River stone Hot Plates

I love these little hot plates I made from river stones.  Such a country thing to have in your cottage kitchen, or in any country themed décor.


I picked up a handful of these little 8 inch straw mats at a yard sale this weekend. You see them everywhere and no one really knows what to do with them any more.

My dear hubby installs flooring and river rock is really popular in showers now so there are always little unused pieces of the flooring leftover from jobs.  It comes pre glued to sheets for installation, and being the hoarder I am he brings the bits home and I take all the little stones off the sheet and save them.  Free craft material... gotta like that.

I haven't done anything using my glue gun lately and I knew it would be so much better than waiting for glue to dry.  I decided I wanted the first one to be darker stones so I separated light from dark and arranged them onto the straw mat. 

Once the arrangement was ok I glued all the stones on the mat. These stones are for the bottom of a shower so they are kind of flat and very smooth.  They are meant to be nice for your feet.  The bonus is that a hot pot will sit on a flat surface.

When I was done I did the same with the lighter stones on another mat.









Here are my hot plates finished. Aren't they cute.  I love how they turned out. Very  beachy cottage chic. What do you think?






Bye for now... and have a great day.

This weeks treasures 1

Have you ever been so excited about something that you couldn't wait to do it,  kinda like a kid on Christmas morning?  That's the way I feel about the ideas I have for repurposing this weeks finds.

This piece was given to me by my wonderful daughter in law. It's doors match the cabinet doors in my kitchen.  I've been looking for a  cabinet to use as a sideboard  in my kitchen makeover so its going to be a perfect  fit. 

Hubby and I went on a yard sale cruise Saturday morning and found these really sturdy maple chairs.  I'm not sure yet whether or not I'm going to paint them.. they do need a good clean up and some new covering on the seats. 

At the same sale I picked up this beautiful side table with storage.  Its lines were so beautiful and the chicken wire on the door was perfect. I could picture her   finished before I even made an offer.  Of course she went straight from the truck right to my work table.  What a marvelous way to spend the rest of my weekend.


The very next sale filled up our truck and put an end to our yard sale shopping for the day.  I spotted these antique beds and was so excited I could hardly contain myself.  We had to take everything out of the truck and repack to fit it all in.

These pieces are at least a hundred years old and the turned posts  have a pretty, unique shape.  The side rails are wood as well so there are extra pieces to work with. The metal pieces that attach the rails to the ends look like old square barn nails,  at least the ones that are left do.


I've never come across anything this old before.   The rails are to damaged to be fixed and the beds are an off size so they don't fit any mattresses today,  so I won't try to restore them as beds. 
Instead I see two of the most fabulous benches I can imagine. What do you think?


Bye for now.... have a great day everyone.

Welcome to the new Kidlets

This week we had two new kids in our daycare.   All of us were really excited to have new kids to play with and we had so much fun showing  them our favorite things to do. Unfortunately I didn't get a chance to take a lot of pictures.  Most of the week was focused on making sure no one felt left out.  Its always a change for both the new kids and the older ones when we add to our group.  Later in the week we had  this playtime outside and everyone was having such a good time I had to take a few pictures to share.

 

 

 

We hope your week was as much fun as ours was.

 

 

Bye for now... and have a great day.

Cabinet makeover

 

Sometimes things  just come together, even when there isn't a plan.  That's what happened with these two pieces.

A few years ago my hubby was given this cabinet from someone remodeling a cottage. 
I used it for toy storage in the playroom for quite a while, but since we moved here its just been in the office collecting dust. 
Its really solid so I couldn't part with it.




It was pretty beat up but would make a fabulous liquor  cabinet  change table   games storage  well you get the idea.  
See the  beautiful grey plush lining.
I finally decided to just go ahead and paint it.  






I dug it out of the office and cleaned it up with some water and vinegar. 
I gave it two coats of my home made chalk paint. 
Its a nice grey/blue that I think goes well with the lining.  
I think it makes a  nice liquor cabinet.  But... its just nice.






Then last week I found this book case at a yard sale.  It had long been forgotten, was covered in dust and grime, but had both the shelves and a really nice shape. 
After a good clean up and patching a few missing bits with wood filler, I decided it needed the same paint as the cabinet. 









Even before I was done painting I new both pieces were going to go together perfectly. 

So was I right?    I think so.













Now  I have to  decide what to put in it. :)


Bye for now... and have a good day everyone.

Kids Activities

Here are a few things the kidlets have been doing to keep busy this summer. 

Playing in the Mud Pie Kitchen. It's  the first place everyone goes for. This is very simple to make.  Mine is just a part sheet of plywood that I fixed to my fence and I use two chunks of firewood for the front legs.  All the pots, bakeware and utensils came from a second hand store where I paid $5 for the lot.  Of course the cooking ingredients come from mother nature herself.

 This Music Wall is another easy thing to make for your kids.  Mine is just some wind chimes, a few pans and jello molds, a xylophone no one played with before I put it on the wall and some plastic and wooden spoons for drumsticks.  It's great fun for very little investment.  We sometimes add some plastic water bottles with rice or beans etc. for shakers as well. Indoors we have a container of music toys and we have music play almost every day.  Rattles, drumsticks, harmonicas, and anything that makes noise is on the menu for this activity. 

This cloud dough sensory bin is great. I put the recipe and instructions in this post. The kidlets have played with it numerous times now. When we use it indoors I just put an old sheet on the floor and let them do what they do. It's easy to change out the play items for a whole new direction and clean up is so easy.

An Idea that came from sensory bin play was this take on a sand table.  Here we are using it with cars, but we have had dinosaurs, farm animals, and little people in the sand as well.  Just put a tray on your tabletop and add a few cups of sand.  I bought a bag of play sand in the spring and while we lose some each time I just dump what's left back in the bag when we are done. 

And of course there's always bubbles on those hot days to keep us busy for a bit. 









One of my favorite places online to find great ideas for everything kids is Happy Hooligans.  Her blog is fabulous and I recommend it to anyone who is looking for first rate ideas to keep your kids active and creative.  I follow it faithfully and once you see it you probably will too.

Bye for now and have a good day everyone.

Shopping List

Did anyone watch Steven and Chris today?  They were cooking some Portabello mushroom pizzas and Ceasar salad that looked super yummy but what I really liked was the grocery list template they shared.  It can be found on their website here ..  shopping list

I'm like a lot of people when I go shopping for groceries, I'm not prepared.  I make a list but its all over the place so I have to go up and down the aisles and backtrack a dozen times to get what I need. The biggest problem with this is that by the time I get out of the store there are a few dozen things in my cart that I didn't intend to buy.  And most of them aren't good for me. 

This list is designed so that you travel the perimeter of the store and don't go up and down the aisles at all.  Because all the healthy foods are on the outside aisles, this keeps you from making those impulse purchases.

You are only supposed to go into the center aisles to pick up the items that are on your list and then head to the checkout. 

I'm thinking this will help keep my diet in check, as well as save me a bit of cash because I'm not impulse shopping.   Just thought I'd share.

Bye for now ... and have a good day everyone.

Yard Sale Love

Last  weekend I realized  I haven't been out  to a single yard sale this  year.  I love yard sales but I usually come home with stuff I don't really need.   After doing  my dresser over with chalk paint, and  loving the finished project, I thought  I'd look  for  some other  things  I could do over. I'd give  myself  a spending limit of $20 and  see  what I could come up with. So  here are the finds from  my first two trips out.

Here's the first batch from last weekend.  I picked up a crib head and foot board plus a stack of bar trays at   one stop, then just when I  thought I was done for the day, I turned onto our  road and found  this perfect little writing  desk  at  a neighbours  yard sale .  Considering my  $20 weekly spending budget I think I did pretty darn good on this  trip.

So far I've turned one of the crib pieces into  a nice chalkboard. and I'm  almost done the desk set,  though the chair still  needs to have   the seat covered.   I'll show  that on another  post when it's finished.


This long weekend has been fabulous so far.  Lovely weather, not too hot or too cold.  A bit of rain, but the garden wants it so that's good.  And a ton of  yard sales. 

This is my haul..  Two plant stands, a ladder back chair, a child's rocker, and a bookshelf. That's the shelves leaning inside.  All solid wood pieces with great potential.. I can't wait to see how they turn out.  And.. I only spent $18.   I'm wondering, does that mean I get to add  the change to  next weeks budget.  hmmm.

I can't wait to transform these into something that can be loved again so I went to the paint store  and got some ooops paint. These  are paints that have been mixed wrong and the customer didn't want so they are on sale. You can get them very cheap. 

I   put the colours  I got onto the  paint stick here.

So  its on to the next step.. deciding what colour to use :) The childs rocker is screaming little girl peach. Lets see what happens.

Bye for now and have a great day everyone.

My new toothpaste.

This is  one of  the things I use every day that I have replaced using items I have in my kitchen.  Toothpaste..... we  put it in our mouth at least twice a day and like a lot of other stuff  I'm just not happy with its list of ingredients.  If you want to find out for yourself , check your brand of toothpaste, and go online to find all the ingredients and what they do.  This tends to be some very interesting research. I had to do this for myself because I didn't really want to take someone elses word for it.  How could it be bad.   Everyone uses it ... right. .. Yeah.

To make my own I simply mixed a few ingredients I felt safe using and started brushing my teeth with my mixture.  Really simple. 

Here is my recipe:

2 tablespoons of baking soda
1 teaspoon of 3% hydrogen peroxide
and about 10 drops of essential oils
I use clove oil, peppermint, and tea tree.

Mix it to a thick paste and  just dip into this and get busy brushing.. and it works  AMAZING.

This homemade paste keeps my mouth feeling fresh all day long.  Honestly, that just brushed feeling lasts for hours. 
It removes the coffee stains from my teeth, (which is a must because I love  my coffee). I am really happy with how white my teeth are now. 
The essential oils keep my mouth healthy and deters the bacteria that cause plaque  and bad breath. 
I do use a less than food grade quality essential oils for this but don't swallow any so that is fine. 

 This has worked great for me but I must mention that you can make your own from any of the  recipes you see online.. I actually tried a few others first and then just came up with this because it has the things I am looking for and is so simple.

If you have tried this toothpaste or any other homemade version, let me know how it works for you and what you are using.

Bye for now and have a good day everyone.

Little round table

I picked a little round table up at a fundraiser  sale recently and had no idea what to do with it.  I went to the sale because it was for the Minden flood relief fund.  See the flood here. 

I thought it was kinda cute and I could imagine it having been a little accent table in someone's farm house for many years.  I hated to see it go to the dumpster, which was the fate of whatever didn't go at this particular sale. At a loss for what I was going to do with it, it just sat in the back room  at home for about a month.

Then last weekend I did the dresser makeover in my last post. Now feeling like a pro, I decided I could fix up this little gem with what I had on hand.


Here  she is with the top missing when I first pulled it out of the back room.
Notice that the vinyl is still intact on the bottom shelf. I actually think it was the aqua colour on the legs that attracted me in the first place.






I tore off the vinyl on the bottom shelf and painted the legs and metal trim with my homemade chalk paint. The colour is called Cucumber Lift.  It's a very pretty green. The lighting in the picture doesn't show it really well. The chalk paint covered the metal as well.

I sat the table aside to dry for  a bit and cut a few pieces of this wallpaper to fit. It's got a vinyl finish, so it will wipe clean and not be ruined if something spills on it. You can't see it in this picture but the paper has a thin blue stripe in the mix that is almost the same colour as the paint.



I glued the paper to the table with some gorilla glue. I wanted to make sure there would be no curling up at the edges.  Then I gave the whole thing a couple of coats of paste wax.

And here is the finished table.  I think she is really sweet, considering how bad she looked before.  I intend to use it as a night table in my guest room.  It's big enough to hold a lamp, clock and a book.  A nice little basket on the bottom shelf would be the perfect place to keep a few things people might forget at home. 

It makes me happy to know I saved her from the dumpster and now she can last another lifetime here in her new home.


Bye for now, and have a good day everyone.



 

Chalk paint Dresser

This weekend I decided to try my hand at something new.  I've had this old dresser for about six months now that I bought really cheap at a local shop  that carries everything used. When I say everything I mean everything.  It's my first stop whenever I need something because I think reusing someones previously loved item is always better  than going new .

This is what the dresser looked like before I started working on it. The top was completely scratched and banged up. It had different colours of paint spilled on it and it actually looked like it had been used as a worktable in someones garage.

It was a well made wood piece and was really solid. All the drawers worked good with little sticking. It was the perfect piece of furniture for a makeover.

I've been seeing a ton of before and afters recently that were done with chalk paint that looked really nice.  I decided to make my own chalk paint because one..it's really expensive and two... I just had to see if it would work. 
I had a part can of latex paint leftover from a previous project and to this I added  some plaster of paris mixed with water. I shook it all together in a large jar and I had my own chalk paint. Too easy.

I started by taking out all the drawers and washing everything down with some vinegar and water. Then I used a palm sander to remove a little of the flaking varnish that was on the top and the fronts of the drawers. Apparently you don't need to sand or prime when you use chalk paint but this dresser actually had loose flaking bits. I only sanded where it was absolutely necessary.


Once it was cleaned up I  painted all the pieces.  I was really surprised at how good the paint covered. The whole thing only needed a couple of coats and it dried really fast so I could keep working without waiting for pieces to dry.




I decided to paint the back as well so it wouldn't always have to be pushed tight against the wall. 







The piece needed some distressing to get the pretty shabby chic look I was going for so I got the sandpaper and started taking off   some of the paint on the drawer fronts and a few spots on the top. 





Once I was  happy with it I added a finishing coat.  For this I used Minwax finishing paste wax.  There are 2 coats overall and a third coat on the top. It added a really nice soft shiny look.

Next I couldn't decide what to do with the hardware.  I looked at some new handles but couldn't find anything like the original ones so I bought some spray paint and thought I'd refinish them. 
I started cleaning them up  with some sandpaper and realized they were really pretty brass. No way was I painting over them.

 
 
 
 
 
This picture shows what the handles looked like before and then after I spent a good amount of time with a sandpaper sponge taking off all the gunge.  What a transformation. I was well worth the effort though, nothing else would have looked this good.

I love how the dresser looks now that it is all finished, and now that I'm done I don't know why I was afraid to try this before. I rate this a complete success, in fact I think the chalk paint is my new favorite thing.

 

 

 

Bye for now and have a great day everyone.

 

Fairy Garden / Hens and Chicks

I had this pot of Hens and chicks sedum that was ugly and over grown.  There's something magical about these perfect little plants that just makes you want to display them but somehow they'd ended up neglected and forgotten. 

This is with most of the plants removed and I forgot to take a picture before I started, but you can still tell how horrible this planter looked.

 They were in definite need of a new home, and my granddaughter B kept saying I need to make a fairy garden.  Over the last few months she kept telling me this would be good for the fairies or that would be good for the fairies, so we made this little house and dining set for them a few weeks back. The birch bark was salvaged from the ground. Please don't pull it directly from a healthy tree.     :(   
The walkway didn't stay, I thought it looked too modern for the setting.

I added some of the plants and a few pine cones because B would have been sad if I didn't give them a place of honour. She was sure fairies would love them. Notice there is a tiny amber marble gazing ball here as well.

The new path to the front door is made from glass pieces from the craft store.  Much more in keeping with a magical setting. To the left of the path are the rest of the hens and chicks and a greeter frog. OH.. and another gazing ball, this time blue.

A few seashells and a quiet little retreat for fairies is born.

Like everything I do there is always one tiny thing that needs to be added before it feels completely finished.  Of course... what kind of a greeter frog would he be if he didn't say "welcome"?

Here is the finished planter on the deck right beside the front door.  I sure hope some fairies come to visit,  this little garden girl has been alone here for a very long time and would truly love some company.




Did I say finished.  I really hope not.  I'm sure all the little girls who come by will think of lots of changes that need to be made.


Bye for now and have a great day everyone.