Weekend Trip!

May is an exciting month to me - we have Memorial Day which means a long weekend, spring is in full force making the weather so beautiful, flowers are blooming and everything is coming back to life - but one of my favorite things about May is the Brimfield Flea Market!  I actually grew up in the town next to Brimfield so it has been a part of my entire life.  Well this weekend my family and a group of friends are venturing up to Brimfield to do some serious antiquing!  We will even be roughing it and camping out in a little cabin in the woods!  Should make for an excellent adventure!  So stay tuned next week for some fun photos of our trip and hopefully some great finds AND follow our Instagram and Twitter over the weekend to see our trip as it happens!

Craft Project - Hanging Mini Flower Vase

This past weekend I decided to create something with the great stuff we found at the Elephant Trunk a couple of weekends ago.  (see our blog post on May 5th)  I had found some amazing small vintage bottles and some bullseye corner head blocks in solid wood - the good antique kind!  I immediately envisioned these items a perfect pairing to make a great wall decoration.  Here is what I created with them and how I did it!

I started with sanding the blocks.  They had a lot of paint build up on the edges that needed a good sanding. Plus as I planned to paint them I needed to have a clean, smooth surface. I then painted the blocks with craft paint.  I did not sand the blocks all the way to the wood as i wanted to be able to have the white showing through the paint.  So I put a couple of light layers of paint on and then sanded the blocks again.  I used a palm sander on the edges and then sanded the detail by hand.

before second sanding

after second sanding

I took the bottles and wrapped them with some thin wire.  Then I drilled a hole in the blocks were I felt they were positioned best and strung the wire through the block.  I then twisted and secured on the back of the block.

I took some pretty flower picks I had and added them to the mini bottles. And with that my project was completed!  These are a great added bit of vintage charm to any home decor.  You can even change the flowers throughout the year to match the seasons!  Hope you enjoy and as always if you would like to have one made for you, please contact me!

Weekend Picking!

I love to shop!  Any excuse to go out and spend a little money makes me very happy.  We plan to attend our first big craft show in the fall so there is much need for some shopping to build up our inventory.  As I have a full time job my weekends are the only time I have to spend on this growing hobby of mine!  So my eyes have been peeled looking for any opportunity to find some amazing treasures that we can transform.  Well this weekend we hit the mother load!  We came across a vintage tag sale in New Haven, CT that was exactly what we were looking for.  It was a two day event and unfortunately we came on the 2nd day so there were a lot of things that had been sold on Friday.  But we still managed to find some amazing vintage goodies!

From the moment we pulled up to the address, I knew we were in for some good picking as the sale took place in what looked like an abandoned factory building.  I felt like I was on one of those salvage shows on HGTV and couldn't wait to see what was in store!

There were so many things to look at it was like sensory overload for me - old tools, vintage books and paintings, some great furniture and my favorite part - rows and rows of vintage glass milk bottles and their original shipping crates.  As the saying goes - a picture is worth a thousands words - so rather then me talking about it, take a look at what we saw for yourself!

Very cool glass plates from stop lights -  I am sorry I didn't get any of these!!

Isles and Isles of wood milk crates with the metal inserts still inside

More milk crates in metal

Wasn't joking about the milk bottles!!  In fact, all of these came from a dairy farm in Middlefield, CT that was being torn down.  Thankfully they were rescued so we could buy them!!

These had to be my favorite find and something I was way too happy to purchase.  They are the original milk tops to the vintage milk bottles!  They had sheaths and sheaths of these and we snatched some up ourselves!

 Check out this old exercise bike!

Look at this mint condition Kelvinator stove.  It even had a steamer pot on the back left burner.  Kelvinator was a company founded in 1914 named after British physicist Lord Kelvin who discovered the concept of absolute zero.  This stove I believe was circa late 40's early 50's.

I was lucky to score the last one of these Sears and Roebuck school desks.  Supposedly there were about 200 of these but by the time we got there this was the only one left!  We also managed to take home quite a few milk bottles and crates, a really cool vintage ink drawing with an amazing frame, some really cool vintage wooden 7 up crates and some other odds and ends.  Overall one of the best tag sales I have ever been to!  I am sure I will be posting about what we do with these great finds so stay tuned!

Reclaimed Wood Kitchen Floor

As I have mentioned before, when we bought this house there were many things we knew we would want to change at some point.  One of the biggest disappointments to us was our kitchen floor.  Not that it was awful - the previous owners had recently re-tiled it - but it wasn't really our style.  And even worse, after about a year or so the tiles started breaking.  Especially in the frequently traveled path to the back door.  One day after being frustrated at replacing these tiles for the 100th time, we decided to make this our next DIY project!  And where did our inspiration come from this time - in a place we least expected - pallet wood!

At the time, pallet wood DIY projects were just starting to become a big thing and I thought why couldn't we use pallet wood for a floor.  First of all you can't beat the price - free - and second of all if it is sturdy enough to hold all the big loads that these pallets are used to then I felt it should be sturdy enough for people.  Of course my contractor Dad thought I was crazy - but I think I couldn't of asked for something better - What do you think?

This project was done in a weekend.  When we started pulling up the tiles we realized why they were breaking so frequently - the previous owners laid the tiles over the original linoleum floor!!  Big no no people!! So not only did we have to rip up the tile but then we needed to rip up the linoleum as well.

 One of the hardest parts of this project was the first step, which was pulling the boards apart as the nails are steel spiral nails and not so easy to take out without damaging the wood pieces.  The second difficult part of this DIY is making sure you have planks that are in the same width.  Matching them up is very important as they need to be able to rest up against each other with no gaps.  This can mean frequent trips to the dump or whatever place you may find your pallets.  Important tip here - not good to use pallets from a grocery store as if they carried produce they will have been sprayed with pesticide and not something you want to have in your home.  The ones you want to look for should have a stamp or brand with an HT which means they have been heat treated.

 After we found the planks we wanted and pulled them apart, we did a really good sanding on them.  Since they are going to be walked on by bare feet, they need to have no splinters or rough edges.  We spent a bit of time making sure they were sanded as smooth as possible.  Then came the process of lying them down.  As we did want a vintage look to the floor we were OK with the fact that each row may not be of the same width.  Some rows were wider then others but the mismatched widths made the floor look like it had been there for 100's of years.  Also, made it easier on us as we didn't have to worry about finding pallets all in one width - which is not easy!

To finish off the aged look we were going for, we used vintage flooring nails to really give it that antiqued look.  You can try to find orignal ones or you can buy them new at any hardware store.

After all the boards were secured in place, the final touch was the staining.  We used Minwax Dark Walnut stain.  We used two rags - one to apply the stain to the wood, the other to wipe the stain off as we moved along.  Because pallets are often made of different types of wood, it created the stain to pick the color up in various ways.  This added to the aged look.  Make sure you like this look as it will be pretty hard to get all pieces to look the same exact color!  Once we let this dry overnight the final step was applying a protector.  We used Polyurethane to protect the wood.  When using this realize there are many different Polyurethane finishes you can use - matte, gloss, semi-gloss - it really depends on what look you are going for.  We used a semi-gloss.

Two and a half years later and thousands of foot steps after and the floor still looks amazing - not to mention it is often a topic of discussion when we have guests over!  We are so happy to not have those breaking tiles to walk upon any longer.

One tip to keep in mind when doing this - have plenty of pallet wood as you will need it!!! And if you have furry friends like we do, you may need to restain again at some point as these two have worn a path from running outside through the doggie door! Happy pallet hunting!!

Craft Project - Making a Jewlery Holder

Over the weekend, my stepdaughter Emily and I came up with a fun DIY project for her bedroom.  Our next room renovation in the house is Emily's bedroom.  As she is quickly approaching the teenage years, we need to update her little girl room and decor.  This is a project we hope to tackle over the summer.

So with thinking about her new room design - she has even made an inspiration board - we decided to make something to hold her enormous jewelry collection. Here is how we tackled this!

We went to Stratford Antique Center over the weekend to try and find something we could use as hooks.  We lucked out and found some great gold drawer pulls with just the detail we were looking for.  If you live in the CT area then Stratford Antiques is a must visit.  They have a ton of vendors and you can spend a lot of time looking through everything from linens and clothes to furniture, odds and ends and so much more.  For more detail visit them at http://www.stratfordantique.com/.  Along with the knobs we decided to use mason jars and then of course some reclaimed wood.

We started by sanding the wood to make the surface and edges smooth and also to get a lighter wood color.  Safety glasses a must when doing this and of course if they are hot pink it makes them ever better!

As Emily's color scheme for her new room is white, black and pink - we decided to incorporate those colors in this piece.  So we painted the Mason jars with a light pink, the hooks in black and we did a white wash on the wood.  We used Milk paint for the white on the wood.

As we wanted an aged look for these pieces, we sanded everything after the paint dried.  I used a palm sander for the wood piece.  When sanding paint off wood, I like to really sand down the edges so the paint is almost all off.  We used just a normal sheet of sand paper to then sand the hooks so we had some of the gold showing through.  On the Mason jar, we sanded only around the raised detail so that the paint came off those spots only - which also helped in making the detail stand out.

After everything was sanded and dried, we then laid the pieces out so we knew where we would need to drill holes.  Luckily, the drawer pulls came with screws so we just needed to drill a hole and then push the screw through and tighten the knob.

To attach the mason jars we used adjustable pipe clamping that you can find in the plumbing section of a hardware store.  They have small slots in the metal so we drilled the screw through one of those slots and into the wood.

As the wire rings are not so pretty to look at, we decided to wrap them with some ribbon we had in black and white stripes.  I used a glue gun to attach the ribbon to the metal piping.

 Then we slid the jars into the rings and tightened the screws on the clamp to make sure the mason jars were secure.

With some brackets added to the back to hang, this jewelry holder will be a great addition to Emily's new room. The great thing about a piece like this is that you will never have two that are alike.  The wood and the hardware you use are the most important. To order one of your own, please contact me by email!

Photos credited to my stepdaughter Emily visit her blog at www.lookingthrualense.blogspot.com