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.

We made a trip to Michael’s and bought a 12′ x 12′ mirror for $5.95 which is pretty much the only thing we spend on this project since we had everything else. And no, that’s not a baby cry signaler in the background if that’s what you were thinking. It’s a doorbell signaler so when someone rings the doorbell, the light will flash since I can’t really hear it. So anyways, Tyler hung it up by nailing it in before we put the mirror on which we used really heavy duty double-sided tape from Home Depot.

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!

See how close the house is next door? It was really nice when no one was living there but then 5 months ago a nice & sweet family moved in. One of our bedroom windows is faced this way. I love having the windows open to bring natural light in but with our bedroom we haven’t been able to really open the windows.

So last month we found this great shade from Costco for $40. My dad came over to help Tyler get it up. We were concerned about the shade moving so we drilled holes on the side and got super duty bungee cords attached then hooked them to the shade and now it works great!

Ta-da! Doesn’t it look great? I like how it has a natural color so it blends right in with everything else. Maybe we should go buy bathrobes and have breakfast outside now that we have our privacy. Oh right, we don’t wear bathrobes…too heavy and feels weird!

Anyways…now that we have our privacy, we still had one more problem. Every day when we come home from work and walk into our bedroom, it was like walking into a sauna. It gets sooo hot in our room since we don’t have sunscreens. We have had some restless nights where it was too hot even with the fan on full blast. With the temperatures rising, we knew it was time to get sunscreens.

My dad works for a sunscreen & door company, so he was able to get us a quote for 5 windows and a sliding door. We wanted to do only our master bedroom and bath for now. My dad didn’t want commission so we actually saved a lot of money and got 5 sunscreens and a sliding door for under $300.  (Thanks, Dad!!!)

We know the sunscreens are working and helping because Tyler woke up late the other morning for work. It was too dark in our room for it to be almost 7AM! It’s actually cooler in our room and really makes a big difference. Imagine drying your hair with a blow dryer in a sauna!! That’s how hot it was in our room and bathroom before.

This past weekend we saw these chairs for sale at Bed Bath & Beyond and knew we were in need for an upgrade. The chairs were priced at $39.99 each and we had 2 coupons for 20% off of one single item so because of that we made 2 separate purchases. So we were able to save $16!

We had dinner outside the other night and even played a game too. It’s just the perfect time to do things outside before it’s 100 degrees which is just around the corner!

Sigh, I can never get enough of this!

P.S. I changed the design of my header again. :)

Okay, I’ve had this bookmarked for months and came across it again when I re-organized my files & folders on my iMac. I can’t believe this is priced at $369 at Crate & Barrel. Ridiculous, right?!

So I finally decided to try and recreate it with Illustrator. It took me a while and even Tyler helped a little bit. He calmed me down when I got stressed over the smallest thing or if the layers weren’t cooperating with me when I tried clicking on a specific layer. I think it didn’t help that it was hot in the house last night!

Doesn’t it look awesome!?

I fell in love with the prints and couldn’t stop thinking about it at work. We live 1 hour away from IKEA and it’s only only 15-20 minutes away from work, so I decided to go during lunch break to buy frames for the prints. I decided to buy 4 frames instead of 6 because I wasn’t too crazy about the 2 (blue & yellow) designs in the middle.

After work, I came home and saved the files on our USB. Tyler and I went to Staples and had them printed. Since the designs are 12 x 12, they had to print it on a big printer which costed us a little bit more. But at this point, I didn’t care because we were saving money anyways!

Breakdown on the project:
FREE!!!!: Create art with Illustrator
$79.96: 4 Ribba frames from IKEA
$25.00: Print at Staples
$104.96 TOTAL!

Now our family room looks pretty and colorful. I also feel very accomplished that we did this ourselves & saved money!

EDIT:
Some of you have expressed an interest of buying the PDFs so here is a link to my Etsy shop where I have it up for sale at $30.00 for all 6 of them ($5 a piece). If you want to buy them individually then let me know. Also make sure you let me know which size you want (10×10 or 12×12) and if you want different colors, I’ll be more than happy to change that for you too.