A Closer Look at my Craft Room: It's Done... but not Quite!

Hey all! I am back and ready to show you what all has been going on here in the past couple of weeks. It's been kind of crazy around here with my friends' [Chris and Julie] wedding coming up in about two weeks plus the stuff we have been working on in the house.

Remember this photo from here?

Two weeks, later, it is now this!!!

I am pretty pumped about this really easy makeover that we did in my craft room. It's the best birthday gift so far! My husband is a giver, he would give me the moon if I asked for it. He is wonderful and awesome and is crazy enough to buy into my ideas. 

He was expecting for this whole makeover to cost $500 or maybe a little bit more. But guess what happens in March? ALL GOOD THINGS! Yes, indeed. The week after my birthday, we both spent our days comparing prices for materials online. We knew we needed 2 15-inch base cabinets, and a 30-inch base +  a 10 ft countertop. I was scoping the internet for coupon codes, printable coupons whatever I could scrounge to lower the cost because even if we had the money for this makeover, we weren't going to be dumb and be letting good deals slip through our fingers. We were better than that!

Enter a friend of ours who has decided to remodel her kitchen. She comes and tells me that she got a few cabinet pieces from Menards who was having a spring sale and the cabinets are on sale too. I got online and went to their website and found out this makeover was gonna cost half the price we were planning on spending. That night, John and I ordered what we needed and the next day, with a truck and trailer in tow headed to Menards to pick up the goods! :) Even the people at the store were pretty surprised how cheap it all cost. They kept asking John if that was really all he paid for the stuff over and over! 

Anyway, we got them home and got to work after doing our happy dance... [you don't want to see that!] Here's John measuring how much we were going to take off from the countertop. I think this was the same night we bought the cabinets. lol It doesn't take much to get him on work mode. Just buy him the goods! 

This was me the next day. John loves building and cutting and using his power tools... but he doesn't like to paint. Thank God I don't mind painting! :) The bookshelves on each end of the counter we got for free from John's parents. They were detached parts of this gigantic entertainment center that they weren't using anymore. 

I have painted so much in the past year and a half, I think I can paint with my eyes closed. These cabinets and bookshelves were nothing to do. I was armed and ready. I used Zinsser's Cover Stain [oil-based primer] and Sherwin Williams Dover White because I had it in hand and I wanted the whole thing to match the trim all over the house to make it look like it was there forever. :)

The insides of the bookshelves I painted that crazy pink at first. I thought it was going to grow on me. Sadly, it didn't. I found a sample can I had purchased a few months ago while I was deciding what to paint our guest bedroom. It's a dark teal and when I rolled that on there, I just knew it was meant to be. 

It took a good four to five days to get everything painted and get the paint to cure. This process takes so much patience. Take my advice, give the paint time to set and cure, otherwise, it will start chipping and peeling and cracking soon as you start using your cabinets. 

I cringed every time I walked into the mess! But I had to keep myself from slapping on a new coat of paint until the previous coat has dried. I just didn't want to be making repairs before I could start enjoying my space!

Here's John [above] helping me put the doors back on! I was so excited. Then we went to the home store to pick up some essentials. We picked up cabinet pulls, cabinet pull alignment guides, and the power hub on my counter. These didn't cost much.

The guides cost us about $6. They made installing the cabinet pulls a breeze. He had all 10 pulls installed in less than 20 minutes! :)

While he was doing what he was doing, I was on the other side of the room, working on this to give to his parents the next day. It was going to be their 41st wedding anniversary. I made this print a long long time ago. I just kept forgetting to get it done for them. 

This is the power hub from Le Grand that John picked up for me at the Home Depot. It took him but a few minutes to install it on my counter. The guy has tools coming out of his ears. So this was pretty easy. He also put a whole on the other side of the countertop so I can have access to the outlet underneath. My Silhouette machine is now sitting comfortably by it. The goal was for me to not to have to climb under the cabinets to plug anything in. He gave me all the comforts I needed! :)

And here she is again! 

The cabinets are pretty much empty. I am slowly going through my stuff and have purged and have been organizing for days now... and I keep finding more as I go. This is going to take awhile. I just need to keep going until I get to the end of this process so I can forge on to the other projects that John and I have going on. We have a couple other projects going on right now that we are trying to finish. We never sit down. Never.

Here's what's in the bottom of the bookshelf on the right.

Here's what's in the bottom of the left bookshelf. :) My fabric stash has a home now!!! 

See, this one cabinet has nothing in it. Not sure why the iron is in it either! lol 

This is as far as I got with the middle cabinet. I have old kits on this paper tower. 

The two middle top drawers have embossing materials, embellishments, copic markers, sewing kit, etc. 

This is the drawer on the far right. It has my thank you cards, camera straps, sewing machine pedal, and i don't know what else in it. lol 

But... my most favorite part is the 10 feet of workspace! :) 

Excuse the messy desk. It's Project Life time around here. I still can't get over the fact that we finally did what we always wanted for this room! This is going to be a work in progress for a while, given I do have some of my stuff stored in closets all over the house. Speaking of closets, my walk-in closet is next on the list. John has a mild heart attack every time he walks in there. lol 

Here's a close up of what's going on on this desk! 

Remember when I said we never ever sit down? Last night John and I were in here admiring the progress this room is taking, we found that we don't like that armoire sitting in the corner. He thinks that the sub-floor underneath that corner is loose because the armoire wouldn't sit level. It's not way off, but if you know my husband, he gets a little over-dramatic about un-level surfaces. I know he is going to want to fix this. At the same time, he is saying that we ought to move the armoire  on the other side so we can maximize the space and add like a corner desk or a place where I could cut fabric. 

I think it's a brilliant idea, but for now, I just want to enjoy my space. Maybe in the fall we can revisit it  and do something about this corner desk/fabric cutting area. :)

This is my most favorite spot in the world! It is mine and my ideas come to life in this room. This is where everything that is pretty that is in this house and that comes out of it is made. 

I am so thankful that I have a husband who understands the importance of having personal space and a place where I could be me, no holds barred, make messes and not worry about the paint splatters on my desk or my stuff. Most importantly, I don't have to craft from totes, bins and share a space with John anymore [he does have a pretty rad music room by the way that I put together for him! So don't be fooled by his puppy eyes! lol] He also is in the process of putting his very own techy home recording studio together so he isn't doing too bad. 

I love that this room has a window that faces west. I get to watch the sun set every single day in here. I love the warmth it brings in.  I just love windows and natural light, period. It's the only way I would photograph anything. 

So there you go, folks. I hope you enjoyed your trip to my craft room. :) 

See you again soon!

Hello There!

Hello! 

I hope everyone has had a nice Halloween. We didn't do anything halloweeny [no, that's not a word]. I am not a big fan of the holiday. It seems to me like it happens, kids/people overload on candy and then nothing...  So I don't invest time or money on it. I did end up channeling my energies into other things, like play with my Silhouette. :)

I finally got a Silhouette Cameo early in October. I say 'finally' because I have been planning on getting it for like a year and a half now and I got it at an unbelievably low price. Getting it was one of those right place, right time kind of thing. My Cameo only set me back $70 as opposed to the $269 price tag it has on Amazon or anywhere else. And it was very very brand new when I got it because the person I bought it from did not want it at all.

 

I have played with it a ton. And I have cut quite a bit of stuff from it... and I am very very impressed by all that I learned about the Silhouette Cameo in comparison to my Cricut Expression and the other stuff I have that has to do with the Cricut. Here's my list:

1) The Cameo doesn't require cartridges, unlike the Cricut. However you do need a computer with the Silhouette machines. But what crafter/paper crafter doesn't have one nowadays? Also, as a Cricut owner, it is an awful feeling paying $20 for a cartridge just so I would get the one or two images I have my eyes on. The Silhouette images only cost 0.99 cents a piece and you can cut any .PNG, .JPG files you have on your arsenal. And if you have the Designer Studio software, you can cut .SVG files too.

2) The design software for the Cameo comes free with it. I paid at least $20 for the Cricut software. My bestfriend, Sara and I got ours from ebay and spent days, maybe weeks waiting for the right deal to come around. Then I spent at least $40 on Sure-Cuts-A-Lot just so I could use the fonts on my computer and non-Cricut .SVG files without depending on my cartridges. 

3) You had me at Print and Cut! Yes, the Silhouette has this capability and I didn't have to buy a totally different machine. I am able to print any image through my printer and cut them in my Cameo.

4) The detailed cuts are SUPERB! I can't tell you all how happy I was when I found out that I could load my vinyl into the machine without the mat! You could certainly NOT do this with the Cricut and there is no guarantee the Cricut blade won't rip your vinyl either. I am loving the presets on the Silhouette software.

5) I love the weight of the Cameo compared to the Cricut. I have tried to lug my Cricut around with me in the past, and none of them was a pleasant experience. I could probably load my Cameo in a plastic sack, that's how light-weight it is. 

6) The learning curve. To me, there is/was none. I am used to using the Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop and I am used to using paths, layers, adjustments etc. So for me, it was easy transitioning from the Cricut to the Silhouette.

I may have forgotten to mention some stuff, but the bottom line is, I love my Cameo. It is totally so much better than what I am used to.

 

John, my Husband has been wanting me to do this for a long long time. But I couldn't do it with my Cricut. I had forgotten about it until a couple of days ago while I was playing with the Illustrator and I bumped into it. So I laid the stuff out on AI and went to cutting this morning.

I also made this last week...

After I painted our kitchen, I found that getting rid of the wallpaper in there also required starting from scratch decorating-wise. So I really can't show much of it right now. It is in the works and John and I are in the process of figuring out the route we want to go design-wise for our kitchen because it has taken a totally different personality soon as I started rolling that grey paint on the walls. :) I wasn't surprised but it sure made me re-think our furniture choices and all kinds of other stuff. 

One of the things I had to re-think was our window treatment/s

 

We only have one window in the kitchen, but we have french doors leading into our back porch and backyard. There used to be lace everywhere in this kitchen. I love lace. Every time I go window treatment shopping, when I see lace, the search is over. This time around though, I decided against it but this doesn't mean I don't have lace anywhere in my house now. I have them all in my craft room.

I've seen a ton of these [photo above] on Pinterest. So I decided I'd give it a shot. I am on a sewing kick so this is a No-Sew project. I actually sewed the slats onto my fabric to secure it. The only tricky part is making sure that all the slats are on straight otherwise, your shade won't cover your window like it's supposed to. The level was my bestfriend during this whole process!

In addition to my subway art, I also added a few other things... I made sure we had a place for precious gifts and memoirs from loved ones. I am working on a really special display for Grandma Turner, John's Granny. In the process of making this house ours, we also don't want to forget that she is responsible for us getting it, and we want to make sure we are reminded every day of her and how wonderful she was. :) I will make a post for it very soon. 

I also did some shopping. Fall is when I do a lot of it because I love fall and winter, and this is also the time when summer clothes go on sale. So I go on a clicking frenzy online and spend most my days waiting for the UPS or the mailman to deliver the goods to me. I love shoes but we are very partial, we love Nike and I love Zappos.

 

 

Also got these gorgeous boots. They [may be] Nine West.

 

And last but definitely not the least, I put one of our trees up in the kitchen! :) To me, Christmas ALWAYS trumps halloween. I did buy two bags of candy, and made loots for my little buddies Reed and Riley [our friends' kids], everything else went to John's belly. He loves candy and he doesn't like sharing. 

 

So, I really didn't miss Halloween. :) I have had a really great time the past couple of weeks getting my house ready for Thanksgiving, Christmas and the New Year. I am ready for Christmas most of all. It's my favorite holiday. 

I'll be back soon for more updates. I am having a good old time working on our house. This has been a great year!

Laterz gatorz,

A Week in Daytona Beach

Hi All! I don't know if I still have readers anymore from being gone too long but HI anyway! The Hubs and I went to Daytona Beach together with a group of teens and a few adults to be at this thing called BigStuf Camps. 3,500 students came to the event and it was an awesome experience!!! The only down side, the hotel WIFI wasn't as awesome as the view off of my balcony. I got proof.

this is only one side of my balcony

This is what you see on the other side of the balcony.

But like I said, the WIFI wasn't as awesome as those views! I had to go to Starbucks a couple of times to make sure my scheduled bill payments went through. They have never missed but I just had to check because I couldn't. You know that feeling? Now you know I'm a nutbag. lol 

I took my junque journal with me and people looked at me weird when they saw me rip a french fry box apart at Burger King and started gluing it into my book. Nothing is funnier as when people stare at you like you are a fugitive because you carry a Tombow Dot roller adhesive with you [like it's a deadly weapon] and it even gets funnier when they saw me pull out my white gel pen, however this time, they were more like in awe because they probably haven't seen one before. LOL

Yes, world! There are crazy people like me who do such things at a fast food place. I can't resist myself. If I could pack my craft room and have it handy with me, I would most definitely do that! Crafting relaxes me. It makes me forget how terrible road trips are. It makes me see the good side of things and it directs my attention into the great memories away from my whiney self. It makes me happy like this particular view made me happy:

 
Hope everyone is staying cool!!!