May 2012 Crafty Round-Up

I've been doing monthly round-ups for 2012, based on the class Kate Nelson taught at Big Picture Classes. I thought it would be fun to do a craft project round-up too, here on this blog. You can see the one I did for our family blog here.

For projects around the house, I made drop-cloth curtains to replace the vertical blinds in the dining room.

Byron put in a new bathroom faucet in the powder room. Love how it completes the room after the makeover it got earlier this year.

I painted the front door inside and out. What a difference. Love it even though this paint job made me cry at least 3 times (that's not an exaggeration - I'm terrible at painting).

I'm really proud of myself for staining the deck all by myself. When we moved in last year, I knew the deck was going to need to be tackled at some point. It had been neglected for a few years by the look of it, and was pretty sorry and grey. I kind of got a wild hair one day and thought I should just stain it before I chickened out. It was not easy, but I'm super happy it's done. It's now a nice dark brown.

And best of all, We had the master bedroom, bathroom, and closet painted. Here's how the bedroom looked when we moved in:

Crazy, right? What is up with those black stripes? It's so very-1995, even though this house was built in 2005. And those black stripes are textured with some kind of plaster, so I was kinda thinking it would be impossible to paint over them. And then, we had a very plain white bathroom (don't even get me started on the very weird tub-in-the-floor):

 The thought of painting these rooms by myself was daunting to say the least - especially since, as I mentioned before, I have cried at much lesser paint jobs. Instead, we splurged and hired an awesome painter. He was able to paint all three spaces in 2 days. It looks AH-MAZ-ING.

 

Bye-bye black stripes...so much better. I am so happy every time I walk into our bedroom now. The bedroom color is Proper Gray from Sherwin-Williams. And the bathroom is Respite, also from Sherwin-Williams.

 

So nice and bright and lovely. Both rooms still need lots of sprucing up, but it's so wonderful to have the painting all finished. I keep hoping I'll run into Matt Muenster while I'm shopping at Lowe's some weekend and end up with a bathroom makeover. Sigh.

Mmmmm....Matt....

That's it for home decor - that's quite a lot for a month, even if 1 of those projects I hired out.

For scrapbooking in May, I created 7 scrapbook layouts this month - 5 paper...

 

 ...and 2 digital...

That first layout was from a tutorial at Jessica Sprague's Photoshop Friday. Love those weekly lessons!

And finally, I started playing around with Lightroom print templates and created one to share with you all via download. I hope you enjoy it - and I'm hoping to make more soon.

That's it for May - a busy month. June is already underway, and I know I'll have more projects to share soon.