One Room Challenge: Week 2

Wow! This week has really flown by!  It’s been an incredibly busy week, and I’ve only had 12-14 hours of time to devote to Week 2 of the One Room Challenge and the office/craft room in the past 7 days.  


Almost two hundred other bloggers and I are in Week 2 of the six-week One Room Challenge, and lots of progress is being made by many!  You can visit Calling it Home to see what the others are up to.  For me, Week 2 was a bit challenging as a result of a very condensed amount of time being available to work, but some changes were made nonetheless. 

Let Them Eat Cake, Volume 3

Hello there!  In reviewing some numbers on the blog recently, I realized that my Let Them Eat Cake post from soon after I began this blog in 2012 is by far my most popular post.  Soon after that original post, I shared a few more in Let Them Eat Cake, Volume 2.  But in the three years since I wrote those first two posts, many more cakes have been enjoyed by friends and family, and I’ll be sharing some of them here in Volume 3.  Take a look; maybe you’ll get an idea for a cake or two of your own!

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How to Reveal a Surprise Trip + Rediscovering my Love for Watercolors, d our Trip to NYC | Homespun by Laura | Create a scrapbook of photos or hand drawings as a gift to reveal a surprise birthday or Christmas trip!

How to Reveal a Surprise Trip, Rediscovering my Love for Watercolors, and Our Trip to NYC – Part 2

Welcome back for Part 2 of the post with the longest title ever! 

I’ve never planned a trip by myself before.  I’ve never surprised anyone with such a big gift, either.  As the time to reveal my plans got closer, I started to worry a little that the Mister wouldn’t like it or that when we actually got there, the trip wouldn’t live up to the hype I’d created.  Also, what if I’d planned too many activities for each day and we wound up rushing from one to the next without fully enjoying each one?  I’m happy to say all these worries were unfounded; somehow I’d allowed the right amount of time for each event and we even had time to wander for a while with no destination.  I just couldn’t stop worrying for a couple of days there.  

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How to Reveal a Surprise Trip + Rediscovering my Love for Watercolors, d our Trip to NYC | Homespun by Laura | Create a scrapbook of photos or hand drawings as a gift to reveal a surprise birthday or Christmas trip!

How to Reveal a Surprise Trip, Rediscovering my Love for Watercolors, and Our Trip to NYC – Part 1

The Mister had a big birthday this year, and I spent the three months leading up to it planning a surprise trip to New York City to celebrate.  I bought the tickets, made the reservations, and planned out an itinerary that I was totally pumped about.  The next step was to come up with a fun, exciting, and original way to reveal it since it was his gift from me. 

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DIY Painted Initial Pillow

Hello and happy Harry Potter’s birthday!  This month really flew by and I can’t believe that August will begin tomorrow.  July was full of vacations and family time, but it’s back to the real world, and I’m excited to share a quick and easy little project that can add a lot of personality to any room.  I’ve been meaning to share it for about two months now, but when they go by as fast as July did, it’s hard to keep up!  

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Projects for my Parents: Part 3

The third and final project that we completed for our Mother’s Day/Father’s Day Work Weekend last month was to create and install a shelf above the microwave in my parents’ kitchen.  For the first 27 or 28 years that we lived here (it just feels weird to only say ‘they lived here’ and exclude myself from it even though I moved out over seven years ago), there was a giant built-in microwave.  A couple years ago, though, it finally died, and my parents had to buy a new one.  The new one is much smaller than the first and looked so lonely in such a large opening.  And when my dad sawed off the wooden trim to remove the old broken microwave, some of the trim turned out a little uneven and needed to be smoothed out. 

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