A Quick Look Back

We're quickly barreling toward the holiday season, and I have a whole mess of posts planned for the next few weeks. But before I dive headfirst into Christmas crafts and cookie-baking, I wanted to take a quick look back at fall.

In October, my husband and I went with some friends to Beasley's Orchard for their fall apple festival. It was a gorgeous fall day and we got to do all those fall things that I usually let slip through my fingers. We ate caramel apples, went through a corn maze, and picked pumpkins. It was as cliche a fall day as there ever was, and I loved it.

There's something beautiful about all the textures in a corn stalk.

A sea of apples as far as the eye can see.

Pumpkin-picking

Is it just me, or are these pumpkins looking at the ones down the path?

Green and gorgeous

Your '70s trash is my interior decor

It's no secret among my friends that I'm a crafty person. What I am not, particularly, is a DIYer. Maybe it's owed to the fact that I've lived in apartments, where there isn't a lot of room to take on projects. Or maybe it's because I just really didn't have a need to. Either way, I haven't really been that kind of person. But that has changed.

With the new house to decorate and a tighter budget, I started seeing more potential in things we already owned or in things that my family members were trashing. And that's where we start the story of this mirror.

My parents purchased a tiny one bedroom condo on a lake this year that came fully decorated. Trust me when I tell you that it came with no less than a flobbitygillion mirrors hanging on the walls. My mom was trying to pare down but, as she put it, "hates to just throw them away."

One mirror in particular caught our eye. It had potential.

Tacky awesomeness

See the potential? No? How about here?

Gold isn't glamorous?

OK. So it isn't very attractive. It's kind of oddly 1970s traditional. The gold with the "carved" top. It's just weird. But now imagine if it was all one solid gorgeous color. Can't imagine it? Well, lucky for you I did it, so you don't have to. My mom and I thought with a good coat of oil-rubbed bronze spray paint, we might just be able to bring this thing into the 21st century. Never having done this sort of thing before, I kind of just made it up as I went along. Lucky for me, it worked.

The first thing I did was remove the frame from the actual mirror glass itself. It was screwed on, so it was easy to take apart.

All I had to do was pop the back off and then pop the glass out of the frame. Pretty straightforward. I did run into one odd detail.



There was actually cardboard on the glass as a kind of spacer between the glass and the backboard. Not a problem -- I just had to be careful not to lose any of the spacers while I had this thing taken apart.

Next I took the frame outside and set it up on a canvas dropcloth. I propped it up on some old recyclables to keep the frame from sticking to the canvas and to make sure that I could get all of the nooks and crannies around this thing.

Pretty sophisticated rigging

Next: Painting. I went over the entire frame with thin coats of spray paint, allowing it some drying time between each coat. I had to go back over the frame several times to make sure I got it completely covered. Just when I thought I was done, I'd see some awesome '70s gold shining through. But after about four coats it was looking good.

Better already

It's hard to tell from my shoddy outdoor photography, but it was a vast improvement.

Much better

See? Didn't think it would work did you? Granted, I had my doubts too, but I figured a $5 investment in spray paint was worth a shot to see if it would work. And I think it did. After I let it dry (and air out for a few days so my whole house wouldn't smell like spray paint), I put the whole rig back together and was pretty impressed with myself.

Looking good

I hung the mirror in our hallway to brighten it up a bit and to give guests access to a mirror bigger than our tiny bathroom medicine cabinet. I know the picture isn't great, but have you ever tried to take a picture of a mirror? Not easy.

Beauteous

As my sister-in-law said, "It looks like something you would actually buy." With just a little paint, the tacky '70s awesomeness now looks like a "modern-traditional" piece that actually fits in really well with our decor and the overall feel of the house.

For my first DIY project, I was pretty impressed with myself. I've even thought of future possibilities for the same piece. It might look really good in white, but with our cream woodwork we decided to stay away from the clashing-neutrals look. Down the road, though, it's a possibility. Another possibility I've considered is removing the mirror altogether and putting in a piece of wood painted with chalkboard paint. I could hang it in the kitchen and use it to track grocery needs.

What do you think? Love it? Hate it? Wish I had kept the '70s golden glory?

Curb appeal

The biggest difference between the new rental house we've moved into and any place we've lived in before is that we're responsible for the outdoor upkeep as well. Initially I thought, "No big deal." But this house has a lot of outdoor space, so it was intimidating for some first-time home-livers (that sounds oddly anatomical, doesn't it?).

It was no less intimidating because of the -- shall we say -- lack of care the house had before we moved in. The tenant before us wasn't exactly up to the task, so we inherited a jungle. First on my list of projects: Our scary overgrown bushes.

We were "that house" on the street

See what I mean? You could barely see the front porch, and you couldn't see the house numbers at all. And the view from the porch? Well...

Lovely, right?

Mike couldn't wait to get started

Not that we have much to look at (the street), but I'd like to see it without a view of bramble in front of me.

Our landlord offered to loan us her manual hedge trimmers, but we quickly realized that those weren't going to cut it. We needed heavy-duty, but as renters we weren't about to invest in a lot of expensive yard equipment. Enter the local rental place. We called and found we could rent electric trimmers for fours hours for just $15. Sold!

It didn't take very long for us to start to see a vast improvement.

Halfway there!

You can actually start to see our big planters full of impatiens. And after about 90 minutes...

Finished

Ta da!

Ok, so they're not great. The bushes are still super overgrown, but at least they're not completely overtaking the front of our house. Our goal is to keep them up for the rest of the fall just using our manual trimmers and then cut them back more over next spring and summer. I was afraid to cut off too much right away because 1.) The bush on the left looks kind of dead on the inside 2.) I didn't want to kill everything a week after moving into the house.

So for now, at least is looks manicured. Plus, now I get a better view from my porch swing.

Manicured hedges make for a better view -- even if it is a parking lot

No more jungle

It just goes to show that with very little money and very little effort, even renters can improve a home's curb appeal. Now all the outside upkeep seems a lot less intimidating than it did before. I had almost forgotten how satisfying it was to do yard work, but I'm loving spending the time outside in the fresh air and sun, playing in the dirt.

New House

Ok. So here it is. A tour of the new house now that it's all shiny and finished. It took a lot of work to make this house feel like it home, but it really does now. It's a 1925 bungalow, so it has tons of character -- and a few issues. But we just love it. To say the last tenant had slacked on housekeeping is an understatement. We spent two whole days just cleaning. I don't think the tops of the doorways had been cleaned in years (mega-barf). But once we got it sparkling clean, we set about painting every room in the house except the bathroom. It's amazing what a fresh coat of paint can do.

A few other simple fixes, like blinds on the kitchen door rather than and safety-pinned fabric scrap, and putting frosted cling on the window in the shower (yeah, you read that right -- window. in. the. shower.) made a world of difference.

So here it is a quick before-and-after tour of our house. I have plenty of projects stashed to blog about, so I'll be back here a lot more now that we're all settled in.

Living Room (facing front door) Before

Living Room (facing front door) After Paint

Living Room (facing front door) Done

Living Room (from front door) Before

Living Room (from front door) After Paint

Living Room (from front door) Done

Living Room (facing guest room) Before

Living Room (facing guest room) After Paint

Living Room (facing guest room) Done

Guest Room Before

Difference Between Original Paint Color and What It Had Faded To

Guest Room After Paint

Guest Room Done

Guest Room Done

Bathroom Done

Bedroom Before (Yes, it was bright pink)

Bedroom After Paint (it's hard to tell here, but it's grey)

Bedroom After Paint

Bedroom Done (Penny Lane Approves)

Bedroom Done

Kitchen Before (Mint Green)

Kitchen After Paint

Kitchen Done

Kitchen Before

Kitchen After Paint

Kitchen Done

Kitchen Done

My Favorite Part of the Kitchen -- A Glass Built-in Cabinet

Look! I Found My Blog!

Alright, first of all, let's get the embarrassment out of the way. I have not blogged in more than seven months. Deplorable. I could give you all the excuses (i.e., school was crazy, graduating was crazy, job hunting was/is crazy) but I'll spare you. Let's be low-maintenance friends and pick up right where we left off.

So the big news is that Mike and I are moving this week. Yahoo! We found an adorable little 1920s bungalow for rent and snatched it up. No more sharing walls with weird neighbors who inevitably keep strange hours. The best part is that the house is right next door to some friends of ours--talk about a bonus.

We're staying here in Bloomington because Mike was accepted to graduate school, which means we'll be in this house for at least two years. I'm really looking forward to settling in somewhere and making it my own.

This is all by way of saying that you're going to see a lot of home improvement and project posts on here soon. I'm hoping to document it all here along with the usual (if there is such a thing for this blog). Let's just say there will be a lot of paint and DIY.

So thanks for coming back and here we go ...

10 things in my house that I wish I didn't need

1. A step stool: Only giants could reach our closet shelves
2. Acne spot treatment: Ugh
3. An iron: Because I hate to
4. Chocolate: Yes, I NEED it
5. Tampons: Self-explanatory
6. Cat grooming wipes: Please don't ask
7. Moving boxes: 4 apartments in 5 years
8. Doggie waste bags: Again, self-explanatory
9. About a half-ton of make up: Unfortunately, at my age, it has become a necessity
10. Carpet cleaner: Dogs puke ... and so do cats ... a lot

Finding my moment of calm

I know it's been awhile since I last posted -- an embarrassingly long while. In my defense, last semester did its best to break my spirit, and after it was over, I slept for about a month.

I'm back at it again, and I want to share one of my more geeky new pastimes. Earlier this winter, I noticed that we had a lot of birds, particularly some gorgeous cardinals and bluejays, living in the brush behind our apartment. With all of the snow we had in December, combined with the bitterly cold temperatures, I new that their food supply was probably scarce. So I pulled out an old elementary school craft project.

I made pinecone bird feeders. Laugh if you will, but it was actually a pretty fun holiday project. All you have to do is string up a pinecone with floral wire or string, spread peanut butter all over it, and then coat it with birdseed.

As you can see, it worked like a charm.

Our male cardinal friend

And his wife

Within about 24 hours, we had a pair of cardinals staking out our feeders and flitting around the brush. It seems like such a simple thing, but watching these birds has brought me more joy than I had anticipated. When you live in the middle of a college wasteland, it's nice to be reminded that nature is still out there.

Initially when I decided to start feeding the birds, I headed to Bloomington Hardware, because I new I'd find out more than I ever wanted to know -- and I was right.

Things you should know:

• Most birds just eat seed, but bluejays also store seed.
• As a result, bluejays tend to stake out a feeder as their own and bully the other birds.
• If you have a bluejay bully, set up a second feeder out of sight of the first.

I've use a seed mix for colorful birds, and they seemed to love it. But it felt implausible to keep refilling a bunch of pinecones all winters. Plus, it makes kind of a mess in the house, leaving peanut butter and birdseed everywhere.

So yesterday I took the leap and bought a 15" tube feeder for $7 from Petco. I filled it and hung it up last night, and this morning, voila!

He caught me staring

He's like a pool ball with wings

My fat little male cardinal popped right back up again. I haven't seen his wife yet, but I'm sure she'll be around soon.