Want a quick and easy gift to take when you are an invited guest this summer that even the dudes will like? I have just the project thanks to Rogue Engineer. I love his detailed directions. Check him out.
Here is the link to his very detailed plans including how to cut and assemble.
Mr. Math cut four of these puppies out in less than an hour. We used reclaimed scrap wood so we probably had to work a little harder than necessary sanding, and adjusting for the wonky wood sizes but the wood was F-R-E-E. They were totally out of scrap wood left over from the media console.
The carrier works great for small bottles of soda as well as for beer and would be a fun host/ hostess gift for outdoor summer parties.
The total cost of the project for us was for the handle (check out ReStore if you have one close by) I paid two dollars fifty cents for my handles only because my hardware is all locked up in storage right now and our nearest Restore is thirty minutes away.
Bottle opener from Hobby Lobby ($1.49 right now.). They are 50% off at least once a month.
The first one is going to the sweet lady who called me to let me know she had cedar siding that she was getting rid of and wanted to know if I needed it. The wood for the project came off her house. She will enjoy seeing what we did with it. I left a lot of the green paint from her lake house on the cedar.
We added a lot of poly to the knot hole so that it won’t fall out. I love that piece of wood best.
The other three are headed to Charlotte, NC.
I can tell we will be making a few of these in the near future.
Mr. Math has already figured out the dimensions for a four bottle wine holder. I know I will have some takers on that, too.
I think the wine holders may be made from our red cedar hanging out in storage.
Oh how I long to have our shop up and running again! July is coming. Woo Hoo.
Do you ever know what you want something to look like but you just can’t explain it to anyone? That is how I am about our soon to be- “needs a name”- house right now. I want the house to have a farmhouse look but with color throughout. A rustic modern farmhouse. Mr. Math hates this word but I want the rooms to be 80% composed of neutrals with “pops” of color infused in every room. I am afraid that some folk in my life are afraid that the house is going to look like a bag of jelly beans. That is not what I mean when I say I want there to be color and light.
Right now all the colorful stuff that is going to be spread around the 2000 square foot house and outdoor kitchen ( which is going to be a bright and cheery kiwi and turquoise) is mushed together in one room with nothing neutral. I can understand the concern when I show my friends this space. If the entire house looked like the storage bedroom does right now I would have to keep a basket of sunglasses by the front door for those brave enough to enter.
I did find some websites that have the style I am going for in our farm house. The first house is over the top but I love #7 which is talking about small doses of color infused I love the white walls, wood ceiling, and bright colors.
This home in Hooked on Houses is much more the look we are going for. It is bright and playful but still an adult home. I love the look of this hallway and the bedroom in this house is beautiful. I love how the homeowner has infused color in an overall vintage and neutral home.
Here are some of the wild colors that will be finding a home in our home.
These quilts, which were all made by my grandmothers or great grandmothers are going to be in a quilt cabinet- as soon as I find, or more likely- make one something like the one pictured below.
I will have to come up with something for the door because I don’t have any windows that size. I love that my grandmothers loved color as much as I do. The quilts are definitely vivid.
source: ashleysprimatives.com
The cow print is going to be hung on a reclaimed wood “gate” made from my husband’s family barn and some hardware off their smoke house door. The gate with the picture are going to hang/lean on our fireplace mantle.
The dresser is going to be our media center.
I may be changing out the red on the bottom drawer and knob but I wont know what needs to be done until I see it in the room. We shall see.
Our bedroom will be light with an aqua headboard, coral lamps, white, mismatched, vintage night stands. There will be milk glass vases, my vintage window , and will have wood elements through a pine bedroom dresser and chest of drawers. I am going to love that room.
I have the bed painted Aqua. I am looking for bedding now.
The chicken was painted by a friend and will be hanging in my kitchen. It is so cute. I love that she painted it for me.
It is so much fun dreaming of our soon to be home. I am excited that in two months we should be moving in.
This past weekend we started out with a plan to put in a faux ship lap wall and make a headboard from reclaimed wood for our bedroom.
We live in a really nice five year old home in a master planned community. Our home is one of the models sold and has a great layout. What the home does not have is character. Last summer we started adding in a little character to the house by updating our bathroom. Bathroom makeover
I love the look of our bathroom now. It feels like it has been around a while and has a story to tell.
Our master bedroom got mini makeover this past weekend. One of the things that I wanted to do was add some texture to the walls. I am a Fixer Upper fan, especially the white ship lap walls. I love the look that the slightly irregular horizontal wood adds to a house.
A quick search online led me to several sights that looked easy enough and not super expensive.
Armed with the information from the sights we started planning the wall. First we measured the wall and got the square footage ( see that math stuff does pay off). Hubby headed off to Lowe’s after work to get the utility plywood mentioned where he found out that they don’t carry that any longer but they have something similar. He asked for the wood to be cut in 6″ sections and told them he would pick it up the next day. Long story short after two more trips to Lowe’s with no wood cut he headed to our Home Depot where he found this product: Underlayment
Just like the stuff from Lowe’s, it also comes in four foot by eight foot sheets. We had them cut the sheets into 5 7/8 inch strips. FYI- Mr. Math is the one who figured out to do 5 7/8″ to take into account the saw blade width. If you ask for them to be cut in 6 inch sections you will come out with one that is way thinner than the others. This stuff is just over a quarter centimeter thick so it is super thin and flexible. The wood at Lowe’s is a half centimeter thick which would make the gaps more noticeable and would be less flexible.
Here is what six sheets cut into strips looks like.
We started at the top of the wall and worked our way down so that any trimming would be done at the baseboard, not at the top of the ceiling. Here is our room before we got started:
The wall was about three inches longer than two sections. We used our air nailer to put the wood up
We cut the first section of each row into random lengths and started each row at opposite ends of the room.
The effect was a staggered wood look. If a piece had a sticker on the front, we used the back side. (We tried getting one sticker off and it was clear that it would be a pain in the neck to get them off.) The darker sections were the back sides of some boards. I used wood filler in the nail holes and Hubby sanded over the wood filler to get a smooth surface. At this point is was my intention to get busy painting the wall white but Mr. Math, my long-suffering husband, loves wood and really liked the look. He rarely asks me to do something specifically for him but this time he did ask if there was any way that the wood grain could show through. I remembered on that on the Remodelaholic blog a while back they had a color washing technique.
I decided to give it a try. I got busy with watered down white paint, a brush and rags, lots of rags. I could only work in about 18 inch square sections at a time so I had to work fast to eliminate dry lines. It was a workout my friends! like an Advil and Epsom salt kind of workout. The room has 10 foot ceilings and my fear of height did not help the process. I think I got better as I went along but I really do like the look of the wall. I used a brush to paint on the watered down paint then a rag to rub it in and take off the excess. I sort of felt like the Karate Kid (paint on, wipe off, repeat).
Against the dark wall it looked terrible and I started to panic a little but as I moved on it really started to look the way I hoped.
The two pictures above really don’t reflect the color that it turned out but you can see that there are not any major overlap marks and that it is consistent.
The photo below shows the color as it actually looks but I could only get this one small picture to give you the real look.
Here is the finished wall. I love the effect even if this is not what I started out to do. Those happy accidents are always the best.
The plywood was $12.97 per sheet and it took 6 sheets for this big wall. The white wash used 2 cups of cheap flat white paint. (I know what you are thinking but it really did only take two cups of paint.) The nice folks at Home Depot waived the 25 cent per cut fee because they were backed up and we were willing to come back to pick it up. All in the wall took about $80.00 to complete.
This was a project that provided you have access to an air compressor and nail gun, anyone could do.
It was nice to get something accomplished this weekend.
I have to plan better next winter. I need some small projects to do in the house while waiting for it to get warm enough for me to head into the Garagemahal, or if all goes well, our new, yet to be named, workshop.
This year I have had a few projects going, but not enough to keep me from being bored.
A lot of searching Pinterest gave me some ideas for quick ideas to keep me busy.
The first was a twiggy letter “S” that got done this weekend. It is an easy project that requires few supplies; a glue gun, large wooden letter, wood stain, garden limb cutters, lots of sticks, and lots of glue sticks.
I bought a large wooden letter at Hobby Lobby 40% off and stained it with walnut stain so it looks a little aged.
To gather twigs at the lake house meant going out to the burn pile and saving some from being burned. The trick is to get the twigs as straight as possible and a consistent size.
Lots and lots of patience are also a requirement for this project.
The steps are easy. Cut the twigs to fit and glue them down.
I love the rustic textural quality of the finished product.
The other three are headed to Charlotte, NC.
