A Closer Look at Ottoman

Meet MiLK

MiLK is a sweet little cat that showed up on Martin Luther King Jr. Day (hence the name). I haven't let her inside for fear of what happened last time, and we currently have an indoor sandbox...so, yeah. However, I've been feeding her and she likes it when Boo and I go outside and pet her...which then makes Boo giddy because MiLK goes around and around him which makes him go around and around. It's also pretty cute that Boo will go out there and ask her questions and talk to her.

That is our cruddy little exterior entry (for lack of a term) that we plan to enclose so that we have room inside for shoes and a closet or something to hang coats which we are desperately lacking. Oh, yeah, and those are my construction slippers...I had to donate a pair to "the cause."

Happy Friday!

Personalized Doily Paintings for V Day!

I finished another Personalized Doily Painting (I'm holding onto them until I visit family in April) and I lined it in a row on my new "mantle" with a couple of others because they look so cute for Valentine's Day! I'm glad I'm holding onto these paintings for awhile because I've been having fun photographing them!

The new one is in the center...it's "Monique" in pink with white lettering. You can have your name made into a doily painting here.

A modern front page

Some of the front pages on Etsy lately have been made by using search terms. I was in one yesterday for the search term "modern:"

Nice work...don't you think? I'm very excited that one of my Personalized Doily Paintings made the front page!

Happy Wednesday!

Today is the last day...

to win a Moss Bobby Pin and a piece from my Cork Collection (your choice) on Etsy Stalker! Hop to it!

Modified Manufactured: New Outlet Covers, Train Table and Flooring

We got quite a bit done this weekend again and the half of the living space with the woodstove is close to being done (well, there will be minor bits to work on, but we'll be able to hang stuff on the walls finally). My partner, Jeff, started to install some new outlet covers that have protection (I don't remember the terminology) in case Boo tries to stick something in them:

And, since we are putting down flooring and sealing it, Boo can't ride his bike inside anymore. :( So, we brought out his train table that we had stored since we moved in for a replacement!

Speaking of flooring, we decided that since we are laying 1-2 more layers of underlayment down so that the floor is really strong and doesn't creek (and the doors are hung unusually high, so they accomodate), we are sealing the underlayment for our floor surface (we are going to do something else in the areas where there will be water). It's cheap and we really like the way it looks...like cork!:

We use the best side of the underlayment even if it's the side that has the stamp. You can see here that we found some "environmentally preferable product." The picture above is with one layer of sealer; we're going to put on 1-2 more layers this next weekend. Here's what it looks like sealed (this is before we found the underlayment in the above picture, so it's a little different looking):

 
You can see it's scuffed up a bit from all the construction, but these rooms (we did the floor in them before we moved in) will be sanded and sealed with another layer once the main living space is finished; then, everything will have felted feet!

Happy Monday!

Doily paintings on my new shelf (mantle)!

Well, there is a new one to share too:

The light in my new place is very blue, but the color on this painting is actually pretty accurate, it's sage green with cream lettering and the name is "Eric."

Here's another image so that you can see the shelf:

I'll share more shots of this shelf soon....I'm very excited to have a 10 foot long shelf behind the woodstove to adorn!

Well, off to work hard on the house this weekend; I'm sure I'll have more pictures to share next week!

Happy Friday!

Interview with me and free stuff on "Etsy Stalker!"

Head on over to the fantastic blog "Etsy Stalker" to read an interview with moi and a giveaway from my shop! Curator Beatrice is a peach and I'm her first solo exhibit (blushes)!

A solution to our family's "flashlight crisis!"

Okay, that's dramatic, but Boo loves flashlights and would find them, leave them on and the batteries would die...which frustrated my partner who wants them to be in proper working order in an emergency. But, we were at The Home Depot recently and found this fantastic nightlight/flashlight/emergency light by Sylvania. It doesn't need batteries! Also, since it's an LED, the light should last at least until Boo is in college (unless it goes swimming or somesuch). It's a flashlight (you push the little astronaut-looking-through-the-window button to turn it on/off), a nightlight that glows with or without the rocket plugged in (it's a little too bright to me with it plugged in), and if it's plugged in and the power goes out, the flashlight automatically turns on! Perfect! Problem (crisis) solved!

Have I mentioned that Boo loves rockets? Well, I must say that I'm pretty impressed with how well my little three-and-a-half-year-old draws them.:

 

That "scribble" at the bottom is the "fire!" Boo enjoys drawing on everything we're working on and I took this picture with the dust still on the underlayment because I thought the drawing may not survive the dusting off; it did and I'm going to cut the rocket out and hang it somewhere in the house.

Off to get ready for a another fun day with Jenny!

Modified Manufactured: A New Series

I'm starting a series on this blog entitled: Modified Manufactured. I've decided that maybe now would be a good time to start sharing about this budget remodel I've been referring to. Here's the scoop....my family does live on a tight budget (it's the price we chose to pay so that I could stay home with Boo instead of me going back to work and putting him in daycare) and we were able to get this home because it was a great deal. It's on a beautiful piece of property, but it's an extra long double wide manufactured home from 1980. Yep, it's true. I'm sure you think that I'm crazy, especially since I'm an educated person with a BFA in Visual Art for crying out loud! However, hear me out on this. All the other houses we looked at were in town on tiny lots and the homes often weren't structurally sound, or were in unacceptable neighborhoods. When we decided that this little piece of beautiful property was the way to go and we had a bit of money left over, we thought we would maybe just build a TINY, one room, little square of a house until we could afford to add to it or maybe get an LVL home. Then, we decided that it would be more environmentally-friendly to fix up the existing structure! Especially since the "bones" of the house lent themselves to a modern home perfectly! So, call us crazy, and maybe we are...but maybe, just maybe, we're a little cutting edge. After all, what sent us over the top to do this project was an article in Dwell.:

The article focuses on trailers in parks...which isn't what we have; BUT, the idea of such a drastic transformation hit us so hard that we knew we could do this!

So, time to share a few pictures...are you ready? Oh, but first, we bought this house from friends, but they rented it out, for some time, to a guy that was off his rocker, so I don't think that they'll be upset when I explain how horrible some things were before we started working on the house. And, these pictures are under construction conditions so please keep that in mind.

This first set of pictures is the area we've been focusing on; it's half of the living space. This first picture was from before we moved in. We weren't going to move into a house with nearly 30 year old carpet that the renter let his dog and cat pee on...it was putrid. So, the carpet had to go first. The pile in front of the wood stove is stuff that we already had ripped out.:

And, a closer shot. The interior walls of the house are entirely wood paneling; yes, real wood, but not good quality and SO dark.:

This shot shows that the carpet was ripped out and a layer of oil-based primer sealed the sub-floor.:

When my dad and his friend were here, we tore out the built-in "stuff" around the wood stove and took off the "decorative" brick behind the stove to prepare it for drywall.:

Here's another angle with my dad's friend getting all the pieces off the wall that stuck out too much ("hi Chuck!").:

You can see here we are laying another layer of sub-floor (and in the living space, two layers) throughout the house because the old sub-floor is only a thin layer and, let's face it, it's been peed on. You can see here how big this room is by the size of the woodstove and this is just one quarter of the space! The area in the bottom right is the kitchen (I'll show more before pictures of that, we ripped out a wall that was an L-shape that existed in the lower left.):

Here's a shot of the area drywalled.:

Okay, that's all for now, but there's more about this space to come!

Happy Inaguration Day!  

The entire Cork Collection is on clearance!

That's right...the Cork Collection is on clearance. I'm retiring the collection (at least for now), so get them while they're still available!