Category: Home Decor

I can hardly believe it’s October, let alone the end of it!  We have been in the 70’s all last week and then yesterday we had a wind advisory with a high of 43.  They are forecasting snow by the end of the week! ☃️

One thing I have found challenging with decorating a new house that is also your first house:  you just don’t have stuff to decorate with.  We are definitely making progress but that’s with every day décor.  The holidays bring a whole other level to the challenge.  I still wanted our house to look like fall even if the weather didn’t agree but I didn’t want to spend much at all.  When I saw those pumpkin pails kids use for hauling all their treats for only a buck, an idea was born. ? Continue reading “A Pumpkin Pail DIY Production” →

As obsessed as I am with Joanna Gaines, Magnolia Markets, and Fixer Upper, I actually haven’t known about this world for very long.  See, I haven’t had cable since i was a sophomore in college.  So HGTV was a distant channel I remembered watching Decorating Cents with my mom back in the day.  But this time last year, we signed up for Sling TV.  And in January I saw my first Fixer Upper episode.  It was an obsession at first watch.

After bonding over the love of the show with a coworker, I found out Magnolia Market existed.  And it existed online! So that night I checked it out.  I immediately fell in love with a sign that had a biblical verse.  “As for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.” (Joshua 24:15)  I had always wanted to do something with that verse above our front door and was excited to find it – designed by Joanna no less!  To my disappointment, it was too wide to fit the space.

Why not hang it somewhere else?  Well, every morning when I walk into the kitchen, I pass our long hallway.  And every morning I turn to my left and look down to the front door.  I don’t know why or if I am expecting to see something, but I liked the idea of seeing the sign there first thing to start my day.

Flash forward to now, and I made my own sign!  I wasn’t sure how I was going to transfer the letters onto the wood but it ended up working really well.

First, I purchase a 6×36 inch sheet of balsa wood from Hobby Lobby for about $7.  I then used Google Draw to make the sign and downloaded it.  After that, I imported it into Excel and resized it to 6×36.  It printed out on 4 pages that I cut the excess off and taped them together.  Meanwhile, I used white acrylic paint to paint the balsa wood.

Once the wood was dry, I taped the paper sign onto the wood one.  I then used a ball point pen and traced the outline of the characters.  I used some pressure to dent the wood but nothing that made my hand hurt once I was finished.  All that was left was to paint in the letters!  I used a black paint pen but it didn’t cover well in some places so I filled in gaps with a black Sharpie.  I used a silver Sharpie for the bottom part.

All that was left was to add brackets to the back and hang it!

Things I found helpful:

Leave one side of the paper sign taped to the wood sign so if you notice letters you can’t see, flip the sign down and retrace.  I also left the paper sign taped on when I put the brackets on the back.  This protected my paint job from getting scuffed while the sign was upside down.

This post should really have a second title:  “How to get Your Husband to Not Like Menards”

We’ve had this table in our hallway for the past year and a half and I love it.  But I have never really known what to hang above it.  A few months ago I decided a nice big mirror would really anchor it down and help fill a very long boring wall.  There was just one little problem.  Giant mirrors are expensive and I have a lot of walls to fill with things.  So a DIY mirror was the way to go.

Back in March I was browsing CB2 and fell in love with the many pieces of this mirror.  The store had displayed 4 of them together and it was grand and eye-catching.  One wasn’t big enough for me but 4 was much to large (not to mention the price tag for multiples).  I then saw some people on Pinterest made large mirrors using many mirrors from the dollar store.  The lightbulb went off! ?

I headed to our dollar store and bought 9 mirrors all 11×14 inches.  At our local hardware store I had them cut a sheet of 1/4″ plywood to 36X45 (we planned on a 1.5 inch border around the perimeter for framing).  I started to take the mirrors out of the frames while Landon screwed in two brackets to one side of the wood and added anchors to the wall.

After all that, we hung the wood on the wall and called it a night.  We left it there for a few days, making jokes about what the artist meant and saying we could stare at the “art” for hours.  What can I say?  We lead exciting lives. ?

After all that fun, we got back to work gluing the mirrors to the wood.  Landon used some heavy duty caulk that was leftover from some house thing or another (Locktite PL Premium Polyurethane Construction Adhesive).  I had marked sections on the wood to place the center mirror down first.  We then worked our way around that mirror gluing all 9 down.  Then we called it a night and left it on a card table in our great room for about a week.

We then had a “pretty nice little Saturday” (get the Old School quote?) running errands.  Remember when I said this post could also be called “How to get Your Husband to Not Like Menards”?  Well we went to Menards to pick out trim to frame the mirror.  And I probably spent a good 30 minutes trying to make up my mind.  Sure they had lots of options but nothing was just right for me.  Poor Landon was going insane following me down the same 3 aisles!  He’s a saint. ?  Anyway, I finally decided to go simple and got plain flat trim, some simple corner pieces, and black paint.

Landon cut the trim and after painting the trim and corner pieces black, we used more of that heavy duty caulk to secure it to the wood border around the mirrors.  Then all that was left was to hang it up once it was dry!

The mirrors are not perfect and I suspect with time they will take on a more fun-house effect but I love it!  It really wouldn’t take long to do this project in an afternoon and it was so easy!  Plus, a project you get to work on with your husband equally is fun too. ?