This title describes this summer for me. It has been just that...crazy and a whirlwind. I'm already down to 3 weeks with my sweet girls and that makes me sad. The time passes so quickly. The crazy part has been having a 3 year old, new baby, and 5 puppies, yes, that's right, 5 puppies! Our newest addition, sweet Dixie, showed up on our porch. She just happened to show up pregnant which means we got to experience puppy birth! Wow! My dining room, which will be a project soon, turned into a labor and delivery room for pups. Thankfully the birth went well and we have 5 healthy pups. Weaning will start this week. I've heard it's messy, but that won't be much different from anything else around here. We have homes for 3, maybe 4, of the pups and we have to find 1 more home...I CANNOT have another dog as much as we would like to and as cute as they are. 4 is pushing the limits, well let's just say it, crossing the limits and 5 would just be crazy. We can hardly keep up with the 3 we already have!
Soooo, with all that said, it's been hard to get projects in, but I've managed to do a few. Today I'm going to share our first project because it made the most impact and should have been done a long time ago. I say "our" because I could hardly get anything done without my mother and Gary. They each did just as much work as I did on this one! In our den we have beautiful built in shelves placed here by the previous owners. They did a great job with them, but they were in a dark color (blue or green...we never could decide and it depending who you asked!) Dark shelves+ plus bad lighting=dark room. With a one month old at home, I decided they had to be painted...don't ask me why. We also decided to add bead board to the back. The hubby tackled that part of it. He cut the bead board to the width and height of the back of the shelves. We quickly realized the bead board would not fit in one piece so we strategically cut the board where we knew a shelf would go. This part turned out to be much more difficult than expected. There were outlets in every section of shelves so he had to cut out outlet holes for each one...quite the pain. After all of the was done, he nailed them in.We then caulked all of the holes and cuts. Then, priming! We primed everything first and then began to paint with the same color all of our mouldings are in a semi-gloss. I do not know the color because it is a match from the previous owners. After 2 coats of paint, the 
shelves were done and they look great! The room is so much lighter and looks sooo much bigger!(See the after picture at the top...sorry about the placement...I'm figuring this thing out!) Someone tell me why we didn't tackle this 5 years ago when we didn't have the added difficulty of kids and a million dogs!
shelves were done and they look great! The room is so much lighter and looks sooo much bigger!(See the after picture at the top...sorry about the placement...I'm figuring this thing out!) Someone tell me why we didn't tackle this 5 years ago when we didn't have the added difficulty of kids and a million dogs! Speaking of kids and dogs...lets talk about the reality of the project. In concept it seems like a simple project, right?!? Adding the kids and dog part made it more complicated and difficult to accomplish. In my old life, aka, before our two precious and awesome additions, this project would have been completed in a weekend. For some reason, in my head, I still thought that was how it would go! Two weeks later, painting during every nap time, we finally finished up. It was well worth the effort and was very rewarding, I just got a dose of reality of our new project time frame!
