Fall Fireplace Mantle

Fall is here!  If you have a fireplace mantle in your home, this is a simple way to decorate it now that will carry through Thanksgiving.  

Cover with some greens, add a variety of small pumpkins including some gold for glam, and finish with a couple of simple white candles.  

Everything I used is (fake!) from Michaels so I only had to buy it once, but it would look stunning with real greenery and pumpkins!

Welcome Home!

This is such a simple and in-expensive way to add a little 'homy-ness' to your home!  I did this a while back and I just love it.  

On the door from our garage to our house I just used scrap booking stickers to write 'Welcome Home' on the door.  Painters tape helped me keep it straight, as always!  

It's nice to always be welcomed home.

Wine Tags

We're always trying new wines and taking recommendations, but it's not always easy to remember why we bought a bottle or what we're suppose to serve it with. After labeling some bottles with post-its, I decided to make actual wine labels to keep myself organized and add a little flare to our wine rack.

The tags are easy and inexpensive to make.  All you need is black 'Chalkboard' paper tags, a white gel pen, and rubber bands.

Use the white gel pen to write whatever you like, then loop a rubber band through so they can easily slide on the neck of the bottle.  You can write on both sides of the tag to have more options to label the bottles.

Here is how the tags look in the wine rack in our new cupboards; subtle yet informative.

Most bottles are labeled with the food they should be paired with, but I labeled some 'Friday Night' or 'Tuesday Night' which is my code for 'cheap bottles' and 'nice bottles'.

When I decorate I always try to add small details that personalize our home and set it apart.  I think that these wine tags have been a great way to add some personalization to our new kitchen!

DIY Vacation Souvenir for the Home

We're not really 'Souvenir people', and judging by all the sombreros and coconuts at Goodwill I don't think most people are. Although we forego the typical tourist junk, I start every vacation by saying, "It would be neat if we could find something cool for the house", and every trip I'm disappointed with what we find.

 A couple of years ago we were in Cabo San Lucas where I was on the hunt for otomi napkins.  I was able to get a great deal on one that went great with our decor, but there was only one. I bought it anyway, and when we got home I turned the lone napkin into an accent pillow for our living room.  I love that is's a reminder of our vacation without screaming souvenir. Now when we go on vacation instead of looking for a perfect piece that doesn't exist, I look for things that I can use in less obvious ways to remember out travels.

How to Level Furniture Overlapping a Rug

 We recently purchased a larger area rug for our living room. I love that it fills up more of the space and defines the sitting area, but most of our furniture now sits half-on/half-off the rug. Since the rug is over 1" thick it created a real issue ( think of red wine on an unbalanced end table!)

After failed attempts to re-arrange the furniture, I turned to these felt furniture pads to extend legs that fell outside of the rug.  I had purchased a huge package of them at Costco when we changed to dark floors to avoid scratches.

I love using the felt pads because you can keep stacking them to get the height needed.  In my case, every foot outside the rug needed two pads.

Since our floors and dark and the pads were light, I colored them with black permanent marker so they wouldn't show.

DIY Scary Halloween Branch Decor

This Halloween branch decor not only looks spooky and has a big impact, but it's basically free to make and doesn't need to be stored--just throw it away and make a new one next year!

I got the twigs from some brush in our backyard and spray painted them black with some paint we already had and put them in a vase

......added some fake spider web

...added some fake spiders

.....added this fake raven from the $ store and that was it!

Here it is on our Halloween bar cart. Is that spooky or what?!?

How to Decorate for Halloween

I LOVE Halloween, partly because it is such a fun holiday to decorate the house for. Our entire living room transforms, to the point that it echos when we take the decorations down!  Decorating for Halloween is great beacuse it's easy to create a large impact using just a few inexpensive items.

Fake spider web is a must for creating a lot with a little during Halloween.  I put it over our entire brick wall, but also look to add it to existing items in my living room including vases and candle holders.

I don't like a lot of little Halloween nick-knacks around, since they take-up a lot of storage space and start to look cluttered to me after a while. I do add a few accents here and there for Halloween guests to 'discover'. To me, a single skull left behind somewhere has more impact than a row of halloween figurines on a shelf.

Fake spiders are great to toss in unexpected places including the inside of lamp shades and on chargers and other flat surfaces.

My favorite item to use is this Halloween cloth that I get from the dollar store. I drape it over everything: serving stands, stair railings, candle holders, chandeliers, and I'll even take down our artwork and drape it on the nails to create a spooky wall.

There are a ton of great Halloween images to print out yourself and add to existing frames.  I even take them over the glass rather than taking the time to open up the frames.  The best part is that they take up almost no space to store!

Also, look for fun ways to make ordinary and cheesy halloween items fresh and exciting, like these window clings strategically placed under a slanting blind or a skeleton that looks up at you from under the sofa.

Wine Cork Rug

 Thanks to the admin ladies at my husband's office, I had piles of corks in my craft closet that kept reminding me I was overdue for a wine cork craft.  

Since I've have already made ornaments and decorative letters out of corks, I was searching for something new to make.  When I came across the idea for a cork rug I thought it would be perfect to put by our patio door.  Since the door is in our living/dining room most rugs look out of place, but we still needed something to hold a pair of shoes for quick access to the deck.

The rug base started as the Nackten rug from Ikea, which I think is $2.

Before I started I painted the edge of the rug dark brown to match our floors incase the edges would show. Then I began hours of hot gluing 200+ corks to the rug.  (This is a two-movie project).

After the rows of corks were glued I went pack and painted the additional white space.

In hindsight, I would have used a rectangular rug with straight edges as it got awkward trying to make the rounded border out of corks.

The finished rug is definitely unique!

Here's how it looks placed by our patio door.

Goodwill Dresser Turned TV Console

What is wrong with me?!? 

That's exactly what I asked my husband the night I picked-up this beast for $40 from Goodwill:

You see I've spent the past 10 months re-designing our living room, which all started because our previous furniture was all from Goodwill and I felt like we were at a point in our lives where we should be past that. So, I sold our entire living room on craigslist to make room for all the great new pieces I was going to buy. Then I come home with this Goodwill gem; uglier, less expensive, more damaged and more out-dated than anything I had ever bought. Look at that drawer! Even I kind of thought I was crazy.

We were in need of a new TV console for the living room. I wanted something substantial with character and that didn't have open shelves.  Everything I liked was over $2,000 and was complete crap in terms of quality, so for $40 I decided to take a chance on the ugly dresser. We set it up in the living room and lived with it a while before I invested my time into painting it.  Even missing the trim on one drawer, it turned out to work great for us! 

We were able to have a local frame shop make a new trim piece for the drawer that was trim-less. It's not a perfect match but no one can tell! We sanded the dresser than painted it white using our Ben Moore trim paint.

My original plan was to replace the hardware to something more modern, but I fell in love with the details in the original hardware.  I sprayed them with oil rubbed bronze spray paint to darken them from the original brassy color.

The best part is the storage! It has 6 large drawers plus 3 hidden drawers in the cabinet. We are able to store all of our photo albums and lay our place mats flat with room to spare!

Overall I'm very happy with our new TV console. Saving $1,960 by being creative doesn't hurt either.