Well, I never promised to blog everyday but I had no idea that I would go 6 months between posts! A lot has happened in my absense from the blogging world. In May, I graduated with a degree in Early Childhood Education from Brenau University. I began working as a librarian in the children's department at my local library. The biggest news by far, however, is that Josh and I are expecting! I'm in my 13th week and starting to feel like myself again. We are so excited and I can't wait to share some of the experiences we've had from the past few months!

I am feeling very blessed now. For the first time in 3 years, I feel like I can breath and relax. Before graduation, my life was a jumble of work and school. I'd work with preschoolers all day and then go to class for 4 long hours 3 to 4 times a week. Don't get me wrong, I LOVED my life. I loved seeing those sweet tiny faces everyday. But life was crazy! Now, as I said before, I'm working in a library. I have no classes to prepare for or get to. I went from days filled with screaming and unpredictablity to days of calm and restfulness. My evenings are filled with reading and making dinners as opposed to homework and classes.

My hope is that due to my new found freedom, I will find more time to craft and share my projects here. Soon we will begin working on the baby's nursery and I can't wait to share that. I've also decided to make a quilt for the baby. I realized that I wanted something to do in preperation for this little one and a quilt seemed like the perfect idea. Hopefully, I'll be able to share this project and inspire someone to pick up a neddle and thread!

Hope all is well with you!
Lindsay

There will be no crafting today. Today I want to say thank you. Thank you to all the women who boldly share their lives with me through their blogs. I am amazed at their honesty. I began this blogging experience reluctantly and skeptically. I would laugh at people who spent the time it takes to be a “blogger”. Slowly, however, I began to be sucked into this underground subculture. I told myself the only reason I would spend hours looking at crafting blogs were for the crafts. I soon realized that I enjoyed reading about the lives of others.

This will not come as a shock for those of you who know me, but I am not a very “open” person. I find it extremely hard to open up to others. Sure I can tell you a funny story every now and then but there are very few people who really know anything about me. This is something I struggle with. For some reason, I have always felt the need to protect not only myself but the people around me from my true thoughts and feelings. I have lived for two decades with the idea that I needed to put on my “everything is fine” face. As you all know…everything is not always fine. I struggle with this daily; however, Sundays are the hardest. My husband and I are involved with an amazing small group who love and welcome us. This group of people accepted us with no judgment which has been so refreshing. The women in this group are wonderful. They are constantly sharing their joys and struggles with me and I have nothing to give back. I simply sit and listen. If I am honest with myself I know that I don’t trust them. I don’t trust that they won’t criticize and gossip about me. I am a coward. I am typing this and my hands are shaking for fear of someone reading this and judging me.

And this is why I thank all of you bloggers out there. Some of you I know and some of you live across the country! You fearlessly share your crafts, recipes, homes, and families. You share your victories and heartaches, your triumphs and pains. I have read your blogs and been encouraged. I am beginning to understand that it is okay to share my life with others. This is, after all, the example that Christ gave us, right? I am working on developing true and honest friendships with the people in my life. It is a daily struggle. I now understand why people blog. It is an outlet. There is something so comforting about expressing myself through words. I don’t know if anybody will read this or ever even look at this little blog that I have begun, but the words have been typed. The feelings of inadequacy and fear are out in “cyber space” and I can sleep better knowing that I’ve released some of it. If you do read this, I am sorry. It is not crafty, funny, or even interesting but sometimes (many times) life is not crafty, funny or interesting. I am beginning to realize with each day that passes, life is what you make of it and people (some who you don’t even know) can bless and encourage you!

"Washing Away The Ugly"

So you've seen the kitchen. Lets move on to the laundry room. First of all, let me tell you how much I love our laundry room. The house I grew up in had a small laundry closet in our hallway. You know the type I'm talking about...slider doors and all. Practical but not efficient. When we began house hunting, one of the things I knew that I wanted was larger laundry room. Now don't misunderstand me and think that I actually do laundry...I HATE DOING LAUNDRY!!!! I thought, however, that if I had a beautiful space to do this loathsome chore in it would make it more fun. I also wanted a space for our cat (at the time we only had the one). I was done stepping on pieces of cat food and stray bits of litter in the bathroom and I refused to put a litter box in the kitchen. So, when our realtor showed us our soon to be first home I fell in love with the spacious laundry room. It had room for everything! Sadly though, it was not the beautiful space that I had envisioned in my mind. It took me about a year of looking at it before I did anything about it. My husband came home one afternoon to find me frantically pulling the border off the walls. At this point, we had to do something...ugly "antique wash board" wallpaper border was nothing compared to the border scraps and wallpaper glue that remained.



I decided to keep the room light and airy. We love blues, whites, tans, browns so we went with blue and white. I knew I wanted to do something fun and crazy and this was the perfect room to do it because my husband and I were the only ones who would see it. At the time, I was obsessed with the HGTV show Design Star and one of the contestants did these amazing and funky murals on the walls of several of her projects. This was my inspiration. The room is a long rectangle shape so we painted the two long walls bright white and the two short walls a pretty light slate blue. I then went on Google Images and found this pattern…



I painted so that it appeared to creep up the wall from behind the dryer. I also decided to paint it so that the vines on the blue walls were white and the vines on the white walls were blue.



I loved the effect but the long white wall still looked bare. I went "shopping" in the garage and found two pieces of plywood. I painted the two pieces the same blue that we used on the walls and used a white paint pen to write a fun saying. This is a simple and cheap project that anyone can do. I opened a word document and typed the saying that I was going to use in the fonts that I wanted. Then I just drew the letters on the boards free hand with a pencil using the word document as a guide. As a side note…you could use stencils to get the same effect. Once the words were drawn onto the boards I filled them in with the paint pen. This project was basically free!



So there it is…our finished project! I still have things that I want to do. I’ve told myself that I would buy wicker baskets to put stuff in for the shelves, however, as you can see there is not a basket to be found. I keep waiting until I find the sale of all sales but,alas, there have been none. Now I have space to do laundry in and I wish I could tell you that I spend hours doing our laundry like a "good wife" should. Sadly, I don't. I STILL HATE LAUNDRY!

Welcome! I'm so glad you found my little corner of the blogging world. I've started this blog to share ideas with friends...old and new! I should warn you that I most likely will not be a daily blogger but I will blog new projects and crafts! I thought I would begin by giving you a home tour. We bought our first home 3 years ago and it needed a good bit of tender love and care! So we started working on it room by room.
Here is a picture of the kitchen when we moved in...


And here is a picture of the kitchen today...


Isn't it amazing what paint can do. We removed all the wallpaper (not fun!) and painted the walls and cabinets. For about $50 we gave the room a much needed stylish update!