hacking a thrift

In the winter time I have a lot less energy and very little motivation. I'm sure many of you are the same. I think this is because the cold weather makes my blood freeze and thus causes me to just want to crawl under a duvet to keep warm. Today the temperature was -27 C. 

The cold weather also affects my desire to do craft work because I like doing my work outside, where I can be messy and in the warm sunshine. My brain is always ready to work on DIY projects, but my ice cold body says "naaah maybe when it warms up." However this week, I felt slightly motivated to work on a project.

I guess it also doesn't help that what will be my crafting space is currently still under construction, and sitting at the coffee table with my sewing machine is not as handy. 

I found this great piece in Value Village for a mere $8. It's missing two drawers, but when placed properly, who cares right?

Here's what I did: 

1. I did nothing here. I just wanted you to see the before. 

2. Removed the drawers. They actually held Cd's so I peeled those out with a butter knife. 

3. I printed out some old looking images that I liked, and cut them to the same size as the front of the drawers.

4. I lined up my drawers on my kitchen counter

5. I made a paper mache mix (flour, water,salt) and coated the drawer fronts with a layer to give a slight texture

6. I paper mached the images with 3 coats of the mix allowing it to dry between coats. 

(Olive helped...not)

7. I placed the drawers back in the the stand and Voila!

I still need to touch up the chipped corners, maybe with a bit of brown paint just to disguise it a bit. I plan on removing the legs and placing just the drawer section on top of my crafting table as I will be using it for my crafting notions.

Bad family photos and barking in the rain.

Okay so I missed a greater number of weeks than I would normally between posts. It's been a busy couple of weeks though, with Christmas, New Years, family outings, winter illnesses, basement renos and what not. All of these are poor reasons for not blogging though, I must confess that. They're not even really reasons...more just excuses.  so here's a bit of an update on most of what I have been busy with.

1. Creating another awful Christmas card. Last year we decided to start a tradition of sending out horribly distasteful Christmas cards. This year's is pretty bad: 

2. The Christmas tree went up. The Christmas tree came back down.

3. Working on our basement. I'm not going to post any pictures of that in this post though. I will blog about that when it's complete, but so far we have a great storage room, and the new laundry/bathroom facility down there. 

4. I found this great drawer unit for $8. I plan on covering each drawer with either printed book pages, or vintage floral paper. Then I will use it in my near future crafting corner which will be in our new basement. I will post the finished results probably not too long from now. 

5. I redid the front entrance way to our house by building in a built-in coat/boot/seat area: 

6. I made Olive a raincoat. I made it out of part of a shower curtain. Our new shower stall in our new bathroom, is only half as wide as the curtain, so I cut the curtain and reused the other half to make this new coat for Olive. I tried to find some patterns online but I didn't really like any of them, so I started measuring my dog and ended up creating my own pattern. 

Olive hated having to be measured every 5 minutes. As soon as she saw me with the partially completed coat, she'd make a dash to the basement or under a chair. But eventually it was completed.. Here is the final result: