Cottage Charm Giveaway!

I've decided to participate in One Woman's Cottage Life Cottage Charm Giveaway. I will be giving away some items available in my shop Home Again Antiques at Old City Hall Shoppes. The prize is pictured above: a nesting bird arrangement, all natural lavender soap, lavender sachets, a vintage doiley, and some instant ancestors (such cute little girls in Victorian clothes!). Due to shipping costs, this prize will go to the first name drawn from within the United States. If I draw your name and you are from elsewhere I will still mail you the latest Mary Engelbreit Home Companion Magazine. If you would like to enter all you have to do is leave a comment on this post by midnight May 30th. On the 31st I will draw the winner/winners. Even if you've never left a comment before, leave one on this post and you are entered!


Fish Scales

He's making progress. This was right before he had to get down due to lightening. I'd like to help with this but I'd be in tears up there....I wish heights didn't bother me, but they do.

Priming the Bathroom/ Before Shots

I've been working on priming the trim and doors that you saw in the last post, and I thought I'd give you some background on this room. this is what it looked like when we bought the house. Complete with plastic, sort of wood looking vanity.
We bought this house in 1988 and this definitely looks like an eighties bath in an old home. In 1999 we decided that we couldn't stand it any longer. I tried to strip the wallpaper, but the wall board came with it. We did not want to gut the room at this point, so I decided to cover it if possible.
Joe and I primed lots of paper bags and tore them up into random pieces which my sis and mom and I applied with wallpaper paste. We planned to do a paint treatment over the paper.
At this time, I got terrified that I had actually made an even worse mess of the bathroom and that we'd still have to gut it.
So I mixed up some paint and did the wall behind the door...and I liked it pretty well!
We found a brand new Kohler sink at a garage sale for a dollar. Which seemed like a great deal until we realized it was a very unusual sink and would require a faucet which cost a couple of hundred bucks over what we would usually spend on a faucet. We bit the bullet and ordered the faucet. Here you see Joe constructing the counter top. He also laid a green vinyl floor.
Counter top almost done. You can see that we had to curve it back to make way for the closet (under the stair) door. I don't have pic, but a skirt hangs under this counter to cover the storage space. I wanted a vintage mirror with no medicine cabinet, but Joe wanted a medicine cabinet. Sometimes you have to compromise...I know Joe does what I want a lot, so turn about's fair play. I'm still not wild about the light on this, and may be trying to find a way to alter the lighting situation and a still keep the cabinet. Any ideas?
The business end of the room. I etched the glass on the window so we wouldn't have to have a curtain. I would love to replace the window with a bigger sash window like in the rest of the house. We could put shutters over the bottom section.

Now the room has been like this for years. We had shower doors for a long time, but they were a pain and now we have a curtain. As you can see I painted the trim a darker color the first time, and now I am going to paint it a lighter creamy color to try and freshen it up. Except the ceiling trim...I like how that kind of just blends in with the border. I'll keep you posted and show more pics as I get things back together.
Today's work....... filled nail holes and primed the doors and jams.
My helper got a little primer on his nose.

While I was doing this, Joe was up on the scaffold painting the fishscale siding on our front gable.

Bathroom Trim

Ahh, a lovely picture of the throne. But wait, look past the throne and what do you see? Baseboard!!!!! You have no idea how happy this makes me! We did this bathroom right before our Year 2000 New Years Party. Every time I sat here, I would get irritated that we still didn't have trim around this floor. Joe has the this week and next week off and he has been knocking out some jobs that have been waiting a long time.
Now tomorrow I have to pick out some paint. I'm going to paint all the trim in this room and that should freshen it up pretty well. Looking at this pic, I think I may have to fill the nail holes too.

Edited to add: I just wanted to say that Joe cut these corner blocks...I think they turned out very nice!

Tagged.......

I was recently tagged by Margo at Robolady. If you like recycling things in a new way you should visit her blog. She's full of ideas! I need to think of 7 random things about myself and then pass this on. So I'll try and come up with 7 new things that I've not shared before.

1. The best practical joke I ever did: sneaking into (breaking and entering!) a friend's apartment and rearranging and hiding his stuff. Several weeks later we visited him and there were still dishes hidden in his overhead light fixture. What can I say...it was college. And were lucky not to be caught.
2. I'm afraid of heights. Afraid enough that I sometimes end up in tears when attempting high up home repairs.
3. My desk really does look something like the cartoon above.
4. I'm 45 and I still want a tree house.
5. In my baby book it says "When I grow up I want to be: a trapeze artist and queen of the Rose Bowl parade." I guess I've always been very practical ;o)
6. My "new" used car has a ton of gadgets---and I love them!!
7. I'd like to bicycle from my house to my sister's house in Indiana. 220 miles.

I'm tagging:
Somewhere Over the Rainbow
Hummingbirds Don't Lie
Equus Villa
Sand Flat Farm
Swallowfield
Garden Antqs Vintage
Red Shoes Blog

Stay tuned....Joe is putting in the baseboards around our bathroom today, and I hope to post a picture tonight!

Prom!

This is our youngest's senior prom. Her cousin was nice enough to travel all the way from Indiana to do hair and make-up for our daughter and her friend.
One of DD'd friend's made these beautiful garters to match each girls dress. She did a wonderful job on them.
They clean up pretty well!
These four have such a good time whenever they are together. If you are a house blogger frustrated at seeing prom pics, please look past the pretty young folks and notice the paint on the porch. Joe and I have a goal to get that painted before graduation. So hopefully when that time rolls around in a month you will see the front of the house freshly painted.
Off to have a wonderful evening!

Birdbath Bling and Peeking at Prom

This is one of those trash to treasure projects that I love. I did post about it a long time ago, but since I filled it up today for the first time this spring, I thought I'd show it again. The birdbath is one we'd had a long time and it developed a hairline crack and wouldn't hold water very long.
I used GE Silicone 2 to put marbles, tiles, coins and bits of dishes on the old birdbath. Then I grouted with sanded grout. I sealed it with a sealer available at Lowes. It says it's safe to use around food products. It seems to be safe for the birds too.
I know now that the silicone is probably not the proper thing to use on this project but it's held up well for several years. I try to haul the top of the birdbath to the basement for the winter, but for the last 2 winters we just leaned it against a tree so no water could collect and freeze....and it seems to be fine.
Here's a little peek at daughter's prom dress. It's pretty amazing.
And she got a sassy manicure to match.

Closet Ceiling Done!

It's one of those little jobs that will make a big difference that we have been putting off for years. This is the closet under the stairs. It opens into our bathroom so all sorts of stuff...towels, sheets, extra shampoo, etc are stored there. I've had to keep the sheets or whatever I'm trying to store on the top shelf in plastic boxes with lids........because anytime anyone runs up and down the stairs dirt sifts down. The picture above shows the underside of the stairs over the closet. YUCK. This has just irritated me for years. It's like having a rock in your shoe...and for some reason you don't take it out.
Yesterday Joe hunted down some materials in the garage, and tonight he cut some beadboard and installed it. It took him a few hours, but what a difference.
Tomorrow I'll paint it up and I'll have a nice functional closet. Yes, and I'm going to put a compact florescent bulb in...it'll burn cooler, save energy, and I don't care what the color of the light is in the closet.

Florida Getaway

While Hawkeye was hanging out with his new poodle buddies, the girls and I went off to do a little exploring. Our friend Mary, who was kind enough to share her home and her poodles with us, provided us with some great maps to help us find our way around.
We went to Blue Springs. This is such a beautiful park. The spring water is crystal clear and the park is a tropical paradise.
The water looked lovely for swimming, but we saw a large alligator not far down stream from where this girl was swimming. That's pretty scary for this northern gal!


We saw seven manatees at the park that day. These two are young orphans that were recently released into the wild. The little bobbers are tracking devices.We got lots of pampering from our host and hostess and their three beautiful dogs. Murphy is the biggest poodle I've ever seen....Louie was a big boy, but Murph has him beat!
The girls spent a lot of time on the beach. On the way home we found a dog friendly beach, so even Hawkeye got to wade in the surf. At first he wasn't so sure about the waves rolling in and would run back from them. Eventually he decided it was pretty fun to splash around.