I Painted My Kitchen!

New paint! The color is by Behr (Home Depot) and is called River's Edge. I love it! I am not a huge fan of Behr paint, though. I find that it doesn't cover as well as Valspar from Lowe's. Either way, two coats are always required from either so I guess it doesn't matter!

Also, every plant is blooming here in Georgia. The ground is covered in yellow pollen. This happens every year, but it came early this year! I am definitely allergic to this mess, so I just stay inside! I did venture out to clip some little blooms off my cherry tree.

Aren't they pretty? Since I took this photo, the blooms have turned pink instead of white. Gorgeous!

Next, I am going to paint my laundry closet! It will be Valspar Poppy Petal:

I wanted a hot pink, but my husband disagreed. I figured that since he uses the laundry room also, that I should not use pink! 

{Cleaning} Old English

I am hosting people three times at my house this week, and, like any homeowner,  I want the house to look as good as possible. I say "as possible" because we've had some plumbing issues and there are still holes in the ceiling of the living room. After that incident, we decided to save up to repipe the entire house with copper. Not cheap. Alas, the holes remain. I suggest you get some of your own; they are wonderful conversation pieces.

Our house is also almost 30 years old, so it takes some major upkeep.  The kitchen cabinets are original to the house. Despite them being old, they are VERY nice classic hardwood cabinets, and they are a great color.  The frequently-used cabinets were a little worn out and grubby:

I had tried everything to get this stuff off: All Purpose Cleaners, Goo Gone, furniture/wood polish, etc.. It was really frustrating that my cabinets looked like that! I like clean!

Today, on my weekly shopping trip, I was in the cleaning aisle (No surprise there. I love it.) when I saw these things:

I put them in my cart:

I immediately went to work when I got home. I couldn't wait to see what would happen! I was not disappointed! I used the Scratch Cover on the worn/grubby parts and just the lemon oil on the rest of the cabinets and my dining room table. They look refreshed and pretty nice! I suppose we can put the kitchen renovation on hold for now!

This stuff is now on my list of favorite cleaning supplies. What are your favorite cleaning supplies?

Bad Week, Part 2

Continued from Part 1.

Thursday afternoon, I spent photographing the pot holders & coasters. Then I moved back up to my sewing room to edit. Kendall was upstairs with me playing on his computer and nosing around in my business. After a while, I heard something that sounded like wind. I immediately dismissed it and turned my music way up to drown out the noise. I am such an idiot.

This went on for about 20 minutes until I needed to go downstairs to do something. There was water rushing down the wall of my house. RUSHING. WATER. I realize at this point that I have no clue as to where the water shutoff is in my house and my husband is out of town in meetings all day. I call him over and over and over and over, no answer. Water is still rushing. Kendall finally chimes in that he thinks "it is in the garage." He showed me where he thought it was, helped me move stuff out of the way and helped me with the ladder. All with a busted, swollen face. Turns out, the kid knew the location of the valve. So between the time I heard the noise and the time I got the water off, it had probably been 30 minutes.

Luckily, my dad had just gotten off work and came over and capped off the leaky line but not before punching a large, medium and small hole in my ceiling. When he stuck the hammer in the first spot in the ceiling, more water and sheetrock came gushing out. It gushed for about 20 minutes. That's how much water was still in my ceiling.

We have water at our house with the exception of one toilet. I think we can manage with that for a few days while we contact plumbers and pipe replacement people to get bids on replacing all of our pipes. We have polybutylene piping, which was shown to be defective in a class-action suit. Unfortunately, we are not eligible to get any money from that because our PB pipes didn't have issues within some time frame.

Meanwhile, I burned my hand on the heating element of our toaster oven and somehow injured my other hand. And our lawnmower is broken so we have the Amazon rainforest in our front yard.

Anyway, here are some photos of my mess:






Part 3 will be the post about my pot holders & coasters. Yep, I finished them.