garage sale finds.

Published on by Quandie12 Comments

My friend opK and I headed out to the Inver Grove city-wide garage sales last Friday and I found a nice little pile of goodies.

I will say that we stopped off at quite a few of what I like to call ‘you should have gotten a dumpster’ sales.  It always boggles the mind what some people will take the time to set out for a garage sale.  Things like previously worn bras, or stained Tupperware.  I also saw lots of the things that I sent to Goodwill as part of my Swedish Death Cleaning, like cut glass serving bowls and such.

But luckily there were 66 sales to choose from in a semi-concentrated area, so we were able to quickly move on from the stained Tupperware sales (as opK likes to call them) and continue looking for gems amid the rubble.

Let’s take a look at what I brought home.

First up, I found a small black vintage suitcase.

I plan to add a stencil to it for Christmas.  Is that weird?  I’ve done a handful Christmas suitcases in the past, and they can be hit or miss as far as selling them goes.

But I rather love them, so I think I’ll give it a shot.

Next up, this fabulous toolbox.

This one has already been painted and I think the patina on that existing paint job is pretty sweet.  However, it has some stains that I don’t love, so I may just add a quick coat of Dixie Belle’s Drop Cloth to clean it up.  I’m planning to paint the interior as well, and will probably add some transfers to the exterior.

I snatched up this crystal doorknob at one sale.

I’m not sure yet whether I’m going to actually put it on one of my doors, or take it apart and add bottle brush Christmas trees like this …

Over the years I have replaced the majority of our door knobs with either black or white enamel knobs, but I still have a couple of plain brass knobs on some closet doors in the bedrooms, maybe I’ll switch one of those out for crystal.

I couldn’t resist this minnow bucket

It looks great for fall with the addition of a simple potted mum.

The price was right on this watering can … or is it technically an oil can?  I’m not sure.

Either way, I plan to dress this one up and will likely hang onto it for the next Carriage House sale.  FYI, I’m leaning towards having my sale in mid to late May next year and giving it a garden theme.

I was amazed to spot this next item in someone’s ‘free’ pile.

Won’t that be a fun makeover?  Stay tuned for that!

I also nabbed this kid sized chair, mainly because I love the color.

I’m not at all sure what I’m going to do with it though.

I found some fantastic vintage ornaments at one of the last sales we visited.

The seller told me that they’d belonged to his mother’s grandmother or some such thing (sorry, it was a bit of a convoluted tale) and he estimated they were 100 years old.  One of the boxes has a small label that says “Poland A 346 S 1 doz” on it, so I’m sure these are at least pre-WWII.

There were three broken ones out of 2 dozen, so that wasn’t too bad.  I have replaced the broken ones with others from my stash, cleaned up the boxes and then nestled the ornaments in some Tim Holtz tissue paper.  I plan to sell these at the shop this holiday season (unless someone wants to snatch them up sooner).

It took the last of my cash to buy them, but I think they were worth it.

Find of the day status goes to this next item from that same sale.

It wasn’t a bargain at $15, but I still snatched it up.  I very rarely find these toppers anymore, even at antique stores.  Although this isn’t the prettiest one I’ve ever seen, it will be a great addition to my non-collection that I display in a painted toolbox for Christmas.

All in all, I’d say we had a pretty successful day at the Inver Grove sales.

Which find would have been your favorite?  Leave a comment and let me know.

this was a rough one.

Published on by Quandie12 Comments

Good morning from the garden.

Well … I have to say, this gardening season is coming to a close on a less than stellar note.

It started out great.  Although the deer once again ate most of my tulips, I had some lovely daffodils and grape hyacinths in the spring.

My peonies were gorgeous, although short-lived as usual.

The alliums were lovely this year too.

I had great success with my clematis after fertilizing it in the spring for the first time.

We did end up getting a hail storm at the end of May which damaged a few of my hostas.

Then, things kind of started going downhill from there.  As I’ve mentioned way too many times, we had a really wet summer.  Lots of rain, and lots of wind.  We lost a good sized branch from our pear tree in one storm giving it a lopsided look.

So much scary wind led to my neighbor/handyman Ken having the beautiful maple tree in his backyard removed … leaving a rather sun scorched landscape where once there was a shady oasis.

Everything I have growing in that back perennial bed is looking really stressed now after going from partial shade to full sun.  I’m trying to look at the bright side though, no pun intended.  I was able to put in a row of Quick Fire Fab hydrangeas …

And I plan to re-work that entire “L” shaped perennial bed in the spring, pulling out the shade plants and replacing them with some sun loving things.

Because we’ve had so much wet weather this year, my lilacs have a bad case of leaf spot fungus which causes their leaves to turn brown and fall off.  This is happening all over our area, and many lilacs look far worse than mine.

The wet weather has also given us a massive crop of earwigs and slugs, and they’ve made mincemeat of my hostas.

A week or two ago I mentioned that at this point the panicle hydrangeas were the only thing still looking good in my garden.

I think it was the very next day that we had a torrential rainfall that practically flattened them.

The giant flowers were so heavy after being saturated with rain.  There was one large section that broke off completely, but I was hoping the rest would bounce back as they dried out.  Unfortunately, they weren’t able to stand back up again.

That being said, they are still gorgeous.  Just a little droopy.

And that brings me to my most recent discovery.  It appears that I have jumping worms.

If you remember, I posted about jumping worms back in May.  They are a non-native earthworm that strips the nutrients from top soil.  And according to Ramsey County they are an emerging problem in our area.  They can be introduced to your garden in mulch, compost and potted plants.

Little did I realize at the time that I would end up having a problem with them myself.

It was the beginning of August when I started to notice that I seemed to have far more worms in my garden than usual.  I thought it was just due to the wet weather.  But then I noticed that my soil was looking funny.  Sort of crumbly.

Then I realized that a patch of creeping sedum that I had was dying off.  I could pull it right out of the ground, it didn’t seem to have any roots left at all.  As I was pulling it, I noticed that the worms were in abundance in that area, and the soil that held the sedum just crumbled away.

Now, creeping sedum is shallow rooted by nature, and this particular patch was growing over flagstone.  So, it was extremely shallow rooted.

That being said, I’d had that patch of sedum for a couple of decades or more.  Here it is in happier days.

It grew right over that flagstone.  And now it’s completely dead.

I’ll also point out, as you can see, that the English ivy is still doing just fine.  It can literally grow without any soil at all, so apparently it’s a good choice if you have jumping worms.

So far the creeping sedum is the only obvious victim of the worms in my garden, but I don’t know what the future will hold for the rest of the plants.  Fortunately many of my hostas have been there for a long time and are really well rooted in.  Hopefully that will save them.

Also, I’ve read that the jumping worm population grows exponentially in a wet year v. a dry one.  So it’s possible that this isn’t the first year I’ve had them, but just the first year that they have been this bad.  This summer’s wet weather strikes again.

The problem is, so far there are no definitive solutions for eradicating jumping worms.  I’m not going to go into all of the details here, but if you are looking for more info on jumping worms and possible ways to deal with them you can check out this link.

I’m going to have to do some experimenting to try and mitigate their damage.  Also, I will no longer be sharing plants from my garden with others which is a bit of a bummer.  But better safe than sorry, right?

As as sidebar, if you grabbed one of my sedum cuttings at the Carriage House sale, don’t worry.

The cuttings were taken from the tops of a taller sedum (not a creeping variety), and potted up in new potting soil.  They would not have contained jumping worms or their eggs.

So at this point, I’m ready to throw in the towel on gardening.  I’ve always struggled with garden burnout around now, but this has been a rough one for sure.  I think I’ll be happy to button things up for a long winter’s nap.  I’m sure next spring I’ll be ready to face it all again.

How about you?  Are you ready to call it good for gardening season this year?  Leave a comment and let me know.

just taking up space.

Published on by Quandie19 Comments

You may have noticed that I’ve been slowing down a bit lately when it comes to sharing projects here on the blog.  That’s because I’ve been focused on something else.  Swedish death cleaning.

Let me explain.  First off, if you haven’t heard of Swedish death cleaning, the most basic description is that it’s the process of getting rid of stuff that you no longer need/use, and that no one in your family is going to want after you die.  The idea is to save your family from having to clear out a lifetime of stuff once you’re gone.

I haven’t actually read the book, or seen the TV series, so I really don’t know much about how it’s supposed to work.  But for me, I just realized that our house was full of stuff that we no longer use and that no one (family or otherwise) is going to want when Mr. Q and I are gone.  It will be so much easier to just gradually start to go through it without having any sort of deadline.

Now, don’t worry.  This wasn’t precipitated by any kind of ill-health, nobody is going to die any time soon, but I did turn 60 on my last birthday so I can’t pretend like I’m ‘middle-aged’ anymore either.

So far I’ve gotten rid of two van loads of stuff that went to the Goodwill, a few electronics that will go to the hazardous waste facility, and one entire metal filing cabinet full of stuff.

The first thing to go was old paperwork.

That was a bit of a process since it involved looking everything over to determine what should be shredded and what could just be thrown away.  I had tax returns going back 20 years.  Those got shredded.  I also had a huge stack of various instruction manuals for appliances, and in many cases I no longer even had the appliance.  Those all got thrown.  If I need to know how to use something, I can look it up online.  I had old copies of resumes, and other work related paperwork although I’ve been retired for going on three years now.  Those got tossed as well.

Once all the paperwork was gone, I realized that the cabinet could go too.  We put it out at the curb with a ‘free’ sign on it one evening, and the next morning we woke up to find that someone had taken two of the drawers.  Argh!  What the heck?  What were we going to do with a filing cabinet that was missing two drawers?

Fortunately, the person came back later and left a note saying that they wanted the cabinet, but had to find a truck.  We offered to deliver it and were happy to see it go.

Another huge category of discarded stuff was serving dishes.  I had serving dishes of all kinds; large glass bowls, glass platters, silver-plate items.

I can’t even remember the last time we used most of them.  I kept the serving dishes that we use at Thanksgiving, and a couple of platters for bringing brownies to a pot-luck, but the rest went.

I also got rid of some barware.

We just don’t entertain like we used to.  Plus that wine opener was a duplicate, do I really need two of them?

I did hesitate for a second over those really adorable stir sticks.

Aren’t they fun?  But we’ve never actually used them.  They’ve just been gathering dust in a cupboard.  They got the ax too.

There were some items that we never use that didn’t get sent to Goodwill though.  Instead, I decided it was time to use them.

That included my ‘good’ silverware.

OK, I know, it’s a bit dated.  But maybe it’s just old enough to be called vintage?  Well, probably not.  I think it’s pretty though, and it’s a much better quality than the cheap silverware we were using every day.  So I sent the cheap silverware to the Goodwill and filled the silverware drawer with this stuff.

Not only did we donate several van-loads of goods, we also filled up our trash can for weeks.  I had a huge box of old photos that I went through and pared down.  Remember when we used to get film developed?  And you could get doubles?  I always got doubles!  And probably 85% of those photos weren’t even good ones.

I even threw away my high school year books.  I never look at them, why keep them?

I did draw the line at my scrapbooks.

Although I don’t look at them all that often, I just can’t quite bring myself to part with them.  Perhaps when I’m in my 80’s I’m going to want to go back and look through them and remember how absolutely frigid it was sailing through the Wachau Valley in November 2014.

Speaking of scrapbooks, it was time to get rid of scrapbooking supplies that I was never going to use.  I think 2014 might have been the last time that I seriously worked on a scrapbook.  I have done a handful of smaller projects since then, like the index card project from 2019 or the altered recipe box scrapbook from last year.

So I am still hanging onto some of my favorite supplies.

A goodly amount of expired jars of spices also made their way to the trash can, along with other expired items from the pantry.

My Watkins spices were still good though.

I’m definitely not done yet.  I still have quite a few cupboards and drawers to go through.  And although I cleaned out the carriage house for my sale back in June, I need to go back and do a much more thorough job out there.

That job might require a trip to the dump.  Does anyone need any antique bed side rails?  Because I have half a dozen of them in there.  When you turn beds into benches, you no longer need the side rails.

I always feel like a weight has been lifted when I get rid of stuff that is just taking up space.

That being said, I still have all of my non-collections.  I have a rule about them, I only collect things that I’m going to display and/or use on a regular basis.  So I still have my ironstone …

And I still have my vintage alarm clocks and cameras, as well as my tiny furniture.

I’m pretty sure that no one in my family is going to want any of my non-collections after I’m gone.  And technically, I don’t ‘need’ or ‘use’ these things.  So I want to add one extra caveat to the Swedish death cleaning concept.  If the items will make for an amazing estate sale, then they are also worth hanging on to 😉

Now, how about you?  Is your house full of items that will make for a spectacular estate sale?  Or are there lots of things that are just taking up space?  Leave a comment and let me know.

the rose botanical cupboard.

Published on by Quandie10 Comments

I popped over to my friend Amy’s garage sale last Friday and came away with some fun stuff!

Some of you may remember when I shared a tour of Amy’s house back at Christmas 2021.

I absolutely love her style, and find it really inspiring, so be sure to check that out if you haven’t seen it.

First up I purchased this pair of kid-sized wooden schoolhouse chairs from Amy.

I plan to dress these up for Christmas with paint and stencils like others I’ve done in the past (here, here and here).

I also purchased this amazing Mill Work sign.

At 8′ wide, it’s pretty large, but I’ve always been looking for something like this to make an impact on the large blank wall of barnwood paneling in our dining room.

Finally, I grabbed a few different cupboard doors to turn into signs including this one.

I loved the crackled paint and that vintage glass knob.

I wanted to keep the crackle, but clean things up a bit. So I gave it a good scrub, and then just applied one coat of Dixie Belle’s Putty.  Once dry, I sanded over it to reveal the crackle and some of that original white.

After vacuuming up the dust, I added a couple of roses from the I.O.D. Rose Botanical transfer set.  After those were applied, I finished everything off with a coat of Dixie Belle’s clear wax.

It was a super simple makeover, yet quite satisfying.

What do you think?  Leave a comment and let me know.

a whisk broom wreath.

Published on by Quandie24 Comments

Remember my non-collection of whisk brooms?

I’ve used them as props in so many photos!  This next one being one of my all-time favorites.

I initially started accumulating them because I wanted to make a wreath, but even after I had enough for that I still hadn’t made one.

So I put price tags on them and put them in my Carriage House sale back in June.

Maybe one or two of them sold, I’m not sure, but most of them didn’t.  For that matter, that really cool bucket didn’t sell either.

So I said to myself, ‘you know what?  I’m going to make that damn wreath after all!’

First I went to pinterest to see if I could find any examples of a whisk broom wreath, but I didn’t find anything there.  Next I just simply googled ‘whisk broom wreath’ and I ended up on Ki Nassauer’s Lived-In Style online membership magazine.

Now I’ve been a fan of Ki for a long time.  Back in the day she had an occasional sale over on the other side of the Twin Cities.  She also was the original inspiration behind the Bachman’s Idea House (back when it was awesome).  She has since moved away from Minnesota, and the Idea House was never the same.

The Lived-In Style online magazine requires a membership fee of $6 per month.  Normally I don’t go for that sort of thing (because you sign up and are perpetually charged each month until you finally remember to cancel your membership three years down the road, yada, yada, yada), but I decided to bite the bullet and pay my $6 to see if there were any good tips on making the wreath.

Comically, when I finally got to the article the instructions were as follows:

“Arrange them on a wire wreath form, with the handles pointed toward the center and the threaded areas aligned as much as possible. Wire the brooms to the frame.”

And that was literally it.  It was one short paragraph, with one photo.

So I gathered up my supplies …

and then started laying out my brooms.

I started by spacing out the larger brooms, and then I filled in with the smaller ones.

I did get one take-away tip from Ki, to align the threaded areas on the brooms.  I hadn’t done that before the photo above, but I did later.

The next challenge was to figure out exactly how to wire them to the form without the wires showing on the front.  I began with a lightweight floral wire.

For the life of me, I could not get that wire through the brooms.  I fiddled around with it for a while, but no go.  So I switched to a heavier weight wire, but again it was a no go.

So I decided to keep it simple and just use hot glue.

I whipped out the tackle box that holds my hot glue supplies and got to work.

I found that I needed to weigh down the wire frame to make good contact with the brooms as the glue hardened, so I just used a couple of bricks and a heavy rock for that.

And that was it.

I flipped it over and hung it on the potting shed.

Now, I’m not at all sure how well the hot glue is going to hold up to the elements.  We’ll see if it lasts the entire fall season or not.  Also, as you can see, it took 13 whisk brooms to make a complete wreath, so accumulating that many might take some time.  Especially if you’re hoping to find them for $1 each at garage sales.

But I think it’s a fun and unique fall decoration.

What do you think?  Leave a comment and let me know.

hydrangeas and sunflowers.

Published on by Quandie6 Comments

Good morning from the garden!

I have to admit, not much is looking great in my garden right now.  The hostas are full of holes from earwigs and/or slugs, the bee balm is dried up and sad looking, the ferns are on their last legs, the tips on all of the irises are brown, and I don’t even want to talk about the pseudocercospora leaf spot fungus on my lilacs (if you haven’t heard about this, it’s rampant in Minnesota this year due to the amount of wet weather we’ve had, for more info, check out this video from Kare11).

That being said, my Japanese Spikenard is still looking gorgeous.

And the panicle hydrangeas are looking absolutely stunning this week, they love all of the rain we’ve had!  This one is my Vanilla Strawberry …

And this one is Limelight …

Here’s a better photo to put the size of that Limelight in perspective.

It’s easily 11′ to 12′ tall.  I sure do hope my new Quick Fire Fab hydrangeas perform as well for me.  FYI, I did fertilize my hydrangeas in early spring with Espoma Rose-tone.  You don’t really need to fertilize panicle hydrangeas, but I’ve read that they will grow faster if you do.  So you can bet I’ll be out there with the Rose-tone again next spring to fire up those Quick Fire Fabs (pardon the very lame pun).

Since my own garden isn’t looking especially inspiring right now, I’m bringing this Sunday morning in the garden post to you from Green Barn Garden Center’s sunflower field in Isanti, MN.

My niece and I headed up there earlier this week to check it out.

Although it was a bit of a gloomy day (and yes, there was more rain!), the flowers were sunny enough to make up for it.

Being there on a cloudy weekday meant we nearly had the entire place to ourselves.

Sunflowers take about 60 days to bloom, and they bloom for about 7 to 10 days.  So Green Barn plants five crops in succession so that they have at least one section in full bloom throughout the month of August.

They provide a bunch of fun photo spots, like this one with a piano …

or this one with an old fire truck.

There were numerous tractors that one could pose on too.

But my niece and I are of the same mind when it comes to photos of ourselves.  We don’t like them.  I did convince her to pose for just one though.

It started to drizzle about halfway through our wander around the field, so we wrapped things up after checking out a few more of the photo props like these fun bikes.

We paused at the end for one quick selfie, which both of us hated …

but we did it anyway.

If any of you locals are looking for some fun photo ops, Green Barn Garden Center should have sunflowers in bloom through Labor Day weekend.  They charge $7 admission, but you can pose for as many photos as you like (or not, in our case).  Here’s a link so you can check out all of the details.

wait a minute, what?

Published on by Quandie8 Comments

0My friend opK and I headed to a town north of the cities to do a little garage saling recently.  Unfortunately, the sales we found were mostly a bust.  My meagre haul includes a tacklebox and a folding ruler from a sale where everything was a dollar.

I also picked up a pretty cool sled that I’ll paint up for Christmas at an estate sale we stumbled upon.

As we were heading home we also happened across the once monthly Picket Fence Gals vintage occasional sale.  I hadn’t realized it was their weekend to be open, so it was a fun little bonus.

This sale features lots of different vendors, each with their own little distinct area or ‘booth’.  As I walked into one particular booth I was thinking to myself ‘this seller has great style’ …

I love that there are pops of green scattered throughout giving the entire booth a cohesive look.

Then, wait a minute, what?

To my surprise, as I was glancing over the space, I saw this …

Are you seeing what I see?

It’s my slide projector case!

And once I realized that, I looked just behind it and recognized my rusty finials.

I don’t believe that I ever shared the ‘after’ of these, but they were from the same garage sale haul as the hardware bin earlier this summer.

I ‘re-finished’ them with some of Dixie Belle’s Patina Paint to give them a rusty look.

As I was chuckling to myself at finding a couple of my things in a shop, I glanced down and saw this …

I painted that way back in May 2023.

But it ended up at my own occasional sale this past June.

As did this clock plate and cloche, which is another project I didn’t share here on the blog.

That clock transfer is from the Brocante set from I.O.D.

Finally, I noticed this green … um … cage thingie?  I’m not sure what you would call it.

I didn’t actually paint that, but I did sell it at the Carriage House Sale.

Some creators get annoyed about shop owners or vendors buying their stuff to resell it, but not me.  I consider it a compliment.  I also purposely price my stuff low knowing that someone could potentially buy it and mark it higher to resell.  There have always been a fair number of shop owners that shop my sale and I’m happy to have them.

I’m not sure who this booth belongs to, but kudos to whoever you are.  You did a beautiful job styling your space.  I was immediately drawn to it and I especially loved all of those touches of green.  If I have another sale next year (so far the jury is out on that one), I hope you’ll come again!

embracing change.

Published on by Quandie20 Comments

Good morning from the garden!

Over the past week I’ve been working hard on embracing change.  I fully admit, I’ve never been a fan.  Especially when the change is not by choice.

Ironically, just last week I wrote a blog post from the garden about having patience, and changes in the garden that take years to come to fruition.  But sometimes the opposite happens and a very drastic change takes place in the garden overnight.

Recently my neighbor/handyman Ken decided to have the enormous shade tree in his back yard cut down.

Ken and his wife planted this tree as a small sapling when they moved into their house back in the late 70’s.

After nearly 50 years of growth, it was huge.  Not only did it shade Ken’s entire backyard, it also shaded a good bit of our backyard and also our house.

But lately Ken had been worried about the the age of the tree.  As I’ve mentioned so many times lately, we’ve had a lot of rain this summer and much of it has been accompanied by high winds.  A tree had come down on a house a few blocks away from us and Ken became convinced that the same could happen with his tree.

He had a local ‘landscape & tree’ company come out, and they agreed with him that there was a possibility the tree could come down in a storm (um, isn’t that pretty much true of all trees?).

So he decided to have it taken down (although I practically begged him to reconsider).  Since the pine tree that sits on the property line between our two houses was pretty lopsided after being overwhelmed by the giant tree and would surely look awful with that tree gone, he decided to have that one removed as well.

Last Monday the tree removal crew arrived with a giant crane.  They set it up in Ken’s front yard, and then lifted just one guy and his chain saw up and over the house and into the tree canopy.

He attached ropes to each huge limb before he cut it, and then the crane lifted it up and away.

Little did I realize that they were actually going to swing those giant limbs over our house!

I have to say, it was a bit unnerving to see limbs the size of full trees dangling in the air above our roof.

They then lowered them onto the street.

That’s just one limb!  There were probably about six or seven limbs that size that came off the tree.

There was a crew in the street that then cut them up and loaded them into a huge truck.

It was quite the production.

Once the dust cleared, I was horrified by the destruction.  OK, horrified is a strong word.  How about devasted?  Or maybe heart-broken?  Really, I was just simply sad.

Sad because that beautiful tree was no more.

It really didn’t help that it was a brilliantly sunny afternoon, and suddenly my once gloriously shaded backyard was blisteringly hot.  In addition, all of the more unsightly details, like the utility poles and the far neighbor’s giant pole barn were much more noticeable.

Although that tree was nearly 50 years old, maples can live from 100 to 300 years.  And as it turned out, it was perfectly healthy inside.  I suspect that tree would have easily outlived not only Ken, but Mr. Q and me as well.

On the bright side (pardon the pun), I now have a section of garden that will qualify as ‘full sun’.  I’m trying to see this as an opportunity to grow some of those flowering plants that have eluded me in my mostly shady garden.  I plan to re-work that flower bed next spring by adding some sun-loving plants.

I also decided to put in a hydrangea hedge along the property line where the pine tree was.  It will go from the end of my existing garden to meet up with the lilac hedge along the back.  I purchased six Quick Fire Fab hydrangeas to fill it.

Aren’t they gorgeous?  They have a similar growing habit to the Limelight hydrangeas that I love so much, but they bloom about a month earlier and the flowers start out white then turn a lovely blush pink, followed by a deeper pink by fall.

It will take several years before they get to their full height of 6′ to 8′ tall, but when they do get there I think they will be stunning.  Let’s hope I have better luck with this hedge than I did with those lilacs!

Before planting, I prepared the bed by adding some cow manure and tilling it into the top 6″ or so of soil.  OK, well, by “I” I really mean the super hardworking high school student that I hired to help me with the heavy lifting.  We then added some Espoma Bio-tone Starter to each hole as we planted the hydrangeas (this product is supposed to help the plant develop a strong root system to get established more quickly).  Once the shrubs were all in the ground, we mulched the bed with some black wood mulch.  I don’t like to use wood mulch on perennial beds, but I do like to use it under shrubs.  It reduces weeding, helps retain moisture, and that black color really makes the plants pop.

The sight of that row of gorgeous hydrangeas has cheered me up a little, but I have to admit that the loss of that shade tree has really thrown me.  I know, it was just a tree.  There are so many more important things in life.  I’m trying hard to embrace the change, but I’m really going to miss that tree.

it feels like cheating.

Published on by Quandie9 Comments

Today’s toolbox makeover is really mostly a repeat of a couple I’ve done in the past.  And in fact, it’s such a simple formula, it kinda feels like I’m cheating.

I really debated even sharing it here on the blog, but I didn’t have anything else to share this week so I decided to just go for it.

Here is the ‘before’, a basic grey toolbox.

I gave it my usual prep.  Washing with Dawn dish soap and the garden hose, a light scuff sanding, and then a coat of Dixie Belle’s Bonding Boss to prevent stains from bleeding through my paint and to improve paint adhesion.

Next up I painted the interior in Dixie Belle’s Cottage Door.

I just love this color.  I’m much more drawn to the warmer short of coral/pink shades rather than the cooler pinks these days.

I added a simple Classic Vintage Label transfer from re.design with prima inside the lid.

I painted the outside in DB’s Drop Cloth.  Once dry, I sanded lightly to distress the edges and after wiping away any dust I applied 1/4 of I.O.D.’s Elysium transfer.

This transfer comes on 4 sheets (as you can see above) and costs around $30.  So I’m spending $7.50 for the portion used on this project, which isn’t too bad.

One thing to note about this transfer is that there is some newsprint writing in the background.  See it there on the left?  Just be sure you are getting that right side up on your project.

To keep the application process simple for myself, I cut the section to fit below the bump out on the toolbox and applied that first.  The I trimmed off the section that would fit to the right of the latch and added it next.  Finally, I added the section to the left of the latch.

If you look closely, you can see where I didn’t get those two top halves to meet perfectly in the middle below the latch.  I don’t think anyone is going to notice that flaw unless I point it out though.

As you can also see, I added a small crown from one of the knob transfers from re.design with prima to the latch.

Although some of the florals from the Elysium transfer did wrap up and over the top of the toolbox, I felt like it needed just a bit more.  So I added some old Tim Holtz numbers in one corner …

and a tiny bit of the I.O.D. Label Ephemera transfer to the other corner.

I think those two simple additions really helped balance out the top of the toolbox.

After finishing everything off with a coat of clear wax, that was it.  Couldn’t have been simpler.

If any of you locals are in need of a pretty floral toolbox, this one is for sale.  Check out my ‘available for local sale‘ page for more details.

the northern grown toolbox.

Published on by Quandie14 Comments

It’s time for another toolbox makeover.

This time it’s one that I purchased at an occasional sale, and to be honest I paid more for it than I normally would.  Mainly because I thought it had a ton of potential.

After my usual prep of cleaning, scuff sanding and coating with Dixie Belle’s Bonding Boss inside and out (to prevent rust bleed thru, and improve adhesion), I painted the interior of this one in DB’s Guacamole.

Next up I painted the outside in my usual Drop Cloth.

I did think about switching it up a bit, but in the end I felt like the transfer that I was planning to use would look great over that warm white.

I especially wanted to make sure that the “Northern Grown Seeds” wording would pop.

That bit of transfer is from the Seed Catalogue transfer from I.O.D.  I thought it was rather apropos for me since it says “St. Paul, Minn” on it.

That’s kind of fun, isn’t it (because I live in a suburb of St. Paul, in case you didn’t know).

That smaller Seed Catalogue transfer looked just a bit lonely on this larger toolbox, so I pulled out the I.O.D. Collage de Fleurs transfers.  There are several large roses in that set with the right shade of deep red.

I also added some of the ivy from that set.

Next I applied some knob transfers from re.design with prima to the latches.

The florals on this toolbox definitely have a bolder look than those I normally choose.

But they totally work, especially since I left the original red paint on the handle.

There’s just something about that kinda wonky looking handle, and the rather off-kilter latches, that really gives this toolbox a handmade feel.

I think it’s absolutely charming now, what do you think?  Leave a comment and let me know.

This toolbox is for sale, check out my ‘available for local sale‘ page for more details.

P.S.  I’ve staged my photos for this post in front of a row of gorgeous Quick Fire Fab hydrangeas.  That’s foreshadowing for an upcoming ‘sunday morning in the garden’ post, so be sure to stay tuned for that.

As always, thank you to Dixie Belle Paint Co for supplying their products used in this makeover.