug out the grass and transplanted it to other areas of the yard. Next came building up with new dirt. We called in the big dirt truck and got a dumper full. Our kids, neighbor kids, and kids we didn't even know all showed up with shovels and gadgets to move dirt from one spot to another. We worked and worked....the pile wasn't getting a lot smaller. So...more neighbors showed up with this... Much faster. While the dirt was going down, the pvc was also going in. Husband and neighbor ran the pipe for the sprinkler system. Gotta love that. Men get really dirty when they are messing with pvc.

Next came the big trip to the Nursery. As one who knows nothing about plants, I had many questions. The nursery man was really nice. We got all the plants and headed home. Then, we had to lay out all of the plants where we wanted them.
Finally we planted and mulched.

Now we have a paved, planted, mulched, watered, landscaped yard. Our groundbreaking metamorphosis is done. We learned a lot in the process and we can't wait to spruce it up some more in the spring.

Thanks for stopping in to see our metamorphosis. Much love, Laura