swing of things

It's no secret how much I love home improvement projects.  But for as much as I love them, I took a much-needed break for basically the whole summer.  After painting every piece of trim in our house, among many other projects, I was beyond worn out.

However, I'm slowing coming out of hibernation, especially after I was introduced to Pinterest and spent a night hanging out with my long-time friend Jill.  Seriously, she is super crafty and creative and definitely has a nack for turning not-so-cool items into spiffy, new decorations.  In the words of Jill - "I just spray stuff."  Her love for spray paint has motivated me to jump-start my list of projects. So, thanks to you Jill :) Oh, and Pinterest is da bomb - do people even use that phrase any more?  Anywho, the site has given me a bunch of ideas for things I want to DIY, but more importantly, it's made me excited and ready to tackle more items on my loooong list of "things I want to do to our house".

Just cuz what's a post from me without a list, here's my list for the fall and winter:

• Replace hall bathroom faucet
• Build extra shelf in office
• Spray paint fireplace doors
• Update kitchen ceiling fan
• Paint kitchen cabinets and update hardware
• Replace kitchen sink window blinds with bamboo shades
• Paint patio door, frost glass, update hardware and spray paint hinges
• Spray paint deck light fixture

That's just some of the more interesting projects because my list also includes a bunch of other random projects like adding bike hooks in the garage, or DIY-ing some fun decorations (inspiration via Jill and Pinterest), and repairing our dining room wall that has a bunch of nicks and smalls holes from frames falling off my wall shelves. Yes, I've been made very well aware that our house is NOT child-proof by any means. [Update - the nicks have been fixed and painted]

So until I tackle some of the projects mentioned above, I'll share a few things we've completed recently.

We finally painted our basement.  It was one of the remaining areas we hadn't painted and since the walls were a wreak, this was something we desperately needed to get done.  With both of us working on it, this only took us a couple hours.  It's not a huge difference, but in person it looks much cleaner and much nicer.

Here are the before shots:

Here I am taping:

In progress:

And here's the basement all finished:

Still need to hang pictures and decorate, and there's the obvious that our basement is furniture-less, but that is like the last thing on my list.  Some of you may notice the addition of a treadmill in the pictures - more to come on that in a future post :)

So, on to the next.  We purchased a swanky new hanging light that will go above our kitchen table. I bought a Groupon to Rensen House of Lights and it expired at the end of September, so we figured we shouldn't wait any longer.  It's really cool, but I can't share any photos because the light still looks like this...

...and I forgot to take any pictures while we were at the store.  I'll for sure share pictures once we get it swapped out, but in the meantime, here's what our light currently looks like...

On one of my many favorite blogs, Young House Love, I saw an art project Sherry created (go here to see her finished product). I thought it was so neat and just had to give it a try. She cut out squares from paint swatches and arranged them from lightest to darkest and framed it.  So easy, and best of all for me, it was free.

Matt and I just happened to be stopping by Sherwin Williams to pick up some paint, so I grabbed a bunch of paint swatches.  Then when we got home I measured everything and cut out all my squares.

Next step was to arrange the squares and tape them all down to the paper. 

Finally, frame it and ta-da...finished.

It's not perfect by any stretch of the imagination, but it makes me happy and I kind like that it's not perfect.  Plus, did I mention?  It was free.

Ever since we, or I should really say, Matt, have taken up biking, we have accumulated a big ol' pile of stuff.  We were storing everything in a little nook right inside our basement door.  It worked for the time being, but I got really tired of opening the door everytime and sighing because it was so un-organized and just not all that pretty.

Time for some built-in-adjustable shelves.  Once again, I took some inspiration from Young House Love.  I'll admit that I was only the idea generator, because Matt actually did all the labor.

After we measured the dimensions, ran to Home Depot and came back with our goods, we realized we had them cut the shelves too short.  Dang it.  So we measured again, headed back out to Home Depot, again, and luckily arrived back home with the correct length this time.  These new shelves make me very happy.  Here's the finished product...

This next "project" really isn't a project as much as it is my obsession with re-arranging all the decorations in our house.  Things magically move around almost everytime I clean or get an idea in my head.  Nothing ever stays the same.  Practically from the day we moved in, almost 2 years ago, I've been on a personal quest to find the "perfect" fireplace mantel decorations.  Trust me, this is no easy task.  Especially since I gravitate toward the larger more bulky objects and the area between our mantel to the ceiling is quite small.

As I was snooping out the sale racks at Michael's, I came across a really cool vase that just happened to be only $5.  I'm sure this arrangement isn't permanent, but at least for the immediate future I'm really happy with it.

That's it for now, but I will definitely have a Part II for this post to give updates.  Anyone else have decorations that like to move around in their house??