Stair inspiration

 

Well, the giveaway is still to come, I promise! Until then, I thought I would share some inspiration for what I’ve been working on all weekend – beautiful stairs. ;)

I am thrilled to announce our stairs are DONE!! Well, other than a coat of poly, but not sure I’m going to even do that yet or not (the stain was a poly mix). Oh, and the landing still isn’t done. Or the the little “extra” I am throwing into this madness.

But otherwise, done. :) And gorgeous.

I will definitely show you this week, I’m really hoping to show you on Monday…but every time I say that out loud something gets messed up and it doesn’t happen.

So until then, let’s oooh and aaah over the beautiful inspiration from Better Homes and Gardens…

You’ll see a trend in most of these – gorgeous moldings. I’m like moth to a flame, I tell you what:

Love the fun color on these! If I had a second stair case, I would totally do something like this:

Love, love, LOVE the tile on these! I think it’s tile?:

Many of you have emailed me to tell me you used wallpaper on the risers – gorgeous!

Forget the stairs, I want that ceiling!:

Oh my. What grown woman little girl wouldn’t LOVE this room?:

Gorgeous molding? Check. Beautiful railings? Check.:

Yes please.:

Many of you told me you painted your risers black. I hadn’t seen that look till I found this picture:

Love that too!

Oh, let’s just add some fantastic storage under our gorgeous stairs:

Luuurve the runner on these:

And, this is how our stairway will look this Christmas:

OK, maybe not. I can dream. But it sure will be purdy!! :)

I’m going to bed so I can rest up my staining arm. Back at it tomorrow!!

Giveaway coming soon!

I’ve had a few technical difficulties tonight with this weekend’s giveaway – so hang in there and I hope to have it up tomorrow at some point.

It’s a great one, so I hope I can get this figured out! ;)

Have a wonderful weekend!

Investing in what you love

I have a few priorities in my life. There are the obvious – obviously. ;) Our children, my husband, my family and friends. And our house.

I have always loved our house, but I adore it because of the effort I have put into making it what it is. What it will be. I love it because I have invested in it – not just with money, but with my time. My sweat. (And YES, many times, tears.)

Today the Bub was at a friend’s house for a few hours so I could get some more work done on the stairs. There are certain parts of this project that I just haven’t done with him around – most of them actually. (For safety reasons.)

I turned on my music (LOUD!) and got to work. I realized something about 20 minutes into staining the stairs…something very important.

I was having FUN.

Like, pure, simple, I-am-in-a-DIY-mode-and-loving-it, FUN.

Perched precariously on each step, working with stinky stain, doing the monotonous job of staining the treads…and I was having a BLAST. The music kept me moving, the stairs were looking absolutely gorgeous and I was thoroughly enjoying it.

I am willing to bet staining stairs is WAY down on the “fun” list for most of you. Call me crazy. ;)

Part of it was the transformation I was watching happen. Part of it was the fact that I was alone and doing something that I enjoyed. Sometimes when I talk about my projects I realize many of you must be rolling your eyes and thinking “Shut. up. That must take forever.”

Or “Oh GOOD LORD that girl needs to get a LIFE.”

The thing is – making our house our home is part of my life. My investment in our home is my time. Do we have the money to buy a piece of art instead of me making it?

Sure, most of the time.

Do we have the money to pay someone to paint a room?

Probably.

Was I tempted to just call a handyman to finish up our stairs in a quarter of the time it’s taking me to do it?

Absolutely.

But I LOVE doing what I do. Other than being a wife and a mom, there is NOTHING more fulfilling to me to take a before and turn it into a beautiful after. And if I can do it for little money, that makes it even better. Fo sho.

Does that mean you will love doing it? Oh my goodness gracious, NO. You may try a craft project or a molding project or try ripping up some carpet and think “That Thrifty Chick has gone and lost. her. mind. This sucks.”

(Sorry about that if that’s happened to you. Oops!)

BUT. I’m guessing if you complete one project, you will be so proud of yourself. Not like I studied for hours and got an “A” on that test, proud. Or I got the entire house clean today, proud.

More like…

I am woman.

Hear me roar.

I am ROCKIN’ it.

I LOVE what I just did.

PROUD.

If you get nothing else from this blog – I hope each and every one of you feel that way at least a few times in your lives. It’s why I’m here sharing what I do. I love doing it. I love sharing it with you.

I love investing my time in our home. Working on our home is an investment in me.

Every woman and mother should find time to do something that makes them happy and fulfilled. I don’t care what it is. I know 99 percent of the time, life gets in the way and makes that impossible.

But once and a while, when the kids are in bed, or when hubby works late, or when the grandparents can take over for a few hours…I hope you do something that you love and that makes you PROUD of yourself.

If you invest in yourself and what makes you happy, everyone else around you will be happier for it. Ask them, they’ll tell you. ;)

P.S. I have another fab giveaway coming up tomorrow! Can’t wait to share it with you.

ORB love

 No, I don’t love the round orbs used as garden decoration. I do lurve some good oil rubbed bronze spray paint! (“ORB” to us spray paint obsessed folk.)

I know – the picture above isn’t of the oil rubbed stuff. It’s the end of the day and I’m just plain lazy right now. Just pretend that can has a brown lid, umkay?

I almost had a conniption last year because my trusty Rustoleum bronze spray paint was disappearing off the shelves. Many of you Squeezies actually contacted Rustoleum and there was a bit of scuttlebutt but very little of actual cans on the shelves. I have yet to find that brand in ORB again.

Whatev. I have found it recently at Walmart in this Krylon brand. It doesn’t cover quite as well as the Rustoleum did, but I’m happy with it overall!

I showed you how I used oil rubbed bronze paint on our vents:

I wasn’t sure how this would hold up to the meeellions of fire trucks, trains and race cars that get run over this spot daily…but it still looks great! I’m super impressed.

I also used it on the handle on the $10 Goodwill coffee table:

I know you can just take the brass metal jobbies off the fireplaces, but just for kicks I spray painted them instead:

(Do you SEE the toys in the reflection on the right? I’d really like to know when our bedroom become the playroom.)

I had no clue how this would do with the heat from the fireplace, since the ORB spray is not for high heat situations. But it's awesome! No bubbling, no cracking. Just NO BRASS. God Bless you ORB.

I used this metallic finish on these lamps too:

I adore them still!

Because I’ve noticed a trend – that I can spray just about anything in this color and I LOVE how it turns out – I tackled this frame the other day:

I’ve been meaning to do this for at LEAST a year. So sorry for no before pics of it hanging on the wall – I got a wild hair to just do it for goodness sakes the other day, and I was too excited to pause to take a true before pic. ;)

Anyhoo, I taped the edges of the art, then covered the rest with a shopping bag, then did a few coats of ORB and got this:

  

I LOVE how it pops off the wall now! The gold color was SO blah on our walls. It had annoyed me for so very long. Now – you actually SEE it! I love how the dark frame now picks up on the darker tones in the art:

And when I say “art” – I mean “$20-something print from Stein Mart.”

   

I am slowly (very, very slowly) changing out all of our light fixtures to the ORB finish:

This one I bought as is, but you can easily update a fixture with the spray paint too! I am happy to announce that we have ZERO shiny brass light fixtures left in this house!!!

Can I get an AMEN???  ;)

But we do still have a few brushed nickel lights – which I don’t mind, but I do want to get them all the same metallic tone someday.

I’m hoping to order all new beautiful, fantastic, luscious, dark ORB knobs from eBay in the next month or so. I’ll let you know how that goes. ;)

I was on such a oil rubbed bronze high from the art (figuratively, not literally), I decided to pop off the brass handles on our sliding closet doors in anticipation of the new knobs throughout the rest of the house:

Let’s just say it didn’t go as planned. ;) I’ll let you know how they turn out. Keep in mind they are shaped like a bowl. Which means it takes  a VERY light, quick spray, or it just kind of puddles up in the “bowl.” I was a little heavy on the “quick” and “light” sprays. Just FAB. Gah.

For all of these items, the only prep I did was to clean them. If they will get a lot of use, you could use a primer before to ensure it will hold up well. But I haven’t had an issues with scratching or chipping on any of my projects – just be sure to let them dry long enough before handling!

So have you been bitten by the ORB bug? Or are you a brushed nickel kind of girl? Or the antique brass? (Which I actually quite like.) OR – do you really really love your shiny brass?  :)

Wanna go shopping with me?

Soooo…you know when I find something at Goodwill like this (for $25):

And turn it into this:

Or this (for $10):

And turn it into this?:

Or when I just find fanfreakingtastic stuff like this cloche: 

And you all ask what Goodwill’s I shop at to find these treasures?
Well…now you can shop with me!
My friend Beckie from Infarrantly Creative and I are hosting a Goodwill Shop and Hop!

If you are anywhere near the Indianapolis area -- join us on Saturday, March 13th at 11 a.m.  We’ll meet for lunch and then spend the afternoon hopping around to various Goodwill stores.

 

Fun eh? It will be! If you’d like to join us, go to Beckie’s site to register. Once you are registered we will send more details.
Hope you can join us!
Oh, and guess what I started this weekend? JUST GUESS!! Gleeeee!
And in true TDC/DOCD-style…I have added another project to this transformation. Good God. But I am so stinkin’ excited about how good I KNOW this is going to look in the end, I could just pass out.  ;)

Click! Take a pic!

OK, first of all, you peeps are stinkin’ funny. I loved reading your comments on the last post! I was cracking UP.

Secondly, to anyone with a child under ten years of age, I now officially apologize for the “Say click! Take a pic!” that will now be running through your head for the rest of the day. So sorry. Or not. It’s funny.

So one of my favorite tips when it comes to decorating is taking a picture of whatever you are working on as you go. When you take a picture, it allows you to flip through the different versions of the same space in seconds.

There are so many times I’ve moved something around and then moved it back and tried another way, and I just can’t figure it out because my mental image of the last arrangement is long gone. This is yet another example of my DOCD(Decorating OCD). You will find more examples of that in a second…

So when I went to redo our mantel in the family room, I only had one criteria – I didn’t want to spend any money. I had already looked at various stores and couldn’t find anything I loved to use on it, so I knew I would have to use what I had.

I told you back on this post that I was trying to break free of the symmetry when I decorated our mantel:

I’ve never decorated this fireplace with the suggestions in that mantel post because it’s so very deep and not wide, like a normal mantel. But I got to thinking, why not decorate it that way?

I wanted to keep the large woven platter thing because it filled in the space well. So I started working around it. I had the cloche on the little table in this post and put it on top of the Southern Living cake stand that had been in the basement. Then I added some glass jars from Joann’s in a grouping on the side to see how that worked:

I LOVED the cloche, but the jars were just too short and the glass wasn’t exactly working.

I tried raising them up with a book:

But that just made them look even more weird. If they weren’t glass this may have worked better.

So then I moved on and grabbed some urns from over the kitchen cabs and tried those:

LOVED how they brought out the colors in the cloche filler. But they still seemed a bit too short, and the urns just didn’t feel right in the family room. Maybe it’s because they had been in the kitchen so long? I dunno. But I wasn’t feeling it.

So I scoured the tops of the cabinets some more (yes, there’s a plethora up there -- if you don’t like it, sue me). I had a couple chunky, tall candlesticks on top and I started a thinkin’. They may work perfect!

I loved it!:

The dark tones work with the iron work, which I love. I would love to use something white up here, but it would just disappear into the background. It is simple, and it has texture and variety.

I love how the candles worked perfectly to pull the colors out of the filler:

 

AND I can actually light them on the mantel, unlike way up high above the cabinets. Brilliant, eh?

Here’s where the DOCD comes in. I needed something to fill the spot on that little table where the cloche came from – this is how the evil decorating ball gets rolling.

I started with a stack of faux books with a vase on top:

I liked it OK for a while, but I’m trying to lighten things up in here and this was just a whole blob of dark.

So I tried a white finial on top instead:

Too bright.

I found some woven balls at Tarjay the other day for $1.24 each on clearance and couldn’t pass them up. So I just tried a tray with those inside:

It’s not exactly the color that I wanted, but I do like it. For now, this one is staying:

See? That’s why I love pictures – instant gratification. You can see the changes immediately!

Next up, the foyer table. Up till today the candle holders still had Christmas in them. Yes they did. Not lying. I finally got rid of the holiday decor and dumped it in the PIT THAT IS OUR BASEMENT. (Breathe.)

I tried moving the books around and couldn’t figure out what I liked best:

 

Then I remembered what has bothered me about this spot forEVA. I got the beautiful Ballard Designs print at my one and only trip to the outlet in Ohio. It was glorious.

Let’s pause to listen to the birds singing…

OK, onward. The print is much wider than the foyer table, and that’s always bugged me. If I had a longer table for that spot, it would fix things, but I don’t. And I was in the midst of DOCD and I had to work with what I had.

Lately this spot has bothered because it’s ALL the same color:

So I switched them out! And I think I am loving the changes!:

Even though the mirror is still wider than the table, it still works better. Much better. Lurve it. All of these changes cost me ZIPPO. Lurve that even more.

Is anyone still with me?

Crickets.

Umkay, well for the five still reading – next time you’re stumped, trying taking a picture. It really does give you a fresh look on the space.

And if the Diego song isn’t going through your head yet – click here.

Buwahahaha!! Have a great weekend!