My Suburban Kitchen

Delicious Recipes to Keep my Family of Four Happy and Full

Here Comes Peter Cottontail

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We have a bunny picture.  It’s Peter Cottontail and was scored, with double matting, at a yard sale for $.50. Last spring (as in 2010)!  I planned our playroom around this picture by adding the Pottery Barn Kids Peter Cottontail valances to the windows and painting the room a great shade of green to match.  In all the planning, I never actually bought a frame for it.  So, this picture has lived everywhere in the playroom except where it belongs: on the wall!
I mentioned here that awhile back we had purchased a bunch of canvases and were planning to paint them.  That all changed and I had to return the collection of canvases.  Mathlete probably wouldn’t be too happy about me just storing 6 11×14, 4 8×10 and 4 9×12 white canvases with no foreseeable plan to use them.
So, off Baby E and I went to A.C. Moore

Now, I’ve been to A.C. Moore or its brother, Michaels, dozens of times in the recent past.  Every single time, I forget about the bunny picture frame until I get all the way back home.  Not this trip! Ta-dah…a frame for the bunny picture:

I scored it for $7.50 because they were running a sale plus offering 15% your entire purchase.  (Oh, I did pick up 2 larger canvases but I actually have plans for those!)  I’m not a fan of the natural wood color for where it is going so I’ll throw some paint on it (soon-ish) and Mr. Rabbit will take his rightful place on the playroom wall.

Ever go to the store several times to get something only to forget it every time?  Do you leave pictures just lying around leaning on walls until you get around to framing them?

© 2012 Just Us Four.  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

Cha Ching!

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Do you like to shop? Boy, do I! I’ve slowed down considerably on my shopping (especially since the arrival of Baby E…two kids ain’t cheap!) but still love the thrill of finding something I love and buying it. I’ve turned my buying more towards stuff for the house recently. Although, don’t get me wrong, I still love shopping for clothes/shoes/bags but I find the time I have to shop for clothes is minimal and, when I have the time, I end up at Gymboree or BabyGap. I’ve got some well dressed munchkins

Back to the shopping…I’ve been eyeing some artwork from Crate and Barrel for awhile. The liquidity prints (I-V) just called out to me as the perfect thing for the wall in our foyer. I couldn’t stomach the price though.

Upon the urging of “Junior” (a.k.a. “my sister”), I decided that I would try some DIY artwork for that space to mimic the design of the C&B prints.  I’m no artist so I knew I wouldn’t even come close to actually copying the prints.  I just wanted the same general vibe.  She was awesome and actually went to the store and bought the canvases and I picked up the paint.  We had grand plans!

We loaded the shopping bags filled with canvases and paint in the car and drove them 5+ hours to the beach with us. Grand plans, I tell you! Every single piece remained in the bag for the entire trip.  We didn’t even manage to get them out to figure out a configuration for the multiple canvases.

So, they took another 5+ hour drive in their shopping bags back to my house where they sat…and sat.  The other day, Junior asked me had I decided on how I wanted them to hang on the wall and I realized I still hadn’t touched them.  I had been so focused on this space for awhile and yet, with supplies in hand, I wasn’t doing anything about it.

Spurred into motion, I pulled out the canvases and laid them all out on the floor in front of the table they would hang above.  I settled on a configuration and put the extras back in the bag to be returned to the store. 

I ran to the computer to write an email to Junior (couldn’t find my phone!) to let her know I had made progress.  Upon opening my email, angels sang I got distracted.  There was an email from C&B that screamed “Sale” in its title.  I opened it up and saw that my beloved Liquidity prints were marked down to a much more reasonable price. I’ve been holding onto a 10% off coupon to C&B too which meant I could drive the price down even further.  Jackpot!

I quickly called the store and checked to see if they had them in stock or if I should order online (and pay shipping, blech!).  They did have them in stock so I stopped on the way the home to pick them up and solve my foyer dilemma (for this week at least).

Fingers crossed it doesn’t take as long to hang them as it has to buy them/paint them.

I mentioned in part of our beach recap that Junior and I went to a few thrift stores while we were on vacation.  I never got around to post pictures of our finds though!

The first place we went was full of clothes and shoes! It wasn’t until we got all the way to very back of their small store that we saw stacks and stacks of fabric pieces.  The pieces were just large enough to make a pillow or other small item out of.  We picked up a few and went on our merry way.

Next up, we hit a much bigger store on the way back to the beach house.  It was full to the brim with furniture, house wares and other items.  I saw a few furniture items I would have considered if we would have had space to get them home in the car.  Instead, I settled for some smaller items:

And here are some recent non-thrift store (but major sale!) purchases:

Any good shopping finds recently?  I keep getting tons of sale notices in my email which is making it so difficult not to go out shopping!

© 2012 Just Us Four.  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

Rescue Me!

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I know you are all waiting anxiously for details about our vacation family trip and I promise to get them to you.  I just have about a million pictures to sort through before I can give you all of the details…you don’t want to look at a million pictures of us right? Didn’t think so.
 
After days hours of unpacking, I needed a break.  I went to pick up our mail from our wonderful neighbors and discovered my package from Chic Shelf Paper had come while we were away.  Cue excitement!  I practically ran out of their house to get home and start my little project. At least, I planned it to be a small project.  If you remember that saying about best laid plans, you can already see where this is going…of course, the title probably gave it away a bit too.
 
Recently, I purchased this awesome white lacquer tray from West Elm with plans to paint the inside of it.
The more I thought about painting it, the more I disliked the idea.  The tray resides in the front hallway on our entryway table.  Given that it is the entrance to our house, the whole theme up there changes quite a bit (think holiday motifs, etc.) so picking a paint color seemed very daunting.  Enter the idea to just line it with awesome shelf paper which is easily changed whenever I want!
Enter: Chic Shelf Paper.  I looked through their online catalog and ordered a few samples before settling on Gypsy Garden.

For this initial lining, I chose to have them pre-cut it for me so I could just place it in the tray.  Now, I am sure you are expecting a pretty picture of my finished project but I will already warn you that the finished picture is pretty far away because I mis-measured (GASP!).  I’ll give you a minute to catch your breath before I continue. Better?

I pulled my wonderful paper out of the package only to find I hadn’t taken into account the difference in size between the entire tray and the inside where the paper would be sitting. No problem…I have a paper cutter!  Well, the paper was too big for my paper cutter so I decided to cut it by hand.  In any normal situation, Mathlete Hubby would have already stepped in with a sanity check some assistance.  This wasn’t a normal situation though because a) I was working in the front hallway and b) it was the weekend of the 24 hours of Le Mans (i.e. a weekend I don’t really have a husband).  So, out came my scissors and my “steady” hand. What came next was a disaster and a cry for help!
Those of you that know me have often heard me complain a little about hubby’s racing hobby.  My hobbies (cooking, shopping, etc.) benefit the entire household while racing typically only benefits him.  That all changed last night…racing rescued me. (There…I said it in print…forever cached by Google!)  In non-professional racing (I hate the word amateur because those guys do really know what they are doing!), the racers get sponsors just like in other sports.  These sponsors, of course, want some recognition for their contribution and that comes in the way of the drivers putting stickers on the cars.  Now, before you go picturing the car from Taladega Nights with even the windows covered in stickers, please know that it is pretty tame compared to some of the bigger motor sports.
Now, racing (and hubby) couldn’t 100% save my paper because I had already cut it too small to cover the entire bottom of my tray.  However, we were able to square off the edges and then center it so it looked like I meant for it to be smaller than the bottom of my tray (we’ll keep our secret, right?).
First up was squaring off the paper to disguise my hack job less than perfect cutting.  I had already peeled the shelf paper from its backing so we had to grab some handy freezer paper (wax paper or parchment paper would work too!) to stick the paper onto while we cut. 
From there, we used a square and an exacto knife to make sure we had the edges perfect.
Once we had the edges right, it was time to put it back in the tray.  The paper was smaller than the tray so I needed to be able to position it perfectly and then have it adhere to the tray.  My Hubby’s secret weapon: a spray bottle.
We sprayed the back of the paper to get it just a little damp. This would allow us to put the paper down and move it into place before the adhesive set.

Once we had the paper in place, we used a very technical tool to go over the paper and push all of the excess water out to the edge so that we could soak it up…a Barnes & Noble kids club card.

With the water soaked up by paper towels (another very special tool of the trade), we put the tray in its proper place in the foyer to dry for 24 hours. It didn’t turn exactly like I planned but it looks pretty good in my book!

Oh, and I learned something from racing too!

© 2012 Just Us Four.  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

Don’t want to leave this bed

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5.18.11
To get ready for the resulting shopping fest that will result from my furniture purge, I’ve been surfing the interwebs looking for inspiration for my master bedroom. I already mentioned that we will most likely be going with a low, platform style bed just to keep it clear of blocking the two windows it will reside between. I do prefer some kind of headboard on a bed though which led me to this:
My searching also  produced some really wonderful bedroom decorating porn pictures that I can use for inspiration as I get further along in this project. Enjoy!

The combination of the low platform bed and shorter headboard here is great! Exactly what I aiming for as far as size/structure of the bed:

 
Love the poster bed in this. It won’t work in my setting but it is beautiful! This is perfectly proportioned between the windows.
Also considering putting a bench or something at the end of the bed.
 
 

© 2012 Just Us Four.  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

Sell, baby, sell

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5.17.11

The aforementioned monsoon steady rain I mentioned yesterday has put a damper on my current to-do list project: sanding and repainting the railings and basement egress bricks. A rational person would just move to something else on the to-do list that doesn’t require being outdoors. I’ll never claim to be rational though and my brain just can’t move though the list like that because then I wouldn’t make it back to the “scheduled” project. Type A much…maybe just a little. So, I did what any irrational person would do and started a project not found anywhere on my list!
Much of the furniture in our house is old. Not old in a fabulous antique sort of way but old in a “I’m too cheap/lazy to put in the effort to buy new furniture.” Actually, that isn’t true. We do have a good reason for the oldness of our furniture. Up until the last year, we’ve always lived in an interim home…somewhere we didn’t plan to be for more than a few years. This interim home thinking kept us from buying new furniture because we didn’t want to drop a bunch of money on something that may not fit into our more permanent space. Now that we are in that more permanent space, I think we are ready to start replacing some of our older furniture. First on the list is the master bedroom furniture.
Our master bedroom furniture was a gift from my parents after college. We bought it used and it has been well used be me (when I was single) and then by Mathlete hubby too after we got married. This set consists of a bed and a long dresser with mirror. (Pardon the mess you see here in the pictures! We were working on emptying the dresser and pulling the stuff from under the bed when I snapped these pictures.)
Our bedroom isn’t really set up in a way where this size furniture works too well. The length of the dresser makes it only work in one space (unless we move it to the sitting area) forcing us to put the bed between the two windows on one of the walls. (I am sort of scooping myself with the pictures above because you can obviously tell the difference in the wall color and drapes!)
I don’t really mind the bed on that wall between the two windows and, quite honestly, might leave it there even when we get new furniture. However, because of the windows, I feel like a lower bed would look a lot better so it doesn’t crowd the windows so much. Something along the lines of:
I’ve been working up to getting rid of this bedroom furniture for awhile but never really made a move because I didn’t have anything to replace it with. Then, I decided that, if I sold the current stuff, I’d buy new stuff sooner. Yeah, I know, there goes that irrational thinking again! So, in the midst of our rain showers, I had Mathlete hubby move our bedroom furniture into the garage and promptly posted it on Craigslist. It is a great set just begging to be refinished and updated by someone with more time and patience than I have right now. So, with a little luck, this furniture will be gone by the end of the weekend and I can start working on purchasing the replacements.

© 2012 Just Us Four.  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

My to-do list is so long…it doesn’t have an end

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5.9.11
The to-do list…

Everyone has one. Some are kept on paper, some in memory, and some are kept on list keeping websites. With 2 kids and husband who is great with a lot but not so much handy in the memory department, I have a lot of to-do lists. In fact, I am so obsessive compulsive vigilant about keeping my to-do items in order and on track (as much as humanly possibly) that I actually subscribe to all three methods for my to-do lists. Of course, since moving in to our new house, none is growing at a faster pace than my house to-do list though. Want to see read the grand plans?

Need to do now (thankfully, this is short!):
  • Repaint outside basement entry surfaces (railing and bricks)àamazingly, I finally got around to purchasing the supplies for this. Who knew I would need my ID to purchase Rustoleum though?!
  • Paint wood posts to deck
  • Seal driveway

On the horizon (12 month timeline):

  • Assemble the playset for the kids (waiting on the HOA approval!)
  • Finish entryway (more on that in-progress project later)
  • Finalize the family room mantle/pillow plans…maybe new lamps?
  • Buy or build a new kitchen table
  • Replace breakfast area light and island pendant lights
  • Hang remaining decorations in kid rooms
  • Build headboard for guest room
  • Refinish furniture in guest room
  • Finish decorating master bedroom
  • Change mirror in hall bathroom (bye bye builder mirror)
  • Paint or refinish kitchen cabinets

In the distance (a.k.a not enough funds to do at the moment):

  • Replace carpets on main level with hardwood flooring
  • Decorate the living room (requires furniture!)
  • Finish basement
  • Add tile backsplash in the kitchen
  • Add stone to the fireplace
  • Install in-ground sprinkler system
There are a whole lot of other little projects to do around the house that I just haven’t focused on enough to add them to the to-do list. I’m sure the list above will keep growing…
How do you keep track of your to-do list? Do you find it grows faster than you can keep up with or do you keep it under control?

© 2012 Just Us Four.  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.