in the fall i was anxious to re-stain and repair the deck in our back yard.

it was peeling and pretty nasty and warped in some places. our toddler was in constant danger of getting splinters or tripping and falling on her face.

however my husband convinced me to hold off, and said that maybe in the spring we could just tear out and redo the whole deck instead. that deck had seen many happy days, but it was time.

over the next few months our idea of building a new deck morphed/snowballed into building a flagstone patio.

the main reason was that we figured that if we were going to invest time and money, then we might as well make it something that would be low maintenance and that we wouldn't have to redo again in 10 years.

so in february we started demo. i fully anticipated relaxing on my stone patio by the end of the month. at least by march.





everyone helped with demo, and it was disgusting. pics of a cute toddler are much cuter than pics of us at this point. why is dirt only cute on babies?

when we found tons of rat poop and spider eggs underneath the deck, i was more happy than ever that we weren't putting up a deck again. the underside of those things are a magnet for nasty apparently!

we also found that part of the deck was built over a concrete pad. this meant that we would have to lay the flagstone a couple different ways on the concrete vs the ground.



the dogs were confused.



we needed lots of breaks.

the demo alone was a tone of work. then the next step was digging out the area on the ground where we would be laying stone.



by now it was march, and the texas spring weather was not working in our favor. this was just a weekend project for us, and some how every weekend seemed to get rained out.

once we dug out the area we wanted, we then filled it with a couple inches of decomposed granite and rented a tamper to flatten it down.

we thought we were done with the hardest part.

ha!

next we had the stone delivered, pressure washed everything, and then dry laid the stones. it felt like the home stretch.



all that was left using some cement to stick down the stones that were laid on the concrete, and then we'd fill the cracks and seal everything.

however, i forgot that i was married to a perfectionist. sticking down the stones and laying them in the perfect place where they would be perfectly level and perfectly sloping away from the house required hours of measuring, placing, and the pulling up the stones and doing it all over again if it wasn't perfect.

this was our life for a month. if i had been the project manager on this part, i would have just eyeballed it, slapped it down, and call it a day. in the end i'm glad my husband took the time to make things look professional, but at the time i was so over it! notice i forgot to take pics of this step. i think i was too traumatized.

that seemingly simple step of sticking down the stones ended up being the most complicated part of the project, so after that we could actually see the finish line!

we filled all the cracks with concrete sand, and then sealing the stones and cracks.

tadaaaa!




by mid may we were enjoying our patio. yes, i said MAY!!
i never thought that day would come.



i got a steal on some comfy patio furniture via craigslist, and we were ready to finally enjoy this thing!



this definitely took the prize for the most exhausting diy of all time. it was back breaking, and never ending. but worth it? now that we're on the other side of things i think i can say yes. i can also say never again! lol.




we've certainly been living it up in the backyard since we finished!

this patio was also a part of my husband's dream of creating a backyard theater, so we're planning to really make the most of all our hard work!



i thought i would be burned out on doing yard work/diys for the rest of my life after that one, but now i'm actually feeling inspired to tackle some new projects. stay tuned...one of them has to do with that big black thing against our exterior wall.



we'll have lived in this house for 5 years next month, so it feels good to give it a little bit of sprucing up in honor of the occasion. hopefully now this patio will last even longer than this house, because we are so done with this project! :)

home decor blogs have long been my guilty pleasure, and pinterest is a more recent one. so i thought that this time around i would take on the challenge put out there by some of my favorite home blogs and actually turn some of my pinspiration into reality.

there are several things in our house that aren't exactly my style, but they're not horrible either, so the reality is that i'm probably not going to invest much money in changing them.

one of these such items was our dining room chandelier.

it was your basic builder/box store sort of unit. nothing horrible, but definitely not a show stopper. and when you put an oil rubbed bronze fixture up against the back drop of a reddish brown wall, you're not doing it any favors. the thing just blended in.



you'll have to pardon my crappy photo shoot. i'm having to use the phone camera at the moment...and i was too anxious to get going on this project to wait to take a daylight shot.

but anyways, i had been browsing pinterest for some cheap updated ideas...preferably something that didn't involve paint, because i wasn't really in the mood to bust all that out...and i ran across this:



a diy rope knock off of a $1500 restoration hardware fixture.

so i decided to give it a whirl.

i just picked up $2 worth of jute twine from home depot, grabbed my hot glue gun, and got to work.



i was a little lazy for this project, because i didn't even take the chandelier down to work on it. my arms got tired, so i just worked on it whenever the mood would strike, or during baby nap time.



i'm quite pleased with the result though. not bad for a $2 upgrade. now it really pops out against the wall, and ties into all the other natural fibers i have going on in the room. i may try to figure out a way to accessorize it a little more in the future, but for now it's much improved.



so i'm pretty happy with how this little pinterest challenge turned out.
now to tackle some of the other bajillion things i have pinned...

home decor blogs are my guilty pleasure. i like to breeze through them in the morning while i sip my chai.

so when a few of my favorite blogs (YHL, Bower Power, Style by Emily Henderson, and Making a House a Home) joined together to issue a Pinterest Challenge, it inspired me to make practical use of my pinning. :P plus, me and my friend Laurene had been talking about actually doing some projects for awhile.

we have lots of boob lights in our house...thanks to it being built in the 70s. and i have been on a mission to be rid of them. i got rid of one earlier this summer, and now i was on a mission to be rid of the one in our hallway. our hallway was in need of a little excitement for sure.

i love the capiz shell chandeliers that are so in style right now...but they're kind of pricey if you plan to buy one. fortunately though, there are about a million tutorials on how to DIY a wax paper version all over pinterest and the internet. i won't go into the details of how i did it since the formula is already out there, but i pretty much followed these directions, except i used and old busted out lamp shade as my frame, and i used a circle puncher to make all the wax paper shells. no way i'd have the patience to cut a million circles with scissors. oh, and i used fishing line instead of thread.

to hang it i just used 3 mug hooks, and since it was pretty big i just hung it directly over the boob light and didn't even bother to take it down. i figure protecting the wax paper from any heat coming from the light is probably a good thing.

anyways, our hall way is now officially fancy! (sorry, i forgot to take before pics..but who hasn't seen a million boob lights? i'm sure you can imagine. :P)











i love how it adds some texture and height to the hall.
this project cost a grand total of about $5...and some time.

ok, maybe a lot of time. but once i figured out how to make it work, and got into a rhythm, it probably took about 6 hours. of course those hours were spread out across many days though.

realistically, this is a very busy time of year for me, and fun DIY projects should have been the lowest priority on my list. but once i started it was almost therapeutic. it became my late night obsession, and my way to unwind after a busy day. almost every spare second i had (or didn't have) was spent working on this baby, so my husband will probably be glad to have me back now.

so...2 boob lights down, and one to go. any ideas on what i should do with the last surviving boob light in the entry way?

as much as i love decorating and updating my house...i also have a hard time getting rid of things.

not so much in the hoarding kind of way...more in the sense that even if i don't love something, but it's still good and functional, i have a hard time justifying replacing it...even with something that i would love.

maybe that just means that i'm cheap. :P

i figure that by the time we pay off our house, then i should have things perfectly how i want them, because by then most everything will have fallen apart and needed replacing at one point or another anyhow.

all this to say, i have never been in love with the light fixtures in our house. but they aren't hideous or anything. they just have no personality.
but oh, i dream about things with character and texture.

in our dining room, i've secretly been lusting after something like this...



or this...




but alas. not a priority.
and like i said. the ones now work fine, look decent, and i'm cheap.

but then the other day the husband and i dropped by the local habitat for humanity restore...and i found this...

vintage capiz light!



for $2!! yes, that's right... $2.00!

oh, and did i mention that i have this other problem? of not being able to resist buying super cheap things...whether i need them or not! :P so home with us it went!

so now i have some decisions to make.
i love the shape and vintage white capiz against the dark wall of our dining room...
but is the fixture too small for that room? you can be honest with me now.


(this pic is just for scale...so try to imagine it actually hanging. :P)

it might work in our eat in table too. but it's not quite so dramatic there to me. maybe because of the proximity to the trash can. :P



i can't help but think that the irony of this is that someone probably ripped this light out of their house, and replaced it with something more like what i currently have.

i dunno why, but i love it.
maybe i was born in the wrong era.

 i finally figured out what to do with a bunch of leftover hanging candle lanterns from my wedding...that was 4 years ago...



take a $1 solar light from dollar tree...unscrew the top...guerilla glue it to the top of your candle lantern...and viola!



hanging solar light!



not bad for a nice backyard glow...the price isn't bad either. :)

the icepocalyse has hit texas, so i'm taking the opportunity of being house bound to think about a few things that i don't normally get time for.

one of my goals for this year was to start shopping with coupons.

i've been meaning to do it for a long time actually...but i never wanted to be one of those people.

you know who i'm talking about. they take 2 hours to check out because they bring a whole file folder of coupons to the grocery store...and then they pay with a check. old school.
they're a dying breed, but somehow they always end up in front of me in the grocery store line.

but since nothing thrills me like saving moolah, i had decided to try out this lifestyle despite the social stigma.

so today i was checking out the coupon policy for my local grocery store online, when i saw this!


maybe i am just totally out of the loop. very likely.  but i had never heard about this kind of coupon technology!

at grocers with reward cards, you can actually add the coupons to your reward card online before you shop so that you don't have to be a clipper! (or a line holder upper)

then the savings automatically applies to the couponed item you buy!

it's a new age of couponing people. i'm excited.
i may not be a clipper...but now i'm a clicker! :)
who knew.