One of my basement projects

One of the items John received from his family home was a bumper pool table/poker table. (you can kind of see it a little in the back ground)  He and a group of guys play poker in our basement about once a month.  Pretty soon after we moved into our current home (almost six years ago!!), a friend of his called and said he needed to come right away, there were six chairs on the side of the road that matched the poker table.  Off he went to pick them up!  And yes, they did match the table perfectly.  I have always thought they were the ugliest chairs ever, and couldn't even believe they were in my house!  But they never came out of the basement. ;)

Well, as part of my basement re-do project, I working on painting and re-covering the chairs.  Finally!

The 2 arm chairs are finished!  Here is a picture of the finished product:

Everything is a little better with a monogram!

I still have more fabric on its way.  I am going to make a small pillow for each of these with a coordinating red fabric.  Hopefully I will have the finished basement pictures ready to share soon!

And a shout out to Dixie Delights for introducing me to Premier Prints fabrics :)  Love.

Basement update

Here is the messy before.  Ugh, I was really hating that wall color down there!!  The room has been cleared out and painted. (Benjamin Moore Sand Dollar) and I have rearranged the furniture and ordered some fabric!

 Here is the lego storage unit now :)  I already had the paint and ribbon and ordered the burlap for under $2 a yard.  I just need to find some lamps for on top...So pleased with how everything is coming along so far.

Upcoming projects and some pictures of our messy playroom

I came back from Nantucket with quite a long list of projects I want to complete!  As I posted in my Master Bath post, I still need a mirror in my dressing area.  Well, I was visiting my sister (before we left for Nantucket) and she had this mirror that was our grandmother's in her barn.  She was going to get rid of it, and I thought it would be perfect for my space if I paint the frame.  And re-orient the hooks.  This is probably the first project to be done.  I think I am going to paint the frame a coral color.  It will match the monogram I painted on my vanity.

 And I am going to make curtain panels for my kitchen.  My parents bought this fabric for a project in their house and decided they didn't like it, so they gave it to me.  Lucky me!

 And then my big project is our basement/playroom.  These next photos are of our playroom/ basement space.  We are so fortunate to have this large space, but it is NOT working well the way it is currently set up.  First on my agenda is to take everything off the walls and paint.  We are not loving the Windham Cream.  This project is going to have be done a inexpensively as possible, because after re-doing both upstairs bathrooms, we are a bit tapped out!  The boys are getting older, and while they still need some room for Legos, they need space to hang out with their friends.  Hubby plays poker down here and that space could be better, and we love to host friends for football watching.  We also do family movie night here.  My head is spinning because I have so many ideas!!  

I have some big plans for this space!  Will keep you updated as I move along :)  For now the carpet will stay (we put it in when we moved in 5 years ago) but I want to put in laminate flooring.  I wish we had done that originally.  Oh well!  And someday we will deal with the hideous ceiling, but that will stay too. :(

Baby Shower Cookies

Later this morning I am going to a baby shower for a friend who is expecting boy/girl twins.  This babies have been hoped and prayed for for a long time!  I am so excited for this shower!  I was asked to make cookies as a favor.  The colors of the shower are navy blue and hot pink, and I was asked to make feet and hearts.  

Luckily my foot cookie cutter arrived on time.  It took me forever to get the navy blue right.  I ended up mixing Royal Blue, Black and Violet.

Packaging production :)  

And the finished favors.  I wanted to monogram them (shocking, I know!) but the mom to be is not yet sharing names.  Oh well!

DIY art for our master bath

While I love love love our master bath redo, it still needs some art work!  While we were on Nantucket I spotted a piece of art that I knew I could recreate.  C is a very good sand dollar finder.  I brought home three of the sand dollars he found in gradual sizes.  Made a trip over to AC Moore and bought a treasure box frame (40% off), a white mat, and a piece of scrapbooking paper.

 I cut the scrapbook paper to the 8x10 size, glued it to the white mat and then glued my sand dollars on.  Easy peasy!

And here it is hanging in the bath!

My second project has been a long time coming (in my head anyway!)  I have been wanting to try my hand at painting on canvas and finally gave it a go.  I keep seeing Angie Reuter's work on Dixie Delights blog and her work inspired me to attempt to paint an oyster shell.  While we were on Cape Cod this past weekend (in Wellfleet, home of yummy oysters) J tried an oyster for the first time.  He then wanted to keep the shell.  Perfect!  After heading to AC Moore for some supplies (well, just the canvas, I had everything else), I pulled the shell from my purse and got to work.  Here is the finished product:

And then what you see when you enter the bathroom:

I really wanted to tie in the color of the glass tile behind the sinks.  I have to say, I am really loving how it came out :)  Thanks for the inspiration!

Our Master Bath Part 2 - The After...

The chandelier in my dressing area!  Love love chandeliers, and hubby not so much.  Working on getting more of them in my house though :)  Still waiting to hang the perfect mirror...then I will show you more of my dressing area!

Our shower before the glass door was installed.  I found the glass tile at a church rummage sale!  The tile above the sinks too.  And the tile on the floor in the shower.  All of it was only $6.00!!!  Can you believe it?  So that meant I had room to splurge on other things :) (like the marble floor and counter top!)

This is how the vanity turned out.  Do you remember what it looked like before??  I changed the knobs to crystal ones, painted it, and had a marble top put on.  Love it!  The color is Cool Grey.  It is an olympic color, but mixed with Benjamin Moore Paint.  And a better view of some of the glass tiles I got at the rummage sale.

After the glass door was installed.  Oh, and you can kind of see the shower floor too.

And the whole thing.  Well, minus the opposite wall, but we haven't decorated that yet! :)  Our theme for this space was "clean" and I just love love love it.

A tad better than what we started with :)

Our Master Bath

Here are some pictures of our master bath BEFORE we started our project.  Remember that our house was built in 1969 and I really don't think this room (or the boys bath) had been touched since! I will do a post on the boys bathroom as soon as I get some good photos.  It was redone while we were on Nantucket.

See the painter's tape?  black mold is under there!  Yuck and double yuck! 

Don't you wish you had a mustard yellow tub and sink?  We did replace the toilet before we moved in, but the only picture I have of it, the seat is up.  Not posting it. :)

 Not sure how well you can see it, but the floor is icky linoleum.  We removed this linen closet.  It took up WAY too much space.

This is my dressing area.  you will see the my closet in one of the during pictures. Don't you just love the lights?

And now for the DURING!!

The area where the shovel is was the dressing area vanity.  We moved the wall back 6" to make more room in the shower.  We also moved the door to the bathroom.  Big difference!

And this fine piece becomes our vanity.  LOVE LOVE LOVE it.

I am waiting on hubby to send me a final picture of the after, so I will continue this post tomorrow!

Our Last Day on Nantucket :(

We get on a ferry tomorrow morning and head to Cape Cod to see Hubby finish the Pan Mass Challenge.  So today was our last real day on Nantucket until we return Columbus Day Weekend.

We had a great last day, and are very sad to say good bye to our favorite island, and our summer friends.

We had a great time at the beach with friends.  Huge surf today, so much digging was done!  As well as some carefully supervised swimming.

We then got ready for our last night here dinner out to a fancy restaurant.  The boys and I started this tradition maybe 4 years ago, and this year my parents joined us :)  My dad recently taught the boys how to tie a bow tie, so they wanted to go somewhere they could wear them.  Don't they look great??

This is where we went to dinner.

Look at these two!  They look right at home ;)

There was a beautiful sunset right between dinner and dessert.  We lucked out!

Both boys really wanted to pose by the cool car! :)

It's been a great summer (so far) and while we are sad to leave, it will be good to get home!

Finally the sun was shining!!

After an afternoon yesterday when is just poured and poured and we played an epic game of monopoly (well, the boys played with my Dad), it was SO nice to have the sun shining again. :)  We headed out this morning to go to Jetties Beach to go snorkeling.

(this is actually a picture from our first snorkeling experience a couple weeks ago (before I was back to blogging!)  No pictures from today's adventure.)

We had a good time!  The ocean was a bit mucked up from the storm yesterday, but we saw several schools of fish, some huge lady crabs, a sea robin and some jumping fish.

Then we had lunch and the boys and there friend Will went swimming.  Only to be pulled out of the water by the life guard!  I was sure there had been a shark sighting (we had just been talking about a shark on Cape Cod!!)  But, thankfully, no shark!  Just high levels of bacteria from the run off due to the storm.  No more swimming! 

We packed up and headed to a South Shore beach.

Everyone played in the water for a bit, but quickly discovered there was a pretty strong undertow, so digging of a big giant hole commenced :)  It was a good time with great friends!  We are all getting a bit sad that our time here this summer is ending.  We only have tomorrow and then we leave on a ferry Friday morning.  We are planning another day at the beach, a quick trip into town (vacuuming the beach that seems to have ended up in my car) and out to dinner where the boys want to wear their new bow ties!