DIY Chalkboard Tutorial!

Hello barbies! I hope you're all having fabulous weekends soaking up this gorgeous fall weather. Aside from a trip to the mall, visiting my parents at their lake house, doing the 2013 Wake County Parade of Homes (look for a post on the fabulous mansions we toured later this week!), a dinner date and watching The Heat with Sandra Bullock (which was hilarious!), we tackled a couple house projects, including this DIY chalkboard project. We already have a chalkboard in our kitchen, but I really wanted a big one for by our front door to do seasonal stuff with. I shopped around, but none were quite big enough for what I had in mind, plus even at the discount stores the larger chalkboards can be pretty pricey. So we did what we always do in these situations - we DIY'd one on the cheap (under $10 total)!

Here's how we did it:
We bought this painting from Goodwill for $6. I picked it because of its size and because I liked the frame. I had my hesitations with the mat (it seemed to complicate the project), but hubby convinced me it was a good feature - and I'm glad he did.

We removed the original hanging wire, cut the back open and removed the painting and the mat, which luckily were attached to each other. We took the glass out and decided to hold on to it for future projects. We used the brown paper from the back and painters tape to cover the white matting while spray painting.

Then we used Rust-oleum Chalk Board spray paint to cover the painting. We bought it at Home Depot for $3.76. The woman at the store advised us to do about 10 separate coats because chalkboard paint needs to be on really thick to work.

We did 4 coats (which used about half the bottle), letting it completely dry between coats, before we did a chalk test. The chalk went on well and wiped off better than it does on my store bought chalkboard, so I declared victory. Hubby put the painting back in the frame using a staple gun, put the original hanging wire back on the back and voila! We had a DIY chalkboard for under $10 - and as always, the coolest part is that we made it ourselves!

  

Before and after:

 

Thanks for reading barbies! If you try it, comment on this post and let us know how it goes! I'd also love to post your before and after pics!

xox

Halloween Decorations!!

Hello and happy October barbies!

Here at the BDH, we couldn't have been more excited to welcome the spooky season the best way we know how: with Halloween decorations! We had a ton already but one thing we were missing was a mailbox swag. Believe it or not, we didn't have a mailbox at our Houston rental house. The whole subdivision shared community mailboxes. So now that we have our own real mailbox, I was eager to adorn it. I'll walk you through instructions so you can DIY your own mailbox swag at the end of this post. Until then, here are some of the spookiest photos from around the BDH!

 

Here's my 7 ft black and orange Halloween tree! Over the years my love has Christmas has kind of leached into other holidays (I also have a 7 ft pink Valentine's day tree covered in Hearts, a Mardi Gras tree covered in beads and masks and a 7 ft white 4th of July tree covered in red, white, blue and stars). This year I've covered it in skeletons, ghosts, ceramic purple witches, pumpkins (of course), a giant creepy eye and some orange glittery spiders. Oh, and of course I top it off with a a candy corn hat, duh. The lace pumpkins around the bottom are DIY projects from several years ago.

I always love to pull out my two-tier spider web server.

 

Halloween bathroom (the rat keeps freaking out hubby, which makes me laugh):

Halloween chandelier. I only had a few of the pumpkin lanterns, but luckily mom bought a ton more last year when they were on clearance. This weekend she's going to bring me hers that she's not using so that I can have one on each prong. I also hung a glittery spider from the center.

 

 Spiders and a glitter pumpkin:

 Front porch with hard to see Halloween wreaths and little scarecrows in the planters

 Halloween wreaths! I DIY'd these two years ago.

 Halloween deco mesh DIY wreaths again:

 Scarecrows at the bistro table and Halloween garden stakes:

I got a ton of these pumpkin picks from the dollar store (!!) so I added them to all of my flower arrangements around the house.

 Glitter pumpkins are my current obsession

 

Bats, cats and pumpkins in the foyer:

 Ledge witch

 I know this was also featured in my fall decor post, but I couldn't resist adding it here too.

Skulls and Crate and Barrel spider cupcake holders in the dining room:

Mark Roberts Halloween fairy from my always trendy mother-in-law who collects them:

 More glitter pumpkins. Swoon.

A childhood heirloom, this pumpkin guy was part of all of my childhood Halloweens. It proudly stood in the doorway at the house in Bahama, NC I grew up in every October. Mom said I could put it up this year and I'm taking the responsibility pretty seriously.

 Spider web rug a la Target's dollar spot.

 And you guys know I love my Prissy Plates - here's the Halloween edition!

Can't forget the DIY deco mesh mailbox swag! Here's what you'll need:

1. Deco mesh - you can get it at Hobby Lobby, Michaels, Carolina Pottery or even Walmart sometimes (way less than a roll - maybe 1/4 a roll at most)(I used about 1/8 of two different rolls - the black roll isn't pictured here)
2. Mesh ribbon (the orange stuff) - available at the same stores
3. Accent ribbon - available at any craft store and also Walmart
4. Pipe Cleaners
5. Scissors
6. I added the white mesh roping for extra pizazz, but it's totally not necessary

First, unroll and cut two strips of about 4-8 feet of mesh, depending on how long you want the swag to drape over your mailbox. I cut one strip of black and one strip of orange and black. Line the two strips up, and pinch them at about 8 inches from the bottom.

Cut your pipe cleaners into halves or thirds and use the pipe cleaner to tie off where you pinched the two mesh strips.

Proceed  every 8 inches or so until your strips of mesh look like a catepillar and are pinched in roughly equal sized sections from end to end. If you want your swag to be symmetrical, make sure you do an even number of sections.

 

 I went back and added the mesh tubing because I had it laying around, but I don't think it was necessary.

The last step is to add the bow in the middle most pinched spot (assuming you want the swag symmetrical). I added an orange mesh bow and then a second bow on top of that with my accent ribbon. I left my bow tails/legs really long for added drama, but you certainly don't have to if you like a neater, cleaner look. And voila! Here's the finished product:

Isn't the foggy morning appropriate for this Halloween post? I wish I could give a cost for this project, but I had all of my materials leftover as scraps from previous projects. For me, it probably cost no more than $7 in materials, but if you had to go out and buy it all new it could be as much as $20, but you would have a lot of stuff left over.

As an added bonus and despite their complete irrelevance to this blog post, here are some good lawyer cartoons, two of my favorite outfits from the last week and a new pic of the BDH. Thanks for reading barbs! You guys are the best!

xox!


Submitted to:
http://www.creationsbykara.com
 http://www.savvysouthernstyle.net/

Formal Living Room Makeover!

Hubby and I spent the weekend giving my favorite room in the house, the formal living room, a fab makeover. The room, which is supposed to be the female and formal living space of the BDH, is meant to have a Marie Antoinette/Victorian era vibe with some touches of 2013 (hot pink, mercury glass, shag rug) and Whitney (pug figurines, photos of my bridesmaids, my scrapbooks) with light pink, hot pink, pale blue and gold as the room's colors.

 

We had the furniture and decor all situated already - we purchased the vintage sofa and matching chair from an antique store in Smithfield earlier this year, hubby built the console table himself, we painted his old yellow oak coffee table white and distressed it, my mom bought two adorable vintage chairs for us from a coworker and I snagged two little white side tables from Joss & Main and an antique market for $40 and $25. We had my bridal portraits, a vintage mirror from Italy that we picked up at an estate sale, coordinating Italian sconces, my preserved bridal bouquet (thanks bff!) and a big gold painting (that I painted over to make more pink) from an antique shop in VA. Needless to say, the room was in great shape aside from the plain tan walls.

To jazz the place up, we decided to wallpaper the upper half of the walls and do cream wainscoting on the bottom half. When we went to Home Depot this morning to get 155 linear feet of trim to do the wainscoting, we changed our minds when we realized the thin little trim was almost $2 per foot! It would certainly be worth it, probably 10-fold, in added home value, but this was a low/no budget project. We already spent a good deal on wallpaper (its more expensive than we thought), wallpaper supplies and paint and still needed to buy trim to do the new crown molding in the room. We decided to wait on the wainscoting until we do it in several other rooms on the first floor at the same time. Instead, we painted the bottom half cream, which will make adding the wainscoting super easy when the time comes.

We started wallpapering Friday night and thankfully had the help of one of my best friend's moms (and one of my mom's best friends lol) who is a wallpaper GENIUS, not to mention kind of a genius in general. We watched her every move as she did the first few strips, and tried to soak in her expertise. We're happy to report that wallpapering is an adaptable skill, because after studying Beth we became pro's. Seriously, it's so much easier than painting! It probably helped that we (accidentally, but thankfully) bought the pre-pasted paper, but it seriously was a breeze. My mom and dad came to help out Friday night too, which made it extra fun. We wallpapered all night Friday night, a couple hours Saturday morning and all night Saturday night. Then we spent most of the day Sunday with me painting the bottom half of the room and Ross doing molding work on the top of the new paper in the two-story part of the room. Oh, and we also added a ceiling medallion to accent our vintage gold chandelier and tie in the cream from the bottom half of the room.

We're so pleased with the result! The Lady Cave is now a complete room, ready to entertain the female loves of my life, my fab female neighbors and their adorable little girls, and most often, my white pekingese Toula and I with a good book (we already re-read a couple chapters of House Bunny in the new room this weekend). Here are some photos of the before, during and after. What do you think barbs?

BEFORE (lots of tan!):

 WALLPAPERING:

 AFTER!

These guys weren't very helpful:

Thanks for reading barbs! xox