A New Purple Rug

On a whim, I ordered this purple rug from Wayfair last week.

I tend  to do things like this in the wee hours of the morning (before leaving for work) and  then regret  the money I spent because the product is not what it appeared to be on my computer screen.

I bought the rug in the hope that it would be a spring update for  my quarter-century old floral love seat and sofa in my living room.

I am  thrilled to report that I LOVE this big 6 ft x 9 ft rug!

This room is rarely used, so the  25 year old furniture still looks new.  I think the rug does work to make the room look more up to date.

I also ordered  that flower vase holder from Wayfair.  I stuck some artificial pink calla lilies in it.

I  like it.

I am still working on the rest of the room, but , so far, I am thrilled with my purchase!

My New Table Arrived Today & I LOVE It!

About 11am the Fed X truck arrived in my driveway with the table I ordered last week.
All we had to do was take it out of the box and plop it down --no assembly required... gotta love that!

I am so happy that it did indeed match the bench I bought last spring.

  Last week I re-designed the floral arrangement on top of my metal lantern.  I wanted to use the antlers from my son's first buck (today is opening day of deer season) and some white owls I recently purchased. 

I think I like the lantern sitting all alone on this table.

When the new table arrived, we were right in the middle of hauling end tables, etc. from the living room  down to the basement to make room for a second table  in our dining room for the  Thanksgiving dinner that we are hosting. We store an old oval table ( I have had it since 1974--40 YEARS!  How can that be???) in the basement for large holiday dinners. If we set it end-to-end with our dining room table we can comfortably seat 14.

 I decorated the china cabinets with items from my Thanksgiving décor boxes, but did not finish the tables.  I need to come up with something down the center of both tables to tie them together.   Not an easy task when the tables are so different!

It's a bit of a mess right now.

Nonetheless, I am fortunate to have enough space in my little ranch home to fit 14 people in one area for Thanksgiving dinner.  I am planning to come up with something to go down the length of both tables to tie them together....will post a pic later to show you what I decided on.

In the meantime I sat among the clutter to plan my menu...

I grabbed a stack of "interesting Thanksgiving recipes" that I have printed in the past month and began to sort through them to decide what I wanted to make and to compose a grocery list (if you know me, you know that I DO NOT wait until the last minute to plan anything!).

I will get the list prepared and J will do the shopping. Together I hope we can pull off a successful Thanksgiving celebration for our families!

Do You Order Online?

I just got an email that this little table has shipped

and should arrive on my doorstep Friday. I do LOVE the convenience of online ordering! I rarely go in a real store anymore.

 

The table matches this bench I bought last spring.

I keep the bench by the garage door and store shoes in the baskets & drawers.

 I plan to store magazines in the new one.

I have invited 14 people for Thanksgiving dinner. It will be the first time I have had J's entire family for Thanksgiving.  I am looking forward to it.  This weekend I want to finish the pilgrim man/woman set I started last winter.  This is as far I am on with the woman. ..

I need to add a border around her. I have not even started on the man.  I am hoping that having all these people over, will motivate me to get it done!

Jewelry Wall Hanger

Last fall I showed you this metal bird cage wall card holder that I had purchased:

I found that cards looked messy, so I used mine in my kitchen to display my old red-handled kitchen utensil collection:

For the past few months, I have been thinking the metal bird cage would be perfect to hold my necklaces, but I liked it in the kitchen. 

So.............. I bought another one and hung it on a wall in my bedroom.

On Sunday I filled it with necklaces. 

 I used to have to paw through a bunch of necklaces in a big plastic container.  Now they are all in view and I just grab the one I want to wear.  Love, love, love this!

In a Spring Mood, Even though it's still Winter Outside

I removed my winter sofa covers from the living room furniture and let the spring/summer flowers bloom!

I hung my denim wreath on the hutch door and put three green purses of pink calla lilies on the coffee table.

I found these purse vases at Big Lots a few weeks ago.

They were marked down to $3 each.  They really need more flowers, but I did not have enough callas.  I think they will be so cute filled with my garden flowers this summer--can't wait to try them with 3 big fat peonies in each vase.

While the inside is looking quite springy, the outside still looks like this:

It will be a long time before I have real flowers to fill those vases!

Book Page Bouquets

A few weeks ago, I decided to make a book-page wreath.  You may have seen them in blogland...they have been all the rage for a few years.

I found an old yellowing book on furniture refinishing that I will never use again, so I tore out the pages and taped them into cones, like this:

I stuck the cones in these two large vases until I had time to make the wreath:

That was about a month ago.  So far I have not been inspired to make the wreath, so I just put the vases full of paper "flowers" back up on the entertainment center in my family room. 

I decided that I kind of like the vases full of paper "flowers"!

Someday I may still make a wreath, but for now I am content with these winter bouquets.

Impulse Purchase Put to Use

I just know some of you are wondering what the heck I did with that metal thing with the bird on top. Remember I showed this to you a few days ago?

Well, I found a spot to hang it in the kitchen and I clipped a few magazine pages to it for future meal inspiration.  It looked like a mess--ripped out magazine clippings hung on the wall--was not even cute.  . . sorry, did not a pic of that.

When I got up Sunday morning inspiration of another kind struck.  I went to the basement and brought up a box of my red-handled vintage kitchen utensils. I wired them to the cage.
Ta da!  I like this  much better!

DH does not need any meal inspiration. He's doing pretty good on his own.  He made square burgers to fit on the grilled bread...genius!

Ladies in the grocery store are even asking him for recipes.  Saturday an 80-something year old lady struck up a conversation in the produce aisle and was amazed that he did all the shopping and even cooked.  She asked him what he was cooking for dinner and then asked for his recipe for cucumbers in sour cream.  He got a big kick out of that.

A Working Weekend at Home

I feel so good about all the work we completed this weekend. Our biggest project was removing all the shutters and repainting them.

This took most of the day today as I had to put at least four thin coats of paint on each shutter.  We do this about every five years.  As soon as I finish this post, we will go out and rehang them.

On Saturday I showed DH how to make chicken pot pies. We had to clean  all the veggies, cook them to the al dente stage,  then cook the chicken breasts, cut everything into bite-sized pieces, make a roux, and do all the clean up.  We used puff pastry so we did not have to make pie crust.   We had two for dinner (very tasty!) and froze enough for three meals later this winter.  I don't think he will ever make them on his own...he thinks they require too much work! :)  Imagine what he would think if he had to make the pie crust, too!   He just took over the cooking duties in May--grilling season. He has done a great job of grilling  all summer, but he has no idea how much effort it takes to cook winter meals. 

I am feeling autumn in the air and decided to take this lantern

and turn it into a fall display.  This is what I ended up with Saturday morning:

It was a quick fun project and goes nicely on this table under my sailboat oil painting.

I also did something with this bird cage picture holder that I bought during one of my 5:00 am shopping sprees two weeks ago. When it was delivered Saturday afternoon, I wondered whatever possessed me to buy this--I really have no pictures that I want to put on it....I did not even know where I would hang it!  The picture is misleading as it only came with 4 clothes pins.

As it turned out, I did not even use the clothes pins. I will show you on another post what I ended up doing with it.

I hope you all had a wonderful late summer weekend!

3 New Clocks

One day last week  I was surfing around in the wee morning hours and I found a blog that mentioned a site I had never heard of.....Joss and Main..................strange name... but I liked some of the items that were purchased at that site, so I wandered on over for a look.

I did not purchase anything that day, but I did register my email.  So, of course, they sent me advertising emails daily.  I think I went there at least five times before the temptation was just too much and I ordered.......................................clocks............................If you had told me I would be ordering clocks, I would have laughed and asked what you had been drinking...I had no idea I wanted clocks! :)

Somewhere in the inner recesses of my brain, I wanted clocks because I ordered three of them.  They arrived this week.  I opened the box and wondered where I would put these three clocks.  My original thought was to use them on my dining room table as a centerpiece...unfortunately the backs are not finished so that did not work. 

I ended up using them in these spaces:

 On top of the dining room curio cabinet:

 

On top of the dining room china cabinet:

 

 

Over the television cabinet:

I think they will be great decoration for a New Year's Eve party dessert table!  I have never had a NYE party, but maybe someday I will.....If I do, I will be prepared!

A bit of Garden Work and a new Summer Coffee Table Centerpiece

I do love to putter around on Saturday morning.  Today I was outside at 6 am.  I cut down a full wheelbarrow load of  dead iris like these:

Here is the same area after they were cut down  (right side near the bird bath):

AND from the path in the other direction:

There is not much blooming right now.  On the other side of the Arbor Gardens,  where  most of the allium heads are going to seed,

I did spot a couple of the later blooming Allium Christophii. Here is one of them:

We have had a lot of rain in the past two days.  DH made this lovely peony centerpiece on the front porch, but it did not last very long in the rain:

So this morning I dumped it and cut down some of the peonies that  the rain knocked down to the ground and remade the bouquet.

This one should last through the weekend.

I could have done a lot more work in the gardens today, but the mosquitoes were terrible, so I came inside and ironed two pairs of new gold buffalo checked curtains that I bought  for the family room.  You can see one pair from the dining room:

DH helped me put them up just to see if I wanted to keep them. I am happy with this purchase.  I still need to buy some ring hooks and then hem them as they are about 6 inches too long. This afternoon  I ordered a third pair for the living room. I will show you more of them once I get everything finished.

I decided the living room coffee  table needed a summer centerpiece.  A quick trip to the basement yielded some shells and white candles.  In less than five minutes  I had this:

Looks summery to me and it was very easy.  It also cost nothing since I had everything on hand...gotta love that!

 

Lamp Shades Lengthened with Fringe

I had a stay-home-clean-cook-bake weekend.

I  finished the two lampshades with the fringe I bought earlier in the month.  You may recall that I purchased two shades which were too short for the lamps.  Instead of returning the shades, I decided to find some fringe to add to the bottom.  Here is a side-by-side of the too short shade and the fringe I added to lengthen it.

 

All I did was hot glue the fringe on. Super duper easy!

 

DH had the taste for a raspberry jello poke cake, so I  made him one on Saturday.

Jello poke cakes are so moist and colorful!

 

Since I was baking a cake, I decided I may as well make a few  Snickerdoodle cookies, too.

It has been a while since I have cooked, baked & cleaned as much as I did this past weekend. Sadly there is still a ton that could be done to keep the orderly home I like to have.  It really never ends, does it? :)

I Took my Christmas Tree Down Today

Just as I expected it took less than 20 minutes to completely take down my small tree and get everything packed up and back to the basement. I had it done by 6:00 a.m. today. :)

Then I began a full day of heavy housework.  Some of you may remember that I have been trying to get DH to add a second picture on one side of my family room entertainment center to balance out the Thomas Kinkade artwork (I originally had two on one side and one on the other).  I have been asking him to do this for a few years.  He has never done it.  Don't ask me why.  It was simple to do.  After he left for work today, I grabbed a tape measure and a screwdriver and had it done in less than 20 minutes.

I added the picture where the red arrow is and moved the bottom pic down a few inches.   The kitchen peninsula in the foreground is where my gingerbread man Christmas tree was.  I replaced it with a quilted runner and a fruit display.

I also rearranged the family room furniture and then spent the majority of my day doing my usual quarterly heavy duty cleaning.

Once all the cleaning was done, I decided to get a jigsaw puzzle going on the table that I use for my seasonal displays in the living room.  I removed all the linen and added a lamp for nighttime puzzling.

This barn puzzle looked interesting.  I am not very good at doing jigsaw puzzles.  I never seem to have the time to really get into doing them.  I decided to try again since I can leave this up all winter if I need to.  Are any of you jigsaw puzzle fans?

I have a 14 lb turkey in the oven that is almost finished for tonight's dinner.  I love being home all day to do this stuff! 

I Must Remember this Date

Today may be the last day that I scrub my floors on my hands and knees. I like clean floors, but I am really tired of  crawling around on my hands and knees to get the job done.  Last year I bought a Swiffer and it works OK for a touch up, but it's not so great for the weekly (weekly-- in a perfect world) deep cleaning.

So this morning I searched for reviews of floor sanitizers and I found that the Haan has a good rating. I had never even heard of this brand, but then I have never looked for this type of product.  I decided to trust the reviews I found and I ordered the latest Haan model.

 It should be here by next weekend.

According to the advertising, the Haan S175 kills 99.9% of germs with no chemicals. You just use tap water and the machine heats it to over 200 degrees and it cleans and sanitizes.  I cannot wait to get it!

After  cleaning my floors the old-fashioned way, I  went outside to walk through the gardens.  It's been a month since I walked this area.  I was startled to see this leaning tree with the bark gone at the bottom.

 I gave it a slight push (wearing my long winter coat that makes my arm look incredibly HUGE).

 It fell to the ground!

Whoaa! I felt like Super woman! :)  I guess it rotted away.  Good riddance is all I can say. 

Yesterday my sweet husband, knowing that I had a pretty bad week,  came home with these pink roses for me. 

Aren't they lovely? I like them in this Mason jar.  They even smell nice.  It's rare to find a rose with a fragrance these days.

I hope you all had a good weekend. I was happy to stay home and get caught up on my household chores.  I hope you did something more interesting!

Last Autumn Decorating Project

This collage features some of the items  I used to decorate the desk in my living room for the autumn season.

The items were arranged atop the desk which I covered in a gold tablecloth with a black fishnet fabric overlay:

I added a black/gold bow with a few fall leaves in the center.  I like the fishnet fabric look.

 

 

Then I brought out the big chalkboard I made last year to hang over the table. It  fits perfectly over this desk and it is fun to use during the holiday season. 

 

In November I will replace the jack-o-lanterns with  turkeys and this table will be ready for Thanksgiving.  Quick, easy, fun....I like that!