Wall Decor

I made this Saturday.

I only planned on making the blue picture frames but then I decided I needed a shelf to put them on.  I got the idea for the picture frames here and the shelf here.  You can get all the measurements from there.  I'm not good at following other measurements because I like to make things the size that I like and it all depends on how much wood I have.

It looks great in my living room.

One more thing I did: 

The after with a new cushion

Remember the before and after?  I changed the cushion cover to match my chair covers. 

Before and after

DIY Stocking Holder Box

We have a beautiful mantle.

I was having a hard time trying to figure out how to decorate it for Christmas because I didn't want to mess the mantle up, after all it's not mine.

So I went to my faithful friend, Pinterest, and came up with this. I didn't want to do the same exact thing because I really didn't want to paint words on it. And i decided to put a bottom in my box too, so if I wanted to weigh it down I could. That way when I fill the stockings up they wouldn't fall off. So, I set on the couch just staring at the unpainted box, just trying to come up with what I wanted to do. 

And this is what I came up with.

About the size of the box: it really depends on what size your mantle is and how many stockings you want to hang. 

Here's how wide my box is. It's not very wide at all, just to give you an idea. 

So, Shannon built the box with more left over wood from the table build. (I'm loving this left over lumber) Then I painted it grey, then red, then sanded it. 

Next I added the hooks. You can use fancier hooks but I already had these. 

Simple white hooks.

Next, I printed off the letters from here and cut out red card stock to glue the letters on. Then I glued painted clothes pins upside down to hold the letters.

Next, add your decorations. I put some burlap in the box so that the decorations would set on the top. The options are limitless. Have fun with it! 

This whole project cost me nothing because I used what I already had. Score!

DIY Glass Bottle Wall Vase

Here is a little project that I made from leftover wood from my table project. It's really hard to find things to hang on the wall here, so I had to get creative.  Again, I got the idea from Pinterest and I'm addicted to Shanty2chic.  You can check them out here.

This is an easy, easy project.  And the good thing is, you can use whatever size bottle that you want.

They sell these great little bottles full of juice here for a little over 2 bucks.

Grape juice bottle.

Now all you need is a board and an adjustable clamp and you've got yourself a great little wall vase. (adjustable clamp=adjustable pipe clamp They cost less than a buck and you can get different sizes.)

The finished project.

I painted my board chocolate first and then painted it white. I then distressed it with sandpaper.  Next screw your clamp to your board and them tighten your jar to the clamp. Then add whatever flower/greenery you want. Or in my case, wheat. 

I love them!

I like it so much that I made two.  

This whole project cost me less than $5 bucks.

The picture came from the market and was purchased by the WM's from Arkansas.


I have a great collection of jars. You just never know what you can use them for, they come in handy. I really want to try painting one.  Oh we will see!

This is a salsa jar that I tied string around and stuck flowers in.  

The Promised Land

We are still needing help purchasing land.  The land that you see in the picture is about 3000 meters and we can purchase it in phases.  The first 1000 meters is going to cost us $60,000-$70,000.  (We are trying to negotiate to $60,000.)  As of right now we have $30,000.  Our church people are really serious about this land purchase and are willing to do whatever it takes to get it.  Our pastor is willing to sell his car for money to help purchase this land.  One of the deacons is even willing to put his house up as collateral to help purchase this land.  (Minimum wage here is about $300 a month and that is what most of our people make.) 

Would you please help our church purchase this land?  Any amount that you give would be greatly appreciated.  You can give by clicking on the link "project" at the top of the page.  

A little clip from church yesterday.

Life in Ecuador

It's been a while since I've posted a personal post, so I thought today would be a good day.

Last week was a hard week because Shannon hurt his back and he was in bed most of the week.  We also spent a day in the ER for his back.  It was just his muscles so he needed an anti-inflammatory.  Funny story, I dropped him off at the ER and then had to go find a parking place.  On my way back in to the hospital I realized that I couldn't find my parking ticket.  It's the ticket that you have to turn in before you leave so they will know how much you have to pay.  I turned around to go look in the car for it and it's no where to be found.  I knew that Shannon would be waiting for me because they won't do anything until I sign papers saying that I would pay for everything.  So I stop looking and go inside.  I go take care of all the paper work and tell Shannon that I can't find the ticket.  We find out that if I can't find the ticket that it's going to cost me $15 to leave.  Which, I was honestly ok with, but it was driving me crazy just knowing that I lost something.  They hooked Shannon up to an anti-inflammatory by IV and I knew that was going to take a while to run through his system, so I decided that I would go back and look one more time for this ticket.  I go back to the car and start digging through everything, looking underneath the seats, etc.  This guy walks up to me (he's the guy that washes cars in the parking lot) and says, you looking for something?  I said, yes, my parking ticket.  He pulls one out of his pocket and says that I can have this one if I wanted it.  He goes on to say that he finds them all the time and hands me the ticket.  I said, is this mine?  He says, no it's another cars across the parking lot.  (Then I started thinking back to when I pulled into the parking space, this was the same guy that asked me if I wanted my car washed before I went into the hospital, the first time)  I look at the ticket and it is the same time that I arrived.   I'm guessing it fell out on the ground and he picked it up and then waited for me to come back to my car to look for it.  Before we left he came back and asked me if the ticket worked and I told him yes.  He then asked me if I would buy him a coke.  I gave him a dollar.  I was played by the car washer at the hospital.  Well, I wouldn't say played because I did loose the ticket.  But I do believe that he knew it was mine and thought he would get a free coke from the deal.  Hey, I guess it was better than paying $15.

Shannon's back is better today.  He's not 100% but he's better.

We are still in the process of purchasing land.  We have found a piece, but it's really expensive.  We are still needing about $30,000.  I still can't believe that a piece of land here that is about the size of 1/4 of an acre costs $60,000-70,000.  That is just crazy to me!  Anyway, if you would like to give towards this land purchase it would be greatly appreciated.  You can find the info at the top of this page under   Project.  We really need to have this land purchased by January or February of 2014.

My health:
I've had a lot of people asking about my health and I'm happy to say that I'm doing great.  I stick to a gluten free diet and feel really good most of the time.  Megan also has an intolerance to gluten.  One thing that we didn't bring with us was gluten free flour.  We ran out of room and just couldn't fit it in.  (I must add this here, Megan wasn't eating gluten free when we left the states.   Because she wanted to enjoy all the foods that we couldn't get here.  It all caught up with her after we arrived back in Ecuador and she got tired of being sick all the time and went back on the gluten free diet.  So when we left the states flour wasn't a priority.)  We do pretty good with what we have, but Megan loves to bake and she can't really do that right now.  We have been able to find several things that we can eat here, one of them being rice noodles.  We just discovered these last week and we are so very thankful.  Pasta was/is my favorite thing to eat.  I did have Jackie and Angelia bring us some gluten free Bisquick and pizza crust mix, but I feel like I hoard it to try and make it last.  For a long time I ate a rice cake and peanut butter for breakfast but I got tired of it and now I eat a small bag of Lay's potato chips.  I'm not lying.  Hey, you do what you gotta do.  I wonder what I will switch to when I get tired of those? So, the first thing on my list to bring back is gluten free flour and gluten free oats.   I will say that it's really easy to get something to eat here when we are out because there is always chicken, rice, and beans to choose from.

Ok, I guess that's enough for now.  Hope you all had a great weekend.

Foto Friday

This is for my friend Tammy, she's doing a link up thingy on her blog.

The picture isn't the greatest but I snapped it while driving down the road.  Shannon was driving, not me.  Anyway, this guy has no legs and he begs for money in the middle of some serious traffic.

A little DIY project.

Here is a great DIY project.

Fruit here comes in all different sizes of "crates", if you want to call them that.

I found this one on the side of the road.  I saw a pin on Pinterest about using old veggie cans as candle holders, so I started saving some of my cans.  

Here's what I used. (sorry for the background of my washer)

I stained the crate and painted my cans.  Then I added some string, candles, and a pumpkin.

Here's the finished project.  

I have a few more projects that I've done trying to decorate my new dining room.  You can see the new dining room here.

I guess I need to add a DIY button to my blog for all these projects.  I will try to do that when I have time.

The wait is over! The project is finished!

Here's what we've been working on.  Let me warn you now, it's long.

I know you haven't been able to sleep because you've been waiting on this post.  haha!

Let me start out by saying that decorating a house in a foreign country can be challenging.  But you've  got to decide that your just going to make it work.  Lots of decorating items are very expensive here so you've got to get creative.  I've done a lot of research on Pinterest and I got a lot of my ideas from there.

So lets begin.

This was our table before.

It's a pretty table with beautiful wood inlay.  However, it's just too formal for my taste.  It worked fine in our other apartment that we had because we had another table where we ate, kinda like a breakfast nook.  But this time this is the only table that we had to eat at, so I wanted something less formal.  (Two kids and a formal table do not go together) We thought about selling the table and just buying another one but it was going to cost anywhere from $750-$1000 and there was no way that I was going to spend that kind of money.

I really, really wanted a farmhouse table.  Oh a farmhouse table here is $2000.  So I did some research on Pinterest and came up with a pattern and asked Shannon if he would help me make it.  (Here is where I found the pattern.  We adjusted it to make ours a little bigger.)  He said, yes!

So we went and found a lumber store, yes, we had to find one, then we bought wood.  Now let me tell you, wood here is not the best quality.  Shannon use to work for a lumber company and he graded lumber and he made the comment that some of the wood we got would have been thrown out in the states.  But, it is what it is and you just got to make the best of it.  Oh, and the only saw we had was a skill saw, we made due.

Cutting our lumber with our awesome skill saw.

Putting our table top together so we can make the base.

Here's the base.

Putting the screws in.

Building our slats.  This is what we used to keep our table top together.

Sanding our table legs. They don't sell 4x4's here so we had to make our own.

Adding more screws to the table top.

Let me add here that a belt sander would have came in handy at this point.  All we had was a palm sander, so that's what we used.  Use what you got, remember?

Before staining we decided to distress it with a chain.

Staining.

Here it is before we moved it upstairs.  It was so heavy that we had to wait until the kids got home from school so they could help us.

Here she is, such a beauty.

Here's the table after we got it upstairs and then we applied polyurethane to the table top.

Ok, next decision was what do we do about chairs.  We could sell our old table and go buy chairs, but that would probably cost us more than we would get out of the old table.  I'm telling you, things are expensive here.  So we decided to re-do the chairs that we had.  It seriously took a lot of time, more time than it took to build the table.  And I know some of you are thinking, how could you mess up beautiful chairs with inlays in them?  If it's not what you like, you do what you gotta do to make them what you like.

Chairs before:

Beautiful formal chair.

If you live in the states I think there is something that you can buy that you could skip this sanding step.  But when you live in Ecuador there is no such thing, so let the sanding begin.

First you've got to do a lot of sanding.  I mean a lot.

Then I went and picked out some material to recover the chairs.

Here's the material that I chose.

Now what color should I paint the chairs?  Decisions, decisions.  I decided I would paint each chair a different color.  I almost chicken out at the last minute, but in the end I went through with it.  So I went and bought paint that matched each color in the material.  You should have seen the lady's face at the paint store when I told her I was painting chairs all different colors.

Here are the colors that I chose.  There's one color missing because I painted one chair white with some paint that I already had.

If you want to distress after you paint I've found the best thing that works, in a foreign country, is flat paint.  If you are in the states you could use chalk paint.

I actually don't have a picture of me painting a chair but let me tell you, it was a lot of work.  Some of the chairs took three coats of paint because some of the paints were different.  That's what you get living in a foreign country, but it is what it is.  I just kept working knowing that the outcome would be awesome.

After the paint is completely dry I sanded the chair again.  It seriously took me 45 minutes to an hour to distress each chair.  There were a lot of details that I wanted to bring out in the chairs.

After that step was complete I had to polyurethane the chairs because I used flat paint.  I was in luck here because they actually had some from the states that was water base and was easy to use.

Next step, replace the seat cushions.

Replacing the fabric on the chairs.

A finished chair.

 Every time I finished a chair I couldn't decide which one I liked better.

They are all so lovely.

And now for the finished product:

I love it.  The total cost for this project was less than $150 bucks, but the labor probably cost $1000. haha!  

I will also be blogging about a few other things that I made from the leftover wood and such.  You probably see them in the picture.

I promise we are doing ministry too.  That's why it took me three weeks to finish this project.  

Colada Morada

We made colada morada at the church over the weekend and we had a great time. Our church people are so fun. You can read about what colada morada is here.

We were making it for Sunday after church so we made about 30 gallons.  

Cutting up lots of fruit.

Cooking the fruit.

Getting ready to make the juice part.  After that's cooked and thickened, you add all the fruit.

Straining out the spices.

Pouring the juice in.

Stirring it.

That's one BIG spoon.

Sitting around waiting for it to get done.

Here's the finished product.  It tastes a lot like blackberry cobbler.