Penn State Wreath

Inspired by Pinterest, and a great game last Saturday, I decided to make a Penn State wreath for my front door.  I bought the supplies, a stick wreath, felt and wooden letters.  I used a hot glue gun to attach the letters to the wreath. 

Then I made rosettes out of strips of felt.  It took a while to get the hang of it, but I think they turned out well. 

I used hot glue to attach the rosettes to the wreath. 

Now we have a Penn State wreath to decorate our door and show our pride!

 I might add some more rosettes to the wreath, I haven't decided if I like the minimalist look or not.  What do you think?

Doors, doors, doors!

Pretty much the first thing we did when we took possession of the house is start taking down doors.  We ripped out the shutter doors in our kitchen, removed the pantry doors, closet doors and bedroom doors.  We even took out the bathrooms doors.  We had a door-less house.

Everntually, we realized we needed to put the doors back on.  First went the bathroom door, then the bedrooms, but that's about as far as we got, and for the past 4 months we have been living in a house with no closet doors.  Until last weekend.

We had bought new 6 panel closet doors to replace the old flat doors with mismatched hardware.  Soon after buying them we realized that we needed to do a lot more than just install them.  First Matt cut off about 3" from the bottoms, because they were a little bit too tall.  Then I painted them, 2 coats each.  Then we needed to buy a new drill bit so we could drill holes for the new hardware.  After drilling the hole we realized that some of the paint got messed up so I painted them again.  Then we installed the hardware, and finally got them installed in our entry closet.  This whole process took about a month.

We also finally got around to painting our front door.  This is something I've been wanting to do for a while, because from the outside the white door blended into the cream painted brick, and from the inside the door was damaged from a deadbolt lock that we removed as well as curtain brackets that we removed. 

The door itself is original to the house.  It needed a little bit of TLC from years of dents, dog scratches and general wear and tear.  We filled in the dents and scratches.

Sanded it all smooth.  Before painting I put a sheet of wax paper over the spot where the door usually hits.

And applied 3 coats of paint.

After one coat of paint

We also spray painted the knocker, which was previously bronze turned black.  We used Rustoleum Brushed Satin, and now it's pretty close to the color of our doorknob.

So now our entry way actually looks like something I would want people to see when entering our house!  I'm so happy to get these 2 projects done.

Before:

 

After:

Upholstering a Headboard

So this was my first time upholstering anything, and it was so ridiculously easy.  Like, I'm almost embarrassed to write this, because if I don't tell you how I did it then you can be amazed by my ingenuity and crafty skills.  But in all seriousness, this is something that anyone can do.  I started out with the old headboard that matched my bedroom set.  I wanted a change that I could undo if I messed it up, and I love the look of upholstered headboards.

I found a great deep purple suede fabric that would compliment both the taupe quilt and the green walls.  I love purple and green together, and this seemed like a perfect fit.

The green doesn't show that great with my camera... It's actually a little brighter and greener in real life.  But anyway, I love the purple fabric.  I also bought quilt batting.  I already had a staple gun, and that's really all you need!

So here is the original headboard:

The first step is to staple the batting to the headboard.

I started on the top in the center.  The I stapled each of the sides, stretching the batting slightly.  Then I stapled from the top towards the sides, and then stapled the bottom.  It took about 10 minutes.  See?  Easy.  But, it was then that I realized I only had 2 staples left, so I convinced Matt to go out to Home Depot with me to get some more.  Since we needed a couple of other things anyway, he agreed, and we headed out.

When we got to the HD, we realized that everything seemed wet.  Apparently they had flooded in the hurricane, and were still working on the cleanup.  But they were open, and since we weren't getting anything that was stored on the floor, we were ok. 
We got the staples and checked out. We got home, and I went to put the staples in the gun, and they didn't fit.  Ridiculous since we had TAKEN THE OTHER STAPLES WITH US!  We had the staples in the store, and we still bought the wrong thing.  So then Matt says that we probably have to buy them at Ace, so we decide to go out again.

This time we were not so lucky with the roads.  Getting off the highway, we had to drive through about a foot of water, and the on-ramp that we would need to take to go home was even worse, so we knew we couldn't go back that way.  We made our way to the Ace, which was CLOSED.  Ugh, so we started to head back to the house.

I'm so glad that Matt was with me, because I still don't know the area that well, and I would have been so lost trying to find an alternate way back.  As it was, we tried about 5 different roads, and all of them were either flooded or blocked by trees and downed wires.  We finally found a way back, almost an hour after we had left, and we still didn't have staples.  So now what should have been a 1/2 hour project is turning into a huge annoyance.

Lucky for me, I have an awesome husband, and Matt picked up some staples after work on Monday.  And they fit!  And there was much rejoicing.

I stapled the fabric to the headboard with minimal trouble, and it took maybe 10 minutes.  And then the headboard is finished, right?  Wrong.  We still had to attach it to the bed frame.  We carried it upstairs (which was annoying, because it is solid wood and very unwieldy), and then took the mattress and box spring off of the frame. 

The first problem we ran into when trying to attach the headboards had to do with our wood floor.  We had put the wheels of the bed frame on rubber protectors, so that they didn't scratch the floor.  Unfortunately, that meant the frame was raised 1/2" higher than the headboard, so when we tried attaching the headboard it floated above the floor.  That seemed like a bad idea to me, so I got a couple of carpet samples we had, and laid them under the headboard and wheel, so they were the same height. 

Not really aesthetically pleasing, but it will work until we get a real carpet. 

The next problem had to do with the fact that this headboard is 23 years old.  The screws were so old that the threads had been worn down, and they wouldn't stay screwed in.  So like the awesome husband that he is, Matt once again runs to Home Depot for me to get new screws.  And guess what?  They work!  We now have an awesome purple upholstered headboard. 

Have you ever had a project that seemed like more trouble than it was worth?  I still can't believe we had to make 3 emergency hardware store trips for this headboard.