I can’t believe that it was over 2 years ago when the seed was planted.  After we put the Christmas decorations away I knew I was really tired of our wine country themed kitchen.

Our kitchen before…

Instead of putting things back the way they were, I filled a vase with some lemons and an idea began to form. It simmered for quite awhile. What I was thinking was very different than what we were used to.

We had played it safe decorating our first home (Who am I kidding? I didn’t really decorate it at all for the first 3 years we lived there).  The walls were plain and white; the tile, white; the carpet,white;..really, it was a lot of white. It was the first place we owned and we could hang stuff on the walls, but we didn’t for a long time.  We didn’t know what to do with it, so we didn’t do much of anything.

Oh, but we did have a huge island with a Corian countertop. It was purple. We selected it when we built the house.  Purple? What were we thinking? Now I am wondering if it was that countertop choice that made me want to move. Did I mention I only dislike one color, only one?  Yep, you guessed it….purple. I don’t think I disliked it then. Heck, I also had 2 bathrooms decorated in purple stuff. But today, yeah even my 5 year old knows that I don’t like purple.

Here it is in all it’s purple and white glory (at least this photo was taken after I wasn’t afraid to try a little decorating). I guess a wine country theme worked great with purple.

And WOW!! That is a lot of white, and I think the tile had purple tones in it. I think the grout was purple.

What do you know? There are the lemons on the right side of the island. Maybe the seed was planted a long, long time ago.

When we built our current home, we opted for whole house “Apache Tan”, and other than my craft room and my oldest’s room, lived safe with a house full of earth tone decor for almost 7 years.  Brown walls, brown tile, beige carpet, stone, cherry wood, brown leather…BROWN.  Want proof…here is the “before” family room.

A little disclaimer…this is when it was nice and neat…(circa 2005 or 2006) that would be before kids. Apparently, it was also when I didn’t know I should turn off the camera flash and use natural light when taking a picture.

(If you thought I was going to show you reality this early in this blog’s life, sorry. If you really want to know what real life not picked up looks like…follow the link in my side bar to my personal blog. I am sure there are pictures there that do not show a clean and clutter free home).

That original seed that was planted a couple of years ago began to fully form into a new vision for our home.  A vision now that has taken on a life of it’s own. How is that one idea or project leads to another, and another, and a 100 more?

My dilemma…a limited budget (don’t most of us face this?). The first 2 jobs were to replace the badly worn carpet in the main rooms and paint. Painters are expensive and I have a long list of needs and wants that gets added to daily. The square footage of the immediate floor replacement was less expensive to hire out.

We opted to have the 800 square feet of new flooring installed for us.  Leaving the painting as our first big DIY project . Phase 1 of “Project Paint” started in February and involves close to 2,500 square feet of our almost 4,000 square foot home.

As of today, we have finished around 2,000 square feet, with 500 to go, plus repainting all the doors and trim. Our flooring has been installed and now it seems we are forever in the middle of a DIY project.

Stay tuned as we share our tales of joy and frustration.  I’ll sign off with this sneak of what’s to come.

Michelle

Are you like me and waited until the last minute to figure out teacher gifts for teacher appreciation week? Between teachers, classroom aides and therapists I have 7 gifts to come up with for my 2 boys classrooms.

I usually give each teacher/aide/therapist a gift card accompanied with some kind of hand-crafted item and I almost always wait until the last minute.  My oldest has been in the same class all through his 2 1/2 years in pre-school so some of the teacher/aides are the same, so I haven’t been able to repeat a gift yet .

Imagine my absolute happiness to stumble upon this cute (and free) printable yesterday at  Crafty Texas Girls. I was over there looking at Samantha’s awesome stair transformation post and many other great articles and she solved my last minute dilemma for teacher gifts.

I started with a 5×7 canvas in Photoshop, pulled in the printable, added a transparent turquoise background, some red digital chevron papers from Lilly Bimble and hit print. Easy! Then I headed off to Target and cleared them out of turquoise RE frames and a couple of black ones too.

Next I needed some cards, so I headed to my craft room to whip up some cards on my Silhouette. Whipping up 7 cards is not nearly as fast as it sounds, but I kept it simple with  7of the same design and I cut out the main elements on the Silhouette and used Studio Calico’s Elementary paper collection.  At least I got to catch up on a couple of Grey’s Anatomy episodes while I was at it.

If you are still needing a quick gift for Teacher’s Appreciation Week, head over to Crafty Texas Girls, say hi, and grab the free printable. We took them to school today and the teachers loved them!

In between continuing with the website development, I’ll be back with more to share this week!