A Springtime Farmhouse Update

Hey folks. Spring has finally arrived, though Old Man Winter keeps trying to have one last hurrah in the form of frost and freeze warnings once a week or so but for the most part, we're enjoying temps in the 60s and everything is greening up. 

Free artwork! Embroidery hoops and vintage feedsack fabrics.

We've been really busy the last 6 weeks readying our farmhouse for the arrival of guests this spring and summer. We are doing a lot of repurposing, upcycling, using found objects to make things we need, hitting yard sales, estate sales and of course, my beloved thrift stores, in a quest to spend minimal money but have a comfortable, relaxing home. So far, we've built a deck and a king size bed frame all from recycled pallets, we've put in a tiny walkway to the front door, and we've reused items we already had to create new spaces in other rooms. 

Perfect spot to read a book or enjoy a cup of coffee. One end of the hallway upstairs. Overlooks the front yard and the beautiful mountains.

We finally have two proper guest rooms!! The twin room was put together when we moved in last fall but the other bedroom was our 'staging area' for boxes. When the weather turned and it was too cold to continue unpacking, that room got put on hold. We've finally cleared it out and furnished it with a king size bed. I will be putting the finished touches on it later today, and then it too will be complete.  

The Twin Size Guest room is complete. A comfortable, bright and airy room perfect for two. 

We also put in a second coffee bar upstairs in the hallway near the guest rooms and our offices. It's smaller than the main coffee bar but perfect so that guests don't have to head all the way downstairs if they want an early morning cup of coffee or if we're working and are too lazy to go fetch a refill. Cost: $0! I had things on hand to use in this area -- a cabinet I bought at a yard sale in Maryland in 2007, an extra coffee maker, vintage canisters, a vintage syrup dispenser that holds the powder (shelf stable!) creamer. 

A second coffee bar located upstairs near the guest rooms. Small but functional! 

As always, the farmhouse is a work in progress. We still want to do landscaping but the weather has been very rainy for the last month. We feel lucky when it's a day without rain so we can stay on top of the mowing, but hopefully once May rolls around we'll be able to plant flowers and do some curb appeal to the front of the house. We are thoroughly enjoying the front porch with the views of the mountains for both morning coffee and evening happy hours. It is nice as is but once we get some projects complete out there, it is going to be even more amazing. 

The view from the front porch. It's beautiful in every season.

What spring projects are you working on? 

Next time: the $100 deck project and the $65 King Size Bedroom Makeover

Our Farmhouse Coffee Room

Hey folks. It's been a busy month. We're slowly getting things unpacked and put away and I really didn't expect to still be doing those things almost a month in but life happens. 

We buckled down on Tuesday and really focused on finishing up the room off our kitchen. We have a much larger dining room off the other side of the kitchen, so we decided to turn this one into our own coffee cafe kind of room. The man and I both LOVE coffee so it's fitting. It is so cozy and just perfect for sitting and having a cup or two (3,4 etc) of coffee. You can see the mountains out the windows and we just love how it turned out. 

This is the view of the room from the kitchen:

There's a door to right, near the aprons, that leads to the hallway. This is the view of the room from that doorway: 

This was kind of an unintentional theme. We didn't go into this thinking 'oh, lets use red and fruit and make it look like Grandma's kitchen' but that's what I  had on hand and I love it, even though *MY* colors of choice are pink and aqua but I think it turned out lovely! I had a lot of old wooden handle utensils so I decided to do a display on one wall of those:

I have long been a hoarder of vintage aprons. Those have a whole wall to themselves. I finally have a space big enough to hang up two of those expandable racks. In my last kitchen, I had just a small space so I hung up one rack and crammed all the aprons I could fit onto it. I like it much better this way: 

Both windows have built in shelves above the curtain rods. I totally took advantage of that space and displayed some of my vintage choppers, sifters and tins. I now have 3 of these sifters with apples on them. Oops! Anyway, I think it's a good look and ties in with the fruit theme: 

This is a cheap-o $7 decorator side table from Wal-Mart. And a thrifted $1.50 tablecloth that I've had for probably 7 years! The chairs were also yard sale finds that I paid $5 for back in 2007. They faded a bit last year on my porch but I still love them. Small enough to fit in the coffee room and perfect for sitting and staring at the mountains: 

And finally, the star of the show and the whole reason for this room -- the coffee bar itself. This old dresser was gifted to my mom from my grandpa probably 20 years ago. He'd received it from an elderly lady some years prior. It wasn't in pristine condition, and of course, wasn't some priceless antique so a couple of years ago, mom and I painted it white and changed out the knobs and pulls to reproduction glass found at Hobby Lobby. I took a $3 vinyl tablecloth and cut it to size and then stapled it around the underneath edges to create a neater, easier to clean surface for the sticky spoons and coffee rings. We have a selection of Torani flavored syrups and K-cups, then above, Mason jars filled with all sorts of flavored coffees. The chrome Tea canister holds the filters, the Coffee canister has regular coffee. In the top drawers of the dresser, we have a selection of tea and extra K-cups. The larger drawers hold other coffees and some vintage Tupperware: 

We are so in love with our farmhouse!! This room has really been a good motivator for getting the rest of the place put together so that's what we're working on today. Our forecast is calling for a snow storm this weekend. I can hardly believe I'm typing that but we're excited. If we're snowed in for a couple of days, we should really have plenty of time to finish every room. 

A New Home Sweet Home

Hello!! Lots of changes have been happening. We moved -- again!! We quickly realized that the old farmhouse we were renting was entirely too small and didn't offer enough storage space, let alone room for guests, and then after a scary-snake-beside-my-bed incident in August, that kind of made our decision to move become even more urgent. 

After some stressful weeks where we were sure we weren't going to get our current place due to clerical errors, we finally received the call that the place was ours. We moved in a week ago yesterday and are IN LOVE!! It's much, much larger: we have 5 bedrooms as opposed to the 2 in the old place, and at 2700 sq feet, we can now have guests! It's still an old farmhouse, though this one is in MUCH better condition, and the views are to die for! 

We're still trying to unpack and get everything put away but it's much easier now that there is room for all of our stuff!! We're thoroughly enjoying fall here in Maggie Valley, too. It's so much quieter than Asheville and we love not having 6 lanes of traffic and 400 stop lights to sit through! My mom, niece and sister came up last weekend to help us move stuff from storage into the house and get started putting things away. It still looks like a bomb went off in here but we're managing to get it all done. Hopefully we'll knock another room off the list today and I'll have lots of new pics to share soon.

VTT - Vintage Aprons

I'm participating in Vintage Thingies Thursday for the first time in forever. Check out the others that are also participating over at ColoradaoLady's blog. 

For years, I've had a bit of an obsession with collecting vintage aprons. I have them hanging in my kitchen, in my pantry, in storage boxes. I don't find them as often anymore since moving from Maryland, but on occasion, one will pop up here and there. I keep the ones that match my decor and then instead of hoarding all of them, I put some in my Etsy shop to share the wealth with others. Here are some of my latest acquisitions. 

VTT - Vintage Bath Towels

Hola, vintage peeps. Today, I'm going to participate in Vintage Thingies Thursday, hosted by the lovely Colorado Lady. Please stop in and visit!! 

Today, I'm showcasing my love affair with vintage towels. The patterns are so fab! 

The colors are (mostly) delicious! 

The quality is unlike anything you'll find today, as evidenced by the fact that these babies are still in great condition some 40 years later. 

Towels I bought 3 years ago are not in this same condition. It's true when they say "they just don't make 'em like they used to". Sad, isn't it? 

Thanks so much for stopping by to check out my vintage towel collection. Find towels like this in my Etsy shop!

Destashing Again

It's that time again - time to tidy up the linens, clean out the cutters and make room for a new batch of yummy goodies. For months (years?!) I've been meaning to take these bins of cutter sheets and make fat quarters and squares out of them. My space and time just doesn't permit such activities so I decided to put them into like-color bundles and list them on Etsy.

 

 Green Gingham Sheets $25

The other week, my mom and dad came to MD to retrieve the rest of my stuff from my old house and take it to SC. While here, I let my mom rummage through the cutter boxes and pull out any sheets she loved.

 Hot Pink Sheets $33.50 

Mom pulled out lots of pretty coordinating sheets to start her sewing business with. Those sheets are going to make gorgeous aprons and other wearables!! 

Olive Green Sheets $33.50

I'm so glad she took so many sheets off my hand the other week -- I cannot imagine how many I would have to list if they were all still here!! And despite my best (recent) efforts to only buy sheets that are in excellent condition, it never fails that after I get home from a day of thrifting and start sorting through all of the newly acquired linens, I run across a couple that have a small flaw here or there that I didn't notice while I was in the store. Now, instead of just throwing them into the cutter bins, I'll go ahead and match them up with other cutters in the same color family and list them for all of the quilters and crafty people to use!

 

Orange Butterflies and Stripes $33.50

All of these cutter bundles ship in a medium Flat Rate Priority Box, so that's perfect!! Normally, I can only fit one sheet into a Flat Rate Envelope, which mails for $5, so this is really saving a lot of money on shipping!!  Perfect for building a stash, too!

Linens. Lots and Lots of Linens

My  mom was here visiting last week and she helped me sort through, iron and photograph hundreds of linens. It was a very time consuming task, one which I'm still doing on a daily basis. It's nice that my stash of vintage sheets is mostly ironed and organized. Seeing all of the pretty patterns sitting together on the shelving unit in my guest room makes me happy. The editing of pictures and creating new listings is a long, long process. I'd say I'm maybe halfway through. Maybe. 

The weather was terrible while my mom was here. It was cold and rainy with some snow showers almost every day, which meant that we didn't get to do any of the touristy stuff like we'd planned. We completely missed out on the Cherry Blossoms but we did manage to get 3 days of thrifting in!! We took a nice drive to Pennsylvania one day, went to a great resale shop, had lunch at a delicious little Mom & Pop kind of place, stopped in our favorite little market. We spent a whole day thrifting here in MD at 3 of the best thrifts around and I really resisted the urge to buy every vintage sheet I found. I only bought the ones that I knew were going to sell right away!! 

Mom left on Friday to go home and I've been working every day trying to get all of the listings done and be 'caught up', if there is such a thing. I don't know when/if I'll ever get to that point though!! 

 Saturday night, I went dancing and had a fabulous time, as always. Then, after 4 hours of sleep that night, I thought it would be a great idea for the honey and I to get dressed and go into DC to see the Cherry Blossoms, despite my legs throbbing from all of the dancing the night before. Well, shortly after hopping on the Metro, I started to feel so motion sick and thought I'd end up yakking on the train but I survived and we finally made it down to the Smithsonian stop. We walked. And walked. And walked and walked and walked. Stood in line for 30 minutes to buy chicken tenders that had too much breading and not enough chicken and cold fries. Went to see the Lincoln Memorial, watched a drum group perform, decided it was time to leave around 5 that night. I didn't take a single picture -- we missed the pretty pink blooms and they were just plain white when we got there. Pretty but not really a picture worthy kind of day. And the crowds were ri-damn-diculous! It's like people forget their manners and/or common sense when they get out in a crowd. 

So, anyway, I've been job hunting again for the last week or so. No luck. Big surprise there. I just really don't know what I'm going to do. I am trying to avoid at all costs having to move back to SC but ugh. It's like I can't catch a freaking break here. I was told by the ex that if I could swing the payments for the house, he'd 'rent' it to me. Well, without a job, that's going to be impossible. And furthermore, it's so damn expensive here that I just really don't know that I'd want to waste that much money on rent every month. I don't want to be house poor and living in fear every month, wondering how we're going to be able to afford the basics. I'm trying to have faith that things will work out but after searching for a job for the last YEAR, and not having found one, I'm starting to lose hope. 

Once again, I have no real pictures of things to share other than all of the yummy linens. I hope my readers don't mind seeing pictures of things I'm hawking on Etsy. Seems like some of the blogs I read only really publish posts or pictures when they add something new anyway.