You may have noticed that I didn’t have a blog post on Monday, or on Wednesday (maybe someone noticed?).  As it turned out, for the last week or so I had a number of irons in the fire, but nothing that was both completed and felt blog-worthy.

The first big project was fixing/replacing a section of our very rickety privacy fence.

Last winter the 24′ section that was 3′ tall behind my fern bed toppled over.  It was pretty well disguised by the ferns that grow tall enough to hide it, but here’s a photo that will give you just a hint of what it looked like.

Those ferns tend to die back early, so it was time for some sort of solution.  We debated just pulling out that section and going fenceless there.  That option seemed pretty reasonable when looking at the area in summer when the ferns are taller than the fence was anyway.

But that’s only good for about 3 months out of the year, for the rest of the year we needed something to block the multiple vehicles in the neighbor’s driveway.  Luckily I have some really awesome neighbors who are good at DIY, and have lots of tools, and access to cheap labor (high school kids who need a little cash).  So all of that added up to replacing that 3′ tall section of fence with a 6′ tall section instead.

It was still a big job and took about two days to complete.

The other big job I’m working on is painting that hutch that I purchased a few weeks back at a garage sale.

I have it mostly painted, but I’m waiting on some supplies for finishing it up, so it’s kind of at a standstill for now.

Meanwhile, I did squeeze in a couple of smaller projects in between the bigger ones, such as this cutting board.

It was a fun little project, but there is really only so much you can say about painting a cutting board, so it didn’t seem worthy of its own blog post.

I painted it in Dixie Belle’s Dried Sage, then I added the artichokes from I.O.D.’s Melange paint inlay.  Then I felt like it needed just a little something more, so I added the ‘Albert Ruoff’ and the ‘1842.’ from one of the 8″ German Grain Sack stencils from ellen j goods.

Another small project I completed this week was this pair of shoe forms.

I purchased these at a garage sale quite some time ago … dare I say several years ago?

If these had a really cool original patina, I would have left them alone.  But I thought they could be improved with a paint job.  So sometime last year I painted one of them in Dixie Belle’s Drop Cloth and one of them their Midnight Sky.  Then I attempted to add some transfers, but instead of the transfer sticking to the paint, the paint stuck to the transfers and pulled right off.  I suspect that these forms had been ‘spruced up’ with some kind of oil or wax before I purchased them, thus causing adherence problems.

So I ending up pushing them to the back of the shelf where they sat for the last year or so.

But I pulled them out recently and gave them both a good sanding.  I thought the one that was originally painted in Drop Cloth looked pretty good, so I simply added a crown and some small wording from a Tim Holtz transfer.

Wouldn’t it have been more fun if that transfer said ‘non-collector’??  LOL.

I decided to paint up the 2nd one in a similar way.  So I gave it two coats of Drop Cloth, and then sanded heavily to distress.  I followed that up with another crown and some wording.

I also added a little number to the heel.

And there you have it.  Two big projects, and two small projects.

Hopefully I’ll have a few more fun things to share with you guys next week, so be sure to stay tuned!