Happy Mardi Gras!

Hello Everybody! I haven't fallen off of the earth, I'm just living it up at Disney World! I am having a great time with my family and I totally feel like a kid again. I'll be back this Friday and will post lost of pictures and tell some great stories! Take care!

My first award!!!!

Honestly, I feel like I just won an Oscar. It's exciting to think that someone thinks that I just might occasionally talk about something interesting. It was even cooler to realize that the person who gave me this award is the very awesome Nicol of Classy and Sophisticated. Nicol's blog is one of my favorites! I enjoy her decorating ideas, reviews and general thoughts. We also have a lot in common; sometimes when I read her blog I wonder if she is a long lost sister or relative!

Part of the rules for accepting this award is that I have to pick fifteen others to give it to. I really need to think about that because I am not sure it I regularly follow fifteen other blogs! I will think on it tonight and announce my fifteen tomorrow. Nicol, I hope that is okay!

Talk about Tuesday- Ugly paneling

Okay. We have finally broken down and are painting the ugly paneling. We are on step two, priming it. Step one was to sand it.

The "horizontal stripes"... that's what JD called them. I was like "ummmm... I think you mean vertical!"
One solid coat of primer on one wall.

Please excuse the mishmash of furniture. Right now the den is a catch-all room. I promise that it will not stay that way for long! Actually, I can't promise that because we leave for Disney World on Saturday and it might be a couple of weeks before we can actually finish painting.

For more Talk about Tuesday entries, pleast visit The Lazy Organizer!

My Mom and Dad are the best, EVER!

Look at what a little brown bird (the UPS man) delivered to me a few minutes ago! Tulips! My favorite. My mom knows that, by the way. How much do my parents rock? I can answer that for you, they are awesome! They are the type of people who hop on a plane at a moments notice because they can tell through facebook and your blog that you are stressed out with home renovations. That's who they are, I tell you.

Aerial view of my tulips

Another aerial view

The sweet card.

I am following the directions that came with the flowers to a "T" because I want them to last and last. At least until next week when we leave for Disney World and will see my parents (and two wonderful little brothers)! I haven't arranged them yet because the package said to cut off the ends about 1" and let them sit in water and food for 8-12 hours. My pictures don't do them justice, they are gorgeous.

Thanks, Mom and Dad! You guys are the best! I love you!

Talk about Tuesday- Bathroom Redo Continued

UPDATED WITH PICTURES!!!!!

The mirror, painted and framed out.

Well folks, I have good news and I have bad news. The good news is that the hall bathroom is finished and looks amazing. The bad news is that my camera broke as I went to take the final pictures. This is also kind of bad news because we leave for Disney World on the 20th of this month, so we will be buying a new camera in the next week. I hate unexpected expenses! Never fear, I will be borrowing a camera to take finished pictures today so they will be up tonight.

I decided to frame our boring hall mirror. I think the mirror is original to the house. It is huge and takes up the entire wall in hall bath. This project was really easy and I am pretty proud of it.

I bought four 6' primed mdf window moldings that were 2" wide. I also bought (4) 2 3/4" rosette box thingies that were primed mdf as well. I proceeded to paint all of these puppies black. A tip for you; PAINT THE BACKSIDE AS WELL! You do kind of see the backside if you don't paint it because of the weird way mirrors work. I also went out and bought a fancy pants glue gun that I thought I was going to have a steamy hot love affair with. It can go cordless and came with different tips like you use when you decorate cakes and it is dual temperature. This glue gun is so serious that it comes in a case.





Except it isn't all it's cracked up to be. In fact, I think I like my el cheapo glue gun better. Oh well, at least I bought it with my 40% off Michael's coupon.





Do you like my bird lamp? I bought two of them on clearance at $15 each! They are now on each side of my bed. I love them! Do you see my cloche? I has a nest with little robin's egg blue eggs in it. I think my usage of "eggs" was redundant there. I threw in the extra "eggs" because I didn't want to think that I had real robin's eggs in there.




Okay, this is the before picture. Not very attractive. A giant mirror . Please pardon the hideous gold fixture. That is going to be replaced soon. Also pardon the refection of the bathroom closet in the mirror. We took off the doors to paint them and they still haven't gone back on. You can see our lovely a/c ductwork in the closet.

This is a picture of the bathroom cabinet. This was the last picture I took before my camera died. We replaced these white knobs last night with pretty brushed nickel ones. This was going to be the before picture. If you look at the top of the picture you can see part of the framed mirror. It really does look nice. Don't worry, if you check back tonight you will see pictures of the entire thing!

For more Talk about Tuesday submissions, visit The Lazy Organizer.

Exciting post coming...

Okay, I have been working on something pretty dern exciting the past few evenings. I got the idea from here. It's taking a little longer than expected because evidently I failed measuring 101. My 12 year old cousin Kyle was over for dinner last night and I showed him my latest project and explained to him that I mis-measured a little bit. He looked at me and said "ummm, you kind of mis-measured by over foot." Thanks kid. I am very excited to show my project to you guys. I will take lots of pics.

On a completely different topic; lying makes me crazy! At work today I had a tenant completely lie straight to my face. I think what grates on me even more is that this lady has kids. What kind of example does that set? Yucky yucky. How can we expect the next generation to be honest and hardworking when their parents are like this lady? Yikes. Oh well, "The Office" is on television tonight. At least I don't work for Michael Scott.

Riding the O.C.D. roller coaster

I'll admit that I am a little crazy. Medication and behavior modification have kept my "crazy" in check pretty well. *I* think that most people who met me would have no clue that I am a diagnosed obsessive-compulsive. I don't want to say "suffer from" because I don't think of it as suffering. I know now that I have been this way all of my life, but growing up, I thought everyone felt and thought this way.

My OCD has to do with control. I always though that if I obsessed about something and control it, that something "bad" wouldn't happen. An example:

I was eight years old. It was summer and I was at day camp. It was a Friday afternoon. There were pony rides. You know, the poor ponies that are saddled up and made to walk around in a circle turning a wheel? Well, I was wearing a sundress and it was my turn for a pony ride. The gentlemen operating the pony ride scooped me up and plopped me down on the saddle, somehow getting my underwear snagged on the saddle in the process. When the ride was over and he lifted me off, my underwear ripped and I had no underwear for the rest of the day. I WAS MORTIFIED! To prevent that from happening in the future, I secretly wore two pairs of underwear for the next several years. My biological dad finally realized what I was doing and basically told me it was stupid and made me stop. I think he might have said "retarded" actually. That wasn't really nice or the proper way to handle things.

I've always done foot circles. When I am laying down trying to go to sleep, I rotate my feet to the right ten times and then to the left ten times, over and over and over and over and over until I go to sleep. Even though I am medicated, I can't seem to break this habit.

In college it was really bad. I became obsessed with dirt. I couldn't stand to have my apartment messy. Oh, I was also terrified of vomit. It was horrible. I would wake up each day and plan my day as if I was going to get a stomach virus. I went out of my way to avoid people who were sick. When I would go places I would have to locate the restroom and figure out a vomit escape plan. I became convinced that I was in the process of getting a virus and felt nauseated all the time. I think I took phenergan (an anti-nausea drug) everyday for about a year.

I used to play games with myself all of the time in my head. I was constantly competing with myself. Things like "if I can make it through the light before it turns yellow, I am a good person and it will all be okay." Or "if I can run and jump into my bed only taking two steps from door to bed, I will live through the night and won't be murdered."

I know this all sounds really crazy, and it was. I don't think like this anymore. Honestly, at the time I thought everyone thought this way. One day at Barnes and Noble I stumbled upon a book that turned my life around; Devil in the Details: scenes from an obsessive girlhood.

Photo courtesy of Amazon.com

This book made me realize what I was doing, but it did it in a funny way. It was the oddest thing, one moment I didn't know and then next minute I recognized my odd behavior. I realized that this person had been where I was and she made it through to the other side. I have probably read this book about five times and I enjoy it every time just as much as I did the first time. Jennifer Traig made me realize what was happening in my brain, she understood me. Someone finally got it. I got off the OCD roller coaster and on the Ferris wheel. It's still a ride in the "crazy" amusement park, but it's a lot less scary and a lot more predictable.

Talk about Tuesday Home Tour- The Hall Bath

I think by now all of you guys know that I live in my grandparents former home. We started major renovations in September 2008. When we started, most of the house looked like it hadn't been touched since 1969. Some of the house had been updated to late 1980's country blue with ducks, but it pretty much stopped there. Two-thirds of the walls were covered in wall paper. The hall bath was no exception. Think off white textured rosettes and paisley! Yikes! My grandmother was also the ultimate in re-purposing items so at one point there was a flower arrangement above the toilet that consisted of a harvest gold bed pan with flowers arranged in the center. Classy!

We wanted to take the bathroom into the 21st century. Luckily the bathroom already had white tile floors and white tile going halfway up the wall. We left that. We stripped the wallpaper, washed and primed the walls and painted them 'Macadamia" by Sherwin Williams.

The shower curtain in this room came from the master bath in my old house. I bought it at Target several years ago. This past weekend I came across it again at Target, but this time it was on clearance for 5o% off! I snatched that baby up and made the fabulous no sew window mistreatment out of it.

Fabulous no sew window mistreatment (notice the birds)

Fabulous (non bedpan) wooden art, $7 at T.J. Maxx!

Shower curtain and window mistreatments

To learn how to get yourself some fabulous window mistreatments, visit my buddy Nester. To view more Talk About Tuesday posts, go visit the newly raw and fabulous Lazy Organizer.

A cloche encounter

Didn't I tell you that I would find myself a cloche? Don't you know how determined I am? Baby, I found two! I don't really think that the one on the left is technically a cloche, more of a dessert stand cover or cheese ball cover, but it works for me. The one on the right is definitely a cloche, but it's stand is kind of wonky. That doesn't matter to me though. The best part is that the two of them cost less than what I would have paid for one on Amazon or eBay! The one of the left was $6.99 and the one on the right was $9.99. I love T.J. Maxx! Please ignore the fact that the cloche's aren't currently displaying anything and that there are still price stickers halfway on them. I was just too excited about sharing them with you to pay attention to these details!

I also went to Target. I found this cute little iron/wood house that I think would be really cute with three little potted ivy plants in it. It was regularly $39.99, but I got it for $9.99. I love a bargain. Please let me know if you have any other ideas for it.

I have also included a picture of our dining room. There is absolutely nothing hanging on the walls yet and you will also notice a round hole in the ceiling. That hole is where a vent cover should go. When we took them down to paint the ceiling and the vent covers, we had no idea that they would be impossible to get back up. Not only do you have to hang it through the Sheetrock, but you have to make sure that the Sheetrock holes match up with the metal vent holes. It about impossible, so we don't have many of them hung up. This picture was also taken at night, so it doesn't look very bright in there. Think of it as a preview of things to come.

I'm kind of nervous because tomorrow is the Lazy Organizer's Talk About Tuesday Home Tour. I don't really have a finished room to display, so I might just be showing some previews of some yet to be finished rooms. Yikes!