HOUSE UPDATE {linen closet and kitchen beam}

For the last five months, my linen closet has been open and messy and not very pretty. 

 

So I was very excited when Andrew set out to fix that. He started with a frame. 

Then he attached the cabinet doors built and stained in his nearly nonexistent spare time. 

Add some knobs and my hallway looks a million times better!

This week, Andrew is finishing the rustic beam across the kitchen ceiling. This project is free except for the cost of stain...thanks again, to our lovely collection of old pallet wood. More to come on this later. 

HALLOWEEN COSTUMES {2012}

I didn't get super creative with the costumes this year. I was just too tired to care. We also bought pumpkins that never got carved and planned decorations that never got put up. I use the excuse that I'm conserving energy for Christmas. 

We went to a Halloween party mid-October and I just pulled out last year's bumblebee costume. Our new neighborhood friends never saw the costume last year anyway. Then I tried to think of something for Andrew that would correlate with a bee. 

A beekeeper? Winnie the Pooh? A honeypot? In the end I found it was easiest to turn him into a bird. 

I had a T-shirt made that said: "Tweet. Tweet." I had Andrew tape craft feathers all over himself. And I planned to make him a baseball cap with a beak, but bought him an Angry Birds hat instead. (Feeling lazy, remember?)

In the end, it was this hat that confused people as to what we really were. They kept saying that I was a bee and Andrew was an Angry Bird...missing the entire "Birds and the Bees" concept entirely. Oh well. 

For school, I couldn't be the bee again.  Last year's kids would remember. So I went further back in time and pulled together my student costume for a second time...again spending the entire day clarifying that I was not a gangster, but a backpack wearing, teacher's pet pest.

I'll try again next year. 

PROCLAMATION PRINT {decorating the great room}

This print is based on The Family: A Proclamation to the World. I love the way this document lays out God's laws and purposes for family relationships in a world where things definitely need to be clarified.

Rather than hanging all nine paragraphs on the wall and making it hard for me to focus on specifics, this print focuses instead on the nine more important words: 

"Successful marriages and families are established and maintained on principles of faith, prayer, repentance, forgiveness, respect, love, compassion, work, and wholesome recreational activities."

I saw a similar one on the Etsy shop Kiki & Company, but after the owner was listed as "on vacation" for about a year, I got impatient waiting to buy her's and used Photoshop to create my own. This ended up being better because I could choose my own fonts and colors...and it was free.

I printed it as an 11x14 for a buck and displayed it on the mantel in a Wal-mart frame spray painted white. 

Looking for more color, I sewed a bunting from thrift store fabric finds and draped it across the vintage windows.

This other picture frame is filled with photos of important women from my heritage: Mom, Grandma Jennie, and Great Grandma Maggie. 

I have a future project in mind that involves more ancestral photos, barn wood, chicken wire, and clothespins. I'm excited to build and share that later, but in the meantime, it will wait as item number fifty-seven on my to-do list. 

But this reminds me...I am going to eventually need help (pretty please?) from some photo bearing family relatives (Dad? Rhonda? Grandma?) getting scans to represent all the branches of our family tree.

Anyway...this room does not completely satisfy me yet. But it is coming together piece by piece. And I love my homemade Proclamation print!