BHG Kitchen+Bath Makeovers Magazine

Ummmm….I have been a fan of this magazine for a long time….with all the house-gutting that’s been going on around here, I’d always grab a copy for some much-needed inspiration (and hope that one day we’d be finished enough that our house might look like all the pretties that were featured there!).  So imagine my surprise when I was contacted by one of their lovely editors about using our master bathroom remodel.  My answer? “Duh, YES PLEASE AND THANK YOU!”

Run on out and pick up this awesome issue, and give a little special attention to page 39!  FUN!!!

Super Simple Starfish Wall Decor

I know what you’re thinking….starfish aren’t really very ‘farmy’.  But aside from the facts that I grew up near the beach, and we’re in Los Angeles which is technically on the beach, these starfish hold some pretty heavy sentimental value.  You see, the Texan and I got married on the beach, and instead of flower petals scattered down the aisle, we had starfish and sea glass.  We tried very hard to gather up as many of them afterwards to bring home with us (I also have a large jar of the sea glass, as well as a small jar of sand from the very spot we took our vows….I’m not usually so mushy, but this was important to me!)

Here’s a few shots from our wedding:

Our ceremony site: on the beach in Los Cabos, Mexico.

A shot of how the aisle was set up.

Close up of the starfish in action.

Gotta throw one of these in!

And this one’s fun….this was about a thirtieth of a second before we both doubled over laughing.  (BTW, this was the morning after the actual wedding–it was our ‘wreck the dress’ shoot–good times!).

All right, enough of that!  Back to work!!

I really wanted to display our starfish in a unique way.  I didn’t want to do anything cheesy–framing seemed too obvious and we just have so many of them!  I finally decided that I just wanted to stick them to the wall, and at first, I put a glob of earthquake putty on each one and just stuck them up like that.  This was all well and good until we had a really hot day and I walked in to find that my painstakingly-lined up grid of starfish was now a detail from a Dalí painting.

It was then that I had my ‘Ah-ha’ moment.  Thumbtacks.  All I needed was thumbtacks.

Here is the world’s most complicated how-to:

Starfish, white thumbtack, and hot glue.

Put a decent glob of hot glue in the center of the back of the starfish, and sink your thumbtack into it so that the glue rises over the first lip of the head of the thumbtack.  Hold it in place until the glue is set.

Let that glue harden and cool completely.  Meanwhile, mark off a grid in the shape that you want it on your wall.  I did a grid of twenty-four starfish: four across, six down.  The marks represent the center of each starfish, and I went ahead and spaced mine six inches from each other (every starfish is, obviously, a different size, so this winds up being an imperfect science–but it works!)

Now, take your fully-dried starfish and gently press the thumbtack into your mark on the wall (if you have drywall–if you have some sort of paneling, you may want to pre-drill a bit so the thumbtack goes in easy).

Press into the wall straight-on–if you angle it at all, you risk snapping the thumbtack off.

There you have it!

The offset of the thumbtacks really makes for some amazing shadows on the wall.

DIY Weathered Wood Headboard

As part of our master bedroom makeover, the Texan and I decided that it was way past due that we have an actual headboard.  Our guest bedroom bed has a darned headboard; shouldn’t we?  How fancy of us!  That being said, we aren’t quite fancy enough yet that we want to spend much money on it (ie: any money, at all).  So we turned, yet again, to our scrap wood pile for a few leftover 2×4′s and some dinged-up pine boards (all of which can be acquired for a nominal fee at your local home improvement store).

We started by building the frame; this took a bit of baffled staring at the wall where the headboard was going to figure out the exact dimensions.  We’ve got light switches and window frames to factor in, but really, it boiled down to a personal preference on how we wanted it to look.  We figured out roughly where we wanted the peak of the arch to be, and roughly where we wanted the edges of the arch to be, height-wise.

Our professionally-drawn plans.  Hey, it isn’t on a napkin!

Once we had decided on all that, it was time to build the frame.

We cut the four pieces according to our height (42 1/2″) and width (72″) requirements, then screwed them together with metal straps from the home improvement center.

Next, we cut our 6″ wide pine planks all to length (29″, which is the length from the bottom cross piece of the headboard to the highest point of the arch).  Here’s a little tip: before you assemble these, use an electric sander or even just sandpaper (I used a Dremel) to knock down the corners along the lengths of the boards–even though they sit side-by-side, those edges still tend to be rather sharp….if there is one thing you don’t want your headboard to be, it’s sharp.

Line your boards side-by-side and face-down, and place the frame on top of them. Screw through the frame and into the boards, one screw in each top and bottom. We used 1-5/8″ length screws–long enough to go through the 2×4 and into the boards, but not long enough to go all the way through the boards.

Millie monitors the Texan’s progress.

At this point, the basic headboard is assembled.  But we wanted to get crazy with the top edge and do an arch.  Which is a little tricky.  This, I’m sure, could be done by one person, but it is a lot easier with two, trust me.

You want to start with the headboard laying flat, face up.  You also need a pencil and a long length of twine.

Find the midpoint of the top edge of the headboard (which is where the highest point of the arch will be), then measure straight back a ways (we used an extra board as a straight reference, because the eventual point you are looking for will fall somewhere below the headboard).  The farther back you go, the more gradual of an arch you will wind up making–you’ll have to fiddle with it a bit and figure out what shape arch looks best for what you are doing.  But basically, you just need to have one person pin one end of the string down (this effectively, is the center of the circle that your arch is a part of), and then tie or hold the other end of the string to a pencil, carefully drawing your line by moving the pencil along in an arc at the end of that string.  You’ll have to practice a few times without making a mark to really figure out what works best.  I am sure there is a more precise way of doing this, but I was never any good at math, so this is quite mathy enough, thank you!

You’ll wind up with a pretty legit arch:

You can see I screwed up a few times. (meh.)

It was time for my favorite tool: the Dremel Trio, which is a handy-dandy little multi-function router-thingy (it routs, it sands, it cuts, it slices, it dices!  JK on the last two–I got carried away).  Carefully, I cut along my not-so-painstakingly-done guidelines.  You can see I didn’t make the cleanest cut….

The arch I wound up cutting was wobbly, at best.  But I figured that because I wanted this headboard to be pretty weathered and beat-up looking, having a wobbly top edge wasn’t the worst thing in the world.  I did sand the living daylights out of the top, which took the wobbliness down quite a bit.

Next, it was time to beat the wood up.  I wanted some glaring imperfections, so I gathered a few weapons and took my aggressions out on this poor, innocent headboard.

Some of my favorite distressing techniques/tools include: tapping a nail in little clusters to emulate worm holes, letting a grinder skip across, repeatedly hitting with both ends of a hammer, etc. Distressing wood is fun.

If there are any splintered wood bits from all your abuse, be sure to give those a quick sand.

Time for stain!  I began with a layer of grey stain (Varathane Weathered Grey).

Next, I layered on a basic brown stain (what we had sitting around: Minwax Early American):

I hate the smell of stain.  I cannot think of anything worse than that smell, right next to my head, soaking into my sheets, as I try to sleep.  Ugh.  So, at this point, we left the headboard outside for several days to air out.  I’ve also read that if you scrub white vinegar on it, it helps to neutralize the smell.  So I did this….a few times.  I like to believe it helped.  Honestly, I think it did.

As is typical of most of our projects, there was no rain in the forecast, yet it began to rain, so we had to move the operation into the garage (which ain’t great for photos).  The next step was to do a white-washed effect over the top of the stain.  I used some semi-gloss Behr Swiss Coffee white paint that we had sitting around.  Using a cheap wooden brush (I like the effect the coarse bristles create), I would load it up with paint and then brush most of the paint off into a rag before rubbing and brushing it onto the headboard.

This is what a ‘drybrush’ looks like. You can brush this on for a streaky, wood-grained effect, and you can also use it to smudge areas and create a sort of color haze.  You don’t want there to be any areas of thick paint–if you accidentally get some, use a dry rag to rub it off as much as possible.

Finished white-washing.

Again, we let this sucker sit in the garage for a few days to air out (also, before I started painting, I mixed a tablespoon of vanilla into the gallon of paint, which helps neutralize the paint fumes without affecting the color).

The final embellishment came in the form of metal star ‘nailhead’-looking trim.

My source for these little pretties is one of my best. kept. secrets.  And I’m gonna go ahead and reveal it to you….deep breath: King Architectural Metals (www.kingmetals.com).  This is where I acquire all sorts of metal bits and bobs (wrought iron fence pieces, cast iron star washers, barn stars, etc.) It is pretty much my most favorite, random, wonderful place to shop.

I went ahead and drilled a center hole in each little star (taking care to remove or sand off any resulting sharp spurs).  I then pre-drilled a hole into the headboard where I wanted each star, and then nailed them each into place with a little furniture tack (acquired from the home improvement store).

We finally placed the headboard and secured it to the wall with a couple of screws in the legs.

There you have it!  A nice little addition to our nice little bedroom, if I do say so myself.

Close-Enough-to-Finished Master Bedroom Makeover

Well, it’s finally pretty darn done.  I can barely believe it.

Let’s do the before and after tour, shall we?

Master entry hallway, before.

Entry hallway, after. Closet curtains are still there….the closet deserves its very own makeover post when our bank account recovers from this one.

A close-up of our hallway photo wall. It is my intention to fill this whole wall, but all things in due time!

Remember this? The main bedroom, before.

The main bedroom, after. Love that plank feature wall. Love it.

A great shot of the ‘starfish wall’ (tutorial coming soon!).

The opposite wall, before.

The opposite wall, after. Those collage photo frames? I was never really in love with them. But I had to use them somehow! See how I hacked them into this ‘stained-glass window’ wall decor in an upcoming tutorial post.

Remember this before?….the all-important dog bed and cluttered nightstand.

Same view, after. It wouldn’t be fair if Chance didn’t get a dog bed makeover, now would it? Those are the same ole Ikea Hemnes nightstands, with a bit of a color and distressed-finish upgrade.

Here’s a good shot of our DIY weathered wood headboard (tutorial coming soon!). It’s nice to have an actual headboard….such grown-ups, we are!

Here’s a little close up of the vignette on my nightstand. I heart pink peonies in a blue mason jar. I just heart them.

Remember how the wall opposite the bed looked before? Abbie does.

After. It’s amazing what a little bold color and crisp white trim will do to a wall, eh?  Although, it feels like something is missing….

Ah. There we go.  Now we can move on.

Tree branches: no master bedroom is complete without.

The french door leading out onto what will soon be a lovely pergola-covered back deck. Right now, it is the deck of death; old and rickety and consummately terrifying.  We don’t go out there.  We don’t look at it.  We don’t even speak of it.

Before: the view back down the hall towards the living room–aka, the escape route.

Alas, the unfinished closets still require our attention, as does the attic hatch in the ceiling. Such is why this post is called ‘Close-Enough-to-Finished’. Close enough, it’s close enough.

That’s about the gist of it!

A few random notes here:  after doing our master bathroom makeover, and slapping that dark, dark, dark grey on the walls in such a small space, I arrived at two decisions.  The first is that I love dark walls with white trim–I adore the contrastiness of it (I like to make up words).  The second is that since the master bedroom is also a small and innately dark room, we should just own it and go dark on the walls there, too.  If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em.  Of course, we tempered the darkness a bit by making the plank wall, as well as a lot of the linens, white.  That always helps.  So do pops of cheerful color.  I think part of the reason I drug my feet on this room for so long was that the voices in my head were at odds with each other over painting the walls some light, gentle color (as logic would dictate you do in a small, dark room).

We were also on the fence about whether we wanted to swap out the existing blue glass pendants for something else.  And when I say ‘we’, well, you probably know what I mean.  Functionally, the pendants are completely awesome–it is brilliant to not have a lamp to knock over on the nightstand (I may or may not flail my arms when I am asleep).  I personally love them, but I’m not 100% sure that they are 100% what I am looking for in those spots.  But do I ever need to be 100% sure about any design choice?  Nope.  I’d say pulling the decision trigger at a respectable 85% is fine.  So the pendants stay; I like the color, I like the transparency (they do, after all, hang in front of those windows), and I like the price tag (ie: already bought).  Works for me!

It is abundantly satisfying to be sleeping in a ‘finished’ room.  The bare drywall edged windows, primed walls, and mish-mashed furniture were great and all, but….change is good.

The Start of the Finish of the Master Bedroom

For those of you who have been keeping tabs on us, you know we’ve been through a pretty serious top to bottom renovation of our 105-year-old house.  After five years of of these shenanigans, we have finally gotten to the master bedroom, and as we put the finishing touches on it, I thought I would regale you with a series of ‘before’ shots to really get you in the mood.

The photo above shows the original master bedroom of the house when we bought it….I didn’t take many photos because we ripped into that part of the house so fast the ink was hardly dry on our escrow papers.  This isn’t a totally fair ‘before’ shot, either; you see, we didn’t even make this the master, or even a bedroom.  But you can see the master bath there, leering at you from the right-hand door….that awful, awful bathroom–we let that stay where it was, but did some pretty major tweaking to it (see that makeover here).  We chose to put the actual bedroom on the other side of the bathroom, in a room that was….well, we don’t even know what it was.  And strangely, I took no photos of it until we started ripping down ‘walls’ (I use quotes because what we found was that most of the walls in this house were actually 1×12 boards nailed up and covered with wallpaper.  The structure of the house defied physics and basic common sense).

As you can see, we started a touch of demo when I snapped this picture.

Here’s a photo of the original master bedroom once we had started our gleeful destruction:

Here, you can see where we are opening up the hallway that will lead to the new master bedroom.  You can also see the shards of ‘wall’ that are coming down.  Good times.

So eventually, we got some legitimate structural walls put up, you know….since this is a house with a roof and all, and arrived at a master bedroom that was finished but not finished.  You feel me?

For five years, the master has looked like this:

The entrance hallway: to the immediate right is the master bath, and to the left is a series of curtained closets. Curtained closets are for people who can’t afford closet doors.

I give you….the bedroom. In all it’s primed-wall, trimless, paintless glory.

A hodge-podge of cast-off furniture completes a very sophisticated college-dorm look. Dang, this place really needs some black-light posters. The white dog would look pretty epic in black-light.   I digress.

The all-important dog bed and cluttered nightstand.

Looking back towards the hallway and closets.

The escape route back to the living room.

I hate to do this to you, but this is it for now.  I just wanted to set the scene and show you how we’ve been living for the past several years.  The Texan is constantly baffled by my lack of initiative with this room and how I have let it stay like this for so long.  It’s very unlike me.  But I only just found my inspiration….so stay tuned, because the ‘After’ post is coming soon!  I swear.  Really, it is.

Bathtubs and Sugar Scrubs

She was running a couple of weeks behind schedule, but the Birthday Fairy got it done.  She Got.  It.  Done.  After five excruciating years, I finally have my bathtub.

Let’s take a little stroll down memory lane, shall we?

How the master bathroom looked when we bought our house. I don’t even want to talk about what we found in the cabinets.  So I won’t.

The sink side of the master bath after our renovation.

Sadly, the space for the intended tub sat vacant for a couple of years….taunting me mercilessly with what should be.

And finally….FINALLY!  Behold:

My long-awaited, much anticipated, official favorite spot in the house.

Due to some pretty tight space constraints, we wound up choosing a tub that is pretty modern in design (despite heavily considering a clawfoot, and at one point even a metal horse trough), but with that antique-looking faucet, I think it works pretty seamlessly in our ‘modern farmhouse’.  It’s a good, deep soak….existentially deep, which makes up for the fact that it isn’t the longest tub in the world (ah, tiny bathrooms).  But, yes….yes, I think I will keep it.

So in honor of our newest, most cherished family member, I decided to post a lovely little recipe for a homemade sugar scrub (something I have been dying to make, but refused, like a petulant child, to make it to use in the shower).

With so much grapefruit in the yard right now, you know it had to be a bit grapefruit-y:

Fresh Grapefruit, Coconut, Rose Scrub:

–1 cup superfine sugar

–2 tablespoons heated virgin organic coconut oil

–1 tablespoon rose water

–1/4 teaspoon fresh grapefruit zest

Start by zesting your grapefruit.  The ones from my tree are the yellow variety (Oro Blanco), but this would work just as well with Ruby Red or something good and pink.

Next, you want to scoop your hardened coconut oil into a microwave-safe dish.

Microwave it for approx. 30 seconds or until it looks like this:

Now mix your sugar, oil, rosewater, and zest all into a paste–you want it moist, but not soupy.  If it’s too moist, add a bit more sugar to dry it up.  It should look a little something like this:

Find a pretty jar to put it in and fill-er-up.

FYI: not really sure how long this might be good for because of the grapefruit peel. Use your best judgment. If it smells funny or turns wonky colors, don’t use it. To make a version of this that probably lasts a bit longer, substitute a drop or two of grapefruit essential oil in place of the grapefruit zest.

Rub-a-dub-scrub!

Okay, so as I was making this….I got to thinking….this would make a really interesting cocktail.  So, yes….this happened:

See the recipe here.

So I ask you this?  How bad is it, on a scale from one to awesome, that I was mixing cocktails at 10:30 am on a Tuesday?  Just wondering.

Go Paint Rocks

In yesterday’s Cupid’s Arrow Doormat post, some of you may have spied these two little glittered heart painted rocks tucked amongst the front porch decor….

I love me some painted rocks, and I must say that I am obsessing over the glittered ones even more!  Painting rocks (and using them mainly as door-stops) was something I started doing in college, when I was broke but living by the ocean where there was an unending supply of nice, smooth, wave-worn rocks to collect and use for whatever I could possibly turn them into.  This was like 15 years ago, people–where the heck has the time gone!?  In more recent manifestations, these painted rocks have been moonlighting at the Farmhouse as bookends, mantel decor, garden markers, and hostess gifts.  They are so easy and inexpensive to make that I thought I’d better share the tutorial.

I have a thing for monogrammed rocks. This is a completely normal thing to have a thing for.

A family of monogrammed rocks for my favorite neighbors’ front stoop.  Shout out to H, N, R & Q!!!

During the holidays, I made a set for my front porch decor that never actually made it into a post:

My text-transferring method for the rocks is one and the same as for my Hand-Painted Signs.  You start, of course, by finding yourself a decent rock.  The smoother the surface, the easier it will be. Design up your words, letters, or shapes on the computer, and print.

Cut each word (or design) out, and then heavily color the backside of it with a grease pencil.

Scotch-tape it where you want it on your rock of choice, and then trace the design, pressing firmly.

You should get a pretty well-transferred image if you slathered the grease pencil on there thick enough.

Now, paint!

If these are going to sit outside, it’s best to use some sort of oil-based exterior-grade paint. Finishing with a clear, protective sealer always helps, too.

If you’re adding glitter, sprinkle it on before the paint has much time to dry.

I must confess that I simply free-handed these hearts….nothing wrong with winging it now and again!

Sign-Painting the Farmhouse38 Way

I get asked quite frequently how I go about painting my signs, so I thought I’d do a quick tutorial for those of you who are game!

The ‘crafty’ methods out there for sign-painting (unless you are one of the mind-boggling talented few who can actually paint a perfect sign by hand) always involve some sort of image transferring from a computer-generated design to wood (or whatever material you are painting your sign on).  And there-in lies the conundrum of sign-painting.  How do I get my tidy computer-designed image onto this darn piece of wood?  And how do I do it easily?  There are many, many methods out there, but a lot of them rely pretty heavily upon specialized (expensive) printers or other materials/ methods that aren’t easily available to the average crafter.  I’m also pretty impatient, so the idea of designing up and having any sort of professional materials (ie, vinyl stencils, large-scale prints, etc) made ahead of time is just too much hassle for me.  And all of that costs extra money.  No bueno.

My method assumes a couple of basic things: first, and foremost, it assumes that you have a computer and average, consumer-grade printer.  Secondly, it assumes that you have some sort of program for ‘designing’ up your image, which can be as basic as Word (really, this is all about being able to print letters, right?).  Third, and finally, it assumes you have, or can acquire the magic ingredient:

I give you….the grease pencil (or china marker).

I love me some grease pencil.  For those of you who have never had the pleasure, this is a great tool–it is a waxy, crayon-type marker that will work on pretty much any surface, including wet ones.  And it is also the key to easily transferring printed images onto another surface.  So if you don’t have one, go to any craft or art supply store and pick one (or five) up.  They come in very handy for a multitude of projects.

Allrighty!  On to the sign-making.  So first of all, you need to pick your wood (or whatever other material you want to make your sign out of).  I have a ton of scrap wood sitting around the yard, and I selected a piece that was about a foot wide by about 5 feet long.

Here is one of my infamous scrap piles. The arrow indicates the piece I chose.

This wood originally was part of an old work-bench table-top, so it was painted and chippy and old and dirty.  In other words, it was perfect.

After you have your signboard selected, you’ve got to figure out what you want to put on it.  I can’t help you here.  You are on your own.  My sign was destined to hang over our new compost station, so I wanted to be clever and make an old-timey advertising-type sign.  I came up with “Miss Kate’s Special Grow Sauce”.  Don’t ask me why.  Given the size of your signboard, you also need to decide on your layout.  I got creative with this one and had all sorts of different sized and shaped lettering, but that’s just me.  Figure out the approximate size you want your letters to be, and then head to your computer and get to work.  I always print everything on standard 8×11 printer paper, so if your sign is larger than 8×11″, you’ll need to print out the various bits and pieces and then put it together like a puzzle….the bits for my sign looked like this when they came out of the printer:

Then you will need to cut them out and place them on your board, anchoring them a bit with a single piece of tape on each one.

Once you have them more or less where you want them, then one at a time, remove the parts, flip them over, and use a grease pencil to color the back side of each letter.  The thicker you put the grease pencil on, the better the transfer.

Once you have the back side of the paper colored, flip it back and attach it where you had it before.  Do this with each segment, one at a time, until they are all colored and all reattached.  Now, it is time to trace your letters.  Press firmly, and I find that it helps to make tiny little scribbles instead of perfect, straight lines, because perfect, straight lines never seem to turn out like perfect, straight lines.

Tiny scribbles.

Soon enough, you will have your letters pretty neatly transferred:

At this point, your sign is ready for paint, and it’s all about staying inside the lines….I never can.  Cheers!

Birthday Bathtub

Image of my hopefully soon-to-be tub from signaturehardware.com with a few embellishments added by yours truly.

I have a hole in my heart….a bathtub-shaped hole.  For five years we have been renovating this house, and for five years, I have pined for a bathtub.  You see, I am a tub person.  I love a good bubble bath.  But I have not had a decent, soaking tub since I moved out of my childhood home (15 years ago).  Now, some of you may have noticed that there is, indeed, a bathtub in the Farmhouse (no, not that enormous kitchen sink) guest bathroom.  It is, indeed, a bathtub.  But it is an old cast-iron wall tub that fills just high enough to get your ankles wet.  It’s great for bathing the occasional visiting nephew, or muddy pup, but for an adult human?  It just does.  not.  cut.  it.

The Kitchen Tub….I probably fit better into this than I do the guest bathroom tub.

We have lovely showers at this house, don’t get me wrong–it’s not like we’re out using the garden hose.  I just really want me a tub….first-world problems, right?  We just can never seem to justify the expense of it, when there are so many other, more important projects that require our time and bank accounts.

Remember when I showed you the photos of our made-over master bath?

And remember this sad little bare patch where there is supposed to be a tub? Yep.  It still looks like this.

I have a big birthday coming up in a month (and it shall remain numberless, thank you very much!).  And I have announced to the Texan (and now to the world) that this is it!  This is the birthday when the birthday fairy is going to bring me my tub.  She and I go way, way back, and I have given her a much-needed vacation for the past several years, so, the way I see it, she owes me a favor.  This is happening, people.  I want my gosh-darn tub!

We’re working with a pretty tight space, so it’s not going to be, say the bathtub of my dreams, necessarily, but it is going to be as big of soaker as we can possibly squeeze into that spot.  I really always figured on a claw foot tub, as it kind of feels as though that’s what a 100-year-old farmhouse might feel comfortable with.  It’s the safe choice.

But, secretly, I kind of want to do a tub like this:

Snatched from http://www.motherearthnews.com/natural-home-living/an-alabama-family-handbuilds-a-sweet-small-home-from-scraps.aspx, photo by Michael Shopenn

Yep.  That’s a fiberglass tub fitted inside a horse trough, and the article claims the whole thing only cost 90 bucks.  That’s pretty farmhouse-y, wouldn’t you say?  Am I brave enough to do this?  I don’t know!  I just really don’t know!

We’ll have to see what the birthday fairy’s got up her sleeve.  Stay tuned….I know you are all on the edge of your seats! 

 

Cheer-Inspired Tablescape

This casual holiday tablescape was directly inspired by a seasonal staple here at the Farmhouse: Shiner Cheer.  Yes, this festive table was inspired by beer.  Are you really that surprised?

Come on! This is gorgeous packaging.

Ever since the Texan introduced me to this seasonal nectar of the Gods, I’ve been hooked.  It is profoundly delicious (dang those Texans know how to make some good beer) and the pretty packaging doesn’t hurt, either.  I am a sucker for pretty packaging.  We literally wait on pins and needles for it to come out every year, and it is darned hard to find in Los Angeles.  But we manage.  This year we drove 60 miles for it.  Priorities.

For me? You shouldn’t have.

I am in love with this color scheme: cream, minty-teal-green, and orangey-red (dare I say….Farmhouse Red?!).  These are my colors, and they repeat themselves ad nauseam throughout our house.  So it was a no-brainer that my holiday table would resort to this color scheme.

In the background, you might notice that our tree is, as of yet, still undecorated. Sigh.

We like it casual here.  I use basic white dinnerware for everything, because it goes with everything.  This table cloth is a fitted sheet (which hugs the oval table in a very pretty way!), with a strip of raw-edged canvas drop cloth set over it as a runner.  The centerpiece is an informal gathering of scavenged, broken branch pieces, craft-store red berries, and strands of mini-lights placed around a set of three chippy-painted candlesticks.

The napkins are wrapped in a simple bind of red grosgrain ribbon, with a Shiner Cheer bottle cap accent.

Let there be cheer!

It only seemed fitting that I show the reclaimed wood sign I’ve got on the mantel, currently….I love the gold-glittered letters against the aged wood.

I walk away from the photo session for one second and leave the door open, and in waltzes a very wet Millie seeking refuge from the rainstorm outside.

Gertie is close on her heels. Wet chickens!

Oh, boy did I get the look of death when I shooed them back out into the rain!

Wishing everyone a case or two of Holiday Cheer!