Sunday, January 26, 2014

4 in 14 January - Project

Recently we have been painting our entire house. If you know me at all you would be aware that having a room one solid color is simply unacceptable. There are at least 5 colors in the living room alone. As you can imagine, this leads to a lot of paint cans in the garage. Because I use different shades on opposite walls, it can sometimes be confusing to keep track.
On a separate note, I was cleaning out my craft area and found chipboard books that I picked up at Michael's on clearance.
Twenty Five Cents
That gave me the idea to make a portable little sample book. I kept it pretty basic. On each page of the little flip book I put the sample from the paint store. 


I wrote the location in the house where each paint was used. I like that this can easily fit in my purse to go to any home decor store I might be visiting and want to coordinate things with. Just to be sure I have the correct matching colors I added the paint labels to the back of each page. 
When buying paint, simply ask the employee to print you an extra sticker. This is especially helpful if you are having them make you a paint that is a custom color match to an item you brought in. 

Friday, January 17, 2014

4 in 14 January - Recipe

This week's post is a little late, but I am still on track. I scored two bags of tomatoes at the local grocery store for $0.98 each. They were a little soft, so they had to be used right away. After chopping them, I boiled them in to a great sauce. I put two carrots through the food processor to use as the sweetener instead of sugar. Sadly, I did not keep track of the spices I threw in. I know there was some onion powder, garlic powder, thyme, oregano and black pepper. I ended up with 8 jars of sauce in my pantry, plus one smaller jar of spicy sauce - made special for the hubby - that also has some cayenne and hot pepper in it.

Wednesday, January 8, 2014

4 in 14 January

So I had this great idea to set goals for myself. I was going to call it "4 in 14" as in, 4 planned activities every month in 2014. So far I am off to a less than stellar start. Weekend one of each month is supposed to be seasonal decor for my home. Now, since I am new to this I was trying to start small so as not to get overwhelmed and give up. I have seen so many neat ideas on Pinterest I decided to dedicate one shelf in my living room built-in to be my makeshift "mantle" and I refer to it as my "pretty shelf".
Sadly, this past weekend I was not able to update the pretty shelf. I was hoping to have it done this week, but that doesn't look like reality either. You see, I decided it would be fun to repaint the living room, which has involved removing our outdated popcorn ceiling.
We have made great progress but this project has taken significantly longer than expected. So, today the pretty shelf looks like this:
New Grey Paint
Just so that I am not at a total loss, I should point out that I gave the pretty shelf an update for Christmas so before the paint mess it looked like this:
Dec 13 Pretty Shelf
I wish I could tell you I know where I got each of these items, but that would not be true. But since this year the Christmas tree was family themed, we busted out the "whimsy" decor. Christmas 2014 will be "Department Store". Stay tuned!!