Painted Ukulele!

Meet my ukulele.... pretty standard right?

WRONG!

I decided I needed a ukulele while at a music store recently. I was attending my nieces' Christmas performance (flute, singing, and trumpet - they are multi-talented). I thought, what better way to work my brain in a different way than I usually do! The only problem was I didn't want a pink one (too baby pink) but I couldn't stand to have a boring old wood one. So I personalized it! I look at painted ukuleles online and they are all so beautiful. Here are some of my favorites: polka dots, more dots, and Hawaii. I decided on painting only the back so the color would be a fun little surprise. Maybe someday I will do the front too.

It took a little liquid courage to take the sand paper to the perfectly smooth back of the ukulele but it was worth the risk. Here was my process:

I started with a lavender ombre and drew the flower design on before I painted it. The inspiration is from this fabric (here) which happens to be the fabric of the very first set of napkins I sold on Etsy! To finish it off I sprayed it down with a glossy sealer - Krylon Crystal Clear. It isn't as smooth as the original finish but it has a nice shiny look and shouldn't ever chip off.

I will leave you with a little family band photo...

Easy Knit Dress

This dress is an incredibly easy Friday night/Saturday morning project.

Working with knit can be a challenge, but this dress was so straightforward and simple it was hardly a problem! I used McCalls 6886 for the pattern and the purple and black houndstooth fabric is from Joanns (I think). I used about a yard and a half. It took me a couple hours on a Friday night to cut it out and get it started and about an hour more Saturday morning to finish it up. It doesn't get better than that for a new dress!

Paper Houses

Last week my sister and I embarked on what turned out to be one of the most fun crafty projects I have ever done! It was harder than I thought it would be at first, but totally worth the effort. Check out our paper mini-houses, made to look like our real houses!

Have you ever seen anything cuter than this? The yellow house is like mine (see the real thing here) and the brown looks like hers.

Can you imagine a whole village of these little guys?

The project took us a few hours one afternoon. We used Martha's templates to get us started but added our own twists like the vellum windows, a window box, and mini wreath and trees. My sister also has a dollhouse that looks like her real house so she had some supplies like the Christmas lights lying around. We used scrapbook cardstock for the house and roof and mostly used hot glue to hold it together. We used some E6000 to add the glitter to the roof and stuck the glitter to the ground quickly after we painted the base so the wet paint held it in place. The last step was hot gluing on the details (notice the little rabbit in the front yard!) and cutting a hole to place a battery operated candle inside the house.

Too freaking cute!

Laundry Room Remodel

I found myself with a little free time this weekend and decided to make it count. I have been wanting to add storage to our laundry room for over two years (I even wrote this post about it back in 2011). I had been holding out for an amazing deal on an upper cabinet, and this spring I finally found one at our Restore for about $25. But... it sat in the garage all summer. My husband actually set this project in motion complaining about the current laundry room situation on Friday.

So this weekend we brought in my cabinet and I got painting. I had an inspiration photo to work from out of Better Homes and Gardens magazine, so T.J. and I were on the same page. He had some carpentry to do, and I had painting to do! I even went to Menard's and found the shelving we needed myself.

This project was truly on a dime. I found shelving in the bargain bin because the ends were broken (but we didn't need the whole length anyway!) for $1.69. We also reused whatever we could.

The grant total was only $36 excluding paint we already had. Now that is a big bang for our buck! See the bottom of this post for a picture of what we were (shamefully) working with before.

Here is my Restore cabinet. It was already cream so it only took a couple coats of white applied evenly with a small foam roller to fix it up.

My broken bargain board that saved us at least $15!

 We simply set the cabinet on the existing shelf after I slapped a fresh coat of white on it (it was highlighter orange before!). The bracket makes the whole operation sturdy.

Next, T.J. added the upper shelves. He made two "braces" out of primed 1x2s for each one and attached them to the wall (into the studs) and the side of the cabinet.

Finally, I reattached the cabinet doors, touched up the ends of the brackets with white paint, and T.J. added extra 1x2 to the fronts of each upper shelf to make a finished edge.

My inspiration photo that has been pinned up for a year in the laundry room!

I wouldn't call this room completely finished... I'm still thinking about replacing the awful florescent light with something prettier, and maybe even stenciling the wall behind the shelves like my inspiration photo. But heck, it is much better than it was before! Our new view when coming in from the garage:

Fifty-Thousand Page Views Later

50,000 page views. Unbelievable!

When I noticed the blog was approaching this milestone I thought about what I might want to do to celebrate. When I started the blog I would request to go out to dinner for every small milestone. :-) I will probably be doing that for this one too, but I also thought it might be nice to reflect on the projects that have actually made a big impact around the house. We have spent nearly 2 whole years DIYing this house, and some projects have definitely been more important than others (ex: a spray painted napkin holder = low impact). So check them out below, in reverse order, the most life-changing projects on Hems and Haws to date:

See the original posts about each of these by clicking the links.

5. My Office
While this wasn't necessarily one DIY project, it came together pretty quickly after we moved in. This room features a hot pink table for a desk, light pink walls, and molding near the ceiling that serves as a shoe rack. (Latest office post)

4. Painting the Trim
The trim in this house was atrocious. I'm not sure what it is about wood trim that I dislike so much, but everything just feels fresh and clean with white trim. There are houses where wood trim looks nice, but this was not one of them. There are still 2 rooms in the house with wood trim, but I am hoping to tackle those this summer. It is not a quick and easy job to paint trim, but it is worth it!  (Tutorial here)

3. The Bar
The bar is the most functional project we have done. T.J. was a huge help, and we completed the project in just about one weekend. We use the bar every single day and it has really upped the quality of life in our house by providing another surface to work/eat/hang out at. (Bar posts one and two).

2. Five Chandelier Projects
What makes these projects the runners-up is that they make me smile every day. All of these chandeliers cost me $30 or less - one of them I got for as little as $4 at a flea market in Lansing, MI. (Posts: White Kitchen Chandelier, ORB Hall Chandelier & Bedroom Chandelier, Pink Office Chandelier, Pink Closet Chandelier)

1. Painting the Kitchen Cabinets White
We spend a ton of time in the kitchen and as they say - kitchen renovations = big bang for your buck. Here I am not talking literal bucks, although I do hope the improvements we have made in the kitchen will pay off. The whole kitchen feels lighter and brighter with the white cabinets and they are a more recent change (1 year ago). The combination of white cabinets with white trim and white doors just makes everything feel updated, clean, and new. If you are considering this project, do it! Read about my experience here.

Master Bath of My Dreams

It's my favorite time of year, Pinterest challenge time over on Young House Love and Bower Power (this time teaming up with Decor and the Dog and The Remodeled Life! Not only is it a great excuse to spend some time DIYing, but it kicks my butt to get something done I've been wanting to do.

The master bath has been a long slow process of one project at a time, starting with painting the trim and cabinet white, making a shower curtain, hanging a new mirror and light fixture, updating the electrical switches, making wall art, and painting the walls. Now the finishing touches - a new faucet and stripes!

The pin I chose is actually one from Young House Love's blog, a tutorial on painting horizontal stripes in the bathroom. See it here.

I started by measuring the whole height of the wall and dividing by 7. I wanted 7 total stripes so I would only have to paint the middle 3! Each stripe ended up being 13.3 inches (total wall = 93 inches). I measured from above the baseboard to the ceiling.

Then I marked the wall from the ceiling down with a pencil. I taped across my pencil marks to make the stripes. YHL does a nice tutorial here if you want more details. Then of course, I ran out of tape. Which put a pretty big halt in the project. :-)

So I got more (and better) tape - I noticed later that the green tape did a better job keeping paint from running under it than the yellow tape did. Then it was easy - 2 coats of gray making sure to pull the tape off while the 2nd coat was still wet.

 

 
I did have a little bit of touching up to do (see tape issue above) but it was mostly user error. I did not do a great job making sure the tape was stuck really well to the wall in the corners and that was my main mistake.

 
The beautiful stripes on the wall also inspired me to go out and buy the last couple of items we needed for the bathroom makeover to be complete: a new rug (chevron of course) and a little plant for the back of the toilet. I wish it was real, but the bathroom has no windows so it would surely die. Nevertheless, I thought the bathroom needed something alive looking in it.

I am beyond happy with the results. I keep telling my husband I am just going to go hang out in the bathroom. While it was nearly the last living space I made any changes in, it was well worth the wait. Maybe patience is the key to good design?

Here is a (terrifying) look at the before. So sad looking! It is hard to believe it is the same room.

As I am writing this post I am realizing almost none of the projects in this room have appeared on the blog, so let me tell you about a few of them. I found the mirror at Goodwill last summer for $8. My sister and I each bought one - we think they must have come from a hotel. It was an ugly gold brown and I spray painted it white. I had been on the lookout for a faucet for a long time but didn't want to take the $70 hit it costs to get a new one. My father in-law happened to just have this one in his garage! He even came for a visit to install it.

New Faucet

This light fixture was from the Restore and cost me around $10. It was again an ugly gold. I spray painted it white and now it is beautiful! Special thanks to Dad and T.J. for installing the light and the mirror. I love the scrolly detail of the light fixture with the lines of the mirror. Finally, the shower curtain is made from some of the fabric I picked up at Mood NYC this summer.

And so this concludes the Pinterest challenge. By far the best one yet! See my previous Pinterest challenge projects by clicking the following links: (button wreath) (clay earrings) (flower ring) and (bee running costume).

Pop Some Tags - Thrift Shop Challenge

This past Monday I trekked in the rain and the fog to my local Goodwill to participate in Young House Love's genius, Macklemore Thrift Shop Challenge. Since their post last Friday this song has become my theme song! If you haven't heard it yet, check it out here.

First I had to drop off my load of donations. I keep a super cute tote bag my sister made me that says "Give" in the laundry room and it collects Goodwill donations for weeks or months at a time. I just grab it on my way out the door. Anyway - when I rolled up to the donations door I of course had the Thrift Shop song playing. Much to my pleasure, the donations guy was totally into it! He was laughing and made a comment about the song. Which made the whole trip worth it. While I didn't find too much of anything wonderful inside on this trip, I did find some house slippers as mentioned in the song.

Whenever I see a whole bunch of something like this at a place like Goodwill I imagine some crazy woman that stocked up on 30 pairs of something silly like slippers - and her husband made her donate them all to Goodwill. More likely a store donated them, but it is funny to imagine!

Since I do not have any thrifting spoils to show off from this week, I thought this would be a good opportunity to pay homage to all the wonderful things I have found at thrift stores since I started seriously thrifting back in June of 2011. My husband tells me that it has become a hip thing for kids these days to do - so I guess all us DIYers better watch out!





So here are a few of the before and afters of my junk turned treasure. Click the pictures to see the posts about them.

#popsometags!