Front Door Wreath

Again with the wreaths... I know! But, this project turned out much better than our last attempt at a wreath.


I have been wanting a cute wreath for our front door, and thought it would be neat to have one for each season. But I wondered where I would store them all when they weren't in use. Then one day I found a cute wreath idea on Living Life Crafty and thought it would be cute to have for our front door. I thought about it for a couple of weeks and then decided that I must make one. I also figured out a plan to incorporate my seasonal wreath idea. I would make a simple and bare wreath and then add seasonal items that could be switched out with each changing season. This way, I won't have to store a bunch of wreaths. Instead, I could just store the accessories. Once I had that plan in mind, I just had to do it!

I took myself to Joanne's and found a simple wood branch wreath for $3.99 and an M for McChesney. You know me and monograms, I just love them. I also bought some black, outdoor, craft paint, red ribbon and a couple stems of red artificial berries.

I started by painting the M black.


Next, I attached the M to the wreath using small red ribbon that I happened to have. Let me just say, this was not my first choice of materials to use to attach the M. I was hoping to use fishing line, but unfortunately we are not fishers, hence no fishing line. I know it doesn't look the best, but I figured that I could get away with it because of the red berries that I was going to add later. I plan to switch out the red ribbon for the fishing line when I dress it up for spring. This will give me a couple of months to find some.

Once the M was attached I added the berries in clumps of three, sporadically around the wreath. Lastly, I cut a long piece of thick red ribbon and tied it loosely around the top of the wreath.

Now, our lovely winter wreath is hanging on our front door. I love it! AND it will be easy to change out when spring comes around. The sooner the better, I say!

Christmas Wreath Wreck

Say that five times fast...

Here is a little story to warm up your "after the holiday blues"... I meant to actually post it during x-mas, but just never got around to it.

As Trav and I were putting up our Christmas decorations this year, we realized that we were a little short on supplies. We thought that we had plenty, but quickly figured out that we had more than enough for our little condo which was half the size of our new house. This year our decorations looked a bit sparse.

In typical Sara fashion, I turned to my favorite blogs for help. I was on the hunt for cheap DIY projects. ALAS, I found a cool post for making a cheap ornament wreath on one of my new fave blogs, Fingerprints on the Fridge. Check it out if you have a minute, it's great!

All I needed to make this was... 1) a wire hanger and 2) a bunch of glass bulb ornaments. EASY!!! Anyone who knows me well, knows about my love of the Dollar Tree. So, I headed there in search of ornaments and found all that my heart could desire! I bought 6 packages of different colored ornaments. I was a little worried about the wire hanger part though. The previous owners of our house left us with an abundance of wire hangers, which I promptly threw out because I think they are the devil. Once I got home from the dollar store, I went on a hunt for any remaining wire hangers. Luckily, I found one who had escaped my wrath.

I started sliding the glass ornaments onto the wreath using the metal hoops at the top of each ornament and in no time at all I had a great looking x-mas wreath.

Remember, this post is called "Christmas Wreath Wreck". So here is where the wreck part comes into play. My hanger was all filled up and was ready to tie the two ends together. The last step was to tie a lovely piece of red ribbon at the top so that we could hang it from our door. I asked Trav to use his big strong muscles to wrap the two ends of the wire together to complete the circle. He had no trouble with this, except for the small fact that the bulbs kept popping off their toppers. Unfortunately, I had overlooked the small step of hot gluing the metal toppers on each ornament. Trav was having a hell of a time getting the two ends together AND trying to manage all of the bulbs popping off. And then finally, in a Christmas miracle he was able to get the wreath finished with all bulbs back on their toppers. What a swell guy! He was walking the wreath over to me in the kitchen when IT happened...

It was like one of those moments where time slows down and everything goes into slow motion... One little bulb jumped off the wreath! Trav being the awesome husband that he is, reached out to catch the bulb... I can picture it now. Trav saying "Oooohhhh Nnnnooooo!" in the deep slow motion voice that they use in the movies. While Trav was reaching out trying to catch the stray bulb with one hand, the wreath slipped out of his other hand and went smashing to the ground.

Many of the bulbs broke into tiny smithereens. Here is proof! I had to capture this mishap on film.

Luckily, I was able to salvage some of the bulbs that were still intact. We had a good laugh while sweeping up all of the broken glass. What else could we do? We had to admit defeat by this evil project. Looking back I should have hot glued the tops onto each bulb. I think this would have saved on a lot of frustration.

Now, the survivor bulbs are tucked away safely in a storage box in the crawl space, until... next year... (enter the Jaws music theme).

Five Favorite Things

Today I was thinking it might be fun to post 5 of my favorite things. Not because they will be interesting to anyone else, but just to document some of the things that I am into right now. After a little more thought I decided this would be fun! Here it goes...

#5) Chai Latte

As a teacher, every year for Christmas, teacher appreciation week, and at the end of the school year I receive many Starbucks gift cards. I love it! This helps to feed my addiction to these bad boys. Yum!

#4) Home Magazines

I LOVE to read, but have never been a huge magazine reader. However, since we bought the house, I have been scavenging the magazine racks for home magazines. Towards the end of the summer I came across Fresh Home and Do It Yourself. I love both of them. Unfortunately, they only come out like 4 times per year. The wait between issues is slightly unbearable.

#3) Crocheting

I just started a new project for our family room. I have made afghans for many other people in my family and realized that I have never taken the time to make one for us. So, I decided the time is now. I have started a green afghan. Can't wait to see it finished!

#2) Mrs. Meyer's Lemon Verbenia Countertop Cleaner.

On the recommendation of my favorite Young House Lovers, we recently bought some of this cleaner for our kitchen. It leaves our kitchen smelling so clean and fresh. Plus, you can purchase the larger bottle of cleaner and add water to reuse the spray bottle. We plan to do this when we need a refill.

#1) Florence and the Machine

I have been listening to this band a lot on Pandora lately and I just love them. I foresee that I'll be purchasing this album in the very near future.


Welp... there you have it. My current top five favorite things. What would you rate as your five favorite things?

Turning Buttons Into Art

As we planned for our move this summer, I began searching online for some neat decorating ideas. I knew that we would have a lot more wall space to fill and started looking for cheap DIY art ideas. For this I turned to some of my favorite blogs. I found that some of my favs had hung their initials above their bed. I loved this idea! I decided that this was a must for our new house. I planned to make 3 pieces. An S for me... Sara, a T for Travis, and an M for our last name McChesney. I planned to print out these letters on white card stock and frame them.

You should probably know that I love monograms! One night I happened upon Etsy and came across some monogram pillows. This brilliant person glued buttons onto the pillows in the shape of letters. They were beautiful and I automatically thought of my bedroom project and decided that this would be a great way to add detail to these simple pieces.

So, I got to work printing the outline of our initials on white card stock, one per page. Then bought some black buttons and filled in the letter outlines.

Here is the S in progress.


Next, I mounted them on more card stock to make them look like they are matted, put them in their frames ($3 @ walmart), and TA-DAH... they are ready to hang. I think they turned out rather cute, if I do say so myself.




Now, here they are hanging above our bed. I'm so happy with how they turned out!


P.S. Please ignore the fact that we don't have any bedside tables yet. We're working on that. ;-)

Our Casa Bonita

This is our new abode and we love it! This has been a huge upgrade from our cozy little 2 bedroom, 2 bathroom condo that we were living in before. We moved in mid-August and have been busy pretty much every weekend trying to get settled and cozy once again. 3 bedrooms, 3 1/2 bathrooms, hardwood floors and a finished partial basement makes us a happy McChesney fam. I will try to post some pictures of the inside as we get each room just the way that we want it, because believe it or not, its already December and we don't have it perfect just yet. Someday... sigh.

Welcome!

Welcome to my blog! I'm really excited to start this process. Over the last few months I have become a little obsessed with reading other people's blogs and have been thinking "hey, maybe I can do that!" So, here it goes... This will be my attempt at a blog.

My husband and I just purchased a new home and are working like crazy to make it our own. My hope is to share this process with anyone who is even slightly interested. I have been stealing DIY and decorating ideas from tons of other blogs and would love to share how I have taken some of their ideas, made a few changes and then made them my own. We are new to the home improvement game and I promise to share the good, the bad and the ugly.

I will probably also throw in some posts about other events and exciting times in our lives. We LOVE to travel and I love to take pictures of our adventures. I love to read and talk about books. Also, have I mentioned that I'm a total Twilight Nerd, or as my friend Lia says "a Twerd". I even have parties to celebrate the movies and my love for all things Twilight.

I would love to hear your thoughts on any of these subjects. So, please feel free to leave comments.

Thanks for reading!
Sara