simplefrills

Duck...Duck...Brass Duck

The title of this post refers to a favorite children's game, but the topic of it is much more adult. I promise. Well, maybe. Actually, I can't make any guarantees about the adult-ness of this BLOG, let alone this post. So read at your own risk. *wink wink*

Can we have a quick conversation about said children's game though? I remember days of fun in kindergarten where we would sit in circles on the floor for what seemed like hours. It would be a constant circle- walk in circles, tapping heads, saying "Duck," until you reached your friend (or maybe kindergarten crush) and smiled widely as you tapped and said "Grey Duck!" and took off at a sprint to make it around the circle and back into that spot. Inevitably someone would slip and fall while sprinting or tap someone's head a little too hard, and the game would have to come to an end. But we always played again!

Now here in the great state of Minnesota, we call this game "Duck, Duck, Grey Duck." A few years ago, I learned that pretty much everyone else in the US calls it "Duck, Duck, Goose." Why the difference? I have no idea. But I like to think it's because us Minnesotans like to stand out a little. Or maybe we're just weird. Either one is fine with me. I accepted my weirdness quite some time ago :)

So what exactly does this game have to do with ANYTHING I might possibly talk about? Enter a thrift store and a pair of brass duck bookends.

These duck bookends, to be exact.

Amazeballs, right?

When I saw them sitting on the shelf, I did a little mental happy dance. That's a lie. I think I actually did a little dance in the aisle. But I'm about 60% sure no one saw me, so it's all good!

I grabbed the pair of them (a steal at 6 bucks for both!) and hightailed it out of there with my precious finds in hand.

My first task was to figure out if they were actually brass or just brass-plated. That would determine how I cleaned them. It's easy enough to figure out...if you put a magnet near pure brass, it won't stick. If you put it near plated brass, it would stick to the metal behind the brass.

In my case...magnet didn't stick, so I'm pretty sure they're pure brass! Whoop Whoop!

I looked up how to clean brass, and settled on following Bob Vila's tips on cleaning brass. As an avid public television watcher in my early years, I grew up with Mr. Vila so I trust his tips to not lead me astray.

I started with just hot, soapy water and a toothbrush like the website recommends. You don't want to move on to the more heavy-duty cleaners until you know the simple ones don't work.

It didn't really change anything.

They were still kind of dirty looking and not very shiny. So on to the next idea I went! This one required making a paste out of vinegar, flour and salt.

This was the point where Mr. B looked at me and was like "So, what EXACTLY are you doing with those ducks?"

Yeah, it looked a little crazy. And unfortunately it didn't really get me the result I wanted either. The ducks are still looking dirty and tarnished. Boo. Because how amazing would they look on my bookcases!?!?! Pretty darn amazing, I think.

Any suggestions on other ways to clean them? I'm kinda stumped. Comment below and let me know! In the mean time, I'll be googling "tarnished brass ~~ducks~~" and likely concocting other mysterious pastes to clean these guys up!

Linking up @:

- A Stroll Thru Life

- The Makers

This Craft Room's so Bright...

You're gonna want shades (what up, 80's music fans!)

The pictures in this post may hurt your eyes if they are sensitive, so I'll wait if you want to grab a pair of sunglasses or preemptively turn down the brightness on your screen.

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Got them? Awesome :) Now you are set to continue!

Last weekend Mr. B took off on a football-viewing mini vacation with some friends. Naturally, I decided to use my alone time to work on some projects...so I decided to get down and dirty and get my craft room transformation under way. First step - Paint!!

I had shared in an earlier post that I was thinking green...and boy, did I ever go with green!

The craft room itself is in the basement. It has low ceilings and poor lighting, so I knew that I needed a color that would help brighten the space and not make it feel even more cave-like. Solution? Hit up the Home Depot on Friday and spend some quality time with the paint chips! (isn't that what everyone does on a Friday night?!?)

Side note - I think the guys at the paint counter may think I'm insane for how long I spent there. I kinda feel like I should ask them their names the next time I go since we will likely be spending more time together down the road as well. Maybe I'll bring them a loaf of thanks-for-putting-up-with-me banana bread. IDK, just a thought.

I got home with 3 different samples that were quite different from one another:

After slapping some squares up on the wall with each sample, I quickly decided that Fern Leaf and Intoxication were just too dark. Though Intoxication is pretty much my favorite color of green ever, it would have made the room feel much smaller than it really is. And I probably would have had to have a halogen worklamp on at all times in that place to be able to see what I was doing.

The more I looked at Honeydew, the more I liked it! So back to Home Depot it was for a gallon of the selected color.

So this is the part where those sunglasses I mentioned come in.

Like, seriously.

When I say bright, I actually mean "WHOA, THAT IS BRIGHT!!"

Brace yourself - here it comes.

WAH-BAM!!! Told you it was in your face.

At first I was a little unsure when I got it on the walls. There were some texts to my BFF Jaime to talk me off the oh-shit-I-think-I-just-spent-3-hours-painting-this-room-a-horrible-mistake-of-a-color, ledge. And some pacing around the room, contemplating each wall.

And then I was exhausted, so I went to bed with 2 walls to complete.

When I woke up the next morning, I tiptoed down to the room to take a peek again (apparently I thought that the silence of my steps would help in the acceptance of the color? IDK, I don't make sense sometimes).

The sleep had helped, because walking through those doors I was totally digging the color! After a few deep breaths, I grabbed all of my paint supplies and finished up those bright green walls!

Here are a few more pics:

Hey look, another Fitz sighting!

As you can see, I've already got my desk and some other furniture downstairs! The table in the middle will be the stand-in until I've got a bit more moolah in the craft bank and I can get to building my ideal table. So until then, our old hand-me-down dining table will do just fine! White paint may grace it soon so that I can accept it's presence in the room for a longer while.

Other plans I've got for the room? Why, I'm so happy you asked! There will definitely be a pegboard built for that giant empty wall - ever since my days in the glamorous retail world, the beauty and pure organizational perfection of pegboard has been in my dreams. It's time to make it reality. I've also got plans for a new light fixture, a fabric filing cabinet and (a looooongggg ways down the line) a sliding door to the bathroom that you can't see in these pictures. Right now there is just a shower curtain there....not my favorite way to close a bathroom.

Oh, and there will be new pompoms as well!

So what do you think? Is the green workable in your mind? Let me know! I'm totally up for any ideas to make this an awesome craft room...on a budget, of course :)

Linking up @:

- Snap Creativity

- Ginger Snap Crafts

- Whimsy Wednesdays

Makin plans, Living Room Style

Yep, more plans.

I just can't quit.

Y'all know I got a few to-dos checked off my looooooonnnnngggg list last weekend (what up, curb appeal and yet-to-be-posted-coffee table!)

Now that my to-do list is shortened by a few items, my natural instinct is to load it back up again.

Seriously, I need to be stopped.

Did you see the first to-do under the living room list? That's what I'm chatting about today. For a while now, I've been eyeing up my options at RugsUSA looking for the perfect BIG area rug for our living room. It's actually a relatively large space considering the size of our house, so a small rug just wasn't cutting it anymore. Style-wise, at least.

So I surfed. I surfed and I surfed and I surfed until I found the rug I was looking for. And the winner (hopefully) is....

This delicious chevron/ikat combination was just what I was looking for! I love the blue color and the fact that it is a large-print pattern so as not to be too distracting. Bonus, it has a tight, low pile so it will be easy to vacuum!! My Fitz fur-hating, vacuum-loving self is so VERY appreciative.

Once it gets to the house, I'll just have to lay it out to make sure that it is as good in person as it is in my dreams. I have high hopes that it will be just right.

Now, being the home decor blog-stalker that I am, I have always wanted to create a design board (virtually) to help figure out what colors, patterns and specific pieces would go best in a room design. This was the perfect opportunity! I'm going to give a brief walk-through of how my board came to be...so here it is!

My living room design board was actually created during the rug-choosing process to help me figure out which patterns and colors looked best with our existing couches and the coffee table I love. It was a huge help to be able to slap the picture of a rug I was considering onto the board and instantly know if it was a contender or not. I got really into it. Like War-of-the-Rugs style.

I made mine in Photoshop, but you can easily do the same thing in Word, Powerpoint or another processing application.

My board started by opening a blank document and pasting in a picture of our current couch, bookshelves and 3-shade lamp. I knew that these were all pieces that I wanted to reuse in the room as they are fully functional and I could style them to fit whatever "statement" pieces I decided on. I removed the background of the images using the "background eraser" tool. (The same effect can be done in Word by choosing the "picture" tab and then using "remove background")

Next is the fun part - searching for the new items to add to the board!

The pillows were the first things that I looked for - I knew I wanted to add some bright, fun colors in a way that would be easily and relatively cheaply changeable in the future. Pillows are a great way to do that! Since I don't want to spend a ton of money on new pillows, the ones I found were actually pillow covers that I can put right over our existing pillows. More cha-ching to spend on other things! Whoop Whoop!

Then I perused the interwebs based on those beautiful pillows that I found to add some more color, texture, and overall awesomeness to the board.

And that's it! It's easy and SO much fun to make these boards. I already have one started for my craft room...and a few others as well :)

Linking up @:

- Creativity Unleashed

- The Party Bunch

- Inspiration Monday

- Monday Funday
- Busy Monday
- The Makers
- Sugar Bee Crafts
- Do Tell Tuesday
- Out of the Box

Curb Appeal - Round 1

The weather in Minnesota these past few days has been just GORGEOUS! You can feel the distinct "crisp" of almost-fall in the air and I'm totally diggin it. Fall is my favorite season - boots! jeans! sweaters! crunching through leaves on walks! What's not to like!?!?

Having some beautiful days over the weekend inspired me to finally give our front entrance the first parts of a multi-step facelift. And boy was it needed.

Sunday morning found me sitting on the front steps in grungy clothes, happily painting away while watching old episodes of Grey's Anatomy on my iPad. Quite the picture, huh? I'm nothing if not a classy DIY girl.

By adding a few plants, some new house numbers and those fresh coats of paint, I made a couple solid steps toward a much more "Welcome to our house that we're working on fixing up bit-by-bit!" feeling for the front entry (instead of the "whatever, come in if you want" feeling it gave before...)

Here's a before....

(and, per the usual, Fitzgerald didn't want to be forgotten about)

Whoof! It was a MESS. The paint on the steps was chipping like a week-old manicure and that railing just wasn't helping the situation either. I decided to paint the railing black to tie in with the new dark house numbers and the hardware on the door. The stairs just got a fresh coat of grey paint that we found in the basement from the old owners.

And now....an after!

I smile when I drive up to the house now! The railing pops in front of the house and it ties together the house numbers and hardware too. Fresh grey steps make it look like people actually care about the house you're driving up to. And a few plants don't hurt either!

Next up in the process is replacing or redoing the light fixture and painting the front door a different color (teal? navy? orange? I can't decide!) I'd also like to build a plant holder to take the job of that tall metal one in the picture...I happened to hide the fact that it's actually a stand that is supposed to be pushed into the ground. Thinking maybe I can use some scrap wood to build a frame around the stand? We'll see :)

Now on to a tiny little DIY project...

Over Labor Day weekend I made the wood board with the new house numbers on it. You may have seen the little glimpse on instagram! Here's the process of how I did it:

The first step in the process was to choose a stain color for the backer board for the numbers.

My go-to stain for a lot of projects is Varathane Kona. It's rich without being too red or orange toned, so it usually matches my style. In this case, I wanted the boards to be a little lighter so the house numbers would stand out. That brought me to one of my other favorite new stain colors, Varathane Sunbleached. It's great for when you want a weathered look that isn't dark.

Neither Sunbleached or Kona were quite right for the project, so I decided to do a little mixing and create a color of my own. I used about a 1/4 cup of Sunbleached and just a teaspoon of the Kona to get the color I was looking for.

After measuring and cutting down my scrap wood, I was ready to stain! After 3 coats of my special mixture, the wood pieces were looking exactly how I had imagined them.

And holding one up to the house confirmed the color was right!

Once the boards were dry, I glued them together with some liquid nails. Since they weren't going to be holding up too much weight or moved constantly, screws or nails weren't necessary. Plus, it kept me from having to run to the store to get some kind of really thin board to screw them too :)

I gave the completed, glued together boards a quick coat of Thompson's Water Seal to protect them from the elements, and then let the whole thing dry for a few hours.

Next was the numbers!

The new house numbers came from my number-one BFF, Home Depot. I swear I spend WAY too much time there. I could browse all day.

Anywho, the numbers had caught my eye a while back and I thought they would be the perfect modern-meets-homey touch to the front entrance. They come with templates for installation and screws to put them in either floating or flush. I chose to use neither of those tools because I am a rebel. So there. (and also, it wouldn't have worked with the way I wanted it to.)

Since the screws were too long for the boards and I didn't want to screw all the way into the house, I decided to just glue the numbers to the board. The spacing was just eyeballed because I didn't feel like cutting out the stencils.

After adding 2 picture hooks to the back of the board and popping a couple nails in the house, the new numbers were up! And I am totally in love with them.

I'll do an update post a few months down the road to let you know how the numbers are holding up and if I would do anything differently. In the meantime, I'm going to enjoy looking at a spruced-up entry when I pull in the drive!

Linking up @:

- The Makers

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