An “Antique” Guthrie Guest Room

Lately, I’ve been helping my mom get the extra room at her house set up as a proper guest room for overnight guests, like me!  Since all the children moved out, the room has been a catch all for random stuff.  We got a wrought iron bed, Mama put it up and we started calling it the guest room.  The furniture had been cobbled together with a secondhand dresser with a few odds and ends from other rooms in the house.  When my grandparents recently decided to get rid of the old dresser they’d been storing for decades, Mama thought it would be fun to do an “antique” room with all the antique pieces she’d collected.  Unfortunately, they didn’t all fit, but we squeezed in as many as we could.  Even though all the pieces in here aren’t true antiques, they definitely work together to create a traditional space with an antique feel.  Throw in a couple dozen rose printed accessories, and I’m a happy camper guest.

Here it is for your viewing pleasure:

The queen size wrought iron bed was a gift (Thanks Nelson and Debbie!) and it goes well with the iron lamp on the bedside table.

The piece de resistance—the antique dresser and mirror.  Mama dragged it out of my grandparents’ attic and refinished it.  I love the antique mirror with all its little imperfections.

We styled the top of the dresser with a watering can and ewer from TJMaxx, basin from Goodwill that just happened to match, and a blue and white teapot.  The perfume bottles Mama has collected over time.  This was a safe place (away from three-year-olds) for their display.

The new addition to this room is the gallery wall, which is a collage of photos from the “Sisters Bridal Shoot” that Hannah and I did around Mama’s yard.  She wanted this room to be centered around her daughters, since we are the primary overnight guests in the house. :)  And it’s no lie, we love to look at pictures of ourselves. ;)

Mama refinished and upholstered a small bench for under the window, which is dressed in ivory sheers and a rose valance.  We plan to add a cornice box over the window with pleated jabots on each side to dress up the simple valance.

The curio cabinet is filled with the porcelain dolls that were collected for us when we were children.  The ballerinas on the bottom are mine.  Since I am going to be a ballerina when I grow up. :)

This piece of art is a calendar page that we framed in a thrift store frame.  I love it!  And it has a look of antiquity, which works perfectly!

Ah, what a lovely place to spend a night. 

Thanks for joining me for the guest room tour.  I’ll be back soon with some pretty summer flowers and a few other outdoor updates!

Welcome Mat Makeover

I bought this festive jute welcome mat back in March for my Spring spruce-up in the front yard.  It was so cheerful and I loved all the yellow accents.

With all the muddy shoes from yard work and puppy dog walking that’s been going on around here the last three months, we’ve been wearing it out!  After all that wear and tear, it was starting to look like this:

Not so welcoming, huh?  So, when I saw that Kristy over at Libbie Grove Design had painted her welcome mat with plain ole craft paint, a lightbulb went off in my head.  I couldn’t bring myself to spend $12 on a new rug only three months after I had just bought one.  So, I decided to use craft paint I already had to spruce up this tired old one. 

I used a little artist’s brush for the small spots and a medium-sized stencil brush for the large areas and within an hour I had revived the rug almost back to its former glory.  See for yourself:

I put it out to welcome guests to our Memorial Day party and it must have been alright, since no one stopped at the front door to say, “Wow, what is wrong with that rug… it looks weird!”  Mission accomplished.  Now if only there were an easy fix to all the muddy dog prints on the front porch.  Guess I have some pressure washing in my future.  :)

Lovely Lattice

So, you may wonder what’s with all the around-the-yard projects that I’ve been packing into the last two months… We’ve built a fence, enlarged a planting bed, bought some flowers, built a rock path and a cute flower bed, painted the swing and made new cushions, and put up a hammock.  Whew!  We’ve been busy sprucing up the yard and it’s all because of this…

…which went down on Monday afternoon.  It was our Second Annual Memorial Day Kickoff to Summer Cookout!  We began this tradition last year with our first Memorial Day cookout.   And it rained.  So we had to have the party inside and we didn’t get to enjoy the backyard like I’d planned.  So this year, I was determined to fancify the outdoors anyway, and if it rained, we could admire it through the windows!  Lucky for me, the weather was perfect!  Not a drop of precipitation for two days prior, the yard had time to de-sog itself, and the sun was shining. 

In preparation for our big soiree, my parents and I pretty much spruced every surface on the property.  We added more hostas along the driveway, installed new sconces on the deck (posts coming soon!), and brought in tons of flower baskets from my Mama’s house, as well as all the party seating.  We decided to have tables and chairs set up on the lawn for maximum garden enjoyment.  And in our planning, we discovered the lackluster view of our deck that would greet guests from the yard.  I told you before how we were hesitant to landscape around our deck because of future plans to tear it down and rebuild it.  Well, that lack of landscaping was quite apparent.  Here’s the view of the deck from last summer:

At least we had some lush green grass. :) 

But that view of the black hole under the deck just wasn’t cutting it for my big party on the lawn!  So, we decided to finish off the little retaining wall at the edge of the yard, as well as enhance the view of the deck by adding lattice underneath.  Yeah!  Our deck shall have an underpinning, instead of a look of neglect!

We picked up four sheets of premium lattice at the hardware store as well as three two by fours for framing strips.  First we cut the two by fours into 1 1/2” strips and cut them to length for each section of underpinning.  We screwed them on with a 5/8” recess so the lattice would fit over top and be flush with the posts.  This framing gave us something to nail our lattice into.

 

I’m sure I just lost half of my readers who are now scrolling to the end for the after shots. 

But for those of you still reading…

Next, we cut each piece of lattice to fit inside the sections.  This was the tricky part, as my deck is 20 years old and has fallen out of square.  See:

So basically, we had to cut the length of each panel to a close measurement, and then fit in one side and draw off the next cut in order to make the lattice fit perfectly in the not-square holes.  Lucky for me, I had my handy Papa to help me (or rather, I helped him, as he did most of the work!).

He also kept reminding me to take pictures of the entire process for my blog. :) hehe

      

And the best part was, eventually he got tired of the nail gun and let me use it! :) Whooo!  And he even took a picture of me with the nail gun for your viewing pleasure.  Love that thing, I gotta get me one of those!

 

And finally we reached the last section and the lattice was done.  Last but not least, we let Mama work her landscaping magic and finish off the little retaining wall with two and a half more 6x6’s.  She filled in the area behind the wall with dirt and mulch.  And to give it a finished look, we added a few shrubs and plants.  Two hydrangeas, two azaleas (from the great hammock landscaping project) and some irises completed the scene.  And voila!  A view to be proud of:

  

The lattice project was a success, just in time for our party on Monday.  And it meant that our guests didn’t have to sit in the yard and stare up under the deck at all the mud, leaves, and all the other debris that Riley has yet to unearth from her favorite treasure spot.  Sorry, Riley, this excavation site is closed. 

Here’s your before and after shot:

 

A great deck makes for a great party.  And a happy hostess. :)

 

Hammock Landscaping

Michael and I decided to get a hammock as an anniversary gift to ourselves this year.  It’s a handwoven cotton hammock from Mexico.  We ordered the matrimonial size which fits two adults plus a dog…. or one adult and three children… and so on. :)  We also got tree straps so we could move it around and avoid putting hooks in our trees.  The first thing we did was to find a couple trees between 13 and 20 feet apart.  We hung it in the front yard at first, since there were two trees the right distance apart.  But when Riley wanted to join us by the hammock, we had to tie her up so she couldn’t run away.  This led to much plant destruction as well as Riley wrapping herself in knots around trees, bushes, etc.  So, we decided to move the hammock to the back yard so Riley could run around freely in her new fenced-in yard.  The only likely spot for a hammock was this little nook:

Unfortunately, this space was home to three beautiful (and large) azalea bushes.  Since it was the only place for a hammock in the backyard, we decided the azaleas had to go.  After all, there was plenty of room for azaleas elsewhere in the yard, but no where else for the hammock.  So, one day we just went to work digging out the azalea bushes and moving them—one went in the adjacent bed, one in the English garden, and one in front of the deck.  Having found new happy homes for the azaleas, we had to re-landscape against the fence in this bed.  We couldn’t just leave it mulch and hammock tree straps.  So we planted five hostas and five violets to create a shallow border behind the hammock spot.  Here’s what it looks like most of the time, sans hammock:

And here it is, all ready for some summer relaxation!

Hmm... that looks very inviting… see you all later!

 

Totally Turquoise Garden Swing Makeover

In an effort to punch up the wow factor in my English Garden, I recently decided that I would paint the swing that lives down there.  It was always wet and mucky and a boring brown wood color.  And to coordinate with the new painted swing, I would need cushions for my garden bench.  And if you give a mouse a cookie Sarah a paint brush, you might as well just paint the garden bench, while you are at it.  So, off we went to the fabric store to pick out some colorful outdoor fabric for the cushions as our jumping off point for the makeover.  (DIY tip of the day: Always pick your fabric first, because you can then have your paint matched to it, rather than the other way around, as you cannot always find fabrics to match paint you’ve already bought.)  We FINALLY settled on this lovely turquoise bird print fabric. 

LOVE.  Seriously, I would have a duvet out of this if that were an acceptable thing to have.

Next, we took the fabric swatch to the hardware store to find a coordinating paint color.  Away we went with a quart of turquoise paint.  Home we came to paint the swing.  First I brought it inside to dry out, cleaned it up, then primed it with oil-based Kilz, and finally painted it with my lovely hued oil paint.  A couple days later, after it was good and dry, we reinstalled it in the garden.

Voila!

And somewhere along the way, I managed to paint the garden bench a soft gray to coordinate with the birdbath and stone path.  And I also found time to sew up the round cushions to go in it!  Here they are:

And for your viewing pleasure, here’s a before and after comparison of the garden swing.

Here’s what it looked like before we moved in—ivy, ivy everywhere!

And after a great ivy battle, some plants and mulch, and a bit of paint and pillows:

Now if I could just get that brick patio under the swing straightened out, all would be well.  For now, I’m enjoying the new fun color in my garden.  Here’s the comparison from last year…

and now!

  

The Cutest Flower Bed Ever

I have been pretty bad at keeping up the ole blog, lately.  But trust me, there has been a LOT of blogging going on in my head.  We’ll just call that brain logging or “brogging”.  When I’m not brogging, I’m hard at work making more projects to blog about later.  And I’ve been ever so busy.  Here’s one of the projects that’s been brewing in my brog, finally ready to reveal on the blog!

A while ago I mentioned to my mother that it was really annoying to have to mow around the crape myrtle tree in the front yard.  Random in-the-yard trees that grow limbs that smack you in the face while mowing, plus interrupt the nice even mower path I try to make are not my favorite kind of tree.  So, she figured it would be a good idea to put a flower bed around said tree to make it easier to mow around, make the tree look purposeful instead of stuck in the center of the yard, and also to give me another place to grow flowers.  More flowers?!  ‘Nuff said.  So, when my tree-loving, flower-bed-not-loving-so-much husband, finally gave the go-ahead for a flower bed that was “no larger than two feet in diameter”, I passed on the news to my Mama.  The next day when I returned home from work, I was greeted with the cutest flower bed ever, that she had created for me.   See:

Cutest Flower Bed Ever.

And we filled it with an assortment of petunias, coleus, and dianthus. 

I love these striped ones, I call them “carnival” because they remind me a ferris wheel or something fun.

I also like these frilly ones with the white edges.  Pretty.

 

Oh, it’s so cute, it makes me smile every time I see it.

Thanks for stopping by… keep on coming back!  I’ll be real blogging about a slew of other projects from my brog very soon, including a porch swing makeover, a cute planting table, new deck sconces, and many more!  But for now, I gotta run… I have lots of projects to work on! :)