Chillin’ on the Patio

For the 2 of you that entered (you guys don't like these giveaways, do you?), the winner of the Show Me a Story is....
#1
Congrats LeAnn! Shoot me an email with your address and we'll get that to you!
Onto super fun things....Pick Your Plum has awesomely cute leg warmers today!! For $5! for 2...What?!? I'm grabbing some for Halloween costumes and play, if nothing else!

Now, for today's project...For the past while, I have been wanting patio furniture for our little area under the main deck. This is our house. Our front door, back door, play area, patio, well you get the idea. I’ve been trying to make it kid friendly, organized, and a space we can hang out.

So, I was perusing some ads on KSL awhile back, and somebody had listed their patio table and 3 chairs as free. What?! I ran over with my dad and his truck and we loaded that bad boy in. Everything was in decent condition, it just needed to be cleaned up, and a few screws tightened (but really, who doesn’t have a few screws loose?) Here’s the table top when we got it.

I’d already started wiping, as you can tell. It seemed to be some sort of contact paper in a faux marble design on top. So, I wiped it off

and decided to spray paint it. I used Rust-oleom, so it hopefully wouldn’t rust, and would look nice.

After one coat of spray paint.

And here it is finished hanging out on our patio. We’ve used it several times now that the weather is actually cool enough outside. One thing to note is it holds water like crazy. So whenever it rains, I have to go tip the table, but it’s always got a ring, so I just wipe it off before we go eat and we’re good. See those cool gray chairs with the awesome design, those were the ones that came with the table. There’s only 2 at the table though.

This one needs a little bit of help.
I’ve done a few more quick, easy projects for my patio to make it more inviting. You may not be able to tell, but that first picture, I had an old rug I just threw out there for people to wipe off their feet before coming in. So, I went to Wal-Mart and bought a cheap welcome mat. It’s so cheap they don’t even have it on their website. So, it was $9, I think. And plain. I cut out a stencil type thing with mom’s Cricut (it resides at my house because I actually use it ), using a mac and cheese box from the recycling, and cut out the letters h, e, l, and o. I grabbed some acrylic paint, and then just stenciled away. I think it turned out super cute. And fun. And cheap. Favorites.

And what doesn’t scream “Welcome” besides coming home and finding snakes hanging out by your door? Gives me the heebie geebies just looking at the picture. Yikes.

I keep all the kids toys, sidewalk chalk, and the ant spray (does anyone else have TONS of ants? In our house and everything. ARGH) on this set of plastic shelves I got from Wal-Mart while I was in college. They’ve served me well. (they were in my crafting area, but I rearranged and moved things so I could use them outside for storage. Craft room post coming soon!)

I make the kids keep their huge toys by the house, and it’s fairly hidden so it’s not the first thing you see when you come down the stairs to our front door/back door/patio/etc.

There’s our $10 makeover to our patio, thus far. Now we have patio furniture, a welcome mat, and little critters.

Now, I need to get some other projects finished so I can get that door and fence wood away. Nothing like that eyesore. Except maybe that 5 galloon bucket of diapers. I haven’t figured out how to get rid of that except by potty training, and we’re not quite ready for that yet. So any great ideas to camouflage the diaper dumping ground? So people don’t have to see that first thing? I empty it every day, so it’s not too bad….

See how they grow

I did the Fat Mum Slim photo a day challenge in August. It looked like this:

I used My Memories suite (posted about here) to showcase all of my pictures from August. I did them all! Can you believe it? I can't. 

If you want to follow me on Instagram, I'm ashleejuanita. I think you can just search for my name and it should come up. I'd love to follow you, leave me a comment with your user name. Do you do the photo a day challenge? Here's Septembers:

On to the project for today:The other day, I was thrifting, and spotted this. It was lovely. It was $3. I bought it. It was a little bowed, I’ll grant you, but you can’t buy nice wood like this for that cheap (and the vinyl), so home it came.

The idea is really simple. A piece of wood, 5 feet tall, with nice routed edges, and then painted a color, mod podge paper rectangles around, and vinyl a ruler up the middle. Simple. So, I ripped off some of the papers that were coming off anyway, and mod podged other paper on top. I covered up the name of the previous child that was vinyled (I’m making up words) on, and just made sure all the paper I added was something other than blue and brown to make it more gender neutral and cutesy.

Voila! It’s hanging in the girl’s room now, and we had a fun night of putting our measurements on, including their size when born. Now, it moves with us when we leave next, and I just need to patch a hole in the wall.

Polka dot wall art how to here. It turned out fun and was super cheap, so bonus!!

We used little labels to write the name & date on so we knew how tall little ones were. I’m paranoid, so you don’t get to see their names. Sorry!

Cute vinyl saying was already on there.

Both my girls were really close to the same size when born…That’s what those stickers show. I know there’s a lot of different versions, but this was my $3 version. They love it!

Tulip Festival

First off, I've finally climbed slowly on the Instagram bandwagon. Just recently, so I don't know much about it, but look at this little cutie:

Any tips from you who are awesome veterans at it? My username is ashleejuanita.
This month, I entered a giveaway on Utah Deal Diva (lots of really helpful tips for Utah residents, including this week is free at Red Butte Gardens on the 28, and for everyone, free National Park Week this week), and actually won tickets to the Thanksgiving Point Tulip Festival. I had my bridals taken there, but that's all I've seen. So we loaded up the SUV and stroller (earlier this week, 4 kids in a 2 kid stroller…that was a hard walk back from the park),

and went down to see & smell amazing flowers! I'll leave you to look at all the beauty. Happy Monday!