Four people, four different ghosts! Mine is the tall one on the right! It was the first time any of us felted!
Felted Ghosts!
Category Archives: Projects
We might have too many spices.
Linda helped me reorganize all our spices. We may need an intervention.
Outside party prep!
Thank heavens it finally cooled off today after two long days of 100°+ temps where you couldn’t work outside for more than five minutes.
They approve of the deck project thus far.
Any bets on how long it takes them to pee or poop on it?
New driveway: Day 1 demo
Adulting. Booooooo. But now the driveway will be good for the next 20ish years. It was shocking how quickly the whole thing came up!!
Katie’s been busy today!
Paint your pet!
Anna and I painted our pets (puppy Olive and Honey) at a local art studio! (Tom and I did birch trees here before!) With the pets, they start you with a pencil drawing from a photo you send— which made it a ton easier!
It was really fun, though I enjoyed it more than Anna did!
The joys of home ownership!
Soooo this is happening today. Perfect timing weather-wise as it might be open longer than we thought did to unforseen wood rot issues.
It’s in but I didn’t take a final photo yet because the molding and such isn’t complete!
It’s baby projects for now.
We can’t afford to redo the entire deck at once so it’s baby projects for now… and today Tom only had time for one side.
New fence door number 1!
Both fence doors are very much worse for the wear so when we saw a great deal on the metal frame, we picked up two. Tom ended up having to replace all the wood, but now it swings open soooo nicely! One down, one to go!
It looks nice but…
I realized we need more desk space, so now Tom is building an 11′ desk for the other wall!
Office Revamp Day 2
Katie wanted to help paint so we let her!
Office Revamp Day 1
We’ve been wanting to redo the office for awhile now…so we decided on this type of shelving. This was the dry fit stage fort the cleats and boxes that Tom built!
The office threw up.
Everything had to come out of the office so we could paint…so the front room is a disaster. We are amazed at how much we had crammed in there!
Tom has been building boxes for awhile now for the new wall of shelving for my business. This was the dry fit.
The office teardown begins!
Amazing Christmas ornament craft!
I’m so excited about the Christmas ornament project I finally finished today (with moral support from Anna)!
INSPIRATION PHOTO:
I wanted to do this because we have soooo many ornaments that we don’t always get to use but I miss seeing. And I didn’t want a wreath because I had lots of big ornaments that wouldn’t have fit well around a wreath. (I used a deep mirrored tray.)
So the ornaments range from things I grew up with on my parent’s tree to handmade ornaments from both grandmas to mementos from family and vacations to favorite TV shows and hobbies and favorite things…and more!
I am soooo thrilled with how it turned out!
A fix for the escape artist!
Since Olive can squeeze under sections of our fence, we had to figure out a temporary solution.
WTHS Postcard party!
Candy, Anna, and I were working on some Vote YesWTHS reminder postcards today and we even roped the kids into helping (and they have better handwriting than we do)!
It was very weird having the kids sign theirs “class of 2027” and “class of 2030”!!!!
This isn’t going to be fun.
I’m glad they’re taking care of it, but 1) it wasn’t that bad to start with and 2) they really made a huge mess out of our driveway.
I can’t imagine what they’re going to do to fix it. The whole thing looks like this.
More solar panels!
We finally have enough usage history to prove that we need the extra panels…
Slowly but surely!
Tom started the install of my pull out drawers for the Tupperware cabinet on March 20. Unfortunately he wasn’t happy with how one drawer was sliding so said he’d fix it—so I left all the contents on the island. Fast forward a week and he tells me it’s fine and I can put everything away. Men!
And somehow we’re missing the bottoms to ALL of these since the kids last fixed the cabinet. Imagine that. Noone has any idea. So either they’re lying about what they did the last time or they’ve managed to lose 11 bottoms in two weeks.
My new little babies!
Proof you can get just about anything on Amazon.
Aaaand now new paint!
Yes, it’s a new color. The purple paint Tom took to get matched was actually the bathroom paint and not the laundry room paint. Oh well. I like this, too!
But look at what happens with the painting when Tom is tired. (It will be fixed later.)
I’m glad he didn’t have to go into work today, either!!
All the swears, you guys…ALL.THE.SWEARS
I screwed it up when I did a shirt like this for his 11th birthday, too. I managed to fix that one but this one I’m just leaving.
I asked and turns out I did design it correctly but I forgot to “weld” the design to print as one solid piece… so the Cricut assumed it knew better than me and rearranged the design to use less vinyl. Lesson learned.
Aaaand now new flooring.
When you decide the laundry room floor needs to be replaced before the new machines arrive in three days…
Tom did this today. He’s awesome. (Oh, and he has time to do this because he hasn’t actually had a full day of work yet even though Monday was his first day!)
But check this out. This is what he found when he removed the vent cover! If you look closely you can see something growing in the second pic. Good lord—what on earth happened in the laundry room?!
This feels more daunting this year.
For the most part I have always replaced regular decorations with holiday—like normal everyday things on shelves/walls got replaced with wrapped boxes/kids artwork. Candles and candlesticks got put away and replaced with reindeer and small trees.
But this year I’m rethinking.
Maybe it’s because we JUST finished redecorating the living room (and there’s lots more stuff now).
Or maybe it’s because we’ve only had one Christmas here and I just don’t have a set place for everything.
Or maybe it’s just because I’m exhausted.
Or maybe it’s because I forgot I bought a lot of clearance stuff last year.
Or maybe it’s because I usually end up doing 85% of it by myself…
Tom’s Friday project!
Installing two Toto toilets for Gramma!
I cannot understand how this happens.
When we moved in, I sorted and organized ALL the Tupperware and got rid of ALL mismatched pieces. Fast forward to now and after sorting, this is a FRACTION of the mismatched pieces.
How? How the hell does this happen? I am missing like six bottoms of one type of container. SIX! That’s not just misplaced or accidentally ruined. And some of the missing pieces are sets I literally just bought within the last two months. GRRRR.
One word: kids.
So I finally took pictures of most of the newly redesigned house.
FYI We have had a few changes since these pics—that teal ottoman and gray loveseat are gone (long and sordid story that ends with us telling you to avoid Roomplace like the plague) and we have a leather loveseat on order. Missing rooms are the dining room and front room because we’ll need to rearrange that furniture again. I finally got around to taking the pics specifically because the ottoman was going away.
My friend Jodi Van Leer (J Van Leer Designs) was amazing in helping us figure out what we wanted, shopping for things, and pulling everything together. We trusted her implicitly and we couldn’t be happier!
Tom got to play woodworker and built:
- the walnut mantle surrounds
- the cabinet doors
- the birch forest (using trees we brought home from my parent’s house in the upper peninsula!)
- the stacked wood wall in the bar (my Pinterest idea)
- and new built-in shelves for the liquor in the bar (so now he finally has his “me room” (and not just a me wall!)—which we’ve named Ground Control)!
Other changes include:
- a new ceiling fan in the living room and a huge chandelier in foyer
- new fixtures to replace contractor-grade boob lights
- a new dining room fixture
- a new foyer table coming this weekend
- new bar footrails
- and a new fireplace tile surround and flooring…
We absolutely love everything and when it’s picked up and free of kid shit it’s freaking amazeballs. It was a shit ton of work and expense and we pretty much got it all done in two months to be ready for the big party! But we finally have our forever home that looks put together and adult!!
P.S. Here’s a Before and After!
And now for the high ladder work!
We had a generic white ceiling fan in the living room but wanted something with a bit more pizzazz since we were redoing everything else…and with the high ceilings we also needed help! This is our electrician Jorge (he’s been doing jobs for us since we moved to Gurnee four years ago)!
We also got a new chandelier for the foyer…which also required Jorge.
So now I’ll take a minute and tell you some backstory: I found this chandelier on Facebook Marketplace back in May. It was expensive but was being offered at less than half price (I googled). But it was exactly what I wanted. Something I would have only dreamed of getting but never would because of the price.
So we discussed and decided yes. We offered $750 but she declined saying they paid full price. We still wanted it. But we had to borrow a truck and then we just couldn’t connect and then she was on vacation for six weeks… But we lucked out in that we were able to pick it up the day before Jorge was scheduled to come.
We went to pick it up and the lady was super nice. We chatted and told her we were military, this was my dream chandelier, etc. and she offered to buy the bulbs too thank us for our service! Wait, what? Seriously? We knew the bulbs were going to be a couple hundred dollars (we needed 36 and they are specialty bulbs) so we asked again to make sure. Yes, she was sure!
We chatted more and I ended up inviting her to our upcoming party, and she said she would order the bulbs ASAP and drop them off at the house!
We then shared a few texts picking out the bulbs we wanted (we had the same ones in both our carts) and then she even dropped off four bottles of Prosecco for our party! So the whole thing just went off perfectly.
Anyway. Back to the install.
Since it was so big and heavy, Tom and I even had to help!
Getting it to this point took two days and about four hours! It took a bunch of trips into the attic to reinforce the bracket and do the wiring and who knows what else.
And then it was time to install the lightbulbs!
And holy crap. It was just a little bright.
The light was obviously meant to be in just a bit bigger room. Or maybe a bigger non-enclosed space? Or less-bright lights? We all got a good laugh out of it regardless. And long story short, the bulbs are dimmable so we will eventually change one of the three switches to a dimmer.
But it’s perfect and I love it.