Since my own renovations are coming along at a painfully slow pace (ack!), thought I’d feature a stunning little church renovation we spotted yesterday in Colonial Beach, VA. This church is St. Elizabeth’s of Hungary, attended by my husband’s family for eons.

This is the original church built in 1906.

And this is how the church looked from 1963 – 2012 after its first remodel.

Now, after a 5-month renovation completed in 2012,  the church looks like this.

Exquisite, right? It’s back to the charm of the original historic structure, with beautiful white brick against gray trim, a mahagony door, rose window and illuminated cupola.

Here’s a comparison of the old structure and then the new from the side.

Here’s a shot from the rear of the new church. I couldn’t find a comparison photo of the old church from the rear.  

I wish I knew the architects who designed this. The job is stunning. You can read details of the church from this link where I got most of the pictures. and this description of the work:

A new black 24 gauge metal roof replaced the old shingle roof, the fading brick exterior was painted a charming country white, the crumbling modernist bell tower was taken down and a lovely cupola with bells placed atop the church itself, with a gold cross crowning it all. Most importantly, the facade was completely remodeled and expanded, featuring African mahogany doors, a stunning rose window and gothic sidelights.

There are two other buildings owned by the church that were included in the renovation.

Old Church Office

Newly remodeled Church Office

Old Meeting House

Updated Meeting House

So if you ever find yourself in the Northern Neck of Virginia, make a point to stop in the St. Elizabeth’s of Hungary Church!

Last week I saw first hand the beautiful chocolatiers for which the Swiss are known.

And when it comes to Easter, there are bunnies and bears and all imaginable chocolate creatures.

I managed to get a few home intact and make a little Easter display.

The nice thing is they’re so cute I want to keep them here….instead of eat them!

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So thank you Basel, Switzerland and your amazing chocolate delicacies!

Take a look at my half-bathroom wall…

This is the scene that greets you as you enter the room. Are you bored yet?

It’s impossibly lackluster and after two years it was time for a fix.

If you know me, you know my love for board-and-batten and all things cottage/farmhouse. (Not to be confused with “country” which is another thing entirely, and not my thing at all.) I wanted this bathroom to feel larger than it is, with a little “farm charm” and reminiscent of the aesthetic in my grandparents’ 1921 lake cottage in northern Wisconsin. (The most beautiful piece of paradise you never imagined in the North Woods.)

So began my transformation, starting with white paint on the bottom 36.5 inches of the wall, overlaid with lattice strips of wood spaced 10.5 inches apart.

I followed much the same  process as the board-and-batten in my son’s room you can read about here. And remember that faux Roman shade I made for the kitchen? I decided to try it out in this room for a different effect.

I cut each of the lattice boards to the exact length needed (my house isn’t exactly square) and then alpha-labeled each board so that my power tool recruit (aka good husband) would know where to place each board.

So the new, improved and not-so-boring-anymore bathroom is…

The map on the wall was the perfect size if I turned it sideways, so naturally I did. (Hey, when you think about it, we never use maps ONLY in their “North Up” position. They’re meant to be used in 360 degrees.)

For inexpensive artwork I bought a 1970s National Geographic map of the Great Lakes ($7 on Etsy), mounted it to foam core and cut it in quarters.

It reminds me of my childhood and wonderful summer vacations to Wisconsin and Michigan and those gorgeous lakes.

I pulled in a little nostalgia with a vintage Campfire tin my Grandmother gave me last summer. It had been in her kitchen for about 80 years.

I replaced the light fixture glass with seeded glass covers that cast really interesting shapes on the wall and give an artwork quality to the light.

The total cost for this space was $120 for paint, oval mirror, wood strips, a new towel hook, the National Geographic map and the foam core.

And so it is complete. I love walking in the space now!

BEFORE

AFTER

This little bookshelf sits in my living room.

A lover of books, I like having the classics nearby even if I only manage a once-yearly trek through the beauty of Jane Austen.

But this bookshelf wasn’t doing it for me.

It’s a low, dark shadowy spot in an otherwise colorful and lifting room.

NOW, please prepare yourself for the easiest, quickest and cheapest bookshelf transformation of all time.

Do you remember how we used to cover our textbooks in grade school? Well I found some paper and some fabric in the colors of my living room (navy, yellow and gray) and just wrapped the books, holding them secure on the inside flaps with painter’s tape which won’t ruin the books if I ever remove it.

I left the Austen and Grimm’s books uncovered. One, because they’re navy blue and match the color scheme.  Two, because this is a house of children (fairy tales) and the aforementioned lover of Jane Austen.

The yellow and white stripes are single sheets of specialty paper from A.C.Moore and the blue/white quartrefoil was remnant fabric for $4 a yard at JoAnn’s that I’d bought for another project.

These little gourds echo the white/yellow striping.

Well, it was SO cheap and SO easy that I couldn’t just stop there. I wrapped a few more books in the entryway…

It adds a nice punch of color and pattern for, oh, pocket change…

This was the straw that broke the camel’s back:

Four baskets randomly crammed with cooking spices.

It was my breaking point and the moment that I finally HAD to do something.

Looking around the kitchen I found these:

Hmm…small, compact, stackable, and I have tons of them from all the baby food we’ve been buying. (Right….because my reality doesn’t include puree-ing food the homemade way.)

The lids are more secure than some other brands (I tested them) and they could fall out of the cupboard without the top popping off.  That was pretty much the only credential that really mattered.

So I grabbed a roll of painter’s tape, a pen, and went to work. Two hours later I had this:

Interestingly, one full bottle of a spice fit perfectly into these little tubs. If you want a prettier look there are all kinds of lovely templates out there for spice labels which are nicer look at, but these spices are hiding in my cabinet and the system just needed to happen fast and be functional. For me, this DIY cheapie does the trick.

You can see that these go 3 deep, so there are 5 rows stacked 3 high and 3 deep. That’s 45 total spice tubs with 9 in each row.

Here’s the view of the entire cabinet.

Now those 4 baskets of chaos have turned into only one small shelf in a cabinet.  When I made gingerbread cookies the day after this spice organization project, it only took me about 20 seconds to find all the spices for the recipe. That was a first for me!

Cost for the whole thing was $20 that I already spend for baby food. So it was actually a free up-cycle project!

Ahh…makes me all kinds of happy to have even this tiny space of my house completely organized.

Well here it is December 30 and I’m just now putting up some Christmas decor photos. This month has been a chaotic blur of travel, kid activities, birthdays, and revolving illnesses passing through our house. So yes, Christmas is over but I still want to share a few photos of my two favorite Christmas spots in our house. (Also possibly the ONLY decorated spots in our house.)

We put the Christmas tree on the screened porch this year and I really love the Southern feeling I get seeing it out there. We barely decorated it at all…just strung some lights and threw on some gold balls that I’ve had for eons. Simple.

Nighttime was especially nice…

The entryway also got some attention. I reused the ornaments from last year.

The great thing is that with so little decorating it shouldn’t take any time at all to put everything back!

I’m not going nuts with the Christmas decorations this year. Can’t actually. Between the new baby and the new business this year, Christmas had to be simple.

And I really REALLY like it.

I made those little boxwood wreaths on a standard wire frame you can get at the craft store. Boxwoods grow so slowly that I didn’t want to take many clippings, which is why I did these in a small size.

My mother-in-law (also the world’s best yard sale/thrift/bargain shopper), found a set of four pewter Jefferson cups for $2 at a yard sale. Can you imagine? She’s the secret to some of my best finds. Anyway, she gave me this lovely set of Jefferson cups which I wanted to use here in the window. I filled them with Epsom salt to look a little like snow.

It smells so good!

Marjorie, my dear friend since childhood, bought her first home last year and began decorating it.

Her downstairs is a cozy lounge-type den with a fireplace, bar, and quiet mood lighting. The colors were all soft neutral browns and tans, so she wanted to put some punch in the space — specifically, turquoise and tangerine.

An afternoon’s worth of pillow shopping at Ross and Homegoods turned up this decent assortment for pretty cheap.

But a massive bare wall above the large sofa presented a challenge because the cost for very very large artwork is pretty high. AND, there wasn’t anything we liked that blended turquoise with tangerine.

Did I mention large? We needed 9 feet of artwork.

So we decided to make a poured painting and put these two colors together. (I posted about this technique here a few weeks ago when I created a poured painting for my master bedroom.) Unfortunately I don’t have any “before” shots of the sofa and empty wall, so following is a photo fest of what we did to put color into a cozy but neutral space.

We started with five 18″x24″ white canvases from AC Moore.

Then we picked a shade of turquoise and a shade of tangerine, put each color in a small paper cup to control the pour, and started working. We used indoor latex paint and a quart was plenty. In fact, a “color to go” size from Sherwin-Williams would have been just the right amount. Because you know I aDORE Sherwin-Williams paint.

Here’s Marjorie getting started…

We let the first color dry completely before adding the second one because we didn’t want the colors to mix together. If you wanted to have a color blend you wouldn’t have to wait until that first color dries.

It took overnight to set because we’d poured several layers of varying thicknesses. By morning it was dry and ready to hang.

You can see here that we intentionally separated the canvases by an inch or so to allow dribble in between the canvases. It looks SO good once these are on the wall, to have a wrap-around effect with the paint.

And here it is dry and hanging….

You can see how we pulled in the two accent colors using pillows and textures as well as the painting.

(Please don’t use these photos as a guide for placement of your artwork on the wall. The paintings should actually hang about 6 inches lower — as in closer to the sofa — instead of suspended equidistant between the ceiling and the sofa top. Small distinction yes, but it makes a big difference in visually connecting the painting to the sofa, creating flow, and eliminating that awkward white space that halts your eye on the wall.) 

We were so pleased with how this turned out, especially considering that the cost is $5 per canvas (get them on sale!) plus two quarts of paint. Total cost was about $50, and for a 9 foot custom art installation, pretty doggone cheap.

And now Marjorie gets to tell all her friends that she made this her very own self.

Because she did.

I think this would be great fun to do at a crafting party. Yes?

As part of our master bedroom makeover I needed a piece of art to go over the bed. The picture doesn’t give you the immensity of this 6-foot wide king bed, but there was a pretty big blank wall above it. I wanted something that would pull together the two main colors of this room — greenish gray with brownish plum. I looked for several weeks and found no fabric or art or anything that could work. So I had to get creative.

I bought four 18″x24″ paint canvases at A.C. Moore on sale for $5 each. Then I took the paint I’d used on the walls of this room (Sherwin-Williams’ Comfort Gray—a fabulous color I must credit my clients the Sacks for turning me on to) and a sample container I’d bought months ago (Sherwin-Williams’ Socialite) and put them together for some poured art.

I arranged the canvases on a drop cloth on my screened porch. (Note: a screened porch is ideal for any of your painting/gluing projects because it allows the airflow without the rain or bugs or pollen or whatever else flies around your yard.)

I poured with the Comfort Gray color first and then let it dry about 2 hours before adding the next color.

I didn’t take any in-process pictures because it’s kind of impossible to be pouring paint in somewhat straight lines and also taking pictures of yourself doing it. I put the paint in a small paper cup so I could control it better, and then just poured on the lines as I liked.

The end result is this abstract piece which reminds me of Aspen trees.

I hung the canvases with two in the middle a little higher than the others because I wanted a headboard-style arrangement. It actually does make you “sink” a little lower in the bed to have them hung this way.

Here’s a shot of the room with the paintings and the DIY painted drapes that integrate the same “Socialite” plum color into the room.

I added a plummy chair we had upstairs previously with a green parrot pillow to connect those two colors a little more intentionally.

Next I’m going to add a pop of plum somewhere in this bedding. I am obSESSed with folding down my sheets and layering the bedding. 

So that’s my $20 + leftover paint project. It is ridiculously easy and you could also do it with different designs like this one I did for my living room.

I’m happy with how this one turned out and I hope you’ll try it and send me a picture! It is SO SO easy and you don’t have to have any artistic skills to do it. And did I mention the $20 total tab?

Okay, now I need to get back to this guy, waiting for me to finish my picture taking…and trying to pull himself up with my drapes.

I know. Tiny ball of gooey, squishy LOVE…this little one.

Soooo, my master bedroom is undergoing a makeover that resulted in a need for new window panels.

Having no inclination or budget for $100+ apiece designer panels, I went shopping in my house for something that could work.

I found a ceramic pie plate, a glass 10-inch pedestal cake stand, a sample-size of Sherwin-Williams “Socialite” plum paint, and two white queen flat sheets.

Yes, that IS a pacifier. It’s a multi-purpose life people.

After filling the pie plate with paint and turning the cake stand upside down in it, the work began.

It took multiple sessions and a fan blowing on each section of the fabric for hours at a time until everything was complete. (My 3-year-old is still trying to figure out why he was cast off to the picnic table outside for days on end.)

After many many MANY circle-stamps with the cake stand, the finished product is now my favorite DIY of all time.

First, here’s the only “Before” photo of the room I could find, taken when we’d first moved in.

And NOW, here it is.

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If you look closely, you can see variations in the line width and paint coverage. That’s what I love about these. They’re obviously not machine-made, and the dribbles, dots and imperfections lend a truly artistic quality.

I’m in love.

No, lust.

No, complete infatuation!