The Congers Cubby: Befores and Afters

I don’t know about you guys, but in the winter, I go CRAZY. I miss being outside, tinkering. So I have to come up with projects to keep my hands occupied. Here are just a few “Befores and Afters” that I’ve been working on. We have a play room in our basement that was kind of just blah. I mean there are a million toys down there-but take out all the toys, and you’d never know that it was an actual “Playroom”. So I decided to paint it, nice and bright! My favorite color is actually green-but lately I am LOVING the color orange. It is just a very fun, happy, and bright color. It seems to take all the doom and gloom out of anything and everything. I painted an accent wall-and I LOVE IT! BEFORE:

AFTER:

After painting the one wall we had Clay and Cody “sign” a small wall by the door with their hand prints. I think it turned out pretty cute...but it was missing something-we'll get back to that.

I’m an avid D.I. shopper. I love finding things for a very reasonable price and then putting my own spin on it. Like for instance, the below bookshelf. Found it at the D.I. for $8. I stripped the paint off, sanded it down, and painted it. I think it looks great in the toy room, don’t you? BEFORE:

AFTER:

Here’s another bargain from the D.I. The frame was .75 cents. All I did was pull the back off it, and paint it. Turns out it was the perfect size for the hand prints on the wall in the toy room.

Frames and shirts are my new favorite things from the D.I. I have a picture wall in the works in my front room, and as you know frames are not cheap! But get them at the D.I. and they ARE! Just takes a little bit of paint and there you have a brand new frame.(I don’t have before shots of the frames I painted-bet you can’t tell which ones I got from the D.I.-hint-they aren't the ones without pictures in them)

I also like getting shirts/blouses from there too. 2 weekends ago, I bought a button up maternity shirt for $3. I got it home and altered it, and you can’t even tell that it used to be maternity. (Sorry I don’t have a before/after shot of the shirt either.)This kind of hobby definately comes in handy for work. For the past four years, I've been able to wear whatever I wanted to work. There wasn't really any kind of a dress code except for no mini skirts or spandex (and believe me that's no problem for me!). But as of lately, our dress code has changed. We can wear jeans but we have to "dress them up". Nice shirts, nice shoes-no tennis shoes, flip flops or slippers-and no hoodies or t-shirts or hats. So what's a girl to do when the things that are banned are precisely what her wardrobe is made out of? Go to D.I. of course! Went there today and got 8 new shirts for $29! If you aren't good at math, that's roughly $3.50 a shirt! Now all I need are some decent comfy shoes-trust me-I probably would have gotten those at the D.I. too, had I not ran out of time. I was on my lunch break. I'm pretty proud of my bargain shopping self. Sorry, went off on a tangent there... another project I was working on was the white board beneath the hand prints. A few command strips/hooks and it’s now hanging instead of leaning up against the wall. The problem we were running into, was that Cody was getting into the markers. So we needed an easy, and accessible place for the markers. All I did was push a nail through a rectangular Tupperware dish and hammered it into the wall and TA DA! It’s perfect, and just high enough so that Cody can’t reach it, but Clay can. And now there’s no excuse for not putting the markers away-cause they go right next to the board.

My brother in law Brian, brought home a mail sorter from his work. He said they had no use for it anymore and that they were going to throw it away. If you could only see the light bulb in my brain go on after he showed me the picture and asked me if I wanted it. Of course I did! I have been wanting something like this FOR-E-VER. I am a major scrap booker person-so I’ve always had my eyes on something similar at JoAnn Fabrics, Michael’s, or Hobby Lobby, to sort all my different colors/textures/sizes of paper-but they are so expensive! Not to mention they come in pieces. You can’t just buy a big piece of furniture like this. Each piece is like only 4 trays and about $60 a piece-and then you’re supposed to stack them. How expensive. With my budget, I’d only be able to get one per month-and I wouldn't have as many as I needed for at least a year! So imagine my excitement with this. It was exactly what I needed. It is so convenient.

Here are a few random pictures that I couldn’t resist putting up because in short they sum up our January and beginning of February 2012. My dad (and mom) in a photobooth at a friend’s wedding. The look on my dad’s face is PRICELESS!