Lazy Days

It is a beautiful long Holiday weekend and summer is fast approaching.

Enjoy the warm sunshine.

Happy Memorial Day!

The Dark Side

My week has been crazy as some of you may already know.  My dad had heart surgery this week, he is doing GREAT and will hopefully be coming home this weekend.  I also moved my shop home Friday as seen in the previous post Coming Home.  All of the contents are now piled in my side of the garage, and it looks like I am having a WHITE SALE.

Needless to say I have not had much time to blog or even thing much about a post.  Yesterday I was leaving a comment on Run Mother Run about a suggestion for her furniture dilemma, I said painting it black would make it look sharp.  I thought I would take you to THE DARK SIDE.

I am going to show you some of the pieces in my home that are black, yep I said BLACK, not WHITE, can you believe it?  A single piece of black furniture or item in a room can almost be like putting the period on a sentence, it just needs to be, at least for me it does.  Almost every room in my home has some kind of black in it.

I have always been drawn to small black pieces from stools to boxes and small furniture.  Even though I like the look of mostly white, I think the contrast of black and white to be very striking in a room.  The trick is to be careful and not over saturate a room with too much black and make it depressing or just too dark.

I have inherited several of my mother's cameras and black hats that I like to use in different areas of the house.

I have more of her black and white hats that I have shown in a previous post The Littlest Room. We can not forget about the black and white floor either.

In my dinning room I have a huge cabinet that I painted black a couple of years ago.  It was originally a dark burgundy so I really did not mind changing the color of such a large piece, in fact all I did was push it away from the wall and I painted it right in the room.  And if I don't like it I can always paint it AGAIN.

My office is one room that has several pieces of black in it.  A cabinet and a desk that; were actually white and I painted them black.  They can always go white again, it is only one paint job away if necessary.  At Christmas time my office even has it's own Christmas tree in all black and white with a vintage sheet music paper chain on it. 

My youngest son had his room originally in where I currently have my office and I did his room in all black and white, but he has since moved up to share a room with his older brother.  I mixed his black furniture with my other son's red and it really works well together.  In my opinion paint can sometimes bring out the details of furniture.

The final black piece is the dresser that we have in the third floor room.  This is one of the pieces I picked up off the side of the road and made my sister stay behind with my kids so I could quick take the piece home.  We were supposed to be going to the beach.  We were only a little late.  Now tell me wasn't it worth it?

There you have it, just when you thought I only used white, white, white.  I hope you liked my surprise.  Have a wonderful Memorial day weekend.

Coming Home

Clara Louise's Painted Cottage is coming home tomorrow.  Read more here.

Got Paint!

I know that White Wednesday is my favorite but I had to take a pass this week.  I have had a lot in my life this week to keep me busy so I did not want to do a poor White Wednesday post.  I thought I would find one from my archives and post one I had for just this kind of day.

As many you have learned I LOVE to PAINT and I don't keep it a secret.  In fact I try to be painting at least one project per week.  This week I am finishing the inside of the shed and boy am I having fun!  That post will have to wait for a couple of days. 

Due to my love of painting I have accumulated my fair share and then some and even some more extra paint.  You see I happen to have a small paint store in my basement.  At least that is what Mr. M. says and he also says quite frequently "why do you need to buy more paint?  You have a ton of it in the basement already." 

In my defense, I had an epiphany and I no longer use most of those colors. 

I am painting WHITE baby, all the way! 

Even though I do not use most of those colors anymore I do NOT throw out good paint.  That would be VERY bad, very very BAD!

I thought you would get a kick out of seeing my little paint store. 

I have blue, pink, purple, yellow-yes Dawn I really do, black, rust, golden, green, burgundy and that is just to name a few of the colors.  Not to mention all of the glazes and concrete stains there.

I even have some of the BIG pails.

I even have plenty of spray paint for just such an emergency.

I always have an extra paint brush or two or three.  I never know when I have more than one painting project to do at a time.

Thanks for stopping by and don't worry I will be back to my WHITE self next week.

.

.

.

.

.

A huge weight has been lifted off my shoulders.  Have a wonderful day, I hope the sun is shinning for you too!

A Little Girls Purple Room

Welcome to my Purple Monday.  I am joining Little Red House for mosaic Monday and Melinda at Alabaster Rose Designs for Vintage Summer Monday's.  You might want to take a minute and check out all the other mosaics and vintage Monday's. 

I am going to give you a peak into my daughter Arden's room. I repainted her room last year and she picked out PURPLE because it is one of her favorite colors.

Even though she is 6 now, Arden still lets me hang some of her dresses from when she was just a toddler.

As some may have noticed from previous posts, I have quite a collection of vintage quilts. Arden has a couple of quilts with PURPLE in them.

Arden's vintage iron bed is one of my favorite flea market finds.

Her favorite book is Pinkalicious. 

Here is a funny story my daughter will remember forever.  One day Arden and I were making Pinkalicious cupcakes when there was an emergency at my mother-in-laws home three houses down.  My youngest son, only a baby and was sleeping so I didn't want to wake him.  Also during this time we were building an addition onto our home.  The contractor Mark, a friend of my brothers, thankfully said he would stay in the house and watch the kids.  Well it ended up as no problem at my mother-in-laws and I came home.......to find Mark the contractor up to his elbows in PINK frosting, he was helping my daughter frost the Pinkalicious cupcakes.  Needless to say Mark and all of the workers were treated to Pinkalicious cupcakes that day and they ate them up Pink and all.

Thank you for taking the time to visit my daughter's Purple room.  Have a wonderful day!

Nets In Hand

Today is all about baseball, frogs and having fun.  After my older son and daughter play baseball in the town park, Mr M. and I are meeting friends at a pond we have in the back of our land to go frog hunting.  This is for FUN only, NO FROGS ARE HURT IN ANY WAY!!!  We have been doing this since my oldest son was able to walk and it is has become a favorite Summer time adventure.  During the summer I bring a magazine, snacks and we make a day of it, with no time pressures.

In the beginning of Summer we try to go back once a week to see if the baby toads have hatched.  The baby toads are usually only a little bigger than a pencil eraser and you have walk stooped over so you can see them.  We bring nets and buckets to fill with their finds.  Catching baby toads is lots of fun, all you hear is "found one" being yelled out all around the pond.  We try to catch as many as we can so we can take them home and set them free in my flower gardens. EAT THE BUGS little ones. 

Last year on a rainy night the kids were in out in our yard with flashlights gathering up as many big toads as they could find.  It was so funny, I have never seen anything like it, they caught 14 toads.  My kids like to build castles in their sand pile for the toads to hop around in.

I am trying to talk Mr. M. into digging a small pond in our back yard.  We have plenty of room for it and then the kids would be able to put the tad poles there instead of a puddle in the driveway.  Poor little things, we have to dump a bucket of water in the puddle every day it does not rain.

After a couple of hours when all the kids have at least one frog to take home and play with and some tad poles to put in the puddles at home we are having hot dogs and hamburgs for dinner, smores and movie night.  Don't you just love this time of the year.

It will be a fun day for sure! 

.

.

.

.

.

I try not to think of all the mud and sand, I try to remember there is always a broom on hand.

The Little Whiter Shed

Thanks for joining me for Show and Tell Friday with Cindy at My Romantic Home.

I thought I would show you some of the progress I have done on the SHED. 

Wednesday I decided to give painting the shed a start, July 4 is going to be here before I know it and I do NOT like to be unprepared for a party.  My youngest son and I carried all of the painting supplies to the shed and then we started to make room to paint, or rather I worked and he asked a lot of questions.  I had planed on using a roller to make it go faster than if I used my usual 2 1/2 angle brush.  My plan was to start trimming and then go back and forth between the roller and angle brush.  Well.....that is not how it worked out, yep the whole thing was painted using my handy dandy angle brush.  Surprisingly it only took me two days and I only worked a half day each time.  I had more fun because I did not have to worry about getting paint on the floor and I was able to let my 3yr old paint too. 

We had some fun conversations; how to paint, first paint up and then paint down, not scrubby all over.  He repeated the paint up, paint down many, many, many times.  I think I finally had to distract him with a snack break and he played in the yard for awhile.  We also talked about how dad was going to call mom CRAZY for painting the shed WHITE, that was Wednesday.  Thursday I'll be gosh darned if the little comedian didn't ask me if dad called me CRAZY.  He also said how much dad was going to be so proud because we were doing such a good job.  I agreed, it was easier than explaining that DAD does not bother to argue with mom when she has painting on her mind. 

Here are a few pictures of the before and afters.  Now please keep in mind I have only just painted the walls and there is still a lot more crap storage items that need to be moved to the garage.

Now you can actually see the floor.  I am trying to decide if I am going to paint the floor.  I know I can not do white, it is STILL a SHED!  But, I am still thinking of doing a checkerboard pattern in medium tone gray and a blue tone, of course I still have to be creative about this.  Look how much brighter it looks with the walls white. 

See, now doesn't the chandelier look so much happier against the white walls.

Ha ha, you were probably thinking WHO puts a chandelier in a SHED.  ME and look there are TWO!

The furniture looks much better against the white too.

Now I have to finish the floor and decide if I am going to paint the ceiling too! 

Thanks for stopping by, let me know if you think I should paint the ceiling, it looks just like the walls did before they became white.  Oh and stay tuned, I still have to furnish it and put my decorating touch on it.  The family brochure says it is a get away cottage.  You will have to check back and see if it is somewhere you would want to spend a weekend vacationing at.

Make sure you visit all the other Show and Tell Friday bloggers and have a great weekend!

Have A Seat In The White

Now that Spring has done her magic in my yard I thought I would take you back outside to see my some of my chairs and white blossoms.  Of course this is for my favorite WHITE Wednesday with Kathleen at Faded Charm. 

As many of you may already know, I have a thing for chairs.  While I was uploading the photos I did a mental count of all the chairs in my flower gardens and I came up with no less than 15.  What can I say, I have a love affair with chairs.  During the summer I love to put a big flower basket in the ones with no seats.  They are my architecture for outside for all of the seasons, and I always have white in my garden. 

Please have a seat and check out some of my favorite flowering shrubs, the Bridal Spireas and Snowball bushes.

 

Thank you for stopping by and I hope you enjoyed sitting among my garden whites.  Make sure you stop and visit all the other White Wednesdays.