Easy ways to change a room’s colour palette
My sister and her husband have a beautiful, modern home in north-end Halifax. They’re child-free so everything in their home is very nice and stays that way — except for the glass coffee table that my children cover in smudgy handprints every time we visit.
Everything is their home is either brand-new or the cool kind of vintage, which is why I was surprised when my sister asked me for a bit of DIY assistance.
They wanted to overhaul the colour palette in their living room. They’d used teal and aqua as their accent colours ever since they moved in several years ago, and they had lots of neutral decorations in warm creams and browns.
(My sister has always been convinced their beautiful velvet sofas are “chocolate brown,” but I have insisted they are charcoal grey. It’s so funny how differently we all see colours!)
Now they wanted to repaint the walls (from a creamy beige to a cool crisp white), focus on deep greys instead of browns and bring in mustard yellow as the primary accent colour …
Continue reading in my weekly DIY column, My Handmade Home …
Christmas gifts for tween boys are NOT EASY
Our son is almost exactly nine and a half years old. While he still seems like a kid in many ways, he’s also very much entering TWEEN territory.
And that means, apparently, that it is much, much harder to buy him Christmas gifts. Sigh.
His major Christmas gift this year — which my husband and I are teaming up with my dad and stepmom to give him — is going to be the Nintendo Switch he’s been begging for.
He understands that getting a big-ticket gift like that from all four of us means he’ll get fewer gifts, and he’s fine with that, but it meant I still needed to come up with gift ideas for the rest of our extended family.
*crickets*
You guys, choosing Christmas gifts for a tween boy? IT IS VERY HARD.
Read MoreEasy ‘cheater’ patchwork quilt squares
For years now, I’ve been using a worn-out 2.5” cardboard square to make good use of leftover bits of fabric. (Nothing fancy — it’s cut from a case of beer!)
If I have a scrap of fabric that’s too small to put back in my regular (colour-coded) fabric bins, I quickly trace as many 2.5” squares as it will hold …
… then cut them out and stick them in a plastic bin for future use. OK, several bins.
The unexpected DIY farmhouse sign
I’ve made a lot of signs and lettered canvases over the years, but this is the first one I made specifically because I needed to fill a strange chunk of wall. “Functional art,” indeed.
Remember when we extended our dining room hutch? Well, bumping our hutch 20” higher — so it came up almost to the ceiling — looked wonderful, but it did throw off the balance in other parts of the room.
The space between the top of our patio doors and the ceiling had never looked “weird” before, but suddenly it was a gaping hole. The hutch’s height was making the doors feel stunted, so I decided we needed a long white farmhouse-style sign to fill the space. For once, the measurements had to be exact …
Continue reading in my weekly DIY column, My Handmade Home …
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DIYing on TV … again!
Remember last September when I was a guest on “Eyes for the Job”? Well, they were kind enough to ask me to come back for another episode, and it just aired earlier this week.
“Eyes for the Job” is DIY show on AMI starring Chris Judge and Alex Haider. Chris is blind but that doesn’t stop him from being a truly awesome carpenter. Alex is newer to DIY — most people recognize her from her days on Global — but has some serious skillz. They’re both so sweet and friendly. I’ve shot four days with them in total, and it’s always so much fun.
As featured on …
