Home Hack: Concealing Cords

I'm back again today with another home hack - how's that for fun?

One of the things in home decor I hate the most is cords. They are such an eyesore but in our technological world, they're a necessary evil. Wouldn't you agree?

In our living room we currently have a wall that is bare. After we switched the TV from that wall to the nook, it left us with an empty wall and an ugly black cord. The cord belongs to our router which is cleverly hiding behind our curtain panel on the right. The router has to stay because it's the wall where the Internet cable connects to the router. So until I decide on a decorating solution to fill the wall (and hide the cord), this ugly thing has been staring back at me for months.

Call me crazy (because I am) but it was driving me so crazy that I just had to do something about it to hold me over until I could throw a piece of furniture in front of it and call it a day.

My solution? White electrical tape!

Pretty ghetto fabulous if I do say so myself. But pretty ingenious too. 

The cord doesn't disappear entirely, but it's much less an eye sore with the white on white. It's totally a quick-fix that I can live with in the meantime. 

Do pesky cords bother you that much too? Tell me...on a scale of ghetto to fabulous - where do I rank? 

Plant Pots and Paint Pens

Say that 10x fast!

As I mentioned at the end of this post, I’m slowly trying to ease my way back into the blog and chip away at all those projects we put on the back burner for a bit. While we’re still knee deep in the raw every day emotions of this new life we’re adjusting to, staying busy helps.

Outside of this blog I work a regular ol’ 9-5 except instead of 5 – 8 hour days, I work 4 – 10 hour days with every Monday off. Having Mondays off is great! While everyone else in the world is at work, I’m able to accomplish a whole lot of blog related stuff and tackle a few projects around the house unless I turn on the TV and get sucked into a Gilmore Girls marathon – then all productivity goes out the window. Over the last few months, that sorta became the norm as I wasn’t very mobile towards the end but I’m slowly redirecting my focus and I have to say that it feels good.

This last Monday was a very productive one after many, many unproductive ones. I worked on and/or completed 5 new projects – all of which I’ll be sharing here sooner or later. High fives for me!

This first one is more so a facelift than it is a project and takes zero skills whatsoever. One of the things I love most about decorating is incorporating live plants into every room. I think plants just brighten up the space and when you add any sort of natural element it just brings the room to life. Unfortunately for me, I totally suck at keeping anything alive. That’s why I always tend to gravitate towards low maintenance plants – usually of the succulent variety. But even I’ve managed to kill quite a few of those too. Most recently I killed a snake plant…or most of it…which is considered to be virtually indestructible. #GOme. I think I have a chronic case of over-watering but I’m working on it.

I woke up one morning to find that 95% of my snake plant was water logged and the stalks were falling over, so after feeling like such a failure, I removed the dying stalks and was left with a whopping 3 stalks. Sure made for a wimpy plant. So while I’m trying to bring it back to life, I went to Home Depot and brought home my next victim and plopped it in the pot that the previous one vacated.

Except the pot totally sucks. Just like my plant caring abilities. It was just a plain white ceramic pot I picked up from Ikea and thought that maybe…just maybe…if I jazzed up the pot a bit the plant would last longer. #Ainthappening. But I went ahead and did it anyways because that’s how my crazy mind works. I could use all the help I can get.

The ceramic pot already had some raised detailing so I just took a paint pen and enhanced the details. Looks like a totally different pot – and much more expensive too might I add! Don’t you agree?

Here's a side by side:

And the best part? You don’t have to have these pots with raised details from Ikea to achieve the same look. Any plain ceramic, or terra cotta pot too for that matter, can be transformed with a paint pen and free-handing a super simple pattern…think dots, crosshatch, grids – the options are endless!

So what do you say? Think this super cute pot will help keep my plant alive? Probably not but #Onecanhope.

15 Minute Fix - Bar Tray

Hi friends!!

I'm back from our Hawaiian vacation, very well rested, and cant wait to share all the fun we had basking in the sun! With all unpacking and laundry that needs to be done I thought the best first project back post vacation would be another project in my 15 Minute Fix series where I tackle a project or something on my to-do / want-to-do list in 15 minutes or less because sometimes all we have time for are quick little projects, am I right?

 

This project is all about reinventing an ordinary, every day item. My favorite kind of DIY! I spotted this pink mirror at the thrift store and although I didn't need a new mirror, the mirror was inset in a deep frame and I thought it'd make the perfect tray. Just so happened that I needed a tray because one can never have too many trays!

 

 

 

To change my thrift store find from a mirror to a tray, I started by taping off the mirror with some computer paper and painters tape and then sprayed the entire frame white.

 

 After the frame was painted, I removed the hanging hardware from the back of the frame. Once the hardware was removed, I covered the bottom of the tray with craft foam sheets that I found at Michael's. To adhere the foam to the back of the mirror, I used spray glue and let it cure for a full day.

 

To add some interest to the mirror turned tray so that it wasn't just a boring white tray, I attached these brass corner brackets on each corner.

 

 Once completed, I loaded up my new mirrored tray with all our bar essentials. The mirrored tray is reflective and looks great with all our decanters we've collected. Since the tray is mainly stationary and really just meant to define a space atop our buffet and to corral all our bar necessities, I never have to/need to move it while all loaded up. I don't suggest transporting the tray fully loaded as the mirror may crack under the weight of the items.

How's that for a quick 15 minute project? This project was so, so easy and the perfect post vacation project while I'm knee deep in laundry and vacationing from my vacation!


15 Minute Fix: Updating Dollar Store Vases

Hey there! Sorry for the brief hiatus...it's been a busy, but productive, few weeks (ahem...patio! I'm talking to you!). The patio makeover has literally eaten me alive but I'm rounding the home stretch and can finally see the light at the end of the tunnel so for now I don't have any other patio updates except to say that the chairs arrived and they're all kinds of tooshy heaven, but I wanted to pop in and share a quick little project I checked off my to-do/want-to-do list recently.

 

With summer knocking on our door, or at least here in CA it is, I'm loving the longer daylight hours and what that means for the blog and the endless amounts of projects I have going at any given time. The extended daylight hours sure make it easier to work on projects and photograph them after a long 10 hour day at the office but even with the added convenience that Daylight Savings brings, sometimes all I really have time for after work, traffic, dinner, clean-up, and all that jazz is a quick 10-15 minute project. Anyone else feel the same? And heck...let's be honest...sometimes I have no desire to do any of the aforementioned tasks and instead just plop myself down on the couch and watch HGTV on repeat. Feel me now?!

 

If you're anything like me, your brain never shuts off and there's always a to-do list a mile long. When I sat down to actually write out what I wanted/needed to accomplish, I realized that a lot of these items were quick, easy, and something I could easily get done in 10-15 minutes...if only I actually set aside those minutes to actually do them. What a concept! Sometimes something as easy as putting pen to paper puts things into perspective and makes all those to-dos a whole lot more manageable.

 

So because I thought many of you might be in the same boat as I, I thought I'd start a new series of sorts with quick 10-15 minute projects straight off my own to-do/want-to-do list that even you might find useful when time is limited.

 

Please don't judge me on my to-do list prioritization because as you'll see when you come back for the next post in this series, I chose to paint dollar store vases first before I tackled the disaster that is my purse because obviously gold vases are way more important than organized purses. Moving on...

 

Over the years I've managed to accumulate close to 50 (#youthinkimkidding) dollar store vases. How? I have no idea, but yeah...it happened. If you need a few vases, holla at your girl! They're the perfect vessel for so many things around the house and because I have so many, I thought I'd have some fun with a few.

 

All I did was tape off a portion of the vase using some blue painters tape. You can get all kinds of crazy or creative with your pattern, just mask off the area that you don't want painted and leave the area you do want painted exposed. For my vases I just taped off an asymmetric line. Sorry, no pics of this! Then just spray the vase whatever color you fancy. I chose gold...because well...duh...I'm obsessed with gold.

 

Once the paint is dry, remove the tape and ta-da! Dollar store vases look like they cost $1.50 now!

 

 

This is literally the easiest project on the face of the planet. I didn't re-invent the wheel, this project isn't going to break the Internet, and you've probably seen it done a thousand times a thousand times better, but it's been on my want-to-do list for-ev-errrr and now...it's not.

 

 

That's all for today - just a quick little 15 minute project for ya! Enjoy my friends! And be sure to check back soon for the next installment of 15 Minute Fix...or if you're lucky, you'll get a patio reveal soon!