A year later plus 3 days of work....

Here is the latest project that I have undertaken.  My rolled arm bench: A $25 purchase from Value Village (you can't lose at that price).  I thought I took a picture of this 'beauty' but realized after I had taken off all the old upholstery that I didn't.  So here is a copycat of my bench...actually this bench even has better coloured fabric than mine did.  Mine had bright 80's flower fabric on it!

I took off all the old upholstery and cut off the rolled arms and ended up with this:

I didn't need a bench and we wanted an ottoman for the living room.  The mdf for the seat was cracked so we cut out a new piece to make sure that it didn't break when a guest sat on it.  I also drilled 10 holes into this piece of mdf so that I could tuft the bench seat.

New foam and fabric later we ended up with a tufted ottoman for our living room!  Yea for us!  I am thinking of putting some nail-head trim I have lying around here along the bottom but haven't decided as of yet!

For those of you who are interested, someone is hosting a Life Cycles Premiere in Calgary during the following information:

Date: Monday October 11, 2010

Time: 7pm, door open at 6:30pm

Cost: $12 a ticket

Tickets can be purchase only at time of event.

Where: The Plaza Theatre

1133 Kensington Road NW

Calgary, AB

His film is also going to show at the Banff Film Festival on November 6, 2010, time to be later announced. 

VEGAS, BABY!

We went to warm and toasty Las Vegas last week to see the world premier of Ryan's film LIFE CYCLES. Check out the link to the side to see a trailer....All I can say is WOW, and this is seriously a sports film/nature film changing show.  It is going to be in the Banff Film Festival and have a premier in Calgary for those who are interested.

Trevor stayed in Vegas for the weekend so we went to see the Hoover Dam as he has never seen it.  It is beyond me how someone can live so close to such an amazing feat and have never seen it.  We were really impressed by the new bridge that they are building to bypass the hoover dam road.  

Sterling in his Vegas heat outfit: Glasses, Hat and Water.  Every-time we went out into the 38 degree Celsius weather he would start crying and say 'It's toooooo hot!".  Poor little Canadian born baby, we aren't bred to handle the heat as well as others.  You can see from the bright red cheeks in the next two photos (and these were taken at 10pm at night with the cool temperature of 35 degrees Celsius).

 We had to go to the 'hobo treat' store.  For some weird reason Sterling has taken to calling M&M's: Hobo Treats.  He told us "WOOOOOOW, I want all this treat, now!"

 Had to take a photo of Sterling's favourite casino, Excalibur.  He loved loved loved the castle the most.  Which is pretty fitting as Trevor and I went on our honeymoon to Vegas and stayed in a castle turret room in the Excalibur.  We took him to the Bellagio water fountain show as well because we thought he would love it.  At first he told us, "The water is dancing".....but this soon turned into huge screeches of "I don't like the dancing water" and "No more dancing water".  Kids......never know what they will like do you?

We had a good trip and got to see both sets of Grandparents, so all is well!

 As you can tell, there are no photos of the preggo.  That is due to the fact that Vegas was freaking hot and my preggo body swelled unattractive sizes and proportions.  And also due to the fact that I was also Canadian born and didn't handle the heat too well and looked over heated and red cheeked.

So instead, I will show you one of my latest projects.  We are in serious need of new furniture that matches the space we live in, but I am going on Maternity leave in 2 months so trying to save on the dough.  I had this horribly boring side table that is the exact same colour as the bamboo floors in our house.  Yeah, yawn worthy!

 And this is what I did to this side table......

 I added panels to the top shelf of each of the side table panels.  I then added a $3 cabinet handle to the front to create a fake drawer.  I then jigged out a piece of wood into some trim to add some interest to the bottom of this side table.  Lastly, and most obviously I painted it bright green.  I know this is not to everyone's liking but I am trying to add some colour into our living room and this really did the trick.  Especially with my sweet Josette Pier 1 chair beside.   Yup, my least favourite piece of furniture in my living room turned into my new favourite!  Yea!

Finally, the elusive toy shelf!

It only took me about 4 months to post this blog on a toy shelf that I completed about 4 months ago.  Wow, I am a horrible blogger while preggers and I am sure it will only get worse after the little girl is born.  I started with a bunch of 1x4's and one 1x1 and only $15.

I glued the 1x4's together and clamped them for a couple hours to make one solid piece of wood.  I could have just used mdf but this seemed to have more charm.

This is what I created after using my favourite tool.  My compressor nail gun.  I love that tool!

  6 months later and I still hadn't found anything that fit and that I liked enough to put the toys in.  This was my temporary solution until I found something that worked in that area of my house.

And this is what came out of the toy shelf I built.  I super love it and each of my kids will have 4 bins each, a perfect amount of toys for our small little house.  I super love it (and my corn husk baskets)!

Where do I even Start...

You would think that staying home would give one person more time in which to get things accomplished.  Not so much...So I thought I would do a blog with some photos in which to show what has been going on the last couple weeks.  Well three weeks.  This is the belly at 25 weeks pregnant.  And yes, I am three weeks late as per usual as I am  now 28 weeks preggers.

I now have chosen to do a lot of sitting as I have entered the 'everything in my body is extremely uncomfortable phase'.  We played scrabble the other night, which led me to the realization that I have an absolutely nerdy family, and I love it!  Scrabble turned into this....

Which turned into this....

Which led to Sterling feeling left out and turned into this....

Took some photos of Sterls for the first time in a few months.  I love taking photos, even quick snapshots so I don't know why I don't do it more!  

Sterling loves to watch hockey, absolutly loves hockey in any form (a little boy after my own heart).  So when he found this hat in the winter hat bin he went ape and he has decided that he need to wear his 'hockey hat' as he calls it all the time (in the house and out of the house).  Here are the latest 25 month old photos of the Sterls.

I have started organizing the clothes and baby toys for our little girl this last week.  I will have more photos of this massive project when it is completed.  I started by making these size tags for the shared closet.  I hated having all my clothes sizes messed up with Sterling so I went uber organizer with this one.  I just used a cup and cut a circle into some spare cardboard.  I think covered them is cute craft paper and voila! Instant size hangers, yea!

World of Difference...

A lot has happened over the last few weeks....Whew!  Which has led to me not doing any posts and my life changing dramatically.  First, I had several appointments with my pre-natal doctor and she determined that for the health of our baby that I cannot work anymore.  Wow, one day I am at work thinking that I will be there for another 4 months and then the next day I am done work for the next 16 months.  I can't lie and pretend that I wasn't a little happy to have 4 months off before our baby is born but the circumstances are not ideal.  Plus, I am supposed to take it easy and for anyone that knows me that is next to impossible.  I can't sit for more than 10 minutes at a time...I pretty much have gone stir crazy and am losing it pretty quickly.

The 2010 first annual Hope Classic Run/Walk/Wheel for Spina Bifida and Hydrocephalus was last Saturday (August 28, 2010).  Thank goodness!  I think about 10 million pounds of stress and nerves have been lifted off my back.  I probably put in about 500 hours of volunteer time into this event so you can bet I am happy to be done it.  All in all I think things went pretty smoothly and we can't complain about how the event went.  We got several participants telling us that it was the best run that they have ever done.  So I think that is a pretty good compliment considering a ton of things didn't go quite to plan!  The glacéau water guy didn't show up until about an hour after everyone had completed the run.  So unfortunately runners were thirsty after 5k and 8k of running.  We did have about 125 runners, which is a freakin' amazing feat!  The huge events they have here are about 500 people so you can bet we were pretty impressed but under-prepared for this amount of runners.  Edmonton told us the first year they had about 40 runners so we really under guessed our numbers and ran out of shirts....oops!  But luckily the caterer for the BBQ had lots of extra food and it was really good food too!  Here are a couple pictures.  All in all weather was nice, BBQ was amazing and door prizes were sweet.  My brother and his family acutally won some of the best prizes....2 Westjet tickets anywhere, 2 Nakiska lift tickets and 50 Home Depot gift card, lucky!  Dangit, Trevor and I were hoping him and Sterls would win those tickets!

Some of our disabled participants and volunteers along with the disability dogs.  

Gotta tell you, some of these kids are pretty inspiring...One kid (about 10-12 years-old) did the whole 5k on crutches!