The Bar That Got Iggy

It's just so fancy now.



And I couldn't be happier to be finished with this never ending project, or more thrilled with how it turned out! I tend to talk too much, so I'm going to throw out the absolutely fab after picture, before I start the rambling wordy part of this post. Feast your eyes on this baby:

I know! Can you even believe that it's the same piece of furniture?

Last week I shared the O'verlays that I painted to match the bar. O'verlays can be used by themselves on any piece of furniture but I wanted to add a mirror, because who doesn't love a good piece of mirrored furniture? I had two mirrors cut at a local glass shop. I brought the O'verlay in with me and asked them to cut it to almost the same dimensions. The mirror was 1/8 inch smaller on each side, but I'll give you the details on that later.

I was super nervous to actually glue the mirror down, because getting things to be straight or even is not a strong point of mine. I decided to make a really big paper template to use. I just taped a bunch of sheets of paper together to make it the same size as one of the doors of the bar. I marked where the knobs go, and then measured where I wanted the mirror to go.

I held it up and used a level to make sure everything was straight, and then cut out where the mirror would be. I was left with a very thin strip of paper that I taped onto the door. I realize there is probably a lot of better ways to make sure you are attaching something straight, but I found this the easiest thing for me.

I attached the mirror using a heavy duty mirror adhesive and a caulk gun.

I then attached the O'verlay to the mirror using a clear silicone adhesive. The reflection of the back of the O'verlay shows in the mirror, which is why I had painted the back, and why it's important to use a clear adhesive.

Once the O'verlay was centered there was a slight overhang, because the mirror was cut just a drop smaller.

I used paintable white caulk to fill the gap. I know, so many (smelly) adhesives for one project. Make sure you are working in a well ventilated area and wear gloves!  Once it was dry painted it gray like the rest of the bar. This gave the bar a more seamless look as opposed to hey, I glued a bunch of things on top if and lets call it a day.

When the final paint touch ups (I did some parts of the door also which is why in the above picture the colors look a little wonky) were done it was time to put this baby back together. Oh happy day!

I am loving this corner of furniture makeovers! The bar really complements the breakfront. The time put into this piece was so worth it. I have a completely different piece of furniture for what it would cost in just shipping fees to buy something new.

Does anyone have any major summer projects on the horizon? Let me know below! I can't believe I have such a big project done, and it's not even July yet. But then again, I did kind of start this thing ten months ago.

If you want to read about this transformation from the beginning, here are the links.

A Tale of Two (ok, one) Paint Chips
This is What a Really Awesome Husband Looks Like
Airing Your Dirty...
That Terrible Middle Stage
Not Quite There Yet
Overly Smitten with O'verlays

Cookies and Crayons for Two

We're in that time between school and camp where some parents go crazy, and I get excited to have everyone home with me. Is that weird? I just like hanging with them.

After spending the majority of yesterday in bathing suits outside, we spent the last few hours of sunshine in our teeny kitchen entertaining ourselves. The first thing on our agenda was baking cookies. Baking is a great activity to do with your kids, I just don't like having the goodies around after, because then I end up eating them. I experimented with all of the different cookies in a mug recipe, but honestly, they were just gross. I then stumbled upon a recipe which makes only two cookies, and after trying it out, let me tell you, they are a real winner. The recipe is from No. 2 Pencil and it's actually by the woman who brought us the cookie in a mug.

Start off by preheating your oven to 350 degrees, and line a baking sheet with parchment paper. Then soften two tablespoons of butter until just beginning to get melty and blend with two firmly packed tablespoons of dark brown sugar, 1 tablespoon granulated sugar, a pinch of kosher salt, and 1/4 teaspoon pure vanilla extract.

Add an egg yolk, 1/4 teaspoon baking soda, and 1/4 cup all purpose flour and mix well.

Add three heaping tablespoons of chocolate chips. Take a 30 second break as your kids try to eat all of the chocolate chips. Then mix it all up.

Form the cookies into two balls (make sure they are the same size so no one accuses the other of having the bigger one) and place on baking sheet several inches apart.

Bake for 8-10 minutes until edges are golden brown. (I did it for 10 minutes and they were extremely soft and the kids ended up eating them with a spoon.) The original instructions say when you take them out of the oven, bang it down on the counter so the cookies deflate and get a lovely wrinkled appearance. I do it and nothing happens, but people live a little and bang those cookies anyway. 

Take half a minute to torture your kids and get a picture of them, when really all they want to be doing is eating those cookies.  

These make really big cookies, so you can probably get four out of them, and just bake them for a little shorter. I love how we had this great activity to do together, but there are no unhealthy leftovers sitting around tempting me.

When we finished our cookie activity we moved onto a little project I've wanted to do for a long time. This is something that is not new at all, but I wanted to give it a go, so we made shaped melted crayons. You know what I'm talking about, it's when you take all your old bits of crayons, and melt them together in a mold, and get a new fun crayon shape. We have a huge bag of crayons that gets dumped out every time someone is coloring. Now we have six fun flowers to keep track of instead. No complaints here.

I put out labeled plates and let Moshe and Lily sort the colors. 

We decided to mix the purple and pink crayons together, so Lily can have all her favorite colors in one place.

After you have your colors sorted you need to get all the wrappers off the crayons. After going through the plate of red crayons, I was highly annoyed it was such a pain in the you know what. I consulted la google and was told to soak the crayons to make the wrappers come off easier. Genius. I don't recommend doing this with a fresh mani.

When the wrappers are all off, chop the crayons and fill up whatever mold you are using. I used a silicone muffin pan. I think it's ruined and wouldn't use it for food anymore, so I'm donating it to the play kitchen. Keep that in mind, don't use your really good pans.

Bake at 250 degrees for around 15 minutes, or until the crayons are melted. After it's out of the oven, I put it into the freezer to help it harden. Pop out the crayons, and viola! New art supplies. I love the way the different colors show.

Anyone here doing anything fun with their kids? It seems like school has been out forever, even though it has only been a week, but I am loving it!

Overly Smitten with O'verlays

Heeeey peeps, we're back to real time updates on the never ending bar project.

The last we left it, I had a very grey box that kind of resembled a large filing cabinet. {Sad faces.} I let it sit like that for awhile while I gathered supplies (and also because let's be real, it takes me forever to get things done). I do have to admit that the whole boxy grey thing started to grow on me the longer it sat. I'm feeling pretty good about how this will all turn out in the end.

I have a vision in my head of what I hope the bar looks like when I am (finally) done with it. When I first came up with the idea, I was nervous to attempt it, since it would involve using saws, and other tools I have never used before. Everyone has a level of DIY they are comfortable with, and while I figured I would give it a try, I wasn't exactly looking forward to building what I needed. And then I remembered O'verlays.

In the back of my head I knew about O'verlays, but I never looked into them. I'm so glad it popped into my brain to go check them out. O'verlays is a genius website where you can order decorative fretwork panels to customize your Ikea furniture, because not everyone wants their Swedish purchases to look the same, right? They have a bunch of different designs in the common sizes of Ikea furniture. Luckily for me, the design that I wanted to use, was one of the patterns they sell. I made paper templates of the sizes they offered, but since the bar is not an Ikea purchase, none of the options were really working. O'verlays does custom orders, and that's what I ended up doing. I told them the style and size that I needed, and not too long later it arrived at my door. The O'verlays are very light, but don't feel flimsy. You paint them, and then attach it to your furniture, and boom, upgrade. And now, Beyonce is stuck in my head.

Ok, Here's part of the plan:

My goal for the week is to finish painting them, so I can hopefully attach them to the bar next week. I set everything up and got my first coat on Monday  night:

This is the point where I say I really regret using high gloss paint. In my head I thought it would leave a very shiny looking surface. After I started painting the bar I realized you need to use enamel for that. The imperfections of the furniture is not well disguised now. The paint also seems tackier than semi gloss, which may be why the O'verlays looked like this yesterday:

You see in the corner, how the paint is sticking out? When I lifted the O'verlay off the table, it took the paint that got on the plastic drop cloth with it. It was a little annoyance that was easily fixed by gently sanding everything down with 220 grit sandpaper. Then it was onto the second coat. I didn't want another sticky paint situation, so I put my tuna hoarding tendencies to good use, and placed a few cans under each piece so it wouldn't sit directly on the plastic.

I used a small paintbrush stolen from the kid's craft supplies. It took about an hour of painting the first night, because I had to get in my painting groove. It was another hour yesterday because I needed to sand first. Each night that I painted the actual bar, it also took around an hour and it's kind of crazy how it took me the same amount of time to paint an entire piece of furniture, as it took to paint two small O'verlays. Even though you won't see the back of the O'verlays, I want to paint them too. I'm waiting for the second coat to really dry and cure first, because it would just suck if the front got ruined while I was painting the back. The crazy humidity is really not helping my paint drying (or anyone's hair, I'm sure).

So I'm sitting around waiting for paint to dry, and I hope by the end the weekend the second coat will be done and it will be on to the next step! But first, let me take a selfie I have to do another Lowe's run.

What you are up to on the sticky humid week? (Or maybe it's perfect weather where you live?) Let me know below!

Bow Big or Bow Home

It's my motto.

Bigger is always better, and we now have quite the collection of big bows for the Boo. When Lily started wearing bows every day instead of headbands, I made a bow holder to keep things organized. It's been a little bit over a year now, and we have run out of room in a serious way. Bows were basically living on the dresser and driving me crazy and something needed to be done about it.

The something that needed to happen, happened yesterday when I had a lot more important things to be doing. Anybody else do that? I tend to stop the task at hand, to do something else that I have been pushing off, when really I just need to focus on one thing at a time. We took a little road trip this weekend, and right in the middle of unpacking I decided I couldn't deal with the messy bow situation for another second.

I sorted the bows out by keeping the basic ribbon bows on the original bow holder that I made. (All of the little bows were given to us by a relative who outgrew them, so when Lily was born, we started off our bow collection with every color of the rainbow)

I then gathered my supplies from my stash, because there is nothing better than a free and fast project when really you are supposed to be doing other things like unpacking and laundry.

This DIY is so simple that I may be insulting your intelligence by even bothering to type it up. All you need is some ribbon, a key ring, scissors and glue. At first I was uber lazy and tried using a stapler to do the project, but that didn't exactly work, so I got out the glue gun and heated it up.

Cut the ribbon to your desired length, loop it through the key ring, glue it down and viola. Instant bow holder.

I also glued the bottom of the ribbon, so it would have a nice seam and not unravel over time.

I made two bow holders figuring that in the future I would need more space, and I would save myself all the energy needed to get out the glue gun again, but in the end I needed every inch of both ribbons. #wehaveabowproblem

I already have hooks hanging on the closet in the kid's room for their hats, so I just hung it up by the key ring.

A little bit of organizing, and I had all of the bows hanging up and off the dresser.

So now I have a fully functioning bow organizational corner in Lily's room. It's great to have everything up, so I can see what we have and not end up with two big white bows (Anyone notice that?)

And guys, I obviously finished unpacking. You know. By like midnight. But it's all good.

How are you all organizing your hair stash? Let me know below!

Not Quite There Yet

I said I would be back today with the bar reveal. I didn't intend for this to be the final reveal because I still have some plans to make it look like a nicer piece of furniture. This was supposed to be the "It's Good Enough for Now" reveal. But sadly it's not even good enough for now. It still looks pretty bad. I guess I am still planted firmly in the middle stage of the project where things aren't looking great and I just want it to be over. And so I present you with a big grey box:

Sigh. I'm in the middle of collecting the materials I need for the next stage of the makeover. I really hope this turns out how I see it in my head because right now it just ain't pretty. 

Have a great weekend everyone! 

That Terrible Middle Stage

Every project has it. You are over the beginning rush of, "Hey! I can do this!" and before your final feeling of "hells yeah I did it!" And it's just not a good place to be.

Working on the middle stage is even less fun when your day starts off at the dentist, where a whole host of horrors is performed on your toothache, followed by going to work, and an endless trip to Ikea after that. (Side story: I once ran over a pigeon in the Ikea parking lot. It was absolutely horrible and I now consider any trip there where I don't murder a bird a success, so I'm not actually complaining about being in Ikea today.)

Once the kids went to sleep I got down to the first coat of paint. I'm not sure why but my paint was just not cooperating tonight. It was very bubbly and it took a long time to ensure the layer of paint was thin and perfectly smooth looking. 

I do have to say I am loving the color so far, it's a little darker in person than what is showing in the picture.

I'll be back once the bar is put back together. I don't want to bore you with a post about the second coat of paint that will be going on tomorrow. Stay tuned and check back here Friday for the reveal! 

Anyone else in the middle of something they just want to be done with? Or make me feel better and tell me I'm not the only Ikea bird murderer out there... 

Airing Your Dirty...

Airing your dirty laundry in public is bad. Airing your dirty laundry on the internet is even worse. But I'm only airing my dirty living room so that's ok, right? So here goes nothing:

In an ideal world I would have a garage to work out of. But I don't. Sigh. I painted the breakfront on my little enclosed porch, but it's still a little too cold to work outside so I decided to paint the bar inside. I moved the couch and rolled the rug back and thought it was really bad. And then I realized it was only going to get a lot worse before it got better... 

Ta da! The sanded and newly clean (it took a vacuum, liquid deglosser, and tack cloth) bar made it's way back inside and took up basically all available floor space. I laid out the newspaper, taped off the parts I didn't want any paint on and got to work priming.

For once in my DIY life I underestimated the amount of time it would take to do something. Woo hoo! So while I thought I would still be priming at this very moment, I finished a half an hour ago. Hooray for a job that took only an hour instead of two! 

I'm hoping tomorrow goes as well as today. I'm really excited to see the first coat of paint go on because in all honesty I forgot what the color even looks like. That's what happens when you buy your paint in September and don't do anything with it until April. 

Anyone else have a productive Monday night? Let me know below!

This is What a Really Awesome Husband Looks Like:

The bar update is finally underway! I've had the paint all ready to go for the past seven months so really it's about time we got this party started.

I tend to really underestimate the man power and time it takes to complete things, and I have to admit I thought I would be putting the first coat of primer on this evening. You can call this blogging in real time. The above picture was taken about an hour ago, after Daniel spent the entire day sanding the monster. He's covered in dust and our apartment is not looking much better (even though all sanding happens out on the porch.) In my head I had this thing painted and put back together by Friday, but now I'm realizing my brain doesn't live in reality. 

I have a long day ahead of me tomorrow where I need to clean this little baby of all the sawdust. Ugh. Worst job ever. If I'm lucky I might be able to get the primer on as well, but I guess we'll see how it goes. I'm going to try to do blog updates on this project as it's happening so stay tuned! 

Here's the very unglamourous before picture: 

The sanding was an epic task on the old honey-do list, so a huge shout out and thanks to D! This project couldn't have started without him. 

What have you all been up to this weekend ? Any big projects underway now that it's finally nice out? 

Sometimes a Pinterest Project Goes Exactly As Planned

Inspiration: 

Reality: 

Boom. 

#shortestblogpostever

More on this little project soon. Happy weekend everyone!

DIY Faux Makeup

Happy first day of Spring!

I have to show you a super cute and super fast project I made for Lily.  For a while Miss Boo would watch me put my makeup on every morning and be thrilled when I gave her a brush to play with. I wanted to give her some makeup to play with too, but I didn't want her actually putting anything on her face, so here is my version of faux makeup.

Start with a trip to Target, or you know just start your Tuesday off like you normally do, and you will end up at Target anyway.

I bought a bunch of cheap makeup and nail polish (I think the most expensive thing I bought was $3) and some brushes. The makeup that you're getting doesn't really matter because you will be getting rid of it, you only need the case it's in. The nail polish should be in colors you would want to use for your face, cheeks, and eyes.

I used a knife to score the makeup until it got really crumbly and then just threw it out. You could also do this project with old makeup containers that you have. Two of the eye shadows that I used were my old ones that only had a little bit left, so Lily has some MAC and Lorac because no one should have only drugstore makeup in their kit.

When you have all the makeup out of the case, wash them out and rinse them until you have squeaky clean empty cases.

You then simply take the nail polish color that you want and pour it into the empty case. I had a nude color for "bronzer" a light pink for "blush" and green, blue, and a metallic silver (for hitting the baby night life scene) for eyes. The cleaning out the case and the pouring of the nail polish took about five minutes each, so at this point its only a 10 minute project. I left the makeup to dry over night with a window open, and the next day they had dried and shrunk. The color wasn't coming up to the top of the case so I added the nail polish a second time. The pink nail polish was almost empty so I cleaned the brush off with some acetone, and left the bottle open to dry up as well.  I realized that letting it dry inside was a huge mistake because it stank to the level of 10 nail salons combined, so I brought it out and left it on my porch with a colander covering it. I wanted it to dry without any gross things getting stuck inside. I left it outside for a week so it would really air out. It still has a very faint smell of nail polish but I figure its not dangerous and its ok to play with.

With the addition of one of those free sample makeup cases, I'd say Lily has herself a sweet beginning to playing with makeup.

And she loves it! She's been playing with it for about a week now, and she couldn't be more smitten. We've all had countless makeovers and manicures from her, and "makeup!" is now her number one request.

In about 12 years or so, when she needs to know about real makeup, I'll be sending her to my sister. I'm a one eyeliner, two lipsticks, and face powder kind of girl, while my sister can go on for hours about the pros and cons of the Naked Palette 1, 2, and 3. We all have our own talents.

This was a fast, easy, and cheap project, but if you think your daughter would like faux makeup, and you don't want to make any, this is an adorable option from Amazon. I kind of want it for myself.