The Ones about Post Series Archives - Page 5 of 30

Living Room: “Big Betsy” {Settle In September}

September 4, 2013 by Jules Leave a Comment

When we moved into this new home, I wanted to get rid of all of our old furniture. We’ve had our furniture for almost a decade. We got them when we were first married. They’ve been loved on through our first 3 kids and although they are still small, I wanted to sell these pieces before they weren’t worth anything 😉
My hubs was okay with this until I sold them all so quickly we were sitting on lawn chairs. Among the fun transition time, I found “Big Betsy” on an online garage sale. I thought it was a pretty good deal until I sent my hubby and his buddy to retrieve my find and they returned with the clunker including but not limited to a handle missing, another handle that looked like they got it off the bottom of the ocean from the titanic, and 2 bullet holes. YEP. You read that right. GUNSHOT HOLES.

First, I ask Matt if the wife seemed…okay. Any bruises etc. lol She was said to be in ‘good condition’. After my concern for her well-being, I ask if he requested a discount after discovering its condition. Like a good hubby, he didn’t question my agreed upon purchase price and simply handed over the cash and heaved this amazingly heavy solid wood junker into the back of a truck and brought her home to me. She sat in the garage for a week until we were completely moved and I had a lil time to love on her. I laughed every time I saw her. I wish I’d gotten better before pictures for you.

When I finally got started, the process didn’t really take that long. About two days with the assistance of a painting pro friend, my handy hoss husband and a rain delay.

I removed all the handles and soaked them in a white vinegar and backing soda mixture in the sink overnight. I don’t think that much time was necessary…I just forgot about them.
I removed all the drawers and wiped them down Really Well. Gross.
I taped off the drawers so only the fronts were exposed. I did this for a couple reasons: I thought other people projects looked cool with some of the original wood showing and it would take less paint. 😉
My friend and I toted all the drawers into the back yard onto a giant plastic drop cloth we had left from painting the kids rooms. We had to place logs on the corners of the plastic to make sure they wouldn’t blow around as well as place logs inside the drawers slightly so they would stay face-up for easy painting. This literally took less than 30 minutes. Read HERE for my silly non-pro tips for spray-painting.
When I realized this project was trucking right along, I hurried into the garage to glob some wood puddy into the big gun hole that went through the middle of the left side, through a drawer, and out the back. I only filled the giant side hole and left the drawer, back, and smaller side gunshot hole.
After I remembered the handles the next day, I hook a magic eraser and very easily wiped each handle off as best as I could. They cleaned up pretty nicely. I considered saving myself the paint cost and leaving them this color…
until the titanic handle refused to come as clean as the rest of them.
I took all my newly clean handles into the backyard on broken down cardboard boxes and spray painted them white.
I chose to start with the backs an only did a light coat.
My hubby was getting ready to head to his office so ask him to through the same plastic drop cloth over his dad’s dolly and but the bones of “Big Betsy” onto the dolly. He was a bit skeptical but this way my pregnant-self could roll it out of the garage, into the driveway and back in if it started to rain or if it was taking too long and I didn’t want to be THAT neighbor.
I used my amazing palm sander to tackle the top of the bones where it looked like someone had taken a very angry, not-declawed cat by the torso and drug it up and down the center of the dresser to add precious claw marks deep into the top. Sweet huh? I chose not to fill it with the wood puddy simply because I’m lazy and impatient. Using the puddy on the gunshot hole was the first time I’d ever used the stuff and wasn’t confident my mad skills would work as well on the TOP of this piece.
While the dust settled, I returned to the backyard where I flipped all my handles over so the fronts were showing. I also flipped the handle piece up as if they were hanging upside down on the dresser. I put a thin coat while they were in this position
Going through the house feeling like a traveling crazy, I went back to the bones in the front yard and washed her down really well with hot water, rolled her into the side yard, took a deep breath, and then started spraying. It took about 3 cans of my fancy dancy gray paint to cover her. Again, if I wasn’t impacient, I would have gone to buy one more can for that extra coat…but I didn’t.
Did I mention it sprinkled for 1/2 a second while I wasn't in the front yard? Yeah...
Making the treck again, I went back to the handles and flipped the handle pieced downward in their natural hanging position. I did that so my final top coats of paint where on the side that would be showing 99% of the time.I let the handles dry for about 45 minutes- an hour. It was super hot outside so it didn’t take long with them basting in the sun. While they were drying I distressed the drawers and wiped them down.
While the bones dried for hours while my husband and I put all the handles back on.
When the bones were dry I distressed it, wiped it down, and the hubs toted inside the house for me. Adding the drawers felt like such a success!
The last think I did before loading her down with my craft supplies was add that foam-ish shelf/drawer liner to each drawer. Not all of them cleaned up perfectly and this would keep things in place as we opened and closed the drawers so often.

I love the end product!!! I originally thought I would put board games in “Big Betsy” but after discovering her quirks I also realized the drawers were extremely shallow. Each one might have held a single board game box. After much thought, I decided to swap the “craft closet” and what I thought would be the “gaming shelf”. I love the swap. It works so much better. Tomorrow I’ll share with you my embracing confession of craft crap hoarding and all things organization in our living room. Those include the throw blankets, movies, games, and craft supply storage.

find other post in this series HERE

Filed Under: Cleaning, Decorating, Homemaker, Organizing, Projects, Settled In September, The Ones about Post Series, The ones about the Rothacher Home

Living Room: Mantel {Settled In September}

September 3, 2013 by Jules 1 Comment

When working on the “collage wall” from yesterday, I decided I needed some other items to break up the crazy amount of frames/pictures as well as to display other items in a different way.

Today's project came about because I chose not to use this mirror from our bedroom set a while back. I was monstrous and I was afraid my growing littles were somehow going to knock off this thing and get smashed. {lil dramatic…I know} Really, it just kinda dated the furniture.

This mantel started as a, "what in the world can we use this ugly mirror that we're never going to use again" project.

I also recently bought a dresser for more storage and it came with a similar mirror piece on top. With these bad boys stacking up, I figured I should find something to do with them. Other than removing and framing the huge mirrors, I had to get real creative…AND get the hubs involved.

I intended on chopping off the bottom and top off these mirror/shelf pieces after removing the actual mirrors. After talking through it with my hubby I suggested we try prying trim pieces off the top so we could save the other parts {in tacked} for another project 😉 When those came off easy enough he decided to try tapping off the bottom part as well.
After removing the pieces I wanted, I went to town spray painting a couple coats of white on the trim while Matt hunted down some wire cutters to get rid of the jaunting nails protruding what will now be the top of the mantel.
{Here's what that looked like: Matt, with wire cutters in hand & wood on kitchen counter. Locates his nail of chose, places wire cutters around said nail, grips with both hands, turns head to the side, closes eyes tightly, snaps off nail only to hear it flying across the kitchen. Locate next nail and repeat.}
After all the nails were removed I took that big piece out and gave it a couple quick coats of paint.
When they were all dry, Matt used our friends nail gun to assemble the pieces, placing the trim pieces off what used to be the bottom of the mirror that would have sat flush on top of the dresser.
With these parts now together well, trim hanging downward to make the appearance of a thick mantel, I used wood puddy in the nail holes, giant holes where the weird decorative parts used to be, as well as the tiny joints between the boards. NORMALLY I'm a that's-good-enough kinda girl but since I had the puddy already from having to fill the gunshot holes in Big Betsy, I figured it would make this look that much more quality.
The puddy dried for about 30 minutes, I sanded it lightly and wiped it down before taking it back outside for the last 3 coats of white spray paint.

Now...how to hang it on the wall...

My hubs and his buddy took a while discussing what would be the best way to hang this on the wall. We didn't need something Huge but also didn't want it falling off the wall if we placed things actually on the mantel. lol
The final decision? We went retro, old school floating shelves were hung int his manor- building a box that would be mounted to the wall in which the mantel would slide over and then be nailed to.
For my mantel, they made the frame 3 foot by 7 inches. This would insure that we could screw the frame into at least 2 studs assuring a maximum hold.
My hubs screw the box frame onto the wall into 2 studs.
We then used a nail-gun to mount the faux mantel to the frame.
Now we are continually praying it doesn't fall off the wall in the middle of the night causing bed urination or unexpected heart attacks.

SEE, I got to play with the GUN! 😀

I hope this tutorial made sense. If not, ask away!

find other post in this series HERE

Filed Under: Cleaning, Decorating, Homemaker, Settled In September, The Ones about Post Series, The ones about the Rothacher Home

Living Room: Collage Wall {Settled In September}

September 2, 2013 by Jules 3 Comments

I love having pictures throughout my house. Most of the time, the things in my house at least have a practical purpose even if they happen to be cute. I want to live in my house. I don’t like the idea of being uncomfortable, especially in my home. I mean seriously, if you know me well, you know that I don’t own “real clothes”. I wear t-shirts and comfy shorts, pants or jeans, and flip-flops.

So when it comes to my home , I’m fairly practical…and cheap. Hehehe We try very hard to get the same age pictures of each of our children. Or at least close to. We did 3 and 6 {and possibly 9} months and then every year. With 3 children and one on the way, that’s a lot of pictures. We also tried to do a family picture once a year. We’re totally slacking on all of these. We haven’t had professional pictures taken in a year and half. Ya know, all this church planting and commuting business had us a little distracted from our photo sessions. We have MORE than enough snap shots in this time. My Facebook page is packed full of daily moments captured.

All this to say, in our old house, we had a huge hallway upstairs that you could see downstairs through the balcony opening thingy. I had tons of space to sprawl out the kiddos. In our new home, there’s not that perfect hallway for the “family portrait wall”. We do however have giant blank walls in our living room. A while back, I ask you guys on the as Jules is going Facebook page “How many pictures of your kids was too many in a public room?” Most of you said there’s never too many. I went with it!

It took me forever to decide how to display these piles of frames on my big wall. I was scared to make a catastrophe of awkward groups, one kid bunched together in a pile, too many of the same color near one another, and so on.

Finally, I just laid them out on the floor and played with them for an entire day. Staring at them, moving, adding and taking away other decorative items to break up the frames. THIS is what I finally came up with. Its a work in progress and still missing some pieces but this is at least a start & frames are laying around in piles 😀
To make sure I had them in the same placement as on the floor, I used THIS technique from Pinterest.

I flipped all the frames over so I could see the hooks they needed to be hanging from. I then used a long piece of wax paper to mark where that row of nails needed to be placed with a colored sharpy. {Sadly, I went through all kinds of other materials to mark the holes on but I couldn’t come up with anything else transparent and lightweight.}
After marking that row of hooks, I taped the wax paper to the wall at the height I wanted and made sure it was level. I started with the top row and worked my way down from the tallest row. I wanted to make sure they started near “Big Betsy” and weren’t crazy high on the wall so I measuring how high I wanted the bottom row off of "Big Betsy" and the mantel {to come} and then added the height for the next 2 rows.
I repeated this process with each row but using a different color marker for each row…because I’m cheap and didn’t want to use an entire roll of wax paper. Don’t forget to measure the distance from the the top nails to one on the next row to make sure they are spaced appropriately when you start putting up the next row of nails. Use a level both for hanging the wax paper with nail placements as well as after hanging each frame.

Here is the after pictures minus the mantel we were still working on as well as the fabric, quote, and picture for the frame where the glass broke in the move.
Hope you enjoyed day one of Settled In September. Come back the rest of this week to tour the rest of the living room. Over this month we’ll walk through the entire house.

EEeeekk. I’m excited to show you guys around!

Filed Under: Decorating, Homemaker, Organizing, Settled In September, The Ones about Post Series, The ones about the Rothacher Home

Settled In September: Introduction to this Months Series

September 1, 2013 by Jules Leave a Comment

In our world today, many times Christians are encouraged NOT to settle down. I hear it even more so in or about ministry. "As pastors, you are never settles. Never in one place for long. Always on the move." To some extent I totally agree. As Christians, not just pastors & family, we are to be willing to follow God's will even when that means a physical move. Location should always be determined by God's plan for your life at the time. How He wants to use you in a specific season of life. WHERE He sees fit for you to be for the most growth in you.

Sadly, when we finally started moving our essentials into our new home, my youngest daughter kept asking when we were going "home". My oldest daughter nervously ask if we could "never move again" because she was "tired of moving in circles". I felt their pain and confusion. Although I wanted to promise my littles that we had found our forever home, I couldn't. I did reassure them that this is our home & do not plan on but moving. BUT as a follower of Jesus Christ, I always had to keep my heart and ears open for if and when God was leading us somewhere else.

Every time the hubs and I move, we plan to stay. After our first move as a married couple, we were there 5 years. That may not sound like long but regretfully, for ministry families {especially youth pastors} that was eternal. We started our lives there together. We bought our first home there. We started our family there. But, God ask us to be willing to give up that comfort and head out to be apart of His grand plan somewhere else.

We've talked a lot about not wanting to move again. How our 5 and 3.5 year old have lived in 4 different houses. Our 2.5 year old has now lived in 3 different houses. Our prayer this time? Our prayer is that of Jeremiah's word from God for those carried into exile from Jerusalem to Babylon.

"Build houses and settle down; plant gardens and eat what they produce. 6 Marry and have sons and daughters; find wives for your sons and give your daughters in marriage, so that they too may have sons and daughters. Increase in number there; do not decrease. 7 Also, seek the peace and prosperity of the city to which I have carried you into exile. Pray to the LORD for it, because if it prospers, you too will prosper." -Jeremiah 29:5-7

As I begin this Settled In September series, I want you to keep all this in mind. With conflicted hearts after "settling in" to our Big Blue house and moving after only 2 years, it brings joy and anxiety to settle down again. Fear of moving. Excitement over a forever home, neighborhood, community, friends, and a growing church family. This month, I want to show how my family is trying to settle as quickly as possible so we can get on to the seek the peace and prosperity {doing life with} of the city to which God has carried us!

All the posts in this series HERE