Fall 2013 Tablescape

First of all, I have to say "EEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!" because we are done with the board and batten!!! We are finishing up a few loose ends and cleaning up all the sawdust, then will be sharing the final reveal! Can't wait to show you! But until then...

More fall decorating has been happening around the house lately! I just completed the centerpiece for our table. I've been wanting to try decorating in cooler colors for fall and have to say, I love it! The cool tones mesh really well with the existing colors in the dining room.

I wanted to use things I already had on hand for the centerpiece...aka, I didn't want to spend money! I grabbed three mason jars from the kitchen, a woven placemat from the breakfast nook, and a berry garland that I had on hand to use on a wreath. I added a white pumpkin, some candles to the small mason jars, and hydrangea blooms to the large mason jar. I've been dying to use the end of summer hydrangea blooms that were still on our bushes and love how they look in the centerpiece!

Update: I had to come back and slip this Instagram picture in. Little Boy saw the centerpiece and gasped, then ran and got the little white pumpkin  from the cabinet and set it next to the big white pumpkin on the table. Then, he declared in a satisfied voice that now the baby pumpkin can be next to the mommy pumpkin. Um, sweetness! And I actually think it looks even better with the baby pumpkin. :)

I used my crafty pumpkins to decorate the teal cabinet. So fun!

I'll share our door decor later this week!

Linking up to Centsational Girl!

Getting Crafty with Pumpkins

I've been inspired to get crafty with my pumpkins this year! I usually just leave them plain, but my dining room has a lot of cool colors, so I wanted to decorate my pumpkins in neutrals to match my existing decor.  

First up, a burlap covered pumpkin! I had some burlap ribbon on hand that I picked up from Michael's a few weeks ago that I used to cover my pumpkin, securing the ribbon with hot glue. I used some leftover dark colored burlap to make the ridges in the pumpkins, then added a leaf and some berries to the top. Easy peasy! 

For my second pumpkin, I decided to give it a coat of creamy ivory paint. When that was dry, I free-handed a chevron pattern with blue paint. I had originally planned to use painters tape to get crisp lines, but the tape was peeling my ivory paint off. So, I decided to go a more rustic route and free hand it and leave it imperfect. I actually really like it this way! 

The small pumpkin is just a Target dollar spot find that I painted ivory. Check back next week to see where the pumpkins land in the dining room! :)

Linking up to The Lettered Cottage and Cuckoo for Design!

Fall 2013 Mantel

Update: We are on the second coat of paint on the board and batten and will hopefully finish this weekend! Can't wait to share the final reveal with you next week!

I'm SO excited it's fall! I love everything about fall...football, cool weather, pumpkin everything, decorating, fleece jackets, and mums! I'm especially excited for fall this year since I'm sporting a giant baby belly and am suffocatingly hot all.the.time. Hooray for some cooler weather and hopefully less sweating! ;)

I've been taking my time decorating this year and have been tweaking the fireplace decor for the past week or two. I think I may finally leave it alone. Maybe. Ha!

I picked up two packages of leaves in the floral section of the grocery store (I've found them at Michael's in the past, too.) and put some in a vase and used the others to spread across the mantle. I added the cow photo I took a few years ago to the mantle since it was taken in the fall and has nice fall colors in it.

I topped the leaves with three mini pumpkins that I painted a creamy white.

I dressed up my candles using burlap, raffia, and silk leaves, just like I did last year. So simple!

Happy Fall!!!

Linking up to Thrifty Decor Chick!

Five on Friday

Time for another Five on Friday post!

1) Today is cleaning day in the nursery. It is covered in sawdust and the even more annoying sanding dust. Tonight, we are going to tackle moving the million tools out of the room, wiping down all the walls, and cleaning the floors up. We will start painting tomorrow and don't want dust sticking to the fresh paint!

2) I found this pumpkin spice cream cheese at the store the other day and LOVE it! So yummy!

Photo Credit- Naplesnews.com

3) I hosted a Favorite Things party last year (SO fun--already planning this year's party!) and my friend Cathi brought Apricot Scrub as her favorite thing. I had totally forgotten about Apricot Scrub! I've been using it every other day and it has done wonders for my skin! Bye bye blackheads! Bonus points for it costing only $3.79 unlike most other scrubs which start at $7! 

4) I have naturally curly, frizzy hair. Of course, I hate it (Who actually likes their own hair? Haha!) and straighten it with a flat iron. My hair doesn't really appreciate the heat damage and needs lots of extra moisturizer. My friend Amy and I were in Target this week and she told me about Aussie's Three Minute Miracle. She has fabulous hair, so I figured that at only $2.99, I'd give it a try. I love it!!! My hair is much softer, more manageable, and less frizzy after using it only one time! 

5) I finally finished my Fall fireplace mantle! Now if only the rain would clear up so I could get enough light in here to take pictures... Hopefully, I will post about it on Monday! 

Have a great weekend! 

Board and Batten Update: Ready for Paint

We are finally finished caulking and filling in all the nail holes in the board and batten! WAHOO! And, yes, it took 2 weeks. I had caulked about 1/3 of the room, then went out of town last weekend on a great women's retreat. Jeremy did a lot of caulking while I was gone and we had great plans of finishing up quickly once I got back by tag-teaming the rest. But, I was exhausted from the trip so almost every night last week, I crashed on the couch by 10pm. Pregnant woman problems. Haha! Jeremy was a trooper, though, and kept working on the caulking while his slacker wife slept. Poor guy! :)

We tag-teamed the last wall and a half this weekend and are finally done with the caulking and spackling! Jeremy used wood filler to fill in all the nail holes. After the wood filler was dry, he used his orbit sander to sand down the dried wood filler. The orbit sander made this job a speedy one!

We bought these caulk scrapers and loved them! They made caulking a cleaner task and I love how crisp the caulk lines turned out using the scraper! We used the 90 degree side to get the most crisp line.

We're hoping to start painting this weekend! Eeep! 

Catch up on previous board and batten posts here: Day 1, Day 2, Day 3, Day 4, Day 5.

Five on Friday

Five Friday randoms for you!

1) Remember how I found those adorable canisters at Target on clearance? I went back and bought the large one, too. I LOVE them!

2) After years of dealing with a broken TV antenna (We started out getting 5-6 channels and now only get 3. We've been being cheap and just dealing with it.), we are finally buying a new one this weekend! Know why? FOOTBALL!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Can't miss an entire football season because we don't have cable and our antenna doesn't even get NBC, now can we? Oh, and another perk? Ellen! Holla!

 

3) We are about 1/4 of the way through caulking and filling nail holes in the nursery after our board and batten project. It's going extremely slow! I'm loving how it's all turning out, though!

4) I had my first pumpkin spice latte of the season this week! That put me in the mood for some candy corn and going through my fall decorations. Now just bring on the cool weather!

5) I found two of these frames on clearance at Bed Bath and Beyond for $4.28 each marked down from $20 each! They are having some great clearance right now!

Board and Batten Installation: Day 5

Check out the updated background, header, and new page tabs! Feeling much fresher around the blog now! Thanks to Jen at Migonis Home for the post today about how to update your blog header!

Catch up on Day 1, Day 2, Day 3, and Day 4!

Guess what, folks?! We're done with the initial install! Can I get a woot woot?!

Hubby only had one wall left and a tiny bit of trim next to the door to finish today. He was able to knock it out in just a couple of hours. It was another doozy of a wall, though, as the floor sloped away by 3/4"! To make everything look right, he had to hang the baseboard exactly level, then hang the top board 3/8" lower than it should have been. But, despite the crooked wall, the board and batten looks nice and straight. And did I mention, it's done?!

As promised, here's a close up of how Jeremy notched the corner of the ledge near the walkway with his jigsaw.

Next on the agenda is an overwhelming amount of tedious work--cleaning up insane amounts of sawdust, caulking every.single.board, spackling every.single.nail.hole, reattaching the quarter round, and painting. I caulked the very small wall behind the door this afternoon and it took me about 20-30 minutes to complete. At that rate, I'll be about 97 when we're done. ;)

Thanks for following along with our board and batten installation! I'll update in a few days with our finishing work progress! Anyone have a magic wand I can wave to make it just magically finish itself? ;)

Board and Batten Installation: Day 4

Catch up on Day 1, Day 2, and Day 3!

Let's just call today "Setbacks", shall we? My poor hubby. About two hours into the day, he was making great progress and had all of the vertical boards cut and nailed to one of the longer walls. He went to put on the top board and this is what he saw.

Totally not cool. He checked his measurements, but from the floor to the top of the vertical boards on both walls was 50". See? Proof! His measurements were spot on!

So what happened?! Why were the boards not lining up?!

Come to find out, the house has settled in that corner some (Our house isn't ancient, but at 15 years old, it isn't a baby either, so you naturally get some settling.) and near that corner of the room, the floor is 1/2" lower than the rest of the room. Grrr!

I felt terrible for Jeremy, because after 2 hours of work, the only thing he could do was rip all of the vertical boards he'd just finished installing off of the wall. This time, he installed the top board before the vertical boards, lining up the top board with the joining top board from the other wall. He was able to salvage the vertical boards by using his Dremel to cut the nails off. Then, he  used his circular saw to re-cut the vertical boards to fit in between the baseboard and top board. To get the boards to fit and accommodate the sloped floor, each board was a different measurement, all off from each other by about 1/4". So irritating. But, he was able to fix that wall in about an hour and a half and kept a good attitude about the whole thing.

After he finished that wall, he completed the wall behind the door easily. He notched the corner of the ledge with his jigsaw so no one would injure themselves on the sharp corner. I'll post a picture of the notched ledge tomorrow.

The next area he tackled was tedious territory. This nook in the room has four doors in it. Yes, four. Between the bathroom door, bedroom door, closet door, and walk out attic door, he had quite a lot to cut around and small spaces to get trim into! He also had to deal with light switches in this section of the room. He cut around the light switches, angling the cuts that directly join with the light switches. We are planning to get new light switches that are built out and chunkier to make them blend in with the board and batten.

 Blurry phone pic, but it was the only way I could get at least half of the nook into one photo. 

Between the lightswitch and that tiny piece in the corner, this small wall was a lot of work!

He also angled the ledge baords near any walkways and where it joined up with door or window moulding...you know, so no one needs to go to the emergency room after bumping into the wall. Haha! :)

Only one wall left, people! Then off to the next steps...spackle, caulk, and paint! SO thankful for this man and all of his hard work!

Board and Batten Installation: Day 3

Well, day three of our board and batten project was a success and went much faster than yesterday! Here's Day 1 and Day 2 in case you missed them. Jeremy was able to finish the other half of the wall with the attic door, the wall with the windows, and several baseboards today! I realized yesterday when I was writing about Day 2 that I had hardly taken any photos. So, to make up for it, today is photo overload! Haha! Of course, you'll have to deal with my mixture of real camera photos and grainy phone photos taken at night. ;)

I won't go into all the details again today since I already wrote them up yesterday, but here's a brief picture walk through of the installation steps.

First, Jeremy measured, cut, and nailed on the baseboards.

Next, he cut, measured and nailed up the vertical boards. He used his spacer board to make them equal distance from each other and checked each board with his level to make sure they were straight before he nailed them on.

The vertical boards that went under the windows were a bit tricky because they were thicker than the window moulding. Jeremy left them straight at the top until the point where the window molding stopped, then did an angle cut so they wouldn't stick straight out. He sanded them with his sander to make them nice and smooth. Here's a close up of how he angled the vertical boards under the window moulding. 

After the verical boards were up, he cut and nailed up the top board, then the ledge, then the moulding to finish it off.

Here's some phone photos of the progress Jeremy made today! I think he's pretty much amazing and is doing a great job! 

Window wall and the wall with the attic door are finished!

The next two photos are of the baseboards he installed. Oh, and yes, the room is full of sawdust! This is not a neat project, that's for sure! 

Hoping we can maintain the same pace tomorrow and keep knocking this project out!