Friday Find: End of Bed Bench

Today's Friday Find is this awesome picnic bench turned "End of Bed Bench" from remodelaholic.  We have been talking about getting a bench for the end of our bed for a long time but I haven't been able to settle on a design that I liked.  With a picnic bench, you could either get really lucky and find a cool one at a flea market or get to building in your garage!

Source: Remodelaholic.com

Ps. Be sure to stop by OurFifthHouse where Carmel featured the playset we built!! What an honor!!

Birthday Party Favor & Recap

Almost 3 weeks ago the kiddos had a big birthday bash.  Their birthdays are just 11 days apart (separated by 2 years) so we were able to have a bunch of family out to the house as well as a couple really close friends.  I wanted to give a small favor out to everyone and saw this really cute s'more party favor at Spaceships & Laserbeams and I knew I'd have to recreate it!

I found these blue take out boxes at The Dollar Tree.  They were three for a buck.  Then, I stuffed them full of goodies, cut a piece of pink paper into a strip and attached the paper with photo squares on each end.  Finally, I added a piece of twine and a smarty-pants tag.  Done & Done!  

Since I'm taking a trip back in time, I might as well show you a few other little details from the par-tay! I ordered paper globes from Oriental Trading Party Supplies.  They were fairly inexpensive but added a lot of color to the yard. Also, I'll be able to use them again because they held up great! (Even though we left them out overnight!)  But the best part of the paper globes was that I had a very handsome guy help me hang them all :)  Thank honey!

Building Stairs for the Club House

There are lots of tutorials on the wonderful world wide web on how to build stairs.  We read almost all of them.  However, I'm not entirely sure we followed any of them.  The good news is that we have stairs and they turned out great!!

The standard rise (up and down measurement) for stairs is somewhere around 7 inches while the run (horizontal measurement) is around 10.5 inches.  Since we were making these stairs for little feet, we decided to make the rise only 6 inches and the run 6 inches as well.  This made for a much smaller step "up" as well as a smaller spot to put your foot.

So how'd we make the stairs? 

Because we used a "square" number for our cut outs (6 inches by 6 inches) it made the math super easy and we were able to use just a regular metal framing square.

Who's Eating Broccoli?

I'm amazed that in just 7 weeks our vegetable garden goes from looking like this to that!

Before this garden, I never understood what sorts of joys come with planting and growing a garden. I never found any enjoyment trying to figure out what was a weed and what was a desirable plant.

Black Bean & Avocado Salad Recipe

We had a family dinner last night.  It's always so nice to have everyone together and to be able to share a meal together.  My parents made T-bone steaks that they picked up from a new farmer.  They also made mushrooms, peppers and onions for the steaks, and baked potatoes on the side.  My mom asked me to bring chips (which we left on the kitchen counter at home) and some sort of dip.

She reminded me of a certain chip dip that I made a while ago and specially requested this one.  It's really easy to make and almost everybody loves it.

Swing Set Lumber List

So I have mentioned in a couple of posts now that we've been spending some time working on building a play set... We originally found inspiration from Carmel who writes a great little blog called OurFifthHouse.  Well, we sill have the stairs to build and an additional swing to purchase, but here's the play set!

If you're interested in building your own, here is what we ended up purchasing for all of our lumber:

The Swing Set Continues

Things got real once we started putting giant timbers into the ground to start getting our swing set planned out further.

The two large posts on the left side of this picture are 6x6's.  They're a whopping 10 feet long and nearly 3 feet are buried below ground.  

Since the ground is clearly not level where we chose to have the swing set, we placed the 4x6 board across the top to check for level and adjusted the depth of the holes accordingly.  This was a painful process since we had to lift the 12 foot long 4x6 on top of the 6x6 posts several times as we adjusted the holes and the amount of gravel that we placed in the bottom of the holes to help with drainage.   Once we were happy with the results, we were able to set the posts in quikrete.  It was important to constantly check the level of the post while poking the concrete into the post holes. We took our time with this process because the main posts would determine whether or not the rest of the set would be level down the road.

Swing Set Surprise

It has been unacceptably long since I have last updated!  So much has happened recently that I was just too preoccupied to hop on the old blog.  For shame!

First of all, the hubby is home from a 37 day "adventure".... Ah yes, now I remember why I haven't been blogging. Bryan enjoys taking up all of my spare time; and I truly enjoy filling that role.  Well, in our spare time we have definitely had the projects rolling.

I rarely let my husband rest.  We also cut down another tree.

Makeshift Vases

I collect jars.  It's been a problem for several years now.  Mustard, jelly, pickles, olives, salsa, sour kraut, salad dressing... any glass jar.  Well, every once in a while, I drag them all out and come up with something to do with them.  I mentioned that I planned on using all of these spray painted jars on my new mantel display that you can see in the background.  It didn't quite work the way I expected so I had to come up with another way to use them.  I collected them onto a circular planter tray, added a few flowers, & I'm instantly pleased!  I'm so happy I didn't have to pack them away again!

Does anyone else have bizarre collections that you don't know why you're collecting them and don't know what to do with them?  Do you have a great idea for jars?  You know I have plenty!

-Janice

Balloon Surprise!

Our baby girl is turning three!  She just recently started sleeping in a big girl bed and even more recently started venturing into our bed at 8 am... every morning.  I can't complain, though.  8 is a very respectable hour!

Well, thanks to the power of Pinterest, I decided to surprise attack her with balloons and force her to break through some streamers in order to get to our bed.  I'm fully anticipating her to freak out and scream.  But I know once she realizes what happened, she'll be thrilled.  I hope she talks about this all day.

I've seen this done so many ways by so many people
that I couldn't possibly give everybody credit... 

I'll be back with more birthday details later!  I'm looking forward to enjoying more cake with my little girl!