So it hit me this morning that Easter is only three weeks away and I have nothing Spring or Easter-ish up around the house.

In some ways, this is nothing new. I gave up trying to lighten up years ago after I realized that all of my pastel decor violently clashed with my new overly red upstairs.

But this morning I decided that I don’t care.

The snow every-other-day thing is getting me down and I need some color in my house. Plus, I figure there’s got to be ways to make “light” play nice with all the dark colors in my house.

So in true THRIVE style, I riffled around the house to see what I could find for inspiration and came up with Easter candy. Lots and lots of Easter candy.

Ahem.

So I broke open those adorable PEEP bunny packages and sorted the jelly beans and wound up with Easter specimen art cute enough to eat.

And the best part was that this project came together in under ten minutes.

Want to make your own?

I really wanted to make these with shadow boxes like all the other cute specimen art floating around blogland.  But I didn’t have any, so I cheated and Rocked What I Got.

I grabbed three frames from my living room …

… popped out the glass and cut white poster board to fit the frames.

To make the PEEPS display, I cut each bunny in half using an old pair of scissors.

Using a knife, even with non-stick cooking spray is a nightmare. Please don’t ask me how I know this.

Arrange the bunnies how you’d like and then gently, but firmly press to the poster board. The marshmallow is plenty sticky to hold those bad boys in place without any extra glue.

Measuring is also a good thing. I eyeballed it and was a little off. Oh well.

Just to be safe, I let my PEEP art sit for an hour to make sure it was good and attached before popping it back in the frame and hanging.

And as for the little blue bunny on the bottom row, I couldn’t resist. 🙂

And as for all of those unused bunny halves …

… my kids created their own lovely hybrid PEEPS to munch on for lunch snack. Thoughtful ones my kids are.

The jelly bean art came together just as easily.

I tried cutting them in half to see if they’d stick to the poster board on their own as well, but it’s a pain to carefully cut through each one without fracturing the outer shell. No biggie. They’re small enough anyway that it worked out fine to use them whole.

A generous dollop of Gorilla glue …

… done and done.

Just to be safe, I let these sit for an hour as well since I didn’t know how well the glue would adhere to the candy coating.

Worked like a charm.

Houston, we have Easter Art.

Ah, much better.

The house is already feeling more Spring-ish which is good since we’ve got more snow on the way. Lovely.

Featured on:

Linking up to:

(Originally shared as a guest post on Ucreate)

Recognize these beauties from the Ballard Designs catalog?

I adore them. I need them. I cannot afford them.

So I made my own.

May I introduce my amazingly strong  Ballard Designs inspired wall pockets made using only materials I had on hand.

Cardboard + Fabric = Catalog awesomeness for $0!

*Swoon*

And making a sleek, customized organizer for all those homework folders/workbooks/mail/bills/receipts without spending any money makes me feel like Superwoman, even if I’m a week behind on laundry.

Want to make your own?

For the base and pockets you’ll need:

For the covering, you’ll need either paint or fabric. I originally planned on going the paint route, but my cardboard had been manhandled by my kids enough that it ended up looking like a painted, hacked apart diaper box instead of a catalog knock off.

So I went with the fabric.

I didn’t have any plain black fabric in my stash, but I did have this left over $1/yd. Walmart clearance fabric from seven years ago.

No biggie. I just flipped the fabric over and used the back.

Making the Base

Open up two medium sized cardboard boxes and glue them together with a heavy coat of spray adhesive.  Make sure the folds are facing out and offset, otherwise the base will be more likely to bend and fold along those lines.  Trim to 15 3/4” x 49 1/2”.

Fill any gaps along the folds with scrap cardboard and tape in place.  Secure the corners and sides with a few pieces of packing or duct tape to make sure the whole piece is solid.

Cut slits on the base for the pockets to slide into using the dimensions from the pattern. (Download link at end of tutorial).

Mark 1” strips on a few box flaps … cut out …

… and glue along the back edge making a frame all around the base.

Making the Pockets

Trace four pockets pieces on good, thick cardboard …

… then cut out and fold into pockets according to the pattern instructions.

Slide the pockets into the base to make sure the fit is nice and tight.

Once everything looks good, carefully remove the pockets and secure the bottom corners of each one with duct tape.  Set aside.

Covering With Fabric

Coat the front of the base generously with spray adhesive and cover with fabric, smoothing out bubbles and wrinkles until its all smooth.

Flip base over and glue fabric to the back frame using hot glue, making sure fabric is pulled nice and tight for a smooth edge.  Trim away the excess fabric.

Feel along the front of the base for the pocket tab slots and cut a single slit down the middle with an x-acto knife ( kind of like cutting a button hole.)

Your base should look like this on the front and back.

To cover the pockets, spray them liberally with spray adhesive–inside and out–and carefully smooth fabric into place, trimming away the excess material and hot gluing down seems as needed. 

Assembling & Decorating ~ The Fun Part!

Insert pockets through the precut slots …

… and glue the tabs towards the middle and top of the base with hot glue.

Touch up any gaps with marker, paint, whatever.

To personalize this design, I purposely left extra room above the top pocket so that I could add a monogram and family motto that were cut on my Silhouette.

The pockets were dressed up with simple cardstock labels cut from scraps using my Silhouette (label_1031).

To hang, I just rested the wall pockets on two existing screws that were left behind from an old FHE chart. Worked great, sort of like an impromptu french cleat.

Ahhhh.

No more piles of clutter on the TV/coffee table/counter/shelf/floor/desk. Love it.

(Download the pocket pattern with additional instructions HERE.)

Linking up to:

Happy Monday everyone!  Hope you had a great weekend.

I wanted to show you another project in our No-Money Remodel.  Our upstairs has a total mismatched collection of fixtures and ceiling fans. None of them are original and it sort of looks like an odd collection of Home Depot clearance sales and garage sale finds.

My least favorite were two, very brassy fixtures in the kitchen: the main, three bulb light and the ceiling fan.  I have searched through literally thousands of pictures going back to 2004 and these blurry shots from 2007 are the only ones I could find.

I’ve apparently tried really hard to keep the glaring brass out of every . single . picture or have cropped heavily.  Or maybe both.

My decorator neighbor suggested painting both fixtures with a little bit of liquid magic:

Specifically Sophisticated Finishes paint by Triangle Crafts in Blackened Bronze. It’s a little larger than a bottle of craft paint and is usually found by the faux finish paints at craft stores.

I’ve used this stuff in the past to paint a little planter and cover an old utensil crock in my kitchen, but was nervous about using it for fixtures. However, since Decorator Girl has a straight-out-of-the-catalog house and I paint diaper boxes, I deferred to her judgment.

Because I’m lazy Because I didn’t think it was necessary, the only prep work I did was to clean both fixtures with soap and water. No primer, no sanding, nothing. And since I didn’t have the electrical know-how to mess with removing either fixture, I just climbed up on a chair and got to work.

I started with the ceiling fan …

… covering the main fan housing with a thin coat of paint using a cheap-o foam brush. (I ended up doing three thin coats).

To paint the top of the fan without getting paint all over the ceiling, I stuck a meellion little pieces of frog tape around the base.

A pain in the neck, yes, but easier than having to remove the fan from the ceiling all together.

To paint the individual arms, I removed the bolts holding the arms to the housing …

… and then removed the small bolts holding the blades to the arms. Everything went into a ziplock bag to keep the kids from walking off with the parts.

The arms got a good wash down and then a first coat of paint. Just a heads up: it’s going to look terrible at first. I mean really, really terrible.

My first coat on both the fan housing and the arms looked awful and sent me into full oh-crap-I’d-better-figure-out-some-way-to-fix-this-before-Mr.Thrive-gets-home mode.  Thankfully, each coat looked better and five thin coats later, the arms looked awesome. And a little bit like lobsters.

Before reassembling the fan blades and arms, I dipped the heads of the screws in paint and let them dry for an hour …

… then carefully screwed them into position, touching up any scuffs with a quick dab of my brush.

On the opposite side of the blades, the tips of the screws got a quick dab of paint to get rid of that last little bit of brass …

… and all of the blades were reattached to the main housing after everything was dry.

Ahhhhh. So pretty.

The other fixture came together the same way: wash with soap and water, dry thoroughly and paint with a bunch of thin coats.

Painting the top of the fixture where it meets the ceiling was handled the same way as the fan.

So. much . better.

 (And I swear to you that this fixture really is clean. I’ve taken these pictures three times and dusted and cleaned obsessively and it still looks like there’s a bunch of dust from this angle. Bleh.)

Using the paint I had on hand made this a great no-cost project for me, but it’s pretty cheap even if you were to buy paint.  I think this bottle was $10 at Michael’s before the coupon discount. I’ve painted two fixtures, a utensil jar and a small planter so far and still have a third of a bottle left.

But hey, Rock What Ya Got.

Fixture re-dos like this would also work great with spray paint or another brand of specialty paint in your choice of colors.

So have fun checking around the house, checking your local recycling center or checking the online classifieds for free/cheap paint.

(And if you’ve painted your fixtures, I’d love to see them!)

**************************************************************

Linking up to:

As promised, here’s the first of two no-cost kitchen projects I’ve completed so far.

I showed you my picture frame cabinet re-do yesterday and love how they turned out. When the pictures are up in the frames, I like to have the area above the cabinets plain so that all the focus is on the pictures.

But there are times when I like to leave the cabinets plain, too.

And when the cabinets are plain, the above space looks pretty bare.  So I’ve been looking for something around the house that I could repurpose and use above the cabinets when frames weren’t in use—something that could easily be removed whenever I wanted to go pack to the pictures.

So I looked and looked and finally found what I was looking for in my own kitchen: plates.

Plain ‘ol white plates actually. 

In the odd-shaped, open cabinet was my glassware and the $7 set of “good plates” from a Target after-Christmas clearance sale from 10 years ago.

I never used them since the kids always seemed to break one whenever I brought them down … and there wasn’t enough to use when company came over because of the whole kids-breaking-them thing … and they were just sitting there collecting dust anyway …

so I put them to work.

The plates got a good wash and then a vinyl design cut on my Silhouette (although you can cut these by hand with an exacto knife, too).

The best part is that I can swap out the designs any time I need to.  For now I used a bunch of different designs that I happened to like plus a monogram for me and Mr. Thrive.

But I could peel them off and put up new designs for holidays, too.

I don’t have any plate stands (working on that), so I just set them up on the cabinet top and leaned them against the wall.  Baring a major earthquake, it works just fine.

Ahhhhh.

I love the extra punch of color and design above the plain cabinets.

And when I’m in the mood to put the pictures back up for birthdays in April, the plates can come down in two seconds and hang out on a shelf until they’re needed again.

Have fun shopping around the house!

****************************************************************

Linking up to:

I’ve been working on this post for a few weeks and it just keeps getting longer and longer—too long, actually. So I’ve broken it into a few smaller posts to hopefully make it easier to read and track our progress throughout this year.

So for this first post, I’ll walk you through my living room and kitchen and catch you up on how those rooms have evolved.

Summer 2004

These pictures were taken during our first walk through of the house. And I’m going to apologize for a lot of the old pictures right now … I took them long before I knew what blogging was and had learned The Ways of The Tutorial.  So, sorry for the pictures that stink.

Our floor plan is like most late 70’s split-levels: from the front door you come up a half flight of stairs to the kitchen with the living room to the right.

The  wood veneer on all five of the kitchen cabinets had been removed and the doors were replace with plain plywood fronts with a slightly routed edge on the inside.

The original brown linoleum had been covered by peel and stick vinyl tiles. Overall, it was a big improvement over the original flooring, but the finish was starting to wear through and the tiles near the sink had shifted quite a bit.

The random white shelving unit to the right was actually a cheap entertainment center from Walmart that the previous owners had been using as extra cabinets. We thought it was so weird to have it in the kitchen, but as we started unpacking and came up short on space, we used it too. For years.

The wall between the kitchen and living room had been partially removed to open up the area, and the back door at some point had been replaced with a nice wood-framed glass door that had been covered by the floral curtain.

The bead board and railing from the kitchen wrapped into the living room which had a large front window.

Within the first weeks and months of moving in, the black, rust and teal floral curtain on the back door came down, the green puff valence over the kitchen sink was removed, the hardware on the cabinets was removed and puttied over and the large green carpet thing was tossed. (It was gross.)

One thing that I tried to change, but couldn’t was the bizarre placement of the frig. It is actually touching the stove and was shoved into what used to be a pantry. One of our neighbors told us that when the previous owners added the “L” to the countertop to create some more space, the frig (which was where the entertainment center is in this picture), was too close to the counter. As in you couldn’t open the frig door without hitting the counter.

So to fix the problem, they took the door off the pantry, cut the doorframe an extra four inches wider and shoved the frig into the pantry right next to the stove.

I know, I know. It makes no sense.

For a few months I tried rearranging the kitchen and put the frig in the only other place it would fit (the opposite wall), but it was a pain.  It is was seriously weird to be able to see the frig from the front door.

So back into the pantry it went and has been there ever since.

The other change I made right away was to get rid of the black, rust and teal wallpaper boarder and matching floral arrangement that ran along the top of the kitchen wall and ended at the random wood shelf thing next to the living room.  The bulletin and chalk boards came down, too, and were used in other rooms.

And that’s how the house looked for the first nine months.

February 2005

When I started talking about painting, I wanted two things: to paint the kitchen red and the bead board any color but “wood.” Mr. Thrive was fine with the red, but really wanted to keep the wood.

Okay. Compromise is good.

I picked out Cabin Red paint from Eddie Bauer and went to work painting the kitchen …

… and along the really long wall …

… and into the living room.

And I LOVED the red. I was THRILLED with the red. I NEEDED to go red.  And I still, to this day, love the red.

That being said, there were some challenges with having this much red that I hadn’t anticipated.

For starters, it made our already low ceilings look even lower. So I freaked out a little bit and nixed my plans to paint the ceilings, leaving them plain white.  And I started worrying that maybe it was just too. much . red.  So I repainted some of the entry walls …

… and the hallway a light cream color to lighten it up a bit.

And for a few months I was happy with the two different colors, but over time it’s started to bug me. Every time I looked at my living room, I wanted to change something, but was never quite sure what it should be.

Another challenge I wasn’t expecting was how jarring the dark red would look up against pure white cabinets. Again, I liked it at first, but over time I really wanted to change the cabinet color.

The fact that my kids treated the white doors like blank canvases didn’t help either.

Darker. Must go darker.

June 2007 – My favorite part of my whole house

A few months after kid #5 was born, I took advantage of company in town and decided to tackle the cabinets.

But I wanted to do more than just paint.

I was seeing all these cute, simple, rustic looking picture frames everywhere with distressed edges. I started wondering if there was a way to recreate that look for cheap using my existing cabinets.

So with Mr. Thrive and my in-laws help, the upper and lower cabinets were painted black (inside and out) and the lower drawers traded in their white knobs for cheap wood knobs stained to match the bead board.

And for the doors I designed simple frames that Mr. Thrive built right on top of the existing doors using 1/8” plywood.  He left tiny openings on the sides and tops of the doors to let me slide in photo mats and pictures.

And it turned out just how I imagined! I LOVE my cabinets!

I made the photo mats out of .50 poster board from Walmart and mounted my favorite black and white family pictures. I love changing the pictures out for kids’ birthdays and holidays.

And when I’m in the mood for a different look, I can slip the pictures out and leave it plain for a little while.

(Memo to me: please wipe off cabinet doors before taking a picture. Thank you.)

Last Christmas I drug out the dollar snow flakes and tacked them up with removable picture hooks. Loved that look, too.

So there you go … pictures and history of my living room and kitchen.

Tomorrow I’ll show you two projects I’ve done in the kitchen and what our game plan for tearing that room apart.

Edited to add: Please leave a comment if you’d like a tutorial on the picture frame cabinets. If there’s enough interest, I’ll put one together.

Post.

A quickie post, people. 🙂

I was really hoping to have my first remodel post up and ready for this morning, but I’ve had six little kiddos needing some extra momma time this week so we’ll shoot for tomorrow.

In the meantime, here’s a quickie idea for all of you still stuck with heavy snow and winter temperatures from Thriver Sue L from Washington.

She sent me her method for free, yummy-smelling fire starters made from items on hand.

Want to make your own?

For this project you’ll need:

Fill your cardboard egg carton with dryer lint, packing it down to really fill each section.

Fill a  clean plastic container (cottage cheese, margarine, sour cream, etc.)  with wax from old candles or Scentsy bricks (or faux Scentsy bricks like I have).

(I ended up adding wax from an old candle to my used wax bricks to fill the container mostly full).

Fill a regular sauce pan with a couple inches of water and add your container with the wax pieces. 

Bring to a boil on high heat and “cook” …

… until wax is all melted.  My mostly full container of wax took about 5 minutes to melt down completely and yielded about about a half container of melted wax.

Even though I know plastic has a higher melting point than boiling water, I was still worried that my container would fall apart.  Turns out I worried about nothing. The container held up like a champ and not a drop of wax ended up on my good pans.

Carefully remove container with melted wax with tongs and let it cool for a minute or two.  (This amount was perfect for filling a single dozen egg carton.)

Pour melted wax over the lint, letting it soak down into each section of the carton. 

And I have to warn you … it’s going to look nasty. As soon as the wax gets poured over the lint, it’s going to look like a giant hairball. 

See?

I know … ew.

But just think about how well hair burns. (All of you who used Aqua Net too close to a lighter in the 80’s know what I’m talking about).

So, suppress the gag reflex and carry on.

Let your melted hairball fire starters dry for an hour or two until firm, then cut or rip apart and use for your next fire. 

Not pretty, but they’re fire-starting ROCK STARS! 

Seriously. Rock stars.

If you wanted to make these up for someone else and were worried about how they looked, you could just wrap each section in newsprint and tie with twine.

And these smell soooo good, even with mixed scents. My batch was a bizarre mix of Peppermint Breeze, Cedar/Balsam Forest and Mandarin Mango Madness that—amazingly–I’m kind of diggin’ it right now.

So there you go …

an awesome quickie way to stay warm this winter for nothing out-of-pocket.

Thanks, Sue!

And if you have a great “quickie” idea that can be made using only items your have on hand, email me and I’d love to feature you!

Hope everyone’s staying warm out there ….