The Farmhouse Kitchen Table

$600

This beautiful, rustic Farmhouse Kitchen Table will give your kitchen a relaxing, inviting presence.  With antique detailing and distressed barn-wood style top, your family will love to share meals here for years and years to come.  Easily fitting six people, this comfortable, yet high end table will invite guests into your home and make them want to stay for dinner

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Rustic X Detail Coffee Table

$300

This beautifully rustic coffee table will be the perfect centerpiece for any southern living room.  Made from solid wood, it's sturdy enough to kick your feet up on after a long day yet beautifully crafted with hand painted antique detailing.  It's warm and inviting, yet intricate and refined.

So much brass...

Our house was built in 2001, but it's got some really. uh..., lovely 90s decor.  When we moved in every fixture, door knob, hinge, and faucet was brass or better combo of silver and brass. 

Oh yes, it was beautiful.  So, we have been working on de-brassing the house every since (3 years in and still trucking along).  Probably the first summer we were there I tried spraying the doorhandles, hinges, and hardware in the downstairs oil rubbed bronze.  We have 7 doors downstairs  and 14 doors upstairs that each have two handles, a lock, a mounting hardware, and three hinges.  I thought for about 2 seconds about just buying all new, but at  $13 a piece for knobs and about $3 a piece per hinge that would cost us almost $500!  And that doesn't include all the faucets and light fixtures!  We are way too cheap for that and since the handles and hardware were in good condition, we decided to try and spray them.  

So, Sean helped me take all of the doors off their hinges and remove all of the door knobs and hardware.  I laid out sheet in or yard and tried to space them out the best I could.  There was so much hardware it took several batches to get it all done.  I sprayed it with Rustoleum's oil rubbed bronze and to give it more of an antiqed feel I took a Q-tip and before the spray paint dried I rubbed off a few accents so the bronze would show through. 

 We also sprayed them with a clear coating to help keep the paint from chipping and hopefully help them last longer. Sean helped me rehang all the doors and re-install the hardware.  It was definitely time consuming but for about $20, it made a huge difference in our house and was way easier to swallow than the $500 option.

Boy's Race Track on the Go

I made a portable race track for a sweet little boy that goes to our church.  The pockets at the bottom hold match box cars and it folds up to be packed up in mom's purse or diaper bag.  He can take it out and play with it at a doctor's appointment or out at a restaurant.  It is fully customizeable and makes a great gift.

Infant Car Seat Cover

One of our friends contacted me to cover an infant car seat for her son.  Their first child was a baby girl and their car seat was pink and very feminine.  They were expecting their first boy and didn't think he would enjoy riding around in all that pink and flowers.  It took me quite a while, but I finally finished it.  It is no longer pink, but still very cute (I think) and will fit over their old base perfectly.

Before:                                                          After:

 

Kitchen Cabinet Redo

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Over the past several months we have been working on painting my parent's kitchen cabinets.  My mom has been talking about it for a while and we finally decided to take the plunge.  Their house is as old as I am so it was definitely in need of an update.  

The dark oak cabinets made the kitchen very dark. It's amazing how much brighter the space looks!  My mom is talking about getting new appliances and counter tops too, but I think we are already off to a great start and a brand new space.

The first thing we did was remove all the doors, hinges, and hardware.   My dad was hoping that we would be able to reuse the old hardware, but they had way too much stuff built up on them from years of cooking in the kitchen.  Sean numbered the inside of each door behind the old hinges and drew a diagram so that we would know where to put them back when we were finished (which was such a brilliant idea and saved us a lot of time and frustration).

   

 Then he cleaned them all with TSP (which worked crazy well in taking off all of the gunk).Just remember to wear gloves while you're using it because it might melt the skin off your hands (probably not but better safe than sorry).

He sanded down all of the cabinets and frames lightly to get them ready for painting and we painted them with "gripper" primer from Home Depot.

I also did some organizing while we had all the cabinet doors off.  My mom was hating me during it but we got 4 huge tubs worth of things to donate to Goodwill and now you can easily find whatever you're looking for.  I even had fun using decorative baskets and labels.  Ahh, I love a good organization system!

We ended up buying a paint sprayer for a little over $100.  It was well worth it!  It gave a really professional finish to the cabinets and was a real time saver.  You do have to spend a loooong time cleaning it, but I still think it saved time in the end and the results were well worth it.

We went with "white linen" and bought the paint from Sherwin Williams, because they have a special paint specifically for cabinets.  It was definitely pricier, but hopefully it will hold up better and be a better investment down the line.  The color isn't a bright white but more of a subdued off white.

We also decided to go with a darker color for the kitchen island to add some visual interest.  I love the way it turned out and wanted to go home and paint my kitchen island right away....but, that thought ended when I got there and had 50 spit up covered toys to clean up and 3,000 loads of laundry to do.

before:

after:

 The color is "thunder grey" by Sherwin Williams.  This was actually just their Proclassic paint because apparently you can't get the cabinet paint in a dark color....lame.  But it was cheaper and looks really great.  You can't tell that the cabinets and island are a different type of paint either.

It looks brand new, and yes we got rid of that disgusting 30 year old trash can too (against my dad's wishes).  He is still complaining about missing that old trash can, go figure.

We decided to go with cup pulls and hinges in a dark oil rubbed bronze color that really pops off the light colored cabinets!

The light color really makes the backsplash pop too!  It's hard to see in the photographs but here is a close up:

We tried to tie in some of the grey when we picked out the island color.

It honestly took up like 5 months to finish.  My parents were so patient living in a kitchen with no cabinet doors for months and months.  With Sean's broken leg and trying to chase around our newly crawling baby it took quite a while.  But, was well worth it.