So Excited for my Black Chandelier

Here is the thing about decorating.....you have to have patience!

I currently have the patience of a saint right now because my husband convinced me to wait the "one year before painting on new construction." The white walls are killing me. Not to mention the flat paint that shows every mark. I have my paint colors all picked out for every room so with that in mind I have been searching for additional decor pieces. 

For a year, yes a year people, I have been trying to find a reasonable black chandelier for my bedroom. I have been to several lighting stores, researched online, and read reviews on black chandeliers. They were either too expensive or too cheap.

My kids are both in school all day for the first time this year, so one day my husband played hooky and we went out for lunch and shopping. We were shopping mostly for house items. I would say I want that. He would say "really?" See my husband can picture things in his mind. I tell him the grand plan of any project, he usually disagrees with my plan but goes along with it, and then when it's all done he usually tells me how good the project turned out! This was also the case with me wanting a black chandelier for our bedroom. After we finished shopping, out of the corner of my eye, I spotted a lighting store tucked back in a corner. 

We walked around the store and we're about to leave when I looked up and I saw her! She was beautiful and exactly what I was looking for! Now the price tag on her was not bad but a little higher than I budgeted. I inquired about her and found out the tag was incorrect, she was even less, and on top of that they were having a store wide sale and took an additional 15% off. I was sold! 

Well she finally came in and I could not wait to get her up! My husband got her up and I couldn't help but smile ear to ear! Now I really can't wait to paint the walls! So the moral of my story is when you have a vision make sure you take your time to put all the pieces together to complete your vision.

My bedroom vision......to be continued. 

Back To School! Organizing The Homework Area!

Well my "summer blogging break" is officially over tomorrow when my oldest returns to school as a second grader. Where did the summer go?? I feel like the summer went so fast! Our summer here in Chicago started out cool and rainy but we still did a ton of things on our bucket list. 

With the start of the school year I knew I need to get our homework area organized - it was a mess! Last year I watched my neighbors twins three days in the week. The twins and my older son were in the same class so doing homework together was easy peasy! This year I will be watching the twins again buy they have one teacher and my son has another, so homework might be a bit more challenging, but I will figure out a way to "getter done!" Also, add to it, my youngest son will be in Kindergarten with homework as well. So I knew I needed to get our homework area cleaned up and ready to go for the first day. 

My youngest son is in Kindergarten all day. He qualified for a program where he will be in a regular Kindergarten class in the morning, and then stay with 12 of his friends to continue working on literacy. He is not recognizing all of his letters. My first thought as a mother is complete failure for not working with him more. Come to find out he is blind as a bat and cannot see near. They believe this is a huge factor but still put him in the program to make sure he is up to speed when entering first grade. I dug through my teacher bin and pulled out all my ABC, numbers, flash cards, worksheets, and other fun activities to help him through out the year.

Here is how our area turned out:

Each child has a seat to work, and supplies are in the middle in a caddy. Our calendar is up and will help my youngest with his counting along with our ABC poster. We also have some fun stuff on the board for seasons, weather and to determine today, tomorrow and yesterday. My youngest always says "Remember last year when we....." instead of yesterday. I will also add fun visuals for each month.

Off to the side I have our ABC/Word and Number/Math helpers. The black drawers hold extra supplies, scrap paper, notebook paper and more school goodies. My white TV cabinet I found at the curb. I removed the doors and spray painted it white. Here I house 3 bins that house workbooks and worksheet for ABC, numbers and math, and the last one has fun activities like mazes, hidden objects, connect the dots and coloring for when the kids are bored. All our markers, crayons, colored pencils, dry erase markers, and pencils live in the pencil boxes. On top is our word wall/sight words, and white paper and construction paper in the trays. The magazine holders hold my calendar markers and miscellaneous items I have used in the past when assisting in doing homework. The crate holds all our flash cards (addition, subtraction, ABC, numbers, sight words). It also holds some games and puzzles related to ABC. 

Education is so important to me and having educational items at my finger tips to use in assisting with homework will make it fun for the kids and fun for me!

Happy 1st Day of School to you all! 

Organizing: Project New Home!

I have an obsession with Thirty-One bags! I love them and want so many of them. So when Julie asked me to do a product review for their hang-up home organizer I was beyond excited!!! I could not wait to share with how I used the organizer that I have had my eye on forever. 

When my box arrived at my door I was giddy! After opening it I was amazed at the quality of the fabric and new right away it would be durable and last. At first I thought for sure I would be using it as an addition to my command center (go here to check out my command center). Then the light bulb went on and I knew exactly what its purpose would be for me. 

First I wanted to add a pop of color to it. What better then some chevron pink!!! I trimmed up some scrapbook paper and inserted it in all the clear pockets.

The next thing I did was find some cute mini clothes pin and added some pink washi tape to them. I loved how they turned out and they work great to clip up items to my organizer. 

After I dressed up my organizer (which I had so much fun doing) I then began to set up my organizer. We have recently moved into a brand new home. It is our second brand new home, but boy I forgot about all the things you need to buy for a new home. The paint, window treatments, furniture, lighting and more! Even though we came from a home where we lived for 10 years I still needed some new items for the new home. So this became my project new home organizer!

I use the 4 pockets at the bottom to hold paint and window treatment quotes, information for my son's lego room and a miscellaneous pocket for things I pick up for later projects.

I love that it comes with a dry erase marker to label areas. I used the middle section to write out any appointments I have and a pocket to keep my business cards. 

The top portion of my organizer allows me to write out my to do list. Some items on this to do list are long term as we are working on one area at a time, but I love that it is right in front of my face to keep me motivated.

The other half allows me to clip up items, like swatches, brochures, picture inspiration, and more. 

Here is my finished thirty-one wall organizer

If you loved what I have done with the home organizer and would like to get organized with Thirty-One head on over to Julie personal website and check out the catalog. She will gladly help you get what you need to get organized!

Wine Bottles

Anyone that knows me, knows I like a good glass of wine! So I usually have an empty bottle or two sitting around. I received a chalkboard painted bottle for a gift from a friend. I keep it in my wine themed kitchen on the counter and love to write messages on my bottle. At Christmas I wrote Ho! Ho! Ho! at Easter a Happy Easter wish and when it is a family members birthday I write a birthday wish on it. There were many times I wish I had two more bottles to split the message up on 3 bottles. That's when I began to collect the empty bottles over the winter. As spring was approaching I got my bottles ready by removing all the labels.

I soaked them in hot water and used a razor blade to scrape off the all paper. Any left over residue I used a little Goo Gone to clean the bottles off. I then set them aside to dry and wait for warmer weather to spray paint them.

Here in Chicago we had a slow go from winter temps to spring temps. Actually I think summer is hear now but we had some unseasonable low temps. When the weather finally warmed up a bit to paint we had terrible winds. No good for spray painting! Finally I had a nice, warm, non-windy day and got all the bottles primed and painted! 

I added two extra bottles to my existing one on the counter and plan to make a count down till our Florida vacation on it. 

The next thing I wanted to do with the bottles was add some to my upper cabinet for wine decor in my kitchen. I first thought I would write one letter on each bottle of our last name. Well that would take 7 bottles and really who thinks our last name is decor let alone fits in my wine themed kitchen! So I decided with 4 bottles each one spelling out Vino. Much better!! I first tried to write with my chalk pen but did not like the results. I then tried with regular chalk and decided it is just my handwriting that I am not happy with. So I had to come up with another way to spell out vino on the bottles. I was cleaning up my scrap room and came across my vinyl.......light bulb! I immediately pulled out my cricket, found a font I liked and cut my letters out.

I loved how they came out! I gave them a home on top of my cabinet and can't wait to add some lighting!

Do you have any interesting things you have made with wine bottles? I would love to see them. Please leave me a link in the comments!

Teacher Gifts!

Wow, these last few weeks of May are flying by! I have so much going on with the kiddos before they get out of school. Just a few weeks ago it was teacher appreciation day. The kids always give their teachers something small to just let their teachers know they are appreciated.

I found the cute printable tags on one of my favorite blogs eighteen25! I love, love their ideas. You can find the printable here on their blog.

For the end of the year gift for the teachers I like to do a bit more to give them a BIG thank you for all that they do. Here is what I pulled together for the teachers last year.

You can find my post about it here. I got wonderful feed back from the teacher on how much they loved them. This year my boys gave me the best Mother's Day present created by my Mom. I loved them so much I decided to make them and give them to the boy's teachers.

Aren't they so stinking cute??? They were so easy to make. All you need is a pair of rain boots, rocks or gravel, dirt, and herb plant of your choice. I also added the colorful duct tape for more color but it is not easy to put on with out any kinks! My husband drilled holes in the bottom of the boots for drainage. I filled the bottom of the boots with rocks to weight them down and then filled with dirt. Planted the herb, gave it some water and attached a to/from tag to it. My son who was in preschool is finished now and his teachers absolutely loved them!

What are you giving the teachers for the last day of school? I would love to see.

Mommy Got a Mini Vacation - Vegas Style!

Hi all! Sorry about the lack of post this week but I had an opportunity to sneak away with the husband to Vegas! We have not been away, without kids, for almost 5 years so it was way overdue!

I have never been to Vegas! It was wonderful! I loved all the lights at night,and the fountain at the Bellagio! We stayed at the Mandaley Bay Hotel and had a wonderful strip view. It was so nice to have some adult time with my husband. It was also wonderful not to have to cook, clean, care for kids, do laundry, and the other bazillion things I do. As a stay at home mom there are no vacation days unless I get away like this.  It was nice to just relax (something else I am not good at doing and really need to get better at doing).

I am very lucky and blessed to have wonderful family to care for my boys who allowed me to sneak away with my husband. A huge, heartfelt thank you to my mother who ended up taking care of both my boys who came down with the stomach flu while I was in Vegas. I am sure that is was way more than she bargained for but I knew my boys were in good hands as she was the best nurse to me when I was sick! Thank you Mom - I love you! 

Well it's back to the grind stone and I have already been doing laundry and disinfecting my home to make sure the nasty bug is gone from our home! This week we will be getting back to our organizing challenge and organizing the laundry room!

Organizing the Boys Closets - Reveal

I'm so excited to show you how the boys closets turned out! If you saw my before pictures here you know I was working with a mess of items, and in a sea of un-organization! Knowing that I did not have a budget to get my dream organizers for both closets I worked with what I had on hand. I once again used dollar store storage to tidy up both closets.

I created, using some old Ikea wicker baskets I had laying around, a basket for clothes that are too big and one for clothes that are two small.

I love the tags I made. Green for one son and Red for the other! I printed out the paper, and text. Trimmed and inked the edges of the text paper just to make it pop out a bit. Then matted and laminated. Then tied it off with some matching ribbon.

I had some left over dollars on my Office Depot gift card so I picked up two green file bins as I knew they would be the perfect size to house all the boys friends. When do boys out grow stuffed animals? The boys stood their ground about not wanting to give away their friends!

My younger son gets all the hand-me-downs including shoes. 13 is too big for him right now so I keep them in the buckets for when he will fit into them. They were previously in a diaper box and I had no idea what type of shoes or size were in there. Now I can easily see I have a few pairs for him when his feet grow.

Since our house is brand new and we are waiting to paint after our year patching is done by the builder, I created a decor bin. Our younger son continued with his train room theme that he had in his old house, so the items in his bin are ones that will go up after we paint. My older son wants a lego room, so as I find items for his theme I have been placing them in his decor bin. I also put baseball pants, shirts and socks in their hats for an easy grab at game time.

Both boys closets are now color coded which makes it easy for them to pick out a shirt that matches their pants or shorts.

Now when I am hanging up their laundry I am happy to do so. Before I would go into their closets to hang up their laundry and want to quickly shut the door again. Now I can't help but have a smile on my face when I open the door. Silly how the simple things like an organized closet make me happy!!