Sprucing Up

More blog sprucing!  You can now subscribe to the blog.  Just click on the link and you can receive the blog via e-mail.  Also, I have put up a Covetable Facebook site.  Look for me there, too.

On to Mullen house sprucing…

Our house and yard have been a beehive of activity.  I have been buzzing around taking care of lots of projects around the house and garden and making some changes to my bedroom, family room and porch area.  It has been a lot of work, but the end product has been so worth it.  And the most fun is that I get to show some of it to you…

Today I am going to show you the improved and updated laundry room.  The last time you saw it, it looked like this:

Laundry room & home office

Remember this?  I posted it to show you that my house really is LIVED in.  It certainly needed some clearing out, especially the desk area.  I have had an idea about what I wanted to do here for a long time, but I just never was motivated to actually carry it out as I had bigger fish to fry elsewhere in my house.  But when I was haunting one of my favorite spots I came across this:

And I knew that I had to get my act in gear.  This is a compilation of Popular Science articles, full of interesting pictures and obviously missing its cover.  It cost a whopping $8!  The fact that is was already in pieces was a huge attraction for me, as I had a plan for those pages.  When I did my Tablescapes table last fall, I used photocopies of a vintage book on the back of my breakfast room chair to hide the feedsack stamp.  This became the inspiration for what I wanted to do with the bulletin board.

Aren’t the photographs interesting?  One of them, on the right, is fun for me as it’s a photo of one of the structures they used to build the London Underground.  Anyway, I used spray mount on the back of the pages to stick them to the corkboard.  I just layered them in in a pretty random pattern.  Next, I decided to use my glue gun “wax” seals on the back of flat thumbtacks to create interesting and decorative tacks.

I first made several seals, putting them on aluminium foil and using a bit of oil between each impression to keep the hot seal from sticking too much in each seal.  Then we – my son Walker helped me- used scrapbooking glue dots to stick the seals to thumbtacks.

Here is one look at the finished product.  See that bin on my desk, full of magazines and clippings?  That’s my “To Scan for My Blog” bin.  Lots of fun photos to share, huh?  Here is the inspiration for the bulletin board.

The back of the chair is the inspiration, obviously NOT the rest of the photo!  Here is another, closer look at the bulletin board:

I like keeping my kids’ artwork near me when I work, so “The Thinker” overlooks me while I toil away.  Here is one last and fuller view of the vastly improved, de-cluttered and much cleaner room.

aahhhh!! I can breathe when I walk in there now and I can actually work in here, too!  Now I just have to stop using it as the dumping spot for things I don’t feel like dealing with…..

More on the new and improved Chez Mullen soon.  I have garden pictures galore!!

Kristin