If At First You Don’t Succeed …

If you’ve been around a while you’ve seen me through Plan A, which is basically me coming to terms with the idea that I don’t have the $, the time, or the house to make my home look like it belongs on the coast of the Bahamas but I’m going to do everything in my power to make it look like the best little house it can be. I also have pretty much have no idea what I’m doing so Pinterest, my pocket book, and I are stumbling along trying to get it just right. In the meantime there’s been some trial and error or we’ve just outgrown something we tried before. but we’re trying again!

Exhibit A: The Closet Office 

• The desk was too deep to actually reach the stuff in the back.
• We don’t hardly use the computer or printer anymore since we gave up the internet bill.
• That file cabinet is just UGLY and I can’t get to it to fix it because it’s tucked back into that corner and won’t come out!
• As deep as it was there wasn’t actually any room to craft. I pretty much use my phone for bills and things now so I needed a crafting space more than an office.

Exhibit B: The Girls Room (more recently)

• Basically the girls weren’t even using this room anymore except to make a toy mess when friends came over. It’s a long story but they have a new room that was meant for Anberlynn but they both sleep together anyway. The house is too small for wasted space.
• The carpet in here was toast after an unfortunate permanent marker accident.
• Though all their friends and I thought their princess loft bed was pretty cool, the girls apparently didn’t.
• Anberlynn will be going to school this fall *sniffle* and we need a place better than the kitchen table to homework and school projects.
• Me only having craft closet isn’t working. I have more supplies than fit in a closet and cutting fabric on the coffee table was not fun.

So there you have it, a couple of things we are working on because they didn’t work out the first time. Luckily, we are learning and getting better at it every time!

We are trying to make our house run smoother and more efficiently and make it us all at the same time. Who knew it would be such a tall order?

Painted Bathroom Backsplash

Once up on a time I found this pin for Moroccan tiles.

Could you not just drool over that all day?! The website says, “Each of these tiles is hand-made and hand-antiqued; a layer of stain is applied to the surface and the edges distressed to give an aged appearance.”

*whimper*

I didn’t even look to see how much they were. Right now the economy tile at Home Depot is out of my budget! But do you know what’s not? Paint. Especially found-it-in-the-garage-paint. And so, inspired by these painted back splashes, I did.

Isn’t it gorgeous!!!?

Ignore my paint clothes and the 3 burnt out light bulbs and just drool with me here for a second.

What’s that? you need a close up? Ok!

How’d I do it? I bought a roll of stencil making material and cut it out using my Cricut. It’s such a simple design that you could totally cut this out by hand though.

You can see where I cut the stencil and taped it back together with painters tape to get into the spaces I needed around the edges and the bottom. I used repositionable spray adhesive to hold the stencil up while I was using it. Spraying over a pizza box help not make my entire bathroom sticky.

And one more time burnt out bulbs, paint clothes, and all!

For the record I bought new CFL bulbs for the light fixture and they show off the “tiles” even more! It’s crazy amazing how beautiful they are in person! New pictures will have to wait though while I finish up all the other craziness I have going on right now!

Easy DIY Family Home Evening Chart

If you don’t already know I am a member of the LDS church AKA Mormon. An activity the church encourages is setting aside a night of the week to spend with your family to get together and teach important values. I’m not great or even good at planning so I need all the help I can get!

Enter the FHE Chart

I let the kids help me repaint the scrap board  and use my Cricut to cut the letters and name tags. Then we ran it all through the laminator!

Crafting is an important value, right? I’m totally counting this as a Family Home Evening Activity!

My favorite part is the way they attach. I used 3m Command picture hanging strips for the name tags. Now they are easy to switch around every week!

Now all that’s left is for me to actually get in gear and use it!

An Organization Transformation!

There have been a LOT of things going wrong lately. The short of it is that both my car and my house tried to kill me. It would be pretty easy to get down about all of it and I’ll admit that I’m pretty close to pulling out my hair now and then but I have some really awesome friends! Every time life’s getting me down one of them is around the corner pulling me back up.

This time my friend Kristin got me the hook up with with a fabulous pantry makeover! She’s pretty much the best Tupperware consultant ever!

Don’t believe me?

Check this out:

That was my pantry before she sent in the troops. It’s pretty chaotic. I couldn’t reach most of it and some of it was even expired! Ew.

Seriously. HOW did I ever find anything? WHY did I let myself live with a pantry like that for 6 YEARS when the whole time it could have looked like this:

Yep same pantry. Now, I did toss a few expired things but it is NOTHING compared to the food storage that I brought back into it. There’s and extra 5# bag of sugar and an entire canister of oatmeal! I also added another little bag of popping corn, a package of quinoa, and almost half of a 25#bag of rice! There’s almost 3x as much pancake mix in there too!

She recommended that I roll out the label maker and it finished it off perfectly.

Let’s try a close up!

Before:

After:

Doesn’t that just make you breathe a sigh of relief?

If your pantry needs a hook up with some Tupperware goodness too check Kristin’s website out by clicking here!