I wrote a short post here that talked about cheap and easy wall decor using scrapbook paper and cheap frames. The idea of course was inspired by Pinterest.... You can find it here at this post. I did mine a little differently then shown there, but the same general idea. I thought I'd put up a picture to show you how I hung my wall art.

Time to switch gears for a couple of seconds... I'm going to go from home decorating to recipe sharing. And this probably won't happen often because I am by no means an expert cook. (not that I'm an expert home decorator either but....I digress...)

Mark and I got this lovely crock pot from my Aunt and Uncle for a wedding present. This was a little bit of a struggle when I wanted to register for one because Mark is not a big fan of crock pot meals...but my mom cooked some delicious meals in the crock pot for us growing up so I insisted we add it to our registry! He agreed after I promised to learn to cook delicious meals in it.

My first attempt = disaster. Chicken and rice casserole that turned out to look like baby food and Mark was not impressed. He was gracious enough not to rub the fact that he doesn't like crock pot meals in my face though.

Only a couple of weeks after that, we were over at Mark's parent's house and his mom made a crock pot macaroni that we loved! I decided to give it a try myself because Mark LOVES macaroni and cheese so I figured it HAD to better than my chicken and rice dish that failed.

I gathered all of the ingredients:

Step 1: Grease bottom and sides of crock pot with butter

5 dollar frames + .99 a piece for scrap book paper = cheap wall decor for my dining room!

When we first bought our house I immediately knew I wanted to paint our kitchen cabinets white. I am pretty HUGELY fond of white cabinets in kitchens. And definitely NOT a fan of dark wood cabinets. This is what we had when we first moved in...

Dark. Out dated. Dirty. Gloomy.

But the question was... how would we go about transforming these dark gloomy cabinets into the bright cheery white cabinets I've always wanted? We basically had two options - sand them all down, choose our own white paint and make sure we Kilz the dickens out of these things before painting OR use the highly acclaimed Rustoleum method. The whole thing with Rustoleum is that everything you need is sold in one kit and you use a "de-glosser" solution to strip the old stain off of the wood instead of having to sand down the wood. It is supposed to be less work and less mess. I did a little research and it seemed like it would be the best choice. Lucky for us a lady from our church had just used the Rustoleum to do her and her mother's kitchen cabinets and loved the way they turned out, so that helped persuade us to use the kit. The only thing I was worried about was that they didn't exactly have a WHITE white color if we followed all of the steps. You see there is this second to last step called the "decorative glaze" that gives the cabinets a wood grain look. Its not that I don't like that look, its just that I wanted a white washed look and if I applied the glaze, then by the examples on the companies website, my white would turn into a cream sort of color. Not what I wanted. But I was assured that we could just skip that step and keep the white washed look so we decided that would be our plan.

So Step 1: We made a diagram sketch of our cabinets and numbered the doors, laying them out on our little paint station in order so we would be able to put them back in the right spot. We ended up buying new hinges for all of the cabinets so we just tossed the old ones. We kept all of the door handles.
Step 2: We got our de-glosser solution and used the scrubbing pads that the kit provided to scrub down all of the doors and the cabinet frames. This was actually a lot more work than I anticipated. It's supposed to be easier than sanding, but I found it just as labor intensive. The ONLY thing that made this better than sanding was that there was less mess. We did have to dry/wipe down everything, but it wasn't as bad as trying to vacuum up dust.
Step 3: Apply the "Bond Coat". This is the color part. We chose to go with Pure White. I mean, you can't get any more white than Pure White right? They say this part is only supposed to take 2 coats. We definitely had to put at least 3 coats, even 4 coats on some of the doors, but luckily we had plenty of paint in the can from the kit.

These are our cabinet frames after the first coat. I was starting to get excited!!! The kit doesn't come with enough paint to pain the INSIDE of the cabinets but we ended up using some white paint that we had had for our trim to put a couple of coats on the inside for a cleaner look when you open the cabinets.

After we felt that our cabinets were white enough, no streaking or dark wood peaking through in places, we came to Step 4. This was the decorative glaze part that we decided to skip. So on to...

Our cabinets drying in the garage after the protective top coat had been applied. We used saw horses and 2x4's, plus a few cardboard boxes to create our paint station.

After the top coat dried it was time to hang up our newly restored kitchen cabinets!!!

Bright. Updated. Clean. Cheery.

I pinned this idea on Pinterest  a few weeks ago because for as long as I've lived, in my parents house and now in my own house, we've had plastic bags stuffed full of more plastics bags, tied up and then stuffed in to more plastic bags! And then eventually we collect so many we just throw the bags away and start all over them. So when I saw this on pinterest I thought I would give it a try.

My new work schedule started today which means I now have every Tuesday until 3pm to do whatever I want/need to! So today I decided to work on our flower beds a little more... Because it was free :)

We already cleaned out the bed from all the weeds and our one lariape plant that was already there finally had room to breath and it got huge in only a couple if weeks. So today I took out a few more shrubs that we didn't want and split up the plant into 4 quarters to fill out the flower bed. Hard work but I loved being home almost all day to get it done. :) ready to buy some fall flowers to plant this weekend!

P.s. see our cute gnome? Yea that's my husband's. He says he loves gnomes but I'm pretty sure it's just because he knows I sort of kind of don't. Buuuut he is kind of cute there :)