Pinmimic: Owl Taggie Toy

For an explanation of my Pinterest series, click here.

So last year I pinned this adorable owl taggie one day, thinking it would be so much fun to make. Little did I know, it was a picture from Life in the Sass Lane, an Etsy Shop, and it cost $24 to buy! Uhhh... I don't know about you, but I don't have money to throw around like that. I wanted to make one for my new niece and I thought, "I can make my own pattern and figure it out."

**Note here: If you copy someone's idea to sell when they're already selling it, then you are breaking the law. If you're copying their idea to just make for someone you know, that's okay. Just so you're clear on that.

So I did. And I learned a few things:

1) Minky fabric hates my guts.
2) It's hard to make ribbons stay in place.
3) I forgot to put on the feet. Oops.

It doesn't look exactly the same, but pretty darn close. And really, in the end, I was just proud of myself for figuring it out without a pattern!

Planning Baby Girl's Room

I am currently sitting in our office-soon-to-become-baby's-room at a desk that's in the middle of the room, away from the walls which are half-taped and begging to be painted. And I'm itching to get there. But this 7-month-pregnancy bump and bad back are slowing me down so alas, here I am wondering why I didn't tackle the baby's room any sooner.

Not that I haven't been doing my research. And by research I mean spending hours on Pinterest, finding my inspiration for this room and pretty much mapping out every detail. In so doing, I created a billion projects for myself. Thankfully I have a totally-rad sister who loves doing room makeovers because she's coming to my rescue in a week to spend "as long as it takes" to get this nursery almost done. It also helps that she's bringing me all her baby girl clothes and accessories that her 10-month-old has outgrown.

So I'm planning that 4 weeks from now I will be totally ready for this baby and then just sit in the sun and rest until this baby makes her arrival. Okay so I'm being optimistic.

But that's totally besides the point of this post. When my sister offered to come, she asked me to make a montage that would show what I was thinking for Baby Girl's room so she could get a feel for it too. And thanks to Pinterest, it seemed like I could find a tutorial or at least a picture for everything I pictured in my mind. So here's what I came up with:

I wanted to keep the dominant colors in my room neutral so that next time around, if we're having a boy, I won't have to re-paint or take out furniture. Grey and off-white was the way to go for me. Then I loved the idea of adding pink and green. The green I could use in permanent pieces and I could switch out the pink accents for blue ones if again, we have another boy in the future. I found a good color scheme (that you can see above, although my off-white and grey are not the same colors as shown there).

Picking paint was a one-day nightmare for me. Why did I have to do it in one day? Because Ace Hardware was having an awesome deal on their paint and I found out about it one day before the sale ended. My first sample of grey turned out blue on my walls. Totally not what I was looking for. That's when I realized that I needed a grey with a warm undertone (and with 0 blue in it at all). My carpet is brown and so with a warm undertone, the grey wouldn't look so out of place.

My 2nd sample came out too brown, but I scored with my 3rd and 4th (some of these I got free at Lowe's with a coupon so I wasn't buying a ton of samples really). Either one would have worked, but I ended up going with Bleached Shadow. I bought one can of it in a darker shade and then asked them to mix me another can of the color, but mixed at only 60%. This is the way to do it if you want the same color but lighter. They can mix it at any percentage, you just have to ask!

The dark grey is for some of the furniture, the lighter grey is for the middle part of the wall (the green part in the picture above) and the off-white (I went with Bone White, but ended up mixing a little bit of brown with it because it was too white) will be for furniture and for the borders on top and bottom. The only paint I have left to get now is green for the dresser.

A word about chevron: I love it in small doses. The chevron fabric above is for the baby glider and I will mimic it on the love sign, but that's pretty much it. Which means I also still have another kind of fabric to find for my valance curtain and teething pads on the crib sides (neither of which are pictured above). Decisions, decisions.

In the end, the main theme of this room is: DIY cheap but cute. I'm using furniture I already have (with the exception of the dresser that I got from craigslist for $60) and my sister & I are doing/making everything ourselves. The paint is the most expensive part really and thanks to coupons and sales, I've bought that cheaper than usual (and I'm going to have leftover for sure! Anyone interested?). Keeping it frugal is how I balance my crazy-project-redo-everything side with my rational-we-should-not-be-spending-money side. And my husband basically tolerates it all (but I know he'll think it looks good when it's all done).

So in a few weeks I'll hopefully be posting a nursery reveal and praying that it looks just as good as everything pictured above or I totally blew previewing it all. :) I'm so excited to see it all done but tired at the thought of completing it all!

Table Makeover... Biggest Project of My Life.

First of all, so you can really appreciate how I badly I needed a table upgrade, here is exhibit A:

This is the table we got for free from Ryan's brother and sister-in-law when we got married. We were so grateful to have a table and chairs and it was nice that this table had 2 leaves with it. But... it squeaked. It didn't really bother me until Kaleb and all his friends/cousins/etc. were old enough to shake it and laugh at how much it squeaked. That just made it worse to the point where I couldn't cut my meat with a knife without hearing, "Squeak, squeak, squeak." Ahhh!

You really couldn't blame the table. It was my sister-in-law's parents' first table so it was easily 40 years old. And I think I was pretty good to be patient with the squeakiness for almost 7 years. I should deserve a tolerance award or something. :)

So I wanted a new table. But this table held up pretty well with kids and Ryan was concerned that if I bought a new one that our kids would just destroy it anyways. This concern was totally founded since my niece Rylee etched her name in their table... click here to see my sister's table redo (but not before you look at mine because hers will blow mine out of the water haha).

Anyways, so I was determined to find a used table for cheap that would go with chairs so that I could justify getting a wood table and risking my kids ruining it. And I found one that went PERFECTLY with my chairs for only $50 off craigslist. A wood table for $50 that was pretty well-taken care of. I was thrilled.

So here is Exhibit B, the new table with my chairs:

Oh it made me so happy to have a non-squeaky table that looked more up-to-date. :) But... now my table and chairs matched my floor and I needed 2 more chairs. So I decided to buy two more chairs from Walmart and then redo it all in a darker finish so it would stand out from my floor.

Now that it's all over with, I will fully admit that I was crazy. Delusional. Overly ambitious. Take any of the above. This project sounded way easier in my head, despite the fact that my sister had warned me that redoing chairs took forever.

It didn't just take forever, it was a beast. I seriously loathed those chairs at one point. It was completely unmotivating to get done sanding one chair and then look at the other FIVE I still had to do. We were able to sand some of each chair with our vibrator sander, but all those spindles and nooks and crannies had to be done by hand.

And to make matters worse, I totally messed up staining the first chair and had to re-sand it completely. I'm even including the picture so you can understand my horror at this first attempt:

 

Yes, I may have shed a few tears at this point. In case you're wondering why in the heavens this happened, it's because I sanded the darker parts more than the rest of the chair so it took the stain more. So I was back to 2.5 more hours of sanding. My hubby could see I was clearly in over my head and helped me sand the rest of everything. Bless that man for having faith in me that it would turn out okay in the end after my blunder.

So after the sanding was done, the next step was to stain again. In order to get the color I wanted, I had to mix 3 different colors of stain together. I wanted a darker color, but I also wanted a little red in it so that it would look warm, like my cabinets. The color didn't turn out to exactly match my cabinets, but it's similar and gives the same feel (and the dining set isn't right next to the cabinets anyways).

I put on to coats of stain, wiping off the first coat and then letting the second coat just dry. The reason I did this was because I felt like the color wasn't deep enough when I wiped off the stain. It's okay to not wipe off the stain like the stain can says, it just takes longer to dry and you have to make sure you evenly apply it before you let it dry.

After applying 2 coats of stain, I put 2 coats of semi-gloss polyurethane on. This was extra tricky with the spindles because if you didn't put it on well-enough, it would drip down. Have I mentioned yet how much I detested doing those chairs? Note of advice to anyone thinking of doing this: redo your table but buy new chairs. The table was easy-breezy compared to the chairs.

The table top is the exact same stain procedure, but I put 3 coats of polyurethane on it as it gets more of the hard use. Then my favorite part: spray-painting the bottom of the table black. Oh I'm so much better at spray-painting than staining. And I LOVE the contrast it gives my table, while totally going with my decor at the same time. I simply taped a dollar store table cloth to the top and sides of the table top to prevent from getting spray paint on it, then I went to town.

The trick that I have learned with spray paint is you can't try to cover it all in one coat. If you do that, you will end up getting it on too thick in some areas and you will have paint runs that look horrible. It takes patience. In this case, it took 3 coats of spray paint (which only took 2 cans by the way) to do it the right way. No runs and it still had good coverage. AND, spray paint takes a shorter amount of time to dry in between coats than stain or polyurethane. Another reason this was my favorite part.

Then I put 2 coats of polyurethane over the spray paint and I WAS DONE! Can't even describe how good that felt after working on this for almost 3 weeks (partially because there were days that were too cold here to do anything)! And, may I add, I did this while I was 6 months pregnant... I promise I wore a mask or it was well-ventilated.

So without further ado, here is the before (again) and the after:

Would I say it was worth it? Totally. Would I ever do it again? Heavens no. I will refinish a table again, but I will NEVER do chairs again. :)

Love this contrast!

The main reason I did this was to get what I wanted, but at a lower price than going and buying it in the store. So how much money did I spend in this upgrade, you ask? Well between buying the table, two more chairs, and all the materials (minus what I sold the old table for), I spent $150.

What would this table cost me if I bought it brand new (now remember this is all wood, not the cheap veneer tables you can get that look the same)? About $650 or maybe even more.

So my grand total savings for doing this myself: $500.  I'll take it!