I Heart Faces

This week's challenge for I Heart Faces is "Summer Fun".  I found this photo of my daughter and thought it would be perfect.  Not your typical pool shot or anything but she was still having fun collecting sea shells at the beach.  :)

Laminate Hiccup....

Over the last few weeks we had our flooring completely redone.  I like nice things but I also appreciate having a nice buffer in the bank so we opted for laminate (not to mention it would hold up to 2 adults, 2 children and 3 large dogs).  I had a friend over the other day and it was the first time he had seen the new floor, not one nice thing came out of his mouth.  It's been bugging me since but I have to remember, our subdivision is 15 years old and not the grandest of the grand around.

It's nice here and all but I don't feel like your should pour more into your house and overdo on the inside what's not on the outside.  Make sense?  If I wanted all the bells and whistles I would have bought in a sub that had all the bells and whistles, not try to polish a turd.  Hope that didn't come out the wrong way.

Anyway, so we had our carpet laid and the wonderful guys came out and knocked it out in one afternoon.  They did a beautiful job on the stairs, wrapping the bull nose.  I just love how it turned out.

The laminate, another story....I'll get to that in a sec.  For now, here's the pics of the carpet..

Now the laminate, my husband took off to help move last minute furniture and such.  He told me there was a "big" crew coming and they should have it done in two days tops.  Mind you, we had been living on grimmy, dusty subfloor with half our furniture (the other half was in the garage to allow for the installers to get started) for about a month and a half.  Home Depot was supposed to call us when the floor came in so we waited and waited and finally had to call them....only to find out our flooring was in the store the whole time.  There was 2 weeks down.  Then the BIG crew my husband said was coming out turned out to be ONE guy.  What the?!  At noon he had about 18 rows laid in the front room when he realized there was a sheen difference and it looked ridiculous.  So he cut out of there at noon while we dealt with Home Depot on the defective product.  Here's the "sheen difference"... you can see the lighter pieces in the upper right of the photo and unfortunately it wasn't the sun causing it.  

WARNING, RANT:

So after a great deal of battling, we had to pick a different flooring.  Wait for it to acclimate to our house for 3 days and then wait for an install "crew" to come out to lay it.  Home Depot wanted to charge us for all of this because "they were at a loss of product and man hours" due to this.  Not to mention they wanted us to pay the difference for the more expensive flooring, all because their product was defective.  Needless to say, we managed to work something out.....we didn't pay a dime thanks to my persistent husband.  Many thanks to Ben from the Home Depot store in Novi for providing fantastic customer service by driving his personal truck and delivering the new flooring within 24 hours of us having to pick it out so it could acclimate and be installed in a timely fashion.  That's hard to come by anymore.  Thanks Ben.  

So here's the new laminate... it has a great texture to it, like hand scraped wood.  The rest of the weekend we're working on baseboards, once we get those finished I'll be able to finish off the decorating and will get some pics up.  

Day at the Beach and my New Rug!

I took the girls to the beach and relaxed with a book today.  To my surprise I arrived home to my brand spankin' new rug waiting for me on the porch!  It's from Rugsusa.com and man was it a steal.  I think it came to $160 for a 7x9!  Plus, FREE shipping.  She's a beaut if I say so myself.  One of the few purchases I'm thoroughly happy with.

Rugs USA Homespun Nawra Trellis Charcoal Rug

  

Old English Sheepdog

Otherwise known as "Sheepie's" or "OES".  My little man, Opie, is growing so fast.   I played around with my new camera today (Canon Rebel T3) and got a few sweet shots of him.

Day before yesterday (July 9th) I was invited to witness the birth of 7 of Opie's brother's and sister's.  It was amazing and made me fall in love with him and all the OES's all over again....

Opie's Mom, Tess and her new little ones....

The only wee girl of the litter

Buffet Makeover

 So a neighbor asked me if I wanted this old dinged up buffet and of course I said yes.  I decided to refinish the top so I sanded away, threw on some stain and wow, did she ever come back to life.  The rest of the piece I painted an antique white, distressed it with my palm sander (just quick touches here and there) and then I finished her up with some good ole polyurethane.  Oh, and I did hand paint the handles black.

BEFORE:

AFTER:

Flower Mirror DIY

We're doing a bit of fixer uppering in the house and there's this huge area above my fireplace that I wanted new artwork for.  After lots of searching I just couldn't find anything large enough that wasn't hundreds of dollars.  I stumbled across this tutorial at The Nester and had the perfect mirror laying around the house for the project.  Here's her version...

And here's my go at it...

So here's the mirror with paper inside so I could paint the ugly brown away.  I used 4 sheets of poster board from the dollar store ($.50 each) and made a petal template and began cutting.  I then used my handy dandy glue gun and started gluing on the petals.  First one on the top, followed by one on the very bottom and then one on each side, working from there.

I only ran into one problem, in the tutorial on the The Nester, the mirror is placed on TOP of everything so it finishes it off perfectly.  My petals were glued on top of the round frame so I cut various size rectangles to place around the edge, it left a pretty cool mosaic look.  Still debating whether or not to spray paint it.....





    

   

Photo Bombed by Opie

I thought I'd take a precious picture of my girls snoozing in our bed (they've been asking to do that a LOT lately).  It was dark, I wasn't sure where I was even aiming and low and behold, look who ends up in the picture.  Opie.  Sheez.