A run, giving thanks and Black Friday!

I hope you all had a very blessed Thanksgiving.  We certainly did.  We are very blessed with sweet neighbors who invited us for Thanksgiving dinner.  And like I mentioned in my previous post, I was attempting to get the dinning room redecorated for dessert at our house.  Got it all done somehow!  I'll share a full reveal of the room next time.

Since I didn't have to spend the whole day cooking this year, Emily and I signed up for the Turkey Trax run Thursday morning. My regular running buddy, Tucker, came along too.

Thankfully, it wasn't too cold and we ran a good race.   Emily needed to stop briefly a few times when she'd get a stitch or going up a steep hill. (See us walking up hill here on the right.)

Emily is very proud and just a little boastful to have beat me to the finish line! Little stinker!  See if I'll be as generous with stopping next time. ;)  We had to start in the back with Tucker and with over 1000 runners, it was a good way back. I haven't seen our official time yet.

After dinner and dessert back at our house, more of our friends came and we spent the evening playing Quelf.  It's an odd little board game, but pretty fun. One notable play, everyone was too mess up my hair.  They had way too much fun with this one!

Emily really wanted to experience Black Friday this year and since we didn't have any family visiting and were home, I thought this was a good chance to give it a try.  We were fairly low key about it. We got to the mall at 6 am and we since the anchor store we parked at had opened at 4am we didn't have a long line or huge crowd.

It was a successful shopping trip. She found several outfits to put under the tree. We had shared some fun mother daughter time and now she really can't wait for Christmas!!  I would do it again, just like this. The lines weren't terribly long and not any more crowded at the stores we shopped at than on a busy Saturday.

Mad dash and Thankfulness

Recently, I feel like I've been in a mad dash of painting and re-decorating.  I do crazy things like this sometimes.  I want to get a project done, see a good time for a self-imposed deadline and go for it.  Sometimes I make it and sometimes I don't.

I've been slowly redecorating our dinning room.  It started with this buffet and the vignette I put together on the top.

 

From there, ideas floated around in my head and I began to get a vision of what I wanted the room to look like.  Then, I scored the perfect corner hutch on Craig's List for $65 and the wheels were in motion.

Not to mention,  I know that my furniture painting days are numbered since the temperature is slowly dropping.  So I figured now was as good a time as any to get my dinning room redo completed.  And with Thanksgiving quickly approaching that seemed like a great deadline.  I hope to reveal the room on Thanksgiving Day when our neighbors come over for dessert.

Here's the list of what I've been doing or plan to do.
1. Paint, wax hutch, Duck Egg Blue
2. Paint and wax dining chairs, Old White
3. Recover chairs
4. Sew curtains

I wisely decided to hold off on refinishing the table.  I'm so glad I was at least slightly realistic about the whole project. (wink, wink)

Before this mad dash started, I added a few fall decorations around the house.  Here's our fall mantle using the palette wood piece I made as an anchor like I did for Halloween. I simply added a few  things from around the house and the fall decorating box.

If you look closely, in the frame on the mantle is a word art verse from 2 Chronicles I created.  I wish I was better at committing verses to memory.  I love having reminders of God's blessing in our home. I'm hoping this will help us all remember.   It's a printable I wanted to share with you too.  First I made it vertical and then I decided I wanted I wanted it horizontal. So you can choose the right one fo your space. ;)

If you click on the version you want you can download the file directly from here, via Keep and Share.  Hopefully you can find a place for it in your Thanksgiving decor. The pdf files are set up for a 5 x7 frame.

I also wanted to share this great vignette with you.  Do you remember the scary dresser?  Well, imagine the smile on my face when I found it looking oh so fabulous at my friend's booth at the Marketplace!  Pretty amazing huh? (Please excuse the iPhone photo though.)

Off to rip some more of the old trim off the dinning room chairs.  Four down and 2 more to go!!

Fall Colors

I just love the color inspiration image I worked with for GCD Studios this month.  Such a great fall palette!

I also was inspired by the loose compartmentalization of this fabulous picnic box and the layering.  Here's the layout I created.  I just love these (2) so much!

Closer...

Supplies: Papers from the Great Outdoors collection and Fun House Collection.  Chipboard letters: GCD Studios and American Crafts  Chipboard words and brads from the Soul Food collection.

Scary Dresser, DIY Chalk Paint

In honor of Halloween, I thought it be a good time to share this scary looking dresser makeover.  Even the seller on Craig's list dubbed this dresser the "Frankenstein of dressers".
Here's the scary before.

Like most projects I work on, I did learn a few things with this piece.

1. Never let a seller deliver items.  If they aren't in as good as condition as you thought, it's mighty hard to tell them to take it back.

2. Seller's interpretation of "in good working order" is sometimes very loose.

The drawers did work, but not very well.  The sliders were metal on wood.  Not a good combination.  In the end the client and I decided to cut our losses and resell it.  She was going to use it as her dresser in her bedroom on a very large wall.  She and I both doubted my skills to fix it well enough for everyday use.

I got lucky when a decorator friend of mine said she'd take it off my hands if I'd paint it to  match some other furniture she was using in a model home.  I was super excited!

I think it came out really great. And most importantly my friend loved it.

Yes, I do realize I need to work on my staging, but really I'm just happy I could convince my husband to move this heavy monster to this clean wall in the garage. I grabbed a few things from around the house, snapped a few photos and let him load it on the truck.

I almost forgot to tell about my experience with DIY Chalk Paint. I used Calcium Carbonate mixed with sample paint from Benjamin Moore per No Minimalist Here. Honestly, I don't think this will be something I do again soon.  I had a really hard time mixing it smooth.  And when I used a roller on the top of the piece, the chalk looked fine going on, but dried with little clumps of white dispersed across the top and I ended up sanding it out and repainting it with a brush.  To be sure I had a durable finish on it, I used Wipe On Poly from Minwax.  I knew there wouldn't be an issue with yellowing since the piece was black.

I believe Annie Sloan Chalk paint is definitely superior to this and is worth the investment. I wanted to give it a try and needed the piece to be a true black per my client's wishes.  Now I know. If I got in a pinch with color or time I might try it again, but it definitely wouldn't be my first choice of paint.