Dinning Room

Hey everybody!  I hope you all had a wonderful Christmas spent with family and friends. I spent lots of time working on my new "studio" which is in the back of our new shop that we are currently designing.  It's so nice to have a warm place to make my bread boards now instead of using the gravel carport behind our house.  I know this is nothing that exciting but I wanted to show you how it looked before I worked on it.   In a word, gross.  This place use to be a taxidermy business so there was all kinds of this and that splattered on the walls and floor.  I'm not sure what it was and I really don't want to know either, I'm just happy it's gone now.  First thing I did was pull up the floor. Then I replaced it with parquet wood floor tiles.  Next, the ick splattered cabinets had to go.  I gave them a good cleaning and coat or two of Kilz, then, another three coats of Valspar Ultra White paint in semi gloss.  I'm thinking about adding...

Wishing all of you a wonderful holiday season!   I'll be taking a short break from blogging to spend Christmas with my family.  Love to all of you!

Hey there everybody!  Is anyone else slightly overwhelmed by the fact that it's almost Christmas?  I'm sure hoping that some of you are as behind as I am?  I always have such great plans to make everyone's gifts, bake cookies with my kiddos, spend time planning teacher appreciation gifts, buy presents, etc., but by this time every December, I've done none of that and I rush to get it all done at the last minute, forgetting what Christmas is about in the first place.  Shame on me. Somehow I found the time to work on the vintage industrial railroad cart that hubby brought home.  We were so blessed to receive 3 of them as a gift from one of my biggest bread board suppporters.  He gave us three of them and I just couldn't wait to get to work on one of them.  Luckily, it didn't really need much work.  I just cleaned it, sanded it, coated it with Minwax special walnut stain and polyurethaned the top and hardware.  Then we brought it inside to use ...

My hubby surprised me today with something we've always wanted. I'm so overwhelmed that I'm just going to show you the photos. Vintage railroad carts.  3 of them. I can't wait to get to work on these bringing them back to their original beauty.  

Hi everybody!  It's the middle of the week, I've got tons of work to do working on our new shop and bread boards so this will be short and sweet.  I hope everyone is having a great week so far. We don't have a fireplace, though I sure wish we did, so I use this ledge that I built for our mantel.  I always try to keep it simple when decorating it for the holidays.   Just some simple greenery that I clipped from some trees in the woods, bright white candles, some silver candle holders for a little sparkle and I added these vintage spools for some warmth and because they look a little like candle holders. I think it all goes perfectly with the rustic pallet bench hubby and I built.  I made the stockings from leftover pieces of canvas painters dropcloth and then wrapped the tops with jute webbing for a little texture. And some nights, we remove the stalkings, add a bunch of candles to the top of the bench, light them and pretend it's a fireplace.  Hey, yo...

Hey there!  I worked on our table decor this morning and as usual, I kept it pretty simple.   For the table, I used vintage Christmas sheet music for placemats.  Then placed my favorite white plates on top, along with my newest set of mini bread boards.  On top of those, I added the gorgeous vintage silver that my hubby brought home to me.  And simple white napkins complete the look. I added some greenery into the hurricanes that were already on the table to add a little "festiveness", is that a word? I found this wonderful vintage dough trencher on Etsy last week and snatched it up to add to my collection.  I filled it with gorgeous pomegranates.  Simple, natural and pretty. For above the pocket door, I simply went into the woods and clipped some greenery off some cypress and cedar trees and stapled it to the wall.  Free. I bought one of those inexpensive faux green wreaths and added burlap strips to it that I cut from some of our coffee sa...

Hey everyone!  We wanted to share some exciting news with you as this probably wouldn't have seemed possible without all of you wonderful readers. If you read our blog regularly, you all know what an amazing "picker" my hubby is.  In fact, he has a storage building bursting at the seams full of his finds from over time.  And you also know my love for transforming his finds into something unique and special, as well as my love for designing and building furniture along with my bread boards.  Because of the unbelievable success of those bread boards and his amazing picking skills, we have decided to go for our dreams and open a new business right here on Main Street.  And all of his finds and my creations, will be available there!  We signed the papers yesterday and get to start fixing up this cute little shop today!  We can't wait to get started.  We're hoping that in the next few months, we'll have everything ready.  It has so much potential ...