What I'm Loving Wednesday

It's time to start a new bloggy tradition... What I'm Loving Wednesday!

I've been encouraged by Kelly to start these blog posts. I always love her Wednesday posts so hopefully mine will be half as interesting as hers! Here it goes...

I love Kelly's blog! I have to give her credit again for inspiring me to even start a blog and for WILW! Go check out and follow her super cute bloggy blog!

I love that today is the 4th of July! It's such a fun holiday and I'm so glad Will & I got to come to the beach to spend time with family!

I love Will's new LifeProof case for his phone. We've had so much fun taking underwater pictures!

I love my new swimsuit top. It has parrots on it! Will said it reminds him of Brazil so you know anything that makes me think of being back there makes me so happy!

I love these two sketches. I'm a big doodler so this just makes want to gather up all my pens and doodle for hours!

I love love LOVE this porch bed! Doesn't it make you want to curl up and read on a rainy day?! And the great thing is, we have a porch big enough for this! Hmm...I see a project in our future!

I love this satchel! Turquoise is a favorite!

I'm really SUPER loving this photo shoot! How fun?! Hmm...maybe I can convince Kelly Ginn Photography to do something awesome like this for Will & I! ;)

Well, there it is! My first WILW post! Hope you enjoyed! Happy 4th to you all and a special thank you to those serving our country!

Old Door Turned Coffee Table

WARNING: This is a long post!

One of my best friends, Brooke ("Bennett") asked Will & I at the beginning of the year if we would convert an old door into a coffee table for her. We (obviously) said yes! We had never done this before but figured it couldn't be that hard. I mean, you've pretty much just have to slap some legs on it, right? Well, it ended up being more complicated than that and took much, much longer to complete than we had thought, but I think that the final product turned out great! First, we had to find a door. I know from being an antique store-aholic that I had seen old doors selling from about the $175 and up price range. Luckily, Bennett had another option. Her husband owns a property management company and he just happened to have some old doors lying around at his office. What's even cooler is that his office is on historic Broad Ave. in Memphis and the door that Bennett ended up picking out was the original door from his office building. So it was pretty old! Will did pretty much all of the hard work. I helped paint and re-did the fixtures, but Will worked so hard on it! Unfortunately we totally forgot to take a picture of the door before we started on it, but you can pretty much understand what an old door looks like. 

After finding the perfect door, Will ended up cutting off about 2 feet from the bottom. It was a really tall door and that part ended up being rotten wood anyway so it worked out. That way we were able to make the door even on all sides. Below is the first photo of the door that we took. This was after Will had sanded off a bunch of old, white paint. This took a pretty good while to do in order to get down to the original wood surface. We ended up not even sanding the bottom because you weren't going to see it anyway. We weren't going to paint the bottom either, but it turned out that you could see some of the bottom's white paint from the top windows. Another aspect that ended up being the most frustrating thing was trying to get all of the windows clean! It gets me frustrated just thinking about it!! It was so hard to scrape off all of that old paint from the windows.

Front of the door-after sanding

Bottom of the door-pretty much exactly what the front looked like!

After Will had done a lottttt of scraping on the windows

This is the paint we used. I probably wouldn't use it again if I had the option. It was some kind of Gel-Flow technology that I wasn't a fan of. 

Painting over the old paint on the bottom!

Working hard!

After spraying the door fixtures with primer--Forgot to take a Before photo of those as well. They were all yucky old brass.

After putting the legs on and in the process of painting the top.

Finished product!!

We ended up using cedar 4x4's for the legs and support beams. All we did was put 3 coats of Polycrylic on them so they will hold their color. I think it turned out great!

The knocker! After they were primed I used Antique Brass spray paint

My favorite!

 

Here it is in Bennett's living room!

This is a photo she sent me a few days after we dropped it off! 

So what do you think?!

I'm back!

Wow, it's been a while since I've posted anything! Sorry about that...for those of you who've noticed! I realized that I never posted photos from the Memorial Day (weekend) cookout we had a few weeks ago, soooo.....

We invited our families over to cook out and hang out! We had a great time and some delicious food! It was also a day for 3 Pinterest recipes that turned out GREAT!

The Grill Master

My parents made steak and chicken kabobs! Yum!

Pinterest Recipe #1

This punch was sooooo good! I found it on here. It's just a can of pink lemonade concentrate, raspberry sorbet, and Sprite. You have to try it!

Some of the food! Pinterest Recipe #2

I made Chili's Copycat Salsa for the 2nd time that weekend. It tastes just like it! Will & I munched on it for the whole week after that because it made so much! Find the recipe here!

Pinterest Recipe #3

This may have been my favorite recipe of the day. It's hard to decide though because they were all so good! I've made this one time since Memorial Day and everyone seems to love them! It's sugar cookie cups, and I mixed half strawberry cream cheese with half Cool Whip, then topped with fruit. It was a hit! The instructions are here. Also the instructions say to put the frosting in a piping bag/Ziploc bag to put it on the cookies. I did that the first time and it was a MESS. It's much easier just to scoop it on there with a spoon!

Enjoy these 3 new recipes! We sure did!

Nail Polish-aholic

If you know me well, then you know that I LOVE painting my nails. I love trying new designs I find online. Loving painting my nails also means having a guilty pleasure of buying nail polish. My collection has grown and I was really excited to find the perfect item to display my nail polish.

Every year MABTS has this huge garage sale, and since Will is a student there we get to go. The awesome thing about this "garage sale" is that everything is FREE. It's held at Bellevue Baptist every year for seminary students. Sometimes you can find good stuff..sometimes not. We have been twice and both times we have come home with some good finds mixed in with some junk that we thought we needed. Anyway, when I saw this one particular item last Fall, I knew it would be perfect for my nail polish. It just needed a fresh coat of paint. I took months to get around to painting it, but it looks great hanging in the guest bathroom!

BEFORE

Had to make sure everything fit!

AFTER

What do you think?! I love the way it turned out!

Total cost: $4