The Painted Suitcase

Ah...Christmas break! I love the week after Christmas, when no one has any responsibilities and you can just let down. It's such a fun, relaxing time! I've been spending the first few days of my break working on some projects. The major one I'm working on is something I started months ago, and ran into a number of snags with. Hopefully I'll be sharing that with you by the end of this week/beginning of next week, but I can't make any promises on that.

The other smaller project I did some work on is an old suitcase that's been sitting in our basement for a couple years. We got it from my grandma's house after she passed away. I like the sense of history it has, but as it was it wasn't very interesting.

I had seen lots of others around blogland who had painted their suitcases and made them look fantastic, so I thought I'd try my hand at it. Below is the result.

I'm pretty happy with the finished product.

Unfortunately the paint didn't stick to the suitcase that well, so when I transported it to take these pictures some of the paint rubbed off the handle. I've got some sealer that I'm going to spray the entire thing with though, which should solve that problem. :)

That's all for now! Hopefully I'll be sharing again with you soon!


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R.I.P Shaina

Today we put our dog of 12 years down. We got Shaina when she was just 4 years old from some friends of friends who no longer wanted her; they even gave her to us for free. We had no idea how fortunate we were at the time. I still can't believe we got a dog like her for free. She was so incredibly well behaved, and wasn't rowdy or messy or stinky, but she was still SO fun. She was also fluffy, VERY fluffy and she had wonderful floppy, soft ears. I was also personally very fond of her nose, because it was really fuzzy and snuggly. Just about a week ago, Shaina started going to the bathroom inside, and wandering around like she couldn't figure out where she was. She seemed confused and would get stuck back in corners, not realizing that she merely needed to back up to get out. We looked up her symptoms online and discovered she had doggy dementia. It's not something they get over. There are medicines for it, but they're very expensive, and they still wont ever completely heal the dog. So we decided Sunday night that it would be best to put her down before Christmas.

Today Shaina rests peacefully in the ground, but she's very much alive in my mind.

On a side note: I've been doing some work on a piece of furniture, which I THINK is almost finished, so check back for that. :)

Thank you all for reading, and caring!

Christmas Decor

It's Christmas time again! My favorite time of year! Nothing beats the burning candles, the dancing snowflakes, or the piny fragrances. Cuddling up with a warm blanket and a hot cup of coffee while a blizzard rages outside? I'm there!

Our holiday decorating took longer than usual this year. Normally me and my mom finish it in one day, but it took us two, plus a few more hours, this year. We didn't really do any more than we usually do, but we WERE exhausted when we did it. Having just tackle decorating my Grandma's house for her the day before, and tackling thanksgiving the day before that, by the time we got to our decorating we were pooped. Don't get me wrong, we had loads of fun but, as I said, it did take us quite awhile, and I had a couple overly-stressed-out-this-isn't-coming-together-at-all moments. Thankfully my mom was there to keep things in perspective. :)

Anyways, you probably all would rather see my decorations than hear me ramble on about them, so I'll go ahead and show you them. :)

This is me and my mom's coffee to keep us awake while we decorated. It was sooo good!


My mom's old ice skates now hang on the wall to give the sense of winter's past.


This old desk is one of the first pieces of furniture I ever refinished. The branches I literally gathered from my yard, the greenery is actually branches from our old Christmas tree (I find they are incredibly handy to have around!) and the chair I found in my Grandparent's barn a year or so back.

P.S. Please ignore the fact that the room is BLUE, BLUE, BLUE! I'm working on fixing that. ;)



This is my interpretation of something I saw on the BHG website. There's looked much better, but, I must say, I still quite like the simplisity of mine.




Some candles and an air freshener to add holiday scent and ambiance.

Again, try not to be overwhelmed by the blue. ;)


The entryway decorations.


Nothing too complicated here, but I think it works nicely. :)

Now on to the family room.


The stockings were hung from the bookshelf with care...

I've always wanted to be able to hang stockings on the fireplace, but we never had one, so this is my solution.


These little guys were made by me, my brother and my sister years ago in art class. They were super fun and relatively easy to make.



This is an old toolbox I found in my grandparents barn, I stained it walnut and then threw in all sorts of greenery, berries, pine cones, ornaments, etc.



Another idea which sprouted from BHG. The brown packages are wrapped in old grocery sacks, and the two smaller colored ones are wrapped in old polo shirts. The big one I had to buy wrapping paper for, because I didn't have any cloth/paper big enough to cover it. I added a few touches of greenery, some pine cones, an ornament and two candles on each side, and it makes for quite a nice display, if I do say so myself, which I do. :P


So there you are, my Christmas decorations! Nothing too special or fancy, just some simple touches and memorable items that fill the whole house with holiday spirit. :)


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Thanksgiving Tablescape

Sorry this has taken me so long to get up, I was CRAZY busy over thanksgiving weekend right up until Sunday, and Monday was sort of my day to relax after it all, so you're finally getting something five whole days after thanksgiving. Actually, I guess that's not so bad, it could be worse.

Anyways, I really wanted to show you all my thanksgiving table scape. It turned out better than I expected, but you'll have to excuse the less-than-perfect images. I had to take them pretty quickly, and as it was incredibly cloudy all Thanksgiving day the room wasn't lit very well, resulting in blurry/grainy images.








Next up: Christmas Decor post!

Thanks for reading! :)

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Thanksgiving Table Sneak Peak

We're having Thanksgiving at our house this year, so I pulled out our two long folding tables today and started figuring out exactly how I was going to set things up. I must say, I'm getting VERY excited about it all! I think it's going to come together really nicely!

Anyways, I thought I'd just give you all a little sneak peak of my table setting:


It's intentionally a pretty vague picture, because I want to save showing you all the full thing until after thanksgiving!

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Beachy Striped Side Table

Gosh, time really gets away from me sometimes! I am sorry for not posting more often, I've just been crazy busy these last few weeks. This last week I had some insane planning to do for a Halloween party me and my friend were throwing. We spent 11 hours one day planning for it, and were up until 1:00. The party was last Friday, and needless to say, after it was over I was just exhausted. I spent basically the whole of Saturday just sitting around. I had absolutely NO motivation to get ANYTHING done. I eventually got myself to go out and work on the end table I had started earlier in the week though, which I just finished earlier today.

The side table is one we got from my Grandma's house after she passed away. We really only got it (and two others) because we knew of a local summer camp that needed side tables. Unfortunately (or, fortunately, I suppose!), when we contacted them about it, they never got back with us, so the end tables just sat in our basement. Well, because I was having some problems with another piece I was doing, I decided I wanted to work on something new, and those side tables are about the only thing we have.

Here is a picture of the side table:


Just look at that swirly laminate wood. Is that not the grossest thing ever? Eeeeeeew! As you can see, I got a little too eager to start stripping the laminate off the top, and forgot to take a "real" before picture, but this still shows how ugly it was.

Here is the after:


I'm quite pleased with the finished result. I wasn't sure how it was all going to come together when I was working on it, and almost decided to change my plans, but I stuck it out, and I'm glad I did.

Thank you all so much for reading!

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Featured...again!!!

Wow, this is slightly overwhelming. I've been featured again, this time at *Remodelaholic*

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An Autumn Afternoon

I promise I have a furniture redo coming your way. I've been trying to work on it every second I get, which lately has meant painting after sunset under the dim porch light. Hopefully tomorrow I'll get some good work in on it and maybe even finish it, but in the mean time this is just a little post to tide you all over.

We had my two grandma's, my grandpa and my sister over for lunch today so I decided to set a nice fall table, because I know my grandma's really appreciate it, and I'd kind of been dieing for an opportunity to do it anyways. Here are a few shots of it:


It's not terribly elegant, it's really quite simple, but I was still pretty happy with it. Simple is sometimes best, imo.

The leaves in the cups was an idea I got of the PB website. They used book page leaves for theirs, but I wanted more color, so I used leaves I'd preserved in glycerin.

The napkins were left over from last thanksgiving. I folded them using the instructions here. I really need to memorize some of the napkin folds on that site because they look so nice, and I'd like to be able to do them without looking on the site every time.




The pine cones I gathered from my grandma's yard. Funny, when she saw the table, she asked me where I got the pine cones remarking that "I could have gotten them from her yard." I did, Grandma, I did! ;)

I apologize for the plates, which don't match all that well. Those are the only plates we have enough matching ones of for the amount of people we had for lunch. Nice plates and cloth napkins are both things I'd like to invest in eventually. For now I'll be content with my none matching plates and my paper napkins. :)


Thanks so much for reading!

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Featured!

Thanks so much to Blue Cricket Design for featuring my post today; what an incredible honor!