Mix n Chic Style Challenge-Decorate bringing the outdoors in

TGIF . Yesterday flew by.  Have you ever been stuck on decorating ideas and not knowing where to start? I'd like to share some tips with you that I use .  Pick one or two items and let your imagination go wild .  There are no rules when it comes to decorating .  I'll show you how I chose to bring the outdoors in for this design Mix n Chic Style Challenge .   I headed over to Chairish, an online marketplace for vintage and used furniture.  They have a great selection of  Shabby Chic pieces to add to your home.  When the paint is peeling and the metal is rusty, the easier it is to mix it in with any decorating style.

Old door for my garden from Mansion Demo

I had a chance to pick through a mansion built in the late 1800's before we demoulished it. The mansion was located an hour away from my house so I was limited to how much stuff  I could load on the trailer and the back of the pickup truck.

Carriage House of  Mansion Demo

Painted Signs for Shed

Hello Everyone. Glad it's friday. My list of  to-do projects grows everyday and we're already into June. Most of my other projects should of been completed weeks ago.  Since it's been raining every other day this past week, I decided to make some painted signs for one of my sheds.

Garden Ponds

Happy Weekend. I haven't been posting much lately. Sorry . Busy with a million projects and still painting the house. Lots of rain or it's too hot. Changing a lot of things around the yard this year. Rebuilding the vegetable garden fence and getting ready to plant some veggies. Not to mention , doing firewood, still mulching, making a potting bench, baseball, school activities, and chasing a woodchuck that is making a mess of our yard.
I did manage to get the garden ponds up and running and made a couple of bird houses.

front yard pond

                                   

Rain delays Painting House

Hello  I thought I would have some things all wrapped up this week , but the heavy rain has delayed all my big outdoor projects. I am also putting together some other accents for our yard.
Here's a sneak peak at what I've been working on. The front door is finished with the new colors we chose. These colors so much better than the white against the cedar siding , it brings out the grain in the wood.

Rusty Antique Garden Urns and Fountain

Last week while we were at our favorite garden center shopping for our Christmas tree , I fell in love with this old planter that was out by the front gate.  It turned out to be a 2 hour trip because I just kept finding one piece after another and visioned it in our garden.

Let me show you some pieces that I was drooling over for my garden.

Decorated Christmas Tree 2013

We finally got our tree last week and finished decorating it a few days ago. Our tree is put up every year in our Master bedroom.  The room is about 20 x 30 and it seems the best place for our tree.  It has the large doors that go out to the balcony and a great focal point when you come down the driveway.  I use smaller trees throughout the rest of the house.
This year I added some porcelain and ceramic decorations and a lace bow/ribbon for a vintage look.

Wooden Sign Post for the Holidays

If you have no porch at your house to decorate for the holidays , don't worry , you're not alone.  Since I don't have much space to decorate when you come to my front door , I decided to make a post to hang a holiday sign and some decorations.  I had a bunch of scrap wood in the garage and out in the yard.  I grabbed the pieces that were the closest to the size I needed to make the post.

Christmas decorating is late this year

By this time in December , my decorations are out and on display .  I am late this year and lots of reasons why. Busy , busy and busy . Let me tell you why.

I went to this demo / hoarder house that is being torn down sometime tomorrow.  Just look at the  ' junk ' that I loaded into my suv.  It's times like this when I wish I had a box truck. 

Chalk Painted dresser with a stencil

Last year I got this dresser from a woman who was down sizing.  It's old and definitely shows it's age. The top was peeling and part of the hardware is missing.  I thought this would be a great piece to try chalk paint.  I let it sit for awhile out in the garage. That's where my projects await me.

I was looking thru some blogs that I follow and got my inspiration from Red Hen Home (www.redhenhome.blogspot.com).

Haunted Mansion junky picks

Haunted Mansion finds:

Look at the old wainscoting on the wall and the checker board tile on the floor. I bet this house was really nice back in the day.

Here is some of the "junk" I managed to get home after a couple of pickup truck and trailer loads.

Antique bed, I grabbed both of them

There were 2 pedestal sinks and 2 twin beds, doors, shelves, galvanized buckets and barrels.Galvanized chicken feeders, old style flat piano. All the old gardening and farming tools. A little too much to take it all with no place to store it. Chairs , furniture, heavy mirrors and so on. This house had a 12 foot elevator that went from the second floor to the attic, which was like another floor because the ceilings were so high. It was really overwhelming yet exciting,  but I still had the fear of some paranormal activity in the back of my mind. So I grabbed what I could.

Nice antique sign

This is a view of the 1st floor of the carriage house. Homeless people kept breaking in and living here as you can see from the mess.

Back view of the house. The carriage house is to the right of this picture but couldn't get it in this shot. The carriage house construction was beautiful. The post beam timber framing with no nail holes in any of the posts. The plank wood flooring, ceiling wood, doors  were salvageable, but we couldn't get anyone down the east coast to dismantle it for another location. 

We took this Mansion down with over 30 tractor-trailer loads.

Note: Every new flashlight we bought, as soon as we entered the basement, all the flashlights would lose their charge. The big 2 mil. candle watt power flashlights and maglight that you can charge, same thing happened, something creepy about the basement....