Santa in the Foyer

The foyer has one of our four trees. It's our Santa tree because it has all Santa ornaments. It has my favorite light color combo with red and white lights. All of my Santa decorations are in the foyer also. On the stairs are our second set of stockings and there are four Santas, one for each of our kiddos. Ho Ho Ho

Christmas in the Living Room

The living room has our main tree. It is the pencil tree that I bought when I first got married 13 years ago. I have always loved it and still do. The nativity is set on top of the computer cabinet next to the mantel. I bought it for $5 at an auction. I did spray paint it gold and I love it. My kids looove playing with it. Especially the little girls. They're so funny so I let them play until the decorating is done and then he's off limits until next year. This is the first year that I decorated the bay window and I really like how it turned out. The pinecones are ones that my kids glittered up for FHE one night. Merry Christmas ya'll!

Christmas Mantel 2011

Just some pics of my Christmas mantel this year. I love this sweet quote about our Savior's birth. I try to do something different with my mantle and I accomplished that this year. I love the basket on the hearth that has things that remind me of my childhood home. The deer antler's are my daddy's and it has a turtle shell from the river behind my parent's house and the loblolly pinecones. Memories of home make me happy:))

Chritmas Dinner

One of my favorite blogs is Between Naps on the Porch. She does a.m.a.z.i.n.g tablescapes. When I grow up I want to be able to do that. Until then I'll do a much smaller scale. This is my fine wedding china. It's Parchment by Mikasa on red chargers from Target. On each plate is a tiny pine cone that I spray painted gold. The red mercury glass votives came from Target. They are a steal at only one dollar. The wooden swan in the middle is such a beauty. My mom got it at auction. It is sold wood and painted white. It sits in a silver bowl from Pottery Barn with the inscription, "Together with Friends and Family is Always the Happiest Place to Be." I love it. The table cloth is a brown toile pattern that I got from consignment for $20. It's so pretty to me. Happy Eating:))

Christmas Front Entrance

I went to Lowe's with the intent of buying greenery for my front door and when I got there it all looked almost dead already. So....I decided to go home and see what I could come up with for free. I decided to let the kids spray paint as many of the large pinecones as they wanted. They used silver, gold, and white. Then I attached them to some ribbon with hot glue and started to poke and wire greenery from our yard. To say I love it would be an understatement. I can't believe how good it looks and the fact that I didn't have to spend any more money. I already had the ribbon and the rest came from my yard. Even my little, ugly artifical trees that I say I'm going to throw away every year look good. I was able to cover up the bases of them with magnolia and pine limbs and then stuffed more pinecones into the greenery. They may even make it another year or two.

Chritmas in the Dinning Room

We decided to put a little Chritmas in our dinning room this year. I was able to put the girls' Christmas tree in there. It was perfect with all it's girly colors and colored lights. I also put the kids' collection of snowglobes. Please don't look too closely to the stenciled walled. It was a whole lot harder to do than I anticipated, but I still love it. It's far from perfect thought.

Shoe Madness

Do you have this problem?

With four kids and three of them girls we have A LOT of shoes to sort through at our house.  My kids are pretty good about taking their shoes off in the garage and putting them in the shoe bin before going inside, but when it comes to finding them it's a different story.

 

The boy has the least amount of shoes and the hardest time keeping up with his.  Of course that may or may not have something to do with the fact that he takes them off in the car, in the yard, on the roof.  Who knows what he does with them all I know is that we can never find them. I tend to be an procrastinator so when I'm running late I need things to be where they are suppose to be.

Here's my solution.  Cheap and easy, I loves cheap and easy.

Take four boxes, any box will do.  I have a lot of these lying around.  Emmy and Ally get larger boxes than the boy and Parker.  They have more shoes.

Cut the flaps off the boxes.

Then take some duck tape.  We have a lot of that at our house.  My husband is not a handy man and so this is how I do a lot of my repairs.

I love all the new colors of duck tape now.  So much better than grey.  Start wrapping the boxes to give them support.  This is a little time consuming, especially when you're doing four, but it's simple enough.

 I just wrapped the sides and bottom. I didn't bother with the inside of the boxes, but you could if you wanted.  In hind sight I probably should have since my dryer is vented into the garage and it tends to get humid in there when I'm drying clothes. 

I did all four boxes in a different color and then added numbers to help the kids keep their boxes straight.

This one is Parker's because she is the fourth little one.

 And wahhlahh.  It has made the biggest difference. We've been using this system for about two months and I can't believe it took me Emmy so long to come up with this idea. 

 

Thrifty Finds

I was browsing around the Raleigh Flea Market Saturday with my mom and SIL and I came across this little cutie.

It was $40, which was a large chunk of my budget for the day, but I seem to have this thing for water coolers.  I asked my mom who owns a thrifting store and she said she thought it was a good deal, but what sold me on it was this

I totally fell in love with the fact that it has a #6 in the crown stamped on it.  6 just happens to be the number of people in my lil' family.  I had to have.  It is missing the spout, but since I don't intend to use it I will just put a cork in it and if I ever change my mind I can just get one from the hardware store.  After I left, my mom said there was another one similar except the lid was missing and it did have the spout for $150.  Wooh! Then I spied this one at my fav Pottery Barn.  It's almost identical except it is smaller than mine.  I'm so pleased with my thrifty find.  Now if I can just keep the kids from breaking it.

I'm linking up with Southern Hospitality

Laundry Room Makeover

I finally got to redo my Laundry Room!!! I'm so excited.  We've lived in this house for three years and we haven't done much to the laundry room since we moved in.  Here is some pictures of the before laundry room.

Not so bad.  I love aprons and so I hang them on the shelf.  Do you see that bright blue birdhouse?  My mom gave it to me for Mother's Day last year.   It was one of my color inspirations.

This is the view from my kitchen looking into my laundry room.  It's funny how you don't realize how bad something looks until you see it in a picture.    My dad helped me make the message board from a yard sale picture and some upholstery fabric I already had.  I love having it up and keeping invitations, announcements,  thank you notes, etc.,  that our family gets throughout the year.  I love seeing them and thinking of the fun times we've had.  I clean it off in January and start again. 

These are the lovely 1980's cabinets that are also in our kitchen.  Oh how I hate the way they look.  The are so sturdy and functional and it would be such a waste to replace them.  I've been trying to convince my hubby to paint them for three years now, but he doesn't want to waste money on painting them.  He wants to wait until we have enough money to replace them.  It's been three years, I'm thinking we'll never get there so I finally succeeded in talking him into letting me paint them.  Yay me!

And finally here is the one window and the $2 valance from Ross e that I bought three years ago.  It wasn't so bad then, but now......I really don't likey.  Notice how dark and dreary the hardware is.

This is what my newly painted laundry room looks like.  I totally love it.  As you can see we painted the walls yellow and the cabinet a creamy white.  I think its Luna from Behr.  I painted the table under my apron shelf, it use to be yellow, and now it's a very light grey.

I changed out the fabric in my message board and painted it white.  The fabric is left over from the fabric I used to make my kitchen valances with.  I'll post pictures later of my kitchen makeover.  Can you see where else I used the inspiration color that is on my birdhouse.  Yep in my curtains. 

I am very happy my my new curtains.  For those of you who stalk Target you might notice these curtains from their current line of spring picnic supplies.   It's actually a table cloth.  They are the exact length that I needed and I love that they're not lined because I want to let in as much light as possible into this little room.  They make me happy just looking at them and they only cost $10 per panel. 

I spray painted the existing curtain rod and hardware white and just hung the table cloth with clips.  It took a lot of spray paint to cover up the ugly hardware.  I was so tempted to buy new because I didn't think anything would make the hardware look pretty, but I'm glad I didn't.  I really like them now and it saved me some money.  I love the way the curtains balloon at the top for a casual breezy feel.  Almost like being at the beach.  Almost.

I think the yellow paint really opens up the space.  I may even enjoy doing laundry now.  Maybe.

Another picture of my message board.  It looks like artwork and I think I may just hold off on putting stuff up on it.  It's just too pretty.  The fabric is by Waverly and is indoor/outdoor fabric called Cascading Coral.

And finally my beautiful cabinets.  We added crown molding to the top and kept the same nobs, but changed the hinges to match the paint color.  So much better.  Thanks for looking.