Knock-Off Dollhouse Bookcase

I've admired these dollhouse bookcases in Pottery Barn Kids and Land of Nod 

ever since our baby girl was born.

Pottery Barn Kids

Land of Nod

Now that she is older (she will be TWO on Friday!!) and enjoys playing with girly things in her room, 

I knew we had to get one of these for her to store her girly treasures in.

But with prices around $200, I knew we'd either have to build it ourselves or find a knock-off for way cheaper.

With Christmas looming around the corner and little time to devote to building one, buying one was really our only option.

A while back I happened to stumble upon one of these adorable dollhouse bookcases at Target. 

It looked very similar to the one from Pottery Barn Kids, except it had a pink roof instead of a green one. 

Oh and the price was a quite different too...

$79 instead of Pottery Barn's $199!!

Still, I held off on buying it.

This morning, however, I was perusing Target's weekly ad

and lo and behold,

the very same bookcase is now on sale for $60!

So, I packed up the kids and raced out and bought it for our little girl.

Good thing they are still young enough not to realize what I am buying...hee hee!

By the way, if you're interested in building one of these 

{and unlike us, you have time to spare},

Ana White has great FREE plans to build it HERE.

Simplifying at Christmas: Holiday Cards

I used to make my own Christmas cards...

that is, before I had kids.

I used to love sitting down at the kitchen table, 

sipping my hot tea with Christmas carols playing in the background 

as I spent hours making our annual holiday cards.

That came to an end two years ago, though,  

as I spent months in the hospital before I delivered our 3 beautiful babies on December 10th.

Our Christmas that year was spent adapting to life as new parents while driving back and forth to the hospital to visit our newborn babies. 

Life was so chaotic that year that we didn't even decorate our Christmas tree, buy gifts, or send out cards. 

None of that stuff is what Christmas is all about anyways, right? 

That year I learned that Christmas is just as joyful without all of the frilly extras that we tend to stress ourselves out over every holiday season. 

What really mattered was that God had not only given us the gift of salvation through his Son, but the gift of three healthy children as well. 

What amazing blessings!

Although we have adapted to a crazy new lifestyle with three little tikes, life is still chaotic. 

So I have had to prioritize what is important and just let some things go.

Things like spending hours making Christmas cards.

Thank goodness for companies like Shutterfly that make awesome personalized holiday cards for those of us who don't have time to do it ourselves!

They make it so easy...

just choose your card and upload your photo(s), 

type your message,

and a few days later your cards arrive in the mail!

Then all you have to do is address your envelopes and mail them out!

This year Shutterfly is even giving away 50 free cards to bloggers!

WU HOO to that - I was planning to order some anyways :)

Here are some of my favorite holiday cards this year...

You can choose from folded greeting cards, flat stationary cards, or flat photo cards.

Decisions, decisions...

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

How do you simplify during the holidays??

Christmas Mantel 2010

The mantel is decked and the stockings are hung...

I had so many great ideas for this year's mantel that it was hard to stick to one...

too bad it's not practical to re-decorate it once a week!

I decided to leave up the mirror and shutters along with the star and wreath since it all kinda went with my warm metallic theme.

I started out by laying a string of white icicle lights (found in our Christmas box) across the mantel and covered it with Burlap Garland (from Michael's).

 

On top of the burlap I laid two stick garlands that have glittery balls attached to them 

(from Joann's) 

and I sprinkled in some gold ball ornaments from our tree.

Then I added in some books covered in brown paper, a starfish, two glass vases filled with more metallic glass ornaments,

and a glittery silver wire tree (from Pier 1).

After standing back and evaluating the mantel, I decided it needed some height, so I stuck some twigs in the glass vases and hung some mini gold ornaments (from Target) from them.

 The only thing left was the stockings.

We have never had cute, coordinated stockings for the whole family, so I decided to splurge on a set for all five of us.
I had been drooling over the white quilted stockings in Pottery Barn for a while, so I decided to go for it.
To ease the pain of these pricey stockings ($30 each!), I ordered two to start with and was going to wait a few weeks to order the rest.

Two beautiful stockings arrived last week embroidered with "Mom" and "Dad" on them and they are exactly what I had been dreaming of. 

So then I went to order the rest yesterday and they are NO LONGER AVAILABLE!!!

WHAT!!????

You have got to be kidding me.

After my little hissy fit and some internet searching, I found that Target carries some very similar
(for only $10!)

So last night I raced out and bought 3 more stockings for the kids. 

They aren't embroidered like the Pottery Barn ones 

(I photoshopped the kids' names on in the pictures), 

but they look darn near as nice!

I hung them from the mantel using some of the Command 3M hangers that are hidden under the burlap garland.

So there you have it - 

our Christmas mantel 2010!

Happy Holidays!

Gathering Christmas Inspiration

I've been saving Christmas decorating ideas in my inspiration folder for months now. 

Here are some of my favorite images...

Martha Stewart

HGTV

BHG

BHG

BHG

BHG

HGTV

Martha Stewart

The Inspired Room

 The Lettered Cottage

Martha Stewart

HGTV

BHG

I am feeling so festively inspired!

Now I'm off to deck the halls - 

it's almost December, I've gotta get moving!

Virtual Living Room Makeover

 Jacob and I decided that instead of getting each other Christmas presents this year, we would buy ourselves two (much-needed!) chairs for our living room.

Our living room is the first room you enter when you come in our front door. It's got super high vaulted ceilings and is is connected to our dining room, so it's a pretty big space.

A pretty big space that is really boring and lacks decent furniture.

I'm a little bit embarrassed to invite people into our house because their first impression of our decor would be pretty sad.

So I spent a few hours giving our room a virtual makeover in Photoshop to see how our living room could potentially look AND to help us decide what kind of chairs to buy.

Here is the BEFORE (what our living room looks like now)

 and virtual AFTER.

I think it's all pretty do-able. 

Buy the chairs.

Paint the walls.

Build the bookcases and trim work above the mantle.

Slipcover the sofa.

Fix up the coffee table.

Buy a rug.

It just might take us a year to complete though :)

Linking up to:

Shutters

I had been looking for something to add to our mantel to give it a little more depth. 

Our fireplace sits against a huge wall and sometimes the things that I put on our mantel get swallowed up by the big wall.

So while I was out junkin' one weekend, I came across a pair of shutters that were just the right size to sit next to the mirror on our mantel. 

How did I know they would be the right size?? 

Well I carry a handy dandy little tape measure in my purse at all times, or course!

The shutters weren't very pretty when I bought them (for 10 bucks!).

This is actually a picture of the backsides (looks the same as the front did) because I got too excited and spray painted the fronts before I took a 'before' picture!

 Speckled red paint on the trim with bad gold paint on the louvers.

Nothing a little sand paper and spray paint couldn't fix though!

And viola! 

Here is how they look now after a few coats of Valspar Warm Grey spray paint. 

Pretend you don't see the beginnings of my Christmas decorations, just look at the pretty shutters!

Now I think I need to paint the ginormous wall behind it - ugh.

Linking up to:

Funky Junk Interiors: SNS #53 - Shutters

Sawdust and Paper Scraps: Weekend Party

One Nightstand Down, One to Go...

We FINALLY got one nightstand built, painted, put in the bedroom and accessorized.

Now we just have to finish one for the other side of the bed...

It looks SO much better than our old nightstands.

Here's a reminder of what we had BEFORE:

And here's the AFTER:

I think it is so pretty!

We built it using THESE plans from ana-white.com

I ended up modifying the measurements from the plans to 

make it a little smaller so it looks 

a little more like a nightstand and a little less like a bookshelf.

It was super fast and easy to build 

(the time consuming part was the sanding, priming and painting!).

And the best part is it only cost us about $50 for all of the materials

for BOTH nightstands.

I already had all of the accessories (the lamp, clock, plant, books, jar) 

that I put on the top half of the nightstand, I just shopped around my house.

I made the artwork (do you call text artwork??) by typing one of my favorite Bible verses in Word using the font "Rough Typewriter" that I downloaded from dafont.com.

Then I stuck the document in a cheap frame from Fred Meyer.

I wanted to corral all of my books and keepsakes so that they didn't clutter up the shelves, 

so I found these baskets at Pier 1 ($15 each) 

and was able to use a $10 off coupon that I found on the internet!

Using some of my scrapbook supplies, 

I made the tags for the baskets using letter stickers and tied them on with twine.

Here is a PDF of the Bible verse I framed and hung on the wall.
Feel free to download it!

Click to download Bible Verse

Linking up to:

Miss Mustard Seed's Furniture Feature Friday

Sawdust and Paper Scraps "what-ever" Linky party

Funky Junk Interiors: Saturday Nite Special #55