Feeling Green

I have been missing the bright colours in our old house lately.... I miss our old bright green walls in the living room and our bright yellow kitchen. Don't get me wrong I LOVE our new house and I love the colours in the new house but its missing that POP of colour!  I have plans for the inside of the house to bring that POP into every room but I just need to find the time.  SO on the weekend I opted to bring that bright pop of colour to our front porch!!! 

We had this black Ikea planter from the last house and it has been hanging on our front porch for a few weeks.  I decided it was time for a change!!!

We found this old metal bucket in the shed when we moved in and Ryan wanted to pitch it (the bottom is just about rusted out). I thought HEY that would look GREAT on the front porch as a planter if we paint it and put plastic lining on the bottom of it. 

I hummed and haaaed about the colour I wanted and finally opted for a nice key lime Rustoleum outdoor spray paint!!!! Here is planter #1 after one coat of paint (the sun was making it difficult to get the true colour of the paint... it looks more yellow here)

And planter #2 after the first coat!

And after 2 coats of paint here they are on the front porch!! I LOVE the look of them . I love the contrast of black and green! Now I just need to fill them with pretty flowers!! 

This made me smile this morning on my way to work!  A nice bright green welcome to my day!

Next step, fill them with dirt and flowers AND get a new welcome mat that matches better!!  I like our mat for the fall/winter but it isn't bright enough for summer!

 

Using What You've Got

It was nice and sunny yesterday... not exactly warm but sunny.  Ryan and I had been debating what to do with our front garden.  The problem with it was that it was about half a foot higher than everything else so when it rained all the dirt ran onto the front walkway and the driveway and ended up being tracked into the house. First we debated getting rid of the garden altogether... but it has really nice perennials in it that I didn't want to retransplant.  Then we thought lets frame the garden in.... but with what??  Thats when we remembered that we had a huge pile of rocks behind the big tree in our backyard. I have no idea where they came from but its was a big ugly pile that we wanted to get rid of anyway. Thats when we realized we could redo the front for FREE!!!! 

This is our front garden before.

So using Norah's wagon we brought many loads of rocks around front and started digging away the dirt a bit to set the rocks in place.  After about an hour we had managed to make it this far and were LOVING IT!

And about an hour later we had this pretty little garden!

Now I loved it but I knew I wanted mulch in the front to help keep it moist and to try to keep away some weeds if possible!  Luckily Canadian Tire had a sale on the black mulch for about $4 a bag, so we picked up 5 bags of mulch for just over $20!  And mulched the front garden!

Then our tree was looking a little bit sad...

So we put rocks around it and mulched it as well!!

It was looking MUCH BETTER!

BUT we couldn't stop there! We decided to mulch and put rock on either side of the front steps to tie it in as well!

And there we have it! Our $20 front yard makeover!  Norah was VERY helpful... she took all of the black mulch OUT of the garden one piece at a time!! :-)

Our Weekend!

This weekend was a slightly relaxing weekend where we decided to do not much on the house! Its nice to take a break every once in awhile to just chill out.  Saturday we had my parents and my one brother and sister in law over for brunch.  My sister in law is 9 months pregnant so I was calling it the 'Labour Inducing BBQ'.  I told her we would get her gardening and squatting and that baby was bound to come out.  WELL IT WORKED!!!! As of Sunday night I'M AN AUNT!!!!  I would like to introduce little Henry Joseph!!! HE IS SOOOOOOO ADORABLE!! 

 Ok I may be beaming a little bit much in this photo but ohhhhh he is the cutest!!!!!!  I'm SOOOO happy for my brother and sister in law!!!  Good work you too!! HAAHAA!

Little Henry made an appearance Sunday night, but Sunday during the day Ryan and I were temporary parents of 3 girls!! We were watching our friends kids for a few hours and had a lot of fun! We did some arts and crafts aka painting pine cones!! (always fun). We coloured. We went to the park and fed the ducks and had lots of fun!!  Norah LOVES playing with these girls.

Overall it was a great weekend!!! Now I just have to make it through the week.... I have a few projects I want to get done this week... hopefully I can post them soon.

Stain or paint???

I finally got around to recovering all of our dining room chairs and I couldn't be happier!!!  I had previously mentioned that 3 of our chairs are different than the others but only slightly.  Below you can compare the 2 types of chairs, one is ever so slightly taller with a different back rest. But only when they are side by side can you actually tell. 

So this is the dining room as it stands today!

The table needs to be refinished this summer and the chairs do as well.  I'm now in the debate whether I should restain the table and paint the chairs a creamy white or just restain everything....

 

I love the look of white chairs with a dark table I'm just not sure if I'd LOVE it in my dining room.... I found these photos at http://www.livecreatingyourself.com/2009/09/kitchen-table-redo-dark-table-light.html and love the look. I just love the light airy feel to the white chairs!

I think creamy white chairs would look amazing and would bring out the green/blue in the chair pads but before I paint over wood I always have to think long and hard about it! What do you think??

Yes Ryan popped into this picture to say hello!

Creating Holes....

Our house came with all of the baby gates already installed and we LOVED that about it.  It meant we didn't have to deal with buying and installing them ourselves.  However, we found that the gate on the main level just didn't function for us! It was installed just off the kitchen to keep kids from going down the back stairs, however it also kept people from the main floor bathroom.  Which meant anytime we had people over they had to ask to use the bathroom because if you don't have kids you have no idea how to open a baby gate.  Plus on top of that our baby gate was a little finicky and involved not only squeezing the lock but a little push and pull to get it to open.  This was driving us nuts. In addition, I have always thought down the line when Norah is out of diapers I can just picture us running her to the bathroom and not being able to get the gate open in time and have MANY accidents in the hallway. This just wouldn't do.   I forgot to take a before picture but this is the best I can do.  This is the gate I'm talking about, the bathroom is beyond the gate to the right and the basement stairs to the left.

The reason they put the gate there was because at the top of the stairs it has to sit on a slight angle to fit... we didn't care, we chose the slight angle over the frustration of always having to open the gate for guests.  Ryan unscrewed the gate to find they had attached it with butterfly clips... needless to say what we thought would be small holes to patch turned into this... a toonie sized hole!!

Luckily patching holes in our house is pretty easy since the plaster is tectured and you can't really do anything wrong because you won't see it anyway. Now we still have to patch the holes but that will be done soon enough (we have tonnes of holes to patch all over the house from where the old owners hung their pictures vs where we have hung ours).  But this is what it looks like now!

 SO MUCH BETTER!!!  Now people can use the bathroom and not be trapped!

Since we are talking about the little lady, here she is a few weeks ago playing with an ant (the little black dot in front of her).  She was fascinated with it!!! She would get down on the ground and watch it! So funny!

Meghan Vs The Church Pew

I got a serious workout over the weekend!!  Remember my church pew turned outdoor bench (post here), well I grabbed my sand paper and power sander and decided to take a stab at sanding her (yes its a girl... a VERY BIG girl) down.  I had to sand her down and seal her as the indoor varnish was flaking off after one rain!! See the picture below you can see the flakes of finish. They honestly just fell off of the back of the bench when you wiped it with your hand! Not good.

I pulled out the power sander and immediately realized this was going to take a LOT longer than expected!!!  The problem was that the bench has a curved back and curved sides... in other words the power sander was not going to do a very good job on those parts.  So using the power of ... well ME... I went to work doing this the old fashion way, with a piece of sand paper and my arm.  OH BOY that was a work out. Just to remind you this bench is close to 9 feet long! The only thing I had going for me was that the finish on the back of the bench was already falling off so that part was easy, the seat was the difficult part but even that wasn't too bad.

After 2 hours of sanding I had a beautifully fresh and solid unfinished bench... I also had claw hands, shaky arms and back spasms.... but I was happy!  I forgot to take a picture of the bench completely sanded but below you can see the sanded bench with a bit of the new outdoor sealant on it on the right side. 

I chose Behr's Premium Weatherproofing Wood Finish in Transparent colour as I didn't want to change the colour of the wood.  After talking with the Home Depot guy this was my best/only option as I didn't want to buy a large can of the stuff and this was the only one they had that came in a small can.  Also I didn't want a stain, I liked the look of the unfinished wood and wanted to keep it that way.  This stuff was perfect! Plus it lasts 6 years outdoors before I have to put another coat of it on. 

I opened the can and using a foam brush I started to spread a thin even layer on the bench, it went on very easily and I was pleased until this happened....

 Yep my foam brush broke.... BUT it was my last foam brush and I was midway through putting in on the bench and I knew if I left and got a new brush you would forever see the line where I stopped... SO I proceeded with my broken foam brush (it was messier but worked).

About a half hour later this is what we I had!  Now it doesn't look much different from before... BUT now its weatherproofed and won't fall apart on us!!  Ryan did a second coat of finish on it over the weekend and we plan on doing one more coat just to make sure it lasts. But after the first coat it rained and the bench held up GREAT!  The water beaded on it which is exactly what we wanted, much better than soaking into the wood!!!

I think in the end I won the war against the pew...however I have MANY aches and pains after tackling her down!!  In fact I can't grip much of anything right now from gripping the sand paper for so long!!!!

Now I just need to make a cushion for the bench which I'm hoping to get to this weekend!

Dining Room Chair Reupholstered

I accomplished a lot this weekend despite a teething toddler who spent a lot of time melting down over the weekend!!!  Poor baby girl!  Between meltdowns I go a fair amount accomplished. I will post an update on the church pew progress later.  After looking at all of the material I purchased for the cushion for the outdoor pew I realized I bought WAAAAY too much material. I'm not sure what I was thinking.... I knew the pew was approximately 8.5 feet long.  Converted to metres that's about 3 metres... however I picked up 6 metres of fabric.  Who knows what conversion I was using at the time!!!!

So after measuring it out I decided the fabric would look GREAT on the cushions of my dining room chairs!  Now we have 7 chairs, 4 came with our table and the other 3 we found at an antique store for $25 each and they are ALMOST identical.  However the 4 original chairs have a cream vinyl on them and the 3 newer chairs have a flowery material on them.  I figure since I have the fabric and love it lets match up my chairs.

Here is the one chair I took a stab at on the weekend.

Since I wasn't entirely sure what I was doing I figured I would test it out on one chair first before taking all of my chairs apart.  First I unscrewed the seat and pulled the old fabric off of seat.  The cushion was in great shape, the hardest part about this was taking the old fabric off... it was secured in place with I kid you not 100 plus staples!!!!!  Next time I'm using a staple remover and not my fingers!!! 

Next I used the old fabric as a template to cut out the new fabric.  Wrapped it around and using a friends staple gun (Thanks H) in a matter of 5 minutes I had accomplished this. Without using 100 plus staples!!!

The corners were a little tricky but I used the same technique the old material had been secured with and it worked nicely!

 Then I put the seat back onto the chair and realized 'oh crap the stripes are slightly crooked'.... Oh well. This was the first chair so with the next one I will make sure to put it on straight.  But I love the end result!!!

Now I just have 6 more chairs to do!