Mermaid Shelf using a Pallet

Last time I shared my daughter’s bathroom with you and today I’m sharing the pallet shelving unit my husband made.

IMG_9028When we completed this project 3 years ago pallet projects were all the rage. At the time I was able to go to our local Habitat store and ask if I could have a pallet. They said sure and I got it for free. Nowadays they charge you for them.

I brought the pallet home and asked my husband to make a shelf for Caroline’s bathroom. After shaking his head and possibly rolling his eyes he got to work.

This was the only picture I could find of it in the building stages – a frame was built and then the wooden boards were attached onto it after being sanded.

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We then used scrap wood for the shelves and bought wooden brackets to place underneath the shelves to hold them up. After that I painted on a mermaid using pink paint.

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I then sanded the mermaid and pallets to add a little character to them.

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And voila, the world’s heaviest shelf is made!

A Little Girl Bathroom – Under the Sea

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This is the bathroom that took 3 years to complete – did we do any major repairs? did we take out the tub and sink? Did we redo the floor?

No. No. And no.

We painted, hung a shelf, and made some art.

3 years people. 3 years.

It’s totally my fault, I hit a wall on the project so it just stopped.

Let me explain.

When we started this project my daughter was three and wanted a Little Mermaid themed bathroom. I knew she would quickly grow out of that so I decided on a whimsy ocean theme.

The plan was to make stripes on the back wall alternating between white and light blue.

My sweet husband worked on this for a couple of days.

IMG_2296 When it was finished I liked it but the pencil lines going across the wall really bothered me as did the raised paint lines. I’m normally not so picky but this for some reason really irked me.

As the painting was wrapping up I was laying out random frames we had – soon after I spray painted them bright yellow.

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I used light weight denim material and covered pieces of cardboard which were the sizes of the frames.

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I found some walls decals on etsy and just printed out the pictures from the listing to create an outline of the sea creature I wanted to use.

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I completed almost all of the art when I came across a problem with the turtle art above – this was the only piece where I used the actual back of the frame to glue the denim to and now the art would not fit back into the frame. I did not have any left over denim fabric since it was left over from another project.

So the project stalled.

For two years.

The stripes stayed and the wall art sat on my bedroom floor.

And there it sat until Christmas time this year and I wanted to get this project -DONE.  I ended up tossing the turtle art and not using him and my husband sanded down the wall and we just put a coat of white paint on the wall. The art wall is white while all the other walls are light blue.

Here’s the final product. I love it.

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Some of the pieces received a little yellow bow.

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IMG_9033I glued on some yellow rick rack to create jellyfish tentacles and some stripes on the fish.

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Next time, I’ll show you how we (read: my husband) made this mermaid shelving unit.

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And to my husband – Thank you for everything you did to make this bathroom so special for our daughter!

 

LEGO Minifigures Scavenger Hunt download

Caroline wanted a lego party for her 6 year old party so I decided to make this LEGO Minifigure Scavenger Hunt. She sat with me and chose all of the figured she wanted on the board.

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page 2 of the download is shown below along with the directions.

MINIFIGURES*Download this LEGO Minifigures cavenger hunt here*

Hope your kids enjoy this game!

*Check out the Bad Guys scavenger hunt here

*Check out the Sesame Street scavenger hunt here*

And remember you can always print out 2 copies of the board and use them as cards for a memory game.

A “Bench” of Personality

The longer I am married the more I have come to realize that I am the big thinker in the marriage. Let’s build a house! Let’s go to Disney World! Let’s paint the piano!

All of these big ideas stress out my detailed oriented thinking husband. I never have a plan of how we are going to accomplish these things, I just always say let’s do it. My husband, ever the detail man, begins to lay down the no’s. I promptly ignore him and say we can do it! Whatever it is, I have faith in us. Whatever it is, he sees the obstacles. He’s an engineer and it shows.

I’m fairly sure it’s what makes our marriage work almost 18 years later. One of us is the gas, one of us is the brakes. Without my husband, I would surely be in debt, live in a fully decked out house, and keep up with the Jones’. (OK, I’m actually not that bad – I’m the one who cut cable to cut costs.) Without me, my husband would surely live in a house with only a mattress and a tv, drive a car from the early 90’s, and die as a lonely miser who would have prepaid his own funeral at cost. (Ok, he’s actually not that bad either – he would live with a mattress, tv, cable, and pizza delivery).

My very long and convoluted point being….I wanted to paint the piano.

“Come on…let’s paint the piano!”

My husband has not been impressed each time I have mentioned this for the past two years.

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In an effort to reach those 18 years of marriage and then move onto 19 I decided this was one of those things that I am just going to let drop. It’s really not that important and is a huge task.

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So instead we recovered the piano bench in 10 minutes on one of the snow days.

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Here’s how the project went down:

Me – “Here’s a piece of fabric to cover the piano bench with.”

My husband – “Is it big enough? Are we going to staple it in? Do we need to take the leather off first? Will we have to replace the hinges?

Me: “I don’t know…let’s just do it.”

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I believe all sides are happy with the result and thrilled that this project has come to an end.

But don’t you worry dear…I’m dreaming up all sorts of projects that you will love.

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Because we can do it!

SNOW DAYS

My kids have been waiting and waiting for some snow days this year. Unlike the north we just need some ice and SCHOOL IS CANCELLED! Yippee!

I’m not going to lie. When we got that call last week that the first day of school was cancelled due to the ice I was thrilled. And then to get another call the next night? Eureka!

What did we do? Cleaned out closets, baked, played games, watched tv, and stayed in our pajamas all day long.

And then 3 days later it started snowing! We got about 4 inches of snow and once again everything in Texas shut down. All our weekend plans (about 8 sporting events) were cancelled and we stayed in our pajamas. Just the best.

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Forecast is calling for more snow on Thursday….and possibly a delay in school start times….to dream the impossible dream.

A Meal Plan for this Week

Every Sunday I sit down with my husband and we hash out our meal plan based on the 7,000 after school activities we have going on. Even with a ton of events we almost always sit down and eat dinner as a family. Whether we have to bump up dinner to 5:00 or push it back until 7:30 we eat together because I think it’s so important.

This week I sat down to create the meal plan at the kitchen table and got up before I finished.

A little while later I came back to my list and noticed that my 5 year old had added onto the list.

See if you can pick out the meal she has decided on:

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Happy Monday Everyone!

 

Random Thoughts #1

Mindy over at Rindy Mae does “Random Thoughts and Tidbits” posts from time to time and they are some of my favorite to read so I thought it was time for my own such post.

*My 9 year old was looking at animals on the local animal shelter website, found one he liked, and called me over. I said the dog was cute. He then proceeded to run around the house and scream, “Mom said we could get another dog. We are bringing Bailee home!” I had to crush him by telling him, no, that is not what I said. There are no new dogs joining our family anytime soon. He has not given up yet though as he keeps talking and talking about getting another dog.

*Every night at 9 my husband and I watch an episode of Modern Family. Funniest show ever. We have never watched it before but we are loving it.

*I made these Individual Frozen Key Lime Pies and they are a big hit at our house. I don’t partake in any of the eating since I firmly believe the words fruit and dessert should never be joined together.

*My mom is sending us a king cake in a few weeks. To say we are all excited is an understatement.

*This is the model for the curvy jeans on the GAP website – umm….Houston I think we have a problem…the girl is gorgeous but curvy? Me thinks not. LOOK AT HER THIGHS!

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*This is a sweet post about being a “Mommy” that my sister-in-law sent me.

*Currently my 5 year old says she’s going to live in a house right next door to us when she grows up. My 9 year old, on the other hand, enjoys telling us that he’s going to move far away.  My 12 year old is sort of indifferent about the whole thing.

*I’ve been home all week with two kids who have taken turns being sick on various days, therefore, I haven’t been at work. On Saturday I get to teach Saturday school to 3rd graders for 4 hours. 4 hours of teaching math! So much fun for me and thankfully they are still young enough to be enthusiastic about measuring themselves with tape measures, creating fractions with skittles, and creating area problems out of cheez-its. I’m so looking forward to it.

*”Caroline it’s time to go run some errands.” She comes down from her room a few minutes later. “I’m ready.

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Shorts leggings on top of pants leggings with knee socks on top of those – Long sleeve shirt under short sleeve shirt which says, “I am made of awesome.”

Yes you are awesome sweet thing.

“Alright, get your shoes on.”

Have a great weekend everyone!

And please feel free to add your own random thoughts below 🙂

 

Elvis is in the Building – A Kid Costume

When I gave my kids the unofficial “What do you want to be for Halloween” survey back in September, my 9 year old said, “Elvis.”

Naturally.

So if that’s what he wanted that’s what we were going to figure out.

I thought, great, that should be easy – jeans, white t-shirt, and leather jacket.

“No mom, I want the other Elvis.”

We started looking at pictures and he kept choosing the jumpsuit Elvis.

“You want a jumpsuit for your costume?

“Yes.”

“That might be hard to find.”

“You can make it.”

For the record, no I can’t. My sewing skills are terrible but I can make my way through pillow construction. Jumpsuits? No.

So I looked online but there were no 9 year old Elvis costumes. I could find baby Elvis, adult Elvis, and even dog Elvis but no kid Elvis.

So then I went on the hunt for jumpsuits at consignment stores and at my 6th store BINGO – A WHITE JUMPSUIT!

The jumpsuit was all white with red material flared at the bottom and came with a red scarf. You have no idea how excited I was – I gave them my $6 and practically ran out the store to go show my son.

A month passed.

And what to little boys do in a month’s time? They grow. The jumpsuit that I thought was perfect for Elvis was looking a little tight and more ABBA like. Stink. What was I going to do?

And then I remembered that my neighbor sews. My beautiful, wonderful, sewing neighbor.

A day before Andrew’s Halloween piano recital (where the kids dress up in costume) I knocked on my neighbor’s door and said, “Please please help me.”

My neighbor came over, snipped the whole jumpsuit in half, sewed the red scarf around the middle and gave our little Elvis enough dancing room.

My neighbor accomplished all of that in under 5 minutes. I sat there amazed but oh so thankful.

My son was adamant that the costume needed a larger collar so I took hard felt and covered it in white fabric. I then made a gold edge for the collar using some leftover Wonder Woman fabric. The belt buckle was made the same way. I then used puffy paints (about $6) and created an eagle on both sides of the collar and a design on the belt.

We found a pair of gold sunglasses ($7 at the party store) and painted on some mighty fine side burns if you ask me.

To complete the look, Elvis put on his “blue suede” Converse and was ready to roll.

I now present to you…THE KING!

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I was literally sewing the belt buckle on to the costume in between stoplights driving to his piano recital. All in the day of a music legends manager I guess.

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A white jumpsuit – $6

Gold sunglasses – $7

Neighbor who sews – Priceless!

Can’t wait to see what he picks for his costume this year.