So last week I was talking to Missa Lee about it at work. She immediately looked on craigslist and the first post she found was a woman who was selling a farm table that she made. It was perfectly priced and just the table we wanted! She and her husband made a similar table to the one from Restoration Hardware for $2,245.

I immediately emailed her and learned that she and her husband were building tables to raise money for their adoption in Congo. I really loved the table and it was a nice touch to it knowing where our money was going towards. We made plans to pick it up with my dad’s car. Really…my dad is amazing for helping us with getting the table. Thanks, dad!

We didn’t waste time once we got it into the house. The table was already sanded so all we had to do was stain it. But I kind of didn’t want to stain it. Tyler on the other hand wanted to. He convinced me to stain it…. more specifically the color, dark walnut.

I was nervous since I didn’t want it to be too dark. You know how it is…the longer you leave the stain on without wiping it, the darker the wood will get. We decided to start staining the bottom of the table so we had some room for error. I didn’t wait too long before wiping it off and it turns out it was too light and I didn’t like it. So we left the stain on for about 20 minutes or so.

Don’t let this picture convince you that Tyler did all of the staining. I did pretty much 85% of the work. I know his little game of being slow and watching football at the same time on TV. He knows I’m fast and focused so I ended up doing most of it.

Yikes! Look at how dark it looks with the stain on for a long time.

Wiping off the stain was Tyler’s job. :) The next morning we put fast-drying polyurethane (semi gloss) on the table. We did about 3 coats and that was it!

Now look at this beauty! Notice something else too?

The new rectangle hanging capiz that I got for Christmas!

Here’s what it looks like with the light off.

I just looove it! After my dad and Tyler got the pendant up, we realized that it was too high so they’re going to fix it later this week and add more rods that came with the package so it’ll be lower.

Seriously this is the best multi-purpose table! For eating, holding cards while playing card games, beer pong and ping pong! Want to come over now?

This is what it looked like before. That table has been moved to the formal dining room for a little hang out spot next to the foosball table.

And this is what it looks like now! The table was $265 and we only spent $35 on supplies (stain, brushes & tarp cover). Total cost of the project: $300!!

I still have my dad’s old school C9 lights that he gave me a few years ago. Last year I filled them up in a vase and this year I wanted to do something different.

Lately I have been obsessed with glitter so I thought why not?! So I bought Martha Stewart’s glittering glue & glitter from Michael’s for the project.

I used a paper plate to shake the excess of glitter off then waited until there was a lot of glitter to pour it back into the bottle. Now I want to sprinkle glitter on everything else in the house!

I wanted to hang these bulbs up in the family room. So I did it the easy way with tying them with hemp that I had in my closet from other projects.

I love it! It’s worth all the glitter that I got on myself and Cheerio, the pup! I still have a lot of more bulbs left that I’ll use around the house. Let’s hope I don’t go overboard with decorations for Tyler’s sake. :)

I found a photo of bats online {sorry, I can’t remember where now} and printed out a bunch of them. After cutting them, we put double-sided tape and put them in the hallway and on both sides of the front door.

It’s always a fun project when we save money by using the things we already have. I’m not a huge fan of going out to buy Halloween decorations just for the month. I need to save my money for Christmas decorations since that’s my favorite holiday anyways.

Mini pumpkins, Halloween subway art & candy corn. I hate candy corn so I’m fine with just using it as decoration or for others to eat.

Now all we need is for the weather to cool down. 100 degrees is NOT okay!

I have always wanted to do something with chalkboard paint in our house but I didn’t really know where or what. After talking with some friends & Tyler, I was told myself that I had to do it before I changed my mind.

The original plan was to do it on the pantry door but it’s so small and I wasn’t really feeling it. Then we both saw the wall in between the kitchen & living room and knew it had to be on that wall.

We made a trip to Home Depot and bought chalkboard paint, wood for the framing and paint.

This project was really easy and painless! We did a second coat after letting the first coat dry for 4 hours per the instructions.

Tyler did the painting while I painted the wood with metallic paint by Martha Stewart. After they dried for a few hours, Tyler cut them up and then nailed them into the wall.

We’re so happy with how it looks! Now we can use it to chalk up reminders, grocery lists and pretty much anything. I love that I have been catching Tyler looking at it with pride. Doing projects ourselves really makes us feel good and accomplished considering that it has been a while. Now I’m hoping we will do another project soon!

I love the pinwheels that Mrs. Priss made! She made them herself and posted a tutorial on her blog. I thought I’d give it a try and do this since it’s a cheap and fun project. I didn’t have anything for the center of the pinwheels so I used dimes. Not bad, huh?

I love mustard yellow & pink! I told Tyler we need to add more pink to our house because he wouldn’t let me before. I’ve added some color of orange (his favorite color) to the house so now I have pretty pink pinwheels in our house. As of adding more pink and going pink-crazy, I guess I’ll have to wait until we have a baby girl some day. No, sorry this isn’t a hint. No babies for us yet! :)

I loooove it! Now I get to go pink-crazy this weekend because I’m in charge of decorating for my sister’s graduation party on Saturday.

I hope you all have a fabulous Memorial Day weekend – any fun plans? I’ll be spoiling my sister and getting some sun!

So let’s talk about our faux fireplace! I’ve been longing to hang something up above it but nothing came to mind until last week when all of my creative juices were pouring out! I wholeheartedly blame it on pinterest and having a new co-worker at work who loves doing DIY projects too.

I have a tall stack of magazines…mostly West Elm magazines. I didn’t know what to do with them but couldn’t bear the thought of throwing them out. All of their pictures and products are so pretty! I decided to rip out my favorite pages and then Tyler rolled them up like cones. We had a whole bunch of heavy poster boards from college so we cut it in a round shape. Then I hot glued the cones on on the edges.

I looooove it! I know the mirror isn’t centered but whatever, I love it that I could care less about the position of the mirror.

Our faux fireplace for the Spring/Summer! See those fillers? Those took forever to make with styrofoam balls and hemp twine. It was worth it because there’s no way I’m buying $15-$20 for just 4 of them when I can make them myself.

We have our sand unity vase on top of the fireplace and I don’t like how there’s no cover for it. So I made a little felt flower and put it on top for now.

We had another vase to use so I thought I’d use more paper cones but with bright colors this time.

I love how we made sure that ‘West Elm’ was going to be visible when we did it cone style.

I’m on a roll here with projects!

Inspired by Flower Patch Farmgirl

Once I saw Flower Patch Farmgirl’s post, I knew I wanted to try this. I needed a break from being on the computer and watching TV. So this was the perfect solution!

Now all I had to do was find something pretty to cut up. I then remembered that I had books from Sabrina Ward Harrison that I bought a few years ago. Without any hesitation, I torn out my favorite pages. It was either making my wall pretty or just keeping the books stored in the closet. I chose to make my walls pretty of course!

I didn’t have a heart punch so I went with the manual method of folding and cutting heart shapes myself. I put them together and taped it together on the front and back. Once I finished that, Tyler hot glued the pennies on for me.

Now I wanted these to go up on the wall where there is an intercom which makes it kind of hard to decorate around an intercom. So that’s why that wall has been neglected until now. So anyway, we did it the old fashioned way and taped them to the wall since they were not that heavy. After all…a penny weighs somewhere between 2 to 3 grams.

This project only cost me 15 cents….sweet!!! ;)

I’m crazy about polka dots so when I came across these napkins from Paper Source, I knew I had to buy them! The color’s just perfect for spring.

I wanted to use them immediately and not just use them as napkins, so I decided to use them as plate mats.

Please ignore the winkly lines! I plan on ironing them but got too excited and wanted to take pictures before it got dark outside. It looks lovely with my Kate Spade china which I absolutely loooove!

We still have to get around to doing our dining room. Heck, our dining table isn’t even a dining table at all! Believe it or not, it’s a desk from IKEA that we bought when we were tight on money a few years ago. I consider it as a placeholder until we get around to doing our dining room.

There’s way too many things on our “house” list and it’s hard trying to figure out what to do first, second, third and so on. It’s all good, we’ll be living here for a while!

I have always wanted garlands and to incorporate them in our house somehow. The other day I came across stephlovesben’s shop on Etsy and fell in love with the garlands in her shop. I just knew I had to order these and stephlovesben was lovely & easy to work with since I wanted the felts spaced out a little bit.

I figured I’d put these up in our laundry room since we haven’t really done anything to it…as you can see in the picture! We plan on getting around to doing the laundry room but we’re not sure yet what we want to do with it. So this will do for now with our pretty garlands.

The garlands were too long so we cut them and then hung it on the door. Haha, Tyler thought it was silly and didn’t want me to put it there. This is a better place for it because I originally thought about putting it by the kitty condo.

Oh, yeah. The kitty condo…. I’m so proud of our homemade kitty condo!

Our cats are so spoiled especially Cozy, our youngest. He loves all the attention he can get and thinks everything revolves around him. So a few months ago, we’ve noticed that Cozy was pooping on the carpet in the dining room randomly. We had no idea why he was doing that and this is the time I really wish cats could talk!

I told Tyler I hated how our laundry room was so small that there’s not really room for 2 cat liter boxes. One was in the way of the door and it was just annoying. So we decided to make a 2-story kitty condo, haha! We had boards from our old IKEA coffee table so we used that. We were afraid that the cats weren’t going to use the 2nd-story liter box and we made sure Cozy knew about it.

A few weeks later, we both realized that Cozy had not pooped on the carpet ever since we did this. We came to the conclusion that he hates sharing the liter box with Coconut, our other cat. Coconut is a big fat cat and refuses to jump to the liter box on the “2nd floor” so now they each have their own liter box and privacy. Woohoo!

Maybe I should label the boxes with their names. I don’t think Tyler’s going to like this, haha.

Anyways, have a wonderful weekend!! I’ll be running my first 5K on Saturday with Tyler and my dad. I’m so excited!

P.S. There is a giveaway on Busy Bee Lauren’s blog to win any item from my Etsy shop – a WordPress/Blogger theme or the printable PDFs! It ends on Monday so be sure you head over there to enter!