Birthday Banner

Between tiling and turkey and Target and the Tide, I haven't been crafting too much lately... and it's killing me! I have several great rehabs just waiting to be prettied and tons of great Christmas ideas if I can ever get the vanity out of the living room! I'm starting to wonder if I'm going to have to put lights and balls on it and call it a Christmas decoration.

I did manage to make a Birthday banner for my niece's birthday party cake table though that turned out pretty cute. It was so simple to make and thanks to JoAnn's and 3 for a $1 scrapbook paper sale, I made it for under $4.00.

All I did was cut enough scallop circles and regular circles to spell out Happy Birthday Alex and hole punched little holes to string a ribbon through it to hang.



I think it spiffed up the blank space over the cake table really well!

Stay tuned for more bathroom progress. We have tiled all the walls and got the light installed over the vanity where the vanity goes and painted. We will finish tiling the floor, bead boarding and trimming everything hopefully in the next few days.

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Bathroom Update Part 2

We are on Day 12 of the bathroom renovation and my poor hands feel like sandpaper, everything in our home has a nice grayish tint because of the drywall dust and we still aren't done.

So far we have torn everything out to the studs, rewired all the light fixtures and plugs, added an extra light fixture over the tub and an extra plug over the vanity, replaced the plumbing to the toilet, vanity and shower, replaced the drywall, replaced the tub and toilet, and have began tiling the floor and shower walls.

Demo was easy-peasy... and fun!

Re-wiring wasn't too bad, unless you ask my mom who was crawling around in our attic on her belly on insulation.

The drywall has been a booger. No wall in our home is square or plumb so it's been a ton of mudding, drying and sanding. I'm almost done with that except for a outside corner that is dealing me fits.

The toilet... oh the toilet. My dad gave me a toilet that he replaced in his home that was nicer than the existing toilet so we decided to use it. I'm just going to share our business here because it's too funny not to! I don't know if it is psychological or what but when you don't have a toilet available, you have to go... a lot. So, I'd like to make my formal apology and sincerest thanks to McDonald's, Dairy Queen, Walmart and Chevron right here. We wouldn't have made it without you! Once we got the Hardibacker and tile glued and grouted
we were able to set the new toilet and after fixing a few small leaks, we were in business



Today we started tiling the shower walls. I had this bright idea to lay them on point rather that square.



After making 97 cuts, I quickly decided that the 2 side walls will be on point and the center wall will be staggered like the floor tiles. I think it looks good together. Just a little something out of the ordinary .


I managed to get the center wall completely done and my mom finished up 1 side wall and started the end wall. Tomorrow I am going to grout it. I can't wait to see what it looks like after that. It always looks messy and off until the grout is in.




I painted a small area the color I bought for the walls. I'm not sold on it. I wish I had a picture that shows the actual color. I'm struggling with it riding the line of calm, rich, warm blue and 1989 country kitchen blue. I hate picking paint colors because I never feel like I get it just right. I just don't know.

So, still on the project list...
Finish tiling walls & floor
Finish drywall
Install beadboard
Paint
Install vanity
Install vanity light
Replace vanity faucet
Install shower faucet
Trim work

(((Sigh))) I'm counting the days until I can sit in that pretty tub and relax in a bubble bath.

I can't wait to have it all done so I can start doing more fun things, like accessorizing and working on all my Christmas projects. Stick with me guys! I promise the bathroom will end (I hope!) and I'll be crafting up some really cute things shortly.

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The Bathroom Update

I'm a bad blogger! I apologize to all of you who have had to seek therapy for withdrawals from My Pretties and anxiety waiting to see what has been going on here! :) We have been running on minimal sleep and maximum mess and I just couldn't make myself blog at 3 in the morning when sleep was an option.

I only have a few minutes before the sarge gets here to start working again so I'm going to give you the short and narrow and I'll have to detail the process when all is said and done.

We started by tearing out the paneling in the bathroom.

We discovered 47 million holes, some big and some small.



After patching 2 million of the 47 million holes we decide to rip out the sheetrock to the studs and start over. The sheetrock was gross and we figured it would only cost a few hundred to gut it completely to have a totally new bathroom.



I got a new toilet paper holder. I think the stud works nicely. It's been fun having only one bathroom and it be under construction.


And since the sheetrock was down, we decided to rewire the entire bathroom since the existing wire is 54 years old.
While we were at it, we added an extra wall plug over the vanity and added a light fixture over the tub.


Then we replaced the plumbing from cast iron to PVC and installed the new faucet and overflow.



The tub has been a pain in the butt. Long story short, we bought a tub, got it roughed in to notice a hairline crack in the side so we had to take it out, take it back and get a new one and start all over.

I think the hardest part is over... I hope. We still have to finish the drywall, replace the toilet, tile the tub surround, add beadboard (unless I just love how the sheetrock comes out and decide against it for now) and trim everything out, but surely that will go smoothly and we won't uncover any more surprises!

Hey, Lowe's... if you are reading this... You should sponsor my blog! I've been sponsoring you a ton this week!

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The Bathroom Plan

You have convinced me to show you the progress along the way, but first, I want to show you my plan and get a few opinions. I am going for a clean, crisp, calming, traditional with a touch of contemporary feel in the bathroom.

This is what I am planning so far...

I want bead board! I love the look of it and to be quite honest, putting bead board up 48" from the floor reduced the number of holes I have to repair from 47 million to 22 million. I kid! It seems like that though.
Actually the paint I bought looks very similar to this color as well. It's a little more pale and earthy but it's still a blue.


All of the finishes will be brushed nickel.

The Vanity light will be something along these lines. God willing and the creek don't rise, Lowe's will have this one in stock!


The sink faucet...



The shower faucet...



The vanity mirror, I'm not really sure about. I would love a chunky espresso colored mirror but I'm afraid that as high as the bead board is going to come that the mirror won't lay right. If that's the case, I'll go with this.



I have no idea about floor and wall tile. I love the glass mosaic tile, but I'm afraid that that might not stand the test of time and since tile is forever in my book, I'm thinking I need to go with some sort of natural stone. I can still do a glass tile art piece to hang if I just can't resist the blue glass tile. We are going to build out little alcoves in the shower wall to have built in cubbies for our shower toiletries.

After all that is done, we are going to replace all the door/window trim, baseboards and crown molding and then I'm going to take a nice long shower. But right now, I'm off to paint the ceiling!

Look for the before pictures and Days 1 and 2 of the progress later tonight hopefully!

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Will you still come around?

Let me tell you a little story. Sometime this past January the hubs and I decided to paint our kitchen cabinetry. After that we decided to replace the overhead light fixture. I couldn't figure out why the light wasn't mounting correctly so I called my mom over to help. Fast forward about 3 minutes and I am missing part of the ceiling in the kitchen. About an hour after that, I had no ceiling. We ended up rewiring the kitchen, replacing the sheetrock on all the ceiling and walls, tiling... the whole shebang in about 3 weeks. I was NOT intending on gutting the kitchen but when my mom said "Bring me a hammer." all hell broke loose from there. I do love my kitchen now though so I guess in the end, it was worth all the callouses, the broken fingernails and sore bones.

The other day, my mom came over to show me how to wind a bobbin on my new sewing machine my grandmother gave me. Thank you a ton, Monar! Somehow we went from winding bobbins, to working on a patchwork quilt for my little guy to, somewhere along the way she says "Go get me a hammer." and she tears out part of the paneling in our bathroom. This was definitely on our to-do list, but it was pretty far down! We took down the awful paneling that had been painted 47 times and discovered a few things... huge holes, small holes, water damage, mold... At this point my chest was hurting and I thought I was going to have the big one. Not only did we take the paneled walls down, we took up 4 layers of flooring and the tub surround. We were doing some serious demo work over here. Yes, the neighbors love us!

I am now into Day Two of the project and of course I have taken photos along the way. It's just so gross and yuck I'm not sure you even want to see the progress. Would you? If not, I can wait and do the revealing when it's complete, which I hope is in 2 weeks or less. Who am I kidding? We have to replace subflooring, sheetrock, the tub, tile the enclosure, tile the floor, add beadboard, patch a billion holes, paint, accessorize... All I know is I hate taking baths and I need my shower back, like now!

So, do you want to see the nitty gritty? It's absolutely crazy what hides behind walls in a 50 year old house. It's embarrassing really. I'll show you though if you want... if you promise you'll still come back around!

I'm off to take a bath to wash the dust from mudding and sanding out of my hair. I'm lookin' a little gray.

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Scarf Made Pretty

Since it has dropped below 70 in the land of melt-your-skin-off-hot where I live, I'm getting ready for Uggs, sweaters, scarves and my sister's famous chili. It seriously went from 85 to 30 in 3 days and I wasn't prepared! So, today I picked up a Plain Jane gray scarf at the Thrift Store for $1.00 (Yay for half off blue tags today!) I guess it would serve the purpose but it just wasn't pretty so I had to doll it up a bit. All it took was some felt and the first degree burner glue gun.

I started by cutting my felt in about 1" strips. I didn't measure because it really doesn't matter. Once you have your strips cut, start rolling your fabric tightly. Once you make about 2-3 complete turns, twist your fabric strips and roll another 1/2 turn. Then twist your fabric again. Do this until you get to the end and put a dab of hot glue to secure your ends. When I made these, I would press them down, burn my fingers and do a little jump-jerk-yell what could be perceived as profanity number as I peeled the glue from my scalded finger. I'm hoping you will skip this step. It doesn't add any benefit. Once you finish rolling your flowers, arrange them and cover the bottoms in hot glue to secure.





Easy Peasy! Now my $1.00 little scarf if ready to brave these frigid (I know I'm dramatic, but dang, it's cold to me after the miserable summer we had!) temps in style!

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Expressions Vinyl Winner Announcement

The winner (drawn by www.random.org) of the $25.00 Gift Certificate courtesy of Expressions Vinyl is entry number 22, Lisa @ The Pursuit of Happiness. Congrats!

Really you are all winners though! The awesome guys at Expressions Vinyl are offering a 10% discount to all my readers if you use the discount code "PRETTIES" when checking out.

Be sure to check out Expressions Vinyl for all your vinyl projects!

Lisa, email me at kristy@kristyevansphotography.com to claim your prize!

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When I first got my Cricut, we tried cutting fabric and couldn't make it work. I read e.l.e.v.e.n. thousand tutorials and watched f.o.u.r. thousand YouTube videos and I still couldn't make it work. It would either not cut the fabric, or it would shred the fabric, or a combination of both. Then I found a tutorial that recommended the HeatNBond Ultrahold and lo and behold, it worked. Thank you smart lady on YouTube that recommended it!

One of my friends was expecting a baby on 11/9/10. I gotta few days to get my carry-to-the-hospital gift ready, right? Wrong! She went into labor Halloween morning and I had to get my gift prepared S.T.A.T. I started with a Pink Quilted Diaper Bag i bought at Hobby Lobby for $4.50 (half off $8.99) and machine embroidered her name on it. Good gift... but not nearly as impressive as I was going for. So I bought a 2 pack of the cutest little ruffle pants in brown and baby blue from Walmart for $7.00 and a 3 pack of long sleeved onesies for $7.00. I only had enough time to machine embroider one of the onesies at my mom's house before we had to leave to go to the Fall Festival. So today was crunch time. I had to come up with something to finish the outfits and I decided to give the Cricut a try again.

So, I read the directions and get going.


Iron the rough side to the back of your fabric paper side up for 2 seconds.

Place the fabric on the cutting mat, fabric side down. This is very important!

Since her name is Reese and I'm a lover of anything Reese's makes, I wanted to play on that. I downloaded the Reese's font and typed her name out in my Sure Cuts A Lot software. Be sure to flip your image horizontally or your letters will end up backwards-- not good! I may or may not have forgotten this step 4 times and have a stack of letters that would only work on the front windshield of an ambulance telling you to move over.

I used Speed 3 and Pressure 4 to cut mine using the regular blade and a fresh mat. If you do it right, it will look like this.



Then I cut out another R to put on an inexpensive $5.00 sleeper from Walmart.

Then I cut 3 more R's to put on 3 bibs that I bought in a 6 pack for $5.00.

The hardest part was designing the last onesie. I cut an R and a bunch of polka dots and couldn't decide how I like them.

Like this...

or this...

or this...


or this...



I ended up doing them like this and adding a few polka dots to the pants leg above the ruffle.



Here is the machine applique I did. Any BAMA fan can appreciate a cute elephant.


For around $20.00, I gave her a personalized bag, 3 outfits (The elephant & Reese top both go with the brown pants) and 3 bibs. Not bad, huh?

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Chalkboard Message Center

Don't forget! You still have a few hours to enter to win a $25.00 gift certificate to Expressions Vinyl here

I love my weekly calendar but I still need a place to keep all the little notes and reminders that don't have a specific date. I saw a message center in a home I recently visited that i loved. Theirs was made of luan (thin plywood) framed in 1x4s. My intention was to do the same thing... right up until I realized that on my trip to Lowe's to get the 1x4 I had forgotten said 1x4. Duh! So, being that I have zero patience, I had to come up with another alternative. It just so happens that I have 42 of the 2000 new cabinet doors in my attic that my mom somehow acquired years ago and I managed to skeeze somewhere along the way. Thanks, Mom! So, I started with this


and gave it a couple light coats of this


and then taped off the edges and painted the center with this.

After everything was dry, I sanded the edges a little bit and mixed some brown and white paint with water like this and painted on rough polka dots like this.

Once everything was dry, I added a sawtooth hanger and screwed in one of these

upside down, to make this.

The cabinet pull is perfect for holding your chalk!

My mom came by and she quickly put dibs in on this one so I guess I'm going to have to make myself another one.

Just in case you were wondering... Chalkboard paint does work. It erases just fine. It look me 954 tries to write a message on the board to take a picture to post. At some point along the way, it had our Thanksgiving menu. Then it had random notes I need to remember. Then at some point it said "Why do I write like a 3rd grader?" then it said "arrrgggg!!!" When I thought my mom was coming to repo it, I just scribbled my blog address on it and had to be okay with it to get the picture before it left me. I wish I had cute handwriting like all these people

I'm partying over on the right sidebar! Be sure to check out all the other great ideas at the parties these fabulous hosts are hosting.

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