THE 7-UP CHRISTMAS TREE

 

 

 

 

 

This year I put my Christmas tree in a vintage 7-UP crate. Our tree is a gorgeous faux blue spruce

4 ft tall tree. I bought it years ago from The Bay in downtown Vancouver.

 

Below left you can see the tree is just being set up and started to get decorated.

Below right all the lights are strung and the tree is all trimmed.

 

 

When your family is young and you have children running around the house Christmas is very much

 about them. And this includes decorating for Christmas too. You trim the tree with the kids and each

 ornament you put on the tree brings back memories of past holidays. Once the kids have moved out

 and are setting up their own homes and their own trees it's time to decorate for yourselves. For some

it is a very hard concept but just like anything in life you must teach yourselves to do. 

 

 

Start out with the thought "I get to decorate the way I want"

And try to start early in the season so you have many days and nights to enjoy your hard work.

My house does not get Christmasified in a day, one area gets worked on each day over a week.

As each area starts to glitter with lights it spurs me on to want to do a little more somewhere else in our home.

 

 

 

 

Decorating for yourself to enjoy is just as important as decorating for your family to enjoy.





MUD ROOM MAKE OVER

Our mudroom had been consumed by water bottles, pop cans, discarded boxes, and all the other

crap I didn't want to see in the main part of the house. Time had come to reclaim this room and one

morning of surfing Pinterest got me motivated to start. Type in "AWESOME MUDROOMS" and see what you get.

Day 1, was a cooler morning as it had rained the night before. I was feeling the need to stay inside,

do some cleaning and eventually a great deal of purging. I had plenty of plastic bins that I could

fill and they would work just fine outdoors. So when George got home he had a stack of full bins

 waiting for him to take to the shed. Thank you honey do! The shed will be made over some other day.

Cleaning up the clutter went quickly also thanks to George dealing with the bottles the week before.
 This room is a small addition (5.5ft x 7ft) built around the back door of the trailer. It is not heated
 and in the winter it is cold. Keeping shoes and coats in there is off limits. I couldn't find the right use
 for the room, until now ...

Welcome to the new Etsy Shop!

Handles, knobs, hooks, and castors don't get too upset when they are a bit cold. All the Etsy stock has
 been over whelming the other rooms in the house. I was tripping over bags sitting in the living room,
sharing space in my dressing room, and the worst was giving up the kitchen island to constant piles of
 hardware in some state of being finished. Now it's all contained in this one space, even the work surface.

Day 2 went a lot slower. This was the day to fill and organize all the baskets, buckets, bins, and boxes
 with labels. Gathering all the hardware around the house was so much fun, I was finding new space
 in almost every room. Once the room started to come together with the bench I designed and built, I
wanted to add a soft edge for when we work in there so I hit Home Sense and bought this rug.

The rug is the only item purchased for this makeover, everything else we had.
The window on the back wall looks out to a storage area so I created a new view with a vintage
mirrored window, it makes the room feel bigger and reflects more of the light from the chandelier.

There is a bit more to this makeover which includes the chandelier and a custom paint job
but that will have to wait for another day ...

But there are a couple more photos in the home tour if interested:
http://4theloveofwood.blogspot.ca/p/our-house.html
 

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Here are some unique hardware pieces available at

FIRSTFINDS HARDWARE STORE