I was cruising Pinterest and came upon a beautiful white-washed fireplace. They took the drab and made it fab! I absolutely love the gray/white toned fireplace.

Seeing this made me think about our own dull and boring fireplace. Our fireplace currently has tile that blends with the walls. Who exactly thought it was cool to put tile on walls around fireplaces? See how ugly ours is?

Whoever built our house built it as if a real fireplace was supposed to be there. See what I mean?

The “fireplace” sticks out just as if a real one was intentionally meant to be built. It even has the roof line extended and it has its own rain gutters.

J and I have talked about installing a real fireplace sometime in the future, but it’s going to be a costly adventure especially if we don’t plan on staying here very long. It’s true that we’re not moving (you can find that post here), but our ultimate goal is to move. Right now we can’t. This blog makes some money but it doesn’t make enough money to buy what we want. :) (If you want to help support us, link to us and tell your friends, your cat or the fly on your window to come and visit this blog. Daily. That would rock. And we would be very grateful! Oh, and I can design stuff too.)

Back to the fireplace. Instead of installing a real brick fireplace, I’m thinking about using tile that actually looks like a chiseled rectangle rock to be installed around our fireplace. In our opinion, it’s better than tile but a cheaper option than installing a brick fireplace. I have my eyes set on these two lovely brick tiles from Lowes;

Tile option #1…

Tile option #2…

Tile option #3…

Here’s a recap of our fireplace to refresh your memory.

There’s a specific look that J and I both have in mind. It’s this beautiful gray stone and each stone is a different shade of gray. We will have to do a lot of hunting to find what we’re looking for if we want the best for our fireplace. The hunting part can’t be that bad, we do live in an area where the ground is mostly stone.

Which one do you guys like better for our fireplace? Tile #1 or Tile #2? Please let me know in the comments.

Attention! If you want to see before and after pictures of how to white-wash your fireplace, check out Cleverly Inspired’s project located here.

I have a love/hate relationship with spring. My nose hates it (allergies, who doesn’t have allergies?), but my eyes love it. Everything is green, beautiful and colorful. It’s also the time where we purchase flowers to give our house some additional curb appeal. Last summer when we planted beautiful vibrant flowers, we received a ton of compliments from our neighbors. This year, we plan on planting again. What flowers you ask? Anything that catches our eye. We love pops of color.

We waited until mid-April to go flower shopping. We didn’t want to risk the chance of our new flowers freezing, and mid-April is when we knew for sure there wouldn’t be any over-night freezes until fall. Today we packed up the babies, hoped in the car and headed down to Lowes. We purchased two different types of plants for $15.00. We planned on spending a budget up to $50, but Lowes didn’t have any other plants that made us say “Wow, we got to have that!” We plan on coming back in May to check-out Lowes updated garden selection and maybe a few other places.

So what kind of flowers did we get? The first plant is a Rubylite Rosa Calla Lily in a purple/pink color. This plant lasted all summer. It’s perfect for the wine barrel because the wine barrel receives a lot of sun.

We planted these last year (when our camera went to Camera Heaven) in our wine barrel. It grew and multiplied rapidly. Only one little plant is all it took. We plan on planting the exact same plant in the same location that we did last year. It was so beautiful. I’ll have to snap a picture for you guys later in the summer so you can see it’s blooming glory.

This is our wine barrel that currently hosts an Ornamental Cabbage. The wine barrel is from some place in nearby Lebanon Missouri. I can’t tell you the specifics as to where it exactly came from.  I did ask, but my parents can’t remember.  Boo right?  Maybe if my mother sees this, she may chime in and let you guys know where they got the wine barrel from.  Hi Mom!

My parents purchased a wine barrel about a year ago just for this purpose. They wanted a real rustic wooden wine barrel vs. the plastic ones you can purchase at your local home improvement store. My parents had the barrel cut in half, and they gave one end of the barrel to us. I think it matches perfectly with our brick exterior.

See how the wine barrel matches? It blends perfectly (our house number removed for privacy). We still have to add mulch to the flower beds and the wine barrel.

The next plant we purchased is called an Asiatic Lily.

Isn’t it beautiful? We love the yellow and the spray-painted maroon.

Last year we planted a yellow daisy-looking flower to the right of the house. This year we are going with the same color scheme in the same area. This is where the Asiatic Lily is going to go.

Don’t worry, we turned off that particular sprinkler so the plant will not get too much water.

Later in the evening, about dusk Jeremiah got the itch to plant the flowers. While he was digging in the planter to the right, we discovered why most of our plants end up dying rather quickly. Enter Cement Chunk ‘O Rama.

When our cement was poured for our driveway, we are guessing that some cement leaked out and puddled right under the spot where we decided to make a planter. Jeremiah broke this beast into chunks so he can dig it out. Unfortunately it left a deep hole in the ground. You think one would plant flowers during daylight, but he had the itch to plant at dusk. Yup, dusk. That’s 7PM in our part of the world in April. Due to all the banging that Jeremiah was doing to break up the rock, our next door neighbor came out to see what all the fuss was about. He saw the gigantic hole that was made after the rock was removed. Our neighbor happened to have one extra bag of dirt left over from his backyard garden. He gave it to us to fill the hole. They’re such great neighbors. :)

I was in the house and didn’t have a clue what was going on, and I’m still working on drilling it into Jeremiah’s head that I must get pictures of these kinds of problems before he fixes them. :) In other words, I don’t have a hole-in-the-ground picture but you can imagine it. Who really needs to see a hole in the ground anyway?

What we thought would take less than 30 minutes to plant two flowers, it took almost an hour and a half. Now we have two beautiful flowers planted for the summer (and more to come).

Here they are, the next day. In their new home for the summer.

Gorgeous!

Can you imagine a wine barrel full of these beauties? I can! Oh, and the big empty space in the flower garden behind the wine barrel is a work in progress. More on that later!

Here’s what the Asiatic Lily looks like without the pile of cement/dirt.

…and more..

Yup, I know. It’s absolutely stunning.

Have you done any planting lately? Link to it in the comments. I’d love to see what you’ve done!

Pst – This post is featured in Serenitynowblog.com.

Our laundry room hosted nothing but the washer and dryer. It wasn’t functional. We had a pantry across the laundry room that was loaded from the floor to the ceiling with stuff. We could barely get the door open to get in and out of the pantry. The pantry hosted everything from cleaning materials, extra pots/pans/blenders/plastic ware-your name tn. I absolutely loathed that it was unorganized and not functional. We had to do something about it.

Here is what our laundry room looked like before. Simple. Clean. Plain. Boring.

We needed to lighten the load in our laundry room pantry to make room for cleaning supplies, extra dishes and our coats. We were also tired of using our kitchen table and the top of our washer/dryer as a central hub for my purse, two diaper bags, my work bag, Jeremiah’s work bag, hats, etc. We couldn’t eat at our kitchen table because it hosted these items.

We headed to Lowe’s and picked up 3 planks of wood in the size of 1″ x 12″ x 6′. I did not want manufactured wood, because I do not like the texture. We needed the length of our shelves to be 5 1/2′ which Lowes ended cutting the wood down to the dimensions we needed. We took one of the planks and split it in half to make a 1″ x 6″ x 5 1/2′ to get a total depth of 18″ for our shelves.

We purchased Killz Original Primer to prime the shelves. We had originally decided to prime the wood so we can paint it to match the interior trim. We decided to prime it and paint it first before we put the shelves together. It’s more difficult to hang up side down and twist your body in all different angles just to paint a shelf after you already hung it.

After priming we saw that the prime was a close enough match to the interior trim. The primer we picked is used to protect the wood from spills and stains. Since we planned on putting our laundry soap, detergent and other liquid items on the shelves, we thought it was a good investment at the time. However, the primer was like paste and had drops of goo inside the texture even after we stirred it up. I don’t think we will be using that specific type of primer again.

We had purchased four brackets from Lowes to help hold the weight of the shelves. Jeremiah’s brother is turning his attic into a two-story house and had some 2″ x 2″ that we used at the end of the shelves. We needed a more stable method to hold the two shelves together to prevent our shelves from flipping over on me while I’m doing laundry. The brackets had only two sets of holes to screw into the wood (two in the top back and one in the top front). We needed four sets to stabilize the shelves and prevent them from flipping over since we were using two pieces of wood (a 12″ and 6″ depth) to equal the 18″ depth that we wanted.

I’m hoping you won’t notice our alignment error. I’m blaming the husband for that.

You can see how we installed the 1″ x 6″ x 5 1/2′ in the back first.

Then we added the 1″ x 12 ” x 5 1/2′. Only the front part of the center brackets were holding the front piece of wood. We screwed each section of the wood into the side brackets to prevent it from flipping over on me while in use.

Here’s the almost-finished product. Aww, isn’t it pretty? We are loving the extra storage space.

Here’s a side-by-side comparison of our almost-finished laundry room shelves.

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The beard board, the hooks, the blue door is beautiful. Who would have thought to paint an interior door blue? I love it!

Here’s the break-down of the costs we spent to build our laundry room shelves.

Total Laundry Room Shelves DIY cost: $62.20

So what do you think? Do you like it? Do you have shelves in your laundry room? Show me.