Speaking of laundry.. how about some soap!

Good morning everyone.

Thank you for all the kind words yesterday regarding our exciting impending Houzz tour.

Speaking of laundry, in case you haven't read any of the other tutorials or reviews out there I am throwing my hat in the ring with my homemade laundry soap.

This is our second batch of soap as the first batch from last year finally ran out so what better time to show the recipe and our experience with using it.

After reading some of the tutorials last year, I found it hard to find the exact products around me so here are the options in our Canadian grocery stores.

Laundry soap ingredients:

1 box of Arm & Hammer washing soda

1 box of Borax (best retro label ever)

1 big 2 kg box of Arm & Hammer baking soda

1 container of Oxi Clean

1 package of 2 Sunlight washing bars (original recipes use Naptha bars but they are really hard to come by here)

2 bottles of Downy Unstoppables: choose your scent (there is only 1 bottle shown here but the more you add the more the smell)

 

 

get yourself a lidded tupperware box or a garbage bag. don't go small or you won't be able to stir/shake your mixture. dump all the ingredients besides the sunlight bars into the container.

 

grate the sunlight bars and dump on top of the other ingredients in your container

 

it will look a little like macaroni on top

 stir everything in your container to mix the ingredients. you can now either leave it in your original container or store some of it in a pretty container in your laundry room.

we have a top loading washing machine and i like to get it running and add just less than 1/3 cup right into the water before adding the laundry in.

my mom also uses this recipe and she has an HE washer. she uses approx 2 tbsp for her washer and it works just as great

 

review time: this laundry soap smells amazing and gets your whites white. i use it on our sheets for wonderful freshness and crazy grass stains from gardening come right out (within reason of course)

I do not suggest using a ton of this in a load of black clothing as with all that oxi washing action it may lighten your colour.

So stop staring at the laundry on the floor and mix yourself up some amazing smelling soap to save some cash and get washing.

Have a great day,

Meg

The big HUGE news and magic fairies

Hello friends!

It is the most gorgeous sunny perfect weather, I don't have to go to work because it is a holiday day ever here in Canada. I am sitting in one of my chairs in the living room with a gentle breeze and birdsong in the background. A hot coffee and a talking cat walking around my living room. Oliver is probably a little more vocal because he had to spend half of yesterday in his room(so now he is in exploring mode) with his other cat buddy Sammy because they are shedding like bears right now. Now don't get all bundled up that I am leaving my cats locked up because they shed, I couldn't have hair floating around the house because it is the absolute cleanest it has ever been for my big HUGE news.

HOUZZ WAS HERE. 

Yesterday in fact.

We were contacted by an editor about a week and a half ago and asked if I(we) would like to be apart of their Houzz tours. The screaming and whooping commenced as I was calmly trying to type out a professional sounding email. I forwarded the email to my mom and she whooped and screamed so much in a hotel room my dad came out of the shower to see what was wrong.

 

We got hooked up with our contributor Esther and lined up a date. Could we do it this weekend? which at that point was a mere 9 days away which to have our house ready is fine but they wanted the outside too. Holy toledo!

 

We have been working like rabbits getting everything ready, shoveling out 6 yds of mulch into the gardens, weeding, planting, dusting, cleaning, vacuuming, window washing. I called in my A-team (my super mom and always ready for everything brother) on Friday to help and they were awesome, allowing me to finish up little bits that needed tending.

 The shoot and interview was a lot of fun and there will be a lot of communication back and forth for sources etc. Esther was a little overwhelmed with the sheer amount of vignettes in our home to shoot and ran out of daylight trying to capture them all. She had mentioned that blogger homes are so fun to shoot because we love to talk about our spaces and have so many stories to go with everything. Darn right, I have hunted, DIYed and thrifted everything in our home. There is a back story some with funny characters to everything.

 I don't have an exact date for the tour to go live but some time in the next month. I will let everyone know closer to the date. I will be screaming it from the rooftops.

A lot of my friends aren't really housy people and the few I have told (don't want to jinx it) hadn't really heard of Houzz so trying to find a suitable example to explain how big an opportunity this is was difficult. It's like the Toronto Maple Leafs winning the Stanley Cup. WOW! (and I am not a hockey person)

And as I sit here this morning, I am wondering about that possibility of some magic fairies for hire to keep my house looking this amazing. I am being extremely proud of our home and loving it being this clean,tidy and quite frankly a little sexy haha.

My laundry room is never a disaster but it doesn't look like this with no clothes in either the hamper or the basket. I am just so caught up but seriously without little magic wings it will be back to socks caught in behind the washer and softener stuck to the lid.

 

I got the sexy striped linen towel from LinenMe  and it's mate found a home in our kitchen.

Well, that's it folks. I hope you will join me over at Houzz when it goes live and I hope you enjoyed your tour of our clean laundry room. That collection of irons really give you the impression that ironing happens in here doesn't it.

It doesn't.

Have a great Victoria day Canadians

and

Have a great Monday my other friends,

MEG 

Joining
a stroll thru life 
the farmhouse porch 
knick of time 
savvy southern style 

Another before and after chippy chic style

As promised Thursday, I have another great before and after furniture style for you today. After I finished up the end tables, I dragged one of our upstairs console tables down to the chopping block. We have had this table since before we were married and I noticed that every time I walked by this table and/or took a photo of it it blended into the background. The handles on it were an awkward center and never fit properly and it drove me frickin' crazy when I opened the drawers.

So paint it I did.

Here's what it looked like before.

 Now don't be mad, but I only took photos in my furniture backdrop because the photos of it in place are being saved for that big HUGE thing I was talking about in the last post. 

I'll show it back in place all vignetted up after that. Promise.

 

This console table was done with Miss Mustard Seed milk paint in grainsack. The body of the piece has 2 coats of paint and the drawers got 1. The waxing is a combination of ASCP dark wax and MMS antiquing wax. The combination of the 2 different dark wax tones helps makes the table look older. I made this one much more chippy than I usually do but it suits the space it is currently in.

 

The new knobs are from Hobby Lobby and I aged them a bit with some antiquing wax.

 

I love how it turned out and even more that it doesn't just blend in. A new life for an old table.

Have a great weekend and week,

I may sneak in with a quick post but if not enjoy yourself,

Meg


Joining
alderberry hill 
savvy southern style 
miss mustard seed 

O&R Provincial Grey end tables

This has been one of the most stressful days I can remember. I had planned to have this post up this morning but when I got up after a restless night of sleep because of a non-sleeping dog, my best friend Milo was having trouble walking. She had been having visible stomach issues since Monday and today was the last straw. I called the vet and went straight there. She went right in for emergency surgery and I had to wait half the day to see if she was going to be alright or have to be put down. Milo is not a young dog and we always said when the time came if we had to, we would put her down so she didn't suffer. The vet seemed to think the surgery was a good choice because she was an otherwise very healthy old dog. Today was not the day to let her go and I can't wait to go and get her tomorrow. Our veterinarian said she came through the surgery wonderfully and she probably wouldn't have made the weekend if I hadn't taken her this morning. ugh, worst day off ever.

Onto some happier things.

I finished up this fabulous set of end tables this week and they were ready for their time to shine. They were extremely beat up on the top with water rings, scratches and dents but the structure was solid. They are made by a well known company of solid mahogany.

If you are local to the Niagara Region these are available for pickup and will also be listed in my etsy store (hit the widget in the sidebar).

They are 26" l x 20" w x 21"h.

They have been finished in paris grey chalk paint and very lightly distressed.

 

a before and after perspective

I have another great before & after of one of my personal pieces of furniture for this weekend and then a bit of blog silence for about a week. I have big BIG HUGE news but it will have to wait because there is a lot of preparing to do.

Have a great night,

 I hope everyone in your family is healthy,

Meg

Joining
Jen Rizzo 
French Country Cottage 
common ground 
hickory trail  
miss mustard seed 
liz marie 

bye bye winter birch

It was a fabulous weekend of weather here and as I type this I am wondering how I am going to stay awake at work today. It was a hard working beautiful spring weekend. We got so much accomplished including a new waterfall for our pond. The unfortunate part is the spring aches from mowing, rock lifting, raking, cutting, painting, sewing, and scrubbing. 

See lots done.

I did have time to visit a few nurseries on Thursday and couldn't resist getting started on my pots. The varieties of ferns were just too lovely to leave hanging on the racks. 

The urn in our front hall sports some tall birch poles from fall throughout winter and it was time say bye bye. Say hello to greenery.

 

this isn't a boston fern, and i can't for the life of me remember the variety but the fronds are large and they stand up very nicely.

this was the only non-christmas photo i could find with the poles, they must not have attracted my attention with the camera in the last little bit. just ignore the crows.

the green of the fern pulls the green out of the frame. i think i am going to need green rehab. i love it too much. in case you are new here, the frame is actually Annie Sloan antibes green with a load of dark wax and made its debut here

in other tidbits, i had a stroke of good luck this week and happened across an ad on kijiji 1 min after it went up for 20 vintage cameras went up for sale and i jumped on it. many many of them will be up in the store very shortly and i have snuck a few into my collection. there are 3 in this photo (there are actually 4 but i already owned 1) that look great on display but there is an alterior motive. the pile of things in front of the demijohn are my shoot props so i don't have to carry them too far into the garage. keeping the organization pretty.

Well that's it for today,

Enjoy,

Meg 

Joining
a stroll thru life 
the farmhouse porch 
savvy southern style 

She could be named Audrey.

I am slowly getting more and more into the work I would like to be doing in conjunction with owning a store. I can see the whole thing in my head, and a lot of the planning is in motion. Soon, but not next week or anything. There is so much learning and reading to do about owning a business. It's exciting but scary too. Any advice?

I love painting unloved furniture pieces to bring new life into someone's home. Most older pieces are solid and have a lot of life left, and they are a quarter of the price of buying new flimsy MDF. Painting, sewing pillows, decorating and gardening. That's where it's at for me. Unless someone plans to pay me for drinking red wine and listening to a lot of music. Probably not.

I will occasionally be showing my transformations here because what is a blog but not the perfect outlet for before & afters. Some of the pieces that are for sale will be listed here, in my etsy store and on Kijiji for more local pickup. It will be neat to see the response in this area as I think there are only 2 or 3 people that are painting furniture, 1 quite messily (no names). It appears that these few are doing quite well. Our area is awful for home decor needs. We have a Homesense, that's about it. No real home decor stores and the ones that are available, are not quite following any modern trends. It is a niche that needs filling.

Moving on,

I have been working on a design project for someone I work with and have been helping her love her home again. Our styles are quite different so, it has been fun going sparkly and bright. She needed a new media center and desperately wanted it to be turquoise. The media centers out there are too big, too small or way too expensive (ridiculous really for what you get) I found this very unloved dresser at the thrift store and quickly went to work turning it into a Tiffany box.

Here she is in all her blue glory. This colour is Benjamin Moore Origins French Blue OR-386, which I made into a custom chalk paint. The 2 center drawers were removed for all the components that needed to be put in here. I added trim to the front of these for a more polished look. Square mercury glass knobs were added for some sparkle.

Just like at Tiffany's.

 

A before and after. The dresser was kind of a gawdy medium tone with massive handles.

She turned out so pretty and was delivered to a new home last night.

Before I even began this piece I made up the perfect area for furniture photography. I wanted somewhere just for this that didn't require me moving furniture in and out of the house. (I don't really have the room for that haha) I love the white brick wall from knack studios but seeing as I don't have a spare brick wall handy, I made my own industrial wall out of some fabulous old sheet metal. I think it looks pretty awesome and different.

Hope to see you again soon with more furniture.

Have a good day, I have some more painting on tap today!

Meg


Joining
Miss Mustard Seed
blue egg brown nest
Suburbs Mama 
alderberry hill  

knick of time
a stroll thru life  
the farmhouse porch
savvy southern style 

Pinterest Inspiration: April 2013

May is here and spring has arrived. In between wandering between my blooming trees and searching for new growth, I have snuck in a few peeks at Pinterest.

I'll be frank here, I joined 2 DIY group boards this month thinking it would be a great idea to see what is out there. It wasn't and my boards got spammed with a lot of useless DIY ideas for the 1 or 2 good ones. Then the new pinterest wouldn't let me out of the board and it was a mess. No more group boards for me.

I did find some really amazing rooms out there.

Have a look,

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this image of all this terrariums gives me smiles.

  
[source-this was a dead end link sorry to whoever this image belongs to] 

this front porch has that vintage flair. lots of white and terracotta

  

[source]

[source]

amazing room. wicker. pattern. galvanized metal. greenery. wow.

 

[source]

 [source]

what an adorable little shelf with all the terracotta pots.

 

[source] 

amazing vintage bathroom

 

[source]

 

 and i leave you with this. i'm still laughing a week later.

Have a good one,

Meg