DIY Tools

Whenever we tackle a DIY project around our house both big { Painting our Entire House, Laying Sod, Refinishing our Hardwood Floors } and small { Painting a Mirror, Re-doing a Bench }  I try and make sure we already have the tools we need to start the project, or what tools we need to buy. Nothing is worse then being in a midst of a project and realizing you have to make a trip to the local Home Improvement store, because popping into those stores its never a in out and thing. Soon we will starting to work on our built-in bookcase for our living room { read more about that here } and I wanted to make sure when have the majority of tools needed and what we need to buy. This made me think about DIY tools that are a must, when your a Beginner DIYer, Intermediate DIYer and Going Pro DIYer 

Beginner DIYer Tools

The basics will help you make over that thrift store dresser in no time 

Beginner Tools:

Philips and Flat Head Screwdriver, Good Paint Brush { I prefer Purdy Paintbrushes } Painters Tape, Large & Mini Paint Roller { keep extra rollers on hand } extra , Hammer, Metal Tape Measure { at least 20ft } 3Ft Level, Caulk & Wood Filler, KILZ Primer & Stain-blocker, Sand Blocks, and TSP. Its's always good to have extra screws, nails, and sanding blocks on hand. 

Intermediate DIYer Tools

This is where your start adding a little power to your tool box to get the job done a little faster 

Intermediate Tools:

Jig Saw, Power Drill, Skill Saw, Miter Saw, Power Sander { keep various grit and papers on hand the lower the girt Number the more it sands, the higher number sanding paper is for finishing } Wet Dry Vacuum, Metal ladder and Saw Horses and Kreg Jig Master 

Going Pro DIYer Tools 

This tools are great when you start tackling larger projects. I'm skipping over the big pricey power tools { Floor Sanders, Paint Sprayer because you can always rent those }

Going Pro Tools:

Air Compressor with attachments, Table Saw, Router and Grinder 

Since we bought our home three years ago, we've bought all the Basics tools and used then all many times. The basic tools you will use over and over again. We have most of the Intermediate tools, we buy what we need, when we need it. 

Our next tool purchase will be a small air compressor with attachments, oh how I want a brad nailer! lol 

What tools are you wanting to add to your tool box?

Dining In

I popped into Cost Plus over the weekend to look around and hopefully get an early start in buying outdoor dining stuff { cups, plates and bowls } we plan on doing lots of outdoor dining Spring though Fall this. turns out I was a a tad bit early to start shopping for outdoor dining stuff, they had a bunch of cute Easter Decor stuff, but I don't decorate for Easter. Anyways, I started looking around some more to out items on my mental 'I Want This' don't we all all one of these lists?


When I came across the perfect addition for my dining room. As you know we have a small eat-in kitchen dining room, its more like a dining nook. But I prefer to call it a our Dining Room :) Our current dining setup is simple we have a dark wood dining table that refinished and four upholstered Ikea chairs (Which have held up well the past few years) We now also have Avery's highchair in our dining room too and a buffet I re-did. This is what I want for my dining room, the Concrete Hayden Dining Bench. I snapped this with my camera phone, the picture by no means does this lovely seat justice.

Picture below from their website. In real life the color is more of a softer medium grey. I love its clean modern lines and dark wood feet. I think the color would look perfect in our dining room and with perfect with the curtains I sewed for the dining room over the Summer. 

I really want to add this to our dining room, it would create a more banquette feeling in the small room. It's a large seat 67 inches wide! Here's what I envision, the banquette would go on our back wall where the window is and we would only use or two existing chairs. I would sell the pair or store them in our garage { for living room use if we have a lot of people over } With the addition of such a large seat, our buffet would likely go bye bye. The tiny room would appear too crowed. Which is fine, because we'll soon have extra counter space and cabinet space when we build a small butlers pantry in our kitchen.


I love these dining rooms below, my vision come to life.

{ via House & Home }

Small dining room with a banquette bench 

{ via Decorpad }

I love the picture below, exactly how i want mine small dining room area to feel, polished pretty and relaxed. 

{ via Hand Made Home }

Hopefully we'll have a new dining room addition soon, be like most DIYers we have a priority project list { Built-in Bookcases, Backyard prettying up to do and our kitchen, and DIY Ottoman } so sadly for now this banquette is at the bottom of the list, but if there was some major Cost Plus dining sale or I got an amazing coupon it might come home much sooner. Oh and when we get it I'll scotch guard the heck out of it! 

edit: The banquette bench is $ 449.99 from Cost Plus World Market 

Question, anything you've spotted recently that's on your 'I Want This List' ? 

We Cut the Cable Cord

For the past six months Hasani and I have been discussing whether should cancel our Dish Network and nix cable altogether. Well, we did just that, we are officially cable free as of 2/9/12. Don't get me wrong we love TV and watching our favorite TV shows together or a part is weekly/nightly must in our household. But, because there's always a but right. 

Bah Bye, dust collector 

There's a few reasons why we decided to end our relationship with cable. We no longer watched very much 'live' TV, I'll explain more further in the post. We had over 120 channels, but we hardly found anything to watch on the channels. We got tired of all the re-runs, most stations would play the same 3-4 episodes over and over again. Yes, I'm talking about you Food Network, DIY Network and so on. Out of the 120 Channels, we maybe watched 15 of them and only we then didn't have excessive repeats. We also experienced frequent outages with our provider. Hasani got tired of being the designated cable 'troubleshooter' in the house. We also got annoyed when our DVR would record a show / movie and we'd watch it and it parts of the show failed to record! 
The last draw for me came 2/5/12 Sunday evening, when our DVR failed to record my show Downton Abbey. How dare they! So the next morning I added up the costs we where paying for cable. Our 120 channels cost $ 24.99, but of course there were additional fees that increased our total to $ 40.00 per month. Not bad considering I have family and friends who play double that amount monthly. However, when I looked at the yearly dollar amount, the total is $ 480.00. We are paying $ 480.00 yearly for a service we almost never watch. I'm so over paying for stuff we don't need or don't use. 


So now comes the questions. 


What did our Tween say?


When we told broke the news to Tabari about being a cable free family, he was a little bummed. He loves watching Nick and Disney. But he can't watch TV during the school week anyways. In the end two days of the week of not being able to watch new episodes Phineas & Ferb is not a huge deal. He can still watch the show, more on that below. 


Are we going to be a TV Free household? Are we still going to watch TV?


Before I cut the cable cord, I did some research on DTV.gov. I wasn't sure if we'd need to buy a converter box to watch free TV ( ABC, NBC, Fox etc ) turns out that only applies to analog TV's and since the two TVs we own are newer we don't have to buy anything extra to watch the free channels. On Wednesday night 2/8/12, Hasani unplugged our DVR, plugged our TV directly into the cable wall outlet and did a scan, and 20 free channels appeared. Most of our new channels are in HD and I can already see a big improvement in the quality (we didn't have HD before, that was an additional cable fee, of course) I noticed a few channels seem glitchy, but they're not channels I normally would watch, so that's OK. Oh another cool thing is this American Girl, now gets to watch the Canadian TV show  Steven And Chris! I never got to watch it before, now I do for free :)


Remember when I mentioned we don't watch much live TV? That's because most { 80% } of our TV viewing is watched though the Roku player. Hasani's dad gave him this great little device as a birthday present a few years back. I think we've had the Roku Player about 2 1/2 years. I call it the gift that keeps on giving. For those of you that haven't heard of a Roku, its a device that steams TV, Movies, Music and lots of other content into your TV using its built in WiFi. So you need to have Internet to use the device. You subscribe to different channels, some are a small monthly fees and some are free, just depends. The Roku only costs one time, when you buy the device that's it no monthly service fees. I hated the annoying service fee, we payed each month on DVR - that failed to record. It plugs in super easy just like your DVD player. 

We subscribe to several channels and only pay for two. We subscribe to Netflix instant ( I love Netflix, been a loyal customer forever, like 5+ years) and Hulu. Netflix costs us $ 15.98 for unlimited streaming and 1 Dvd at home at a time. You can also watch Netflix instant on your computer or even your phone. We pay $ 7.99 monthly for Hulu,  we watch movies and TV shows. You can also watch Hulu online for free! We also subscribe to these free channels: Flixster { for movie previews, I also have the app on my phone } Crackle, and Pandora. I love listening to my favorite music channels on Pandora. If we want to rent movies, we visit Redbox or rent a movie on Amazon.com. The Amazon rentals stream right though our Roku player and most new releases cost $3.99 or $ 4.99 for HD and are available to view for 24 hours. The cost much cheaper than pay-per-view and quicker than going to Blockbuster, which is pretty much extinct where I live in Sacramento. 

At home we have the movie 'Something Borrowed' to watch this weekend. 

How Netflix Instant appears on our TV screen. There are thousands & thousands of movies and TV Shows to watch at any time. 

Our channel lineup on the Roku Player 

So now that we've cut the cord officially, I guess you can say we've weaned ourselves off of cable thanks to the Roku player. I'm so glad were getting rid of the bulky DVR from Dish network, which is a good thing because we don't have to stress about it fitting in our bookcases we are building soon (since the DVR is deep) 


Now were only spending $ 287ish bucks a year on TV versus paying over $ 480.00 a year on cable alone. Oh, we are considering paying additional $ 79.00 a year to become Amazon Prime members. Because we'll be able to watch over 15,000 TV shows w/our Roku and get free 2 day shipping and have access to a whole bunch of books for my kindle. So if we decide to get Amazon Prime, I'll let you know if its worth it { or too similar to Netflix } most of the content needs to be different for it to be a go. It feels so good to save money on smoothing that no longer works for our household. 

Do you have a cable? Love it, Hate? Are you considering cutting the cable cord like we have? 


Any questions about our decision to quit cable?


Bonus question: Do you watch Downton Abbey? I'm hooked, I watched the 1st series (as the Brits call them)  on Netflix instant , it was good! I'm currently watching series two on PBS, I still have one more Episode to watch. 

Favorite Things Gift Swap

I was recently asked by Brandi of Don't Disturb This Groove to Participate in a Favorite Things Blogger Gift Swap. I teamed up with my fellow blogger & friend Summer from the blog Shades of Summer. When I read Brandi's idea, I loved it! How fun to send a few of my favorite things to one of my girlfriends. You can read what I sent to Summer here on her blog.

Here's the letter I received from Summer

Katrina,

Enclosed in your exchange box you will find the following:

Ceramic egg crates: I adore these little guys, I just love the way they dress  up my fridge and eggs. I know you like all things white so I thought these would make you smile and get some use also.

1/2 Yard of bold blue and white fabric: Sine I am not sure if you like the fabric or not. I got half a yard....I figure you could always make some napkins or use the fabric for trim on a pillow if you think it will compliment the decor in your living room.

The item I'm most excited about is the mini Parfait Glasses and the spoons: I had to have these as soon as I saw them and I know you do entertaining from time to time, I thought you may have use for these and I figured that if cannot always get together to enjoy celebrations, at least we can have something alike when we do entertain and we can think of one another.

I certainly hope you enjoy your items....Thanks for always being a great friend to me.

Summer

The fabric & the mini Parfaits glasses, so cute!

I love these ceramic egg crates!! 

Perfection!

I love everything Summer gave me! So thoughtful! I really love the egg crates, I've always wanted some for my fridge! And now, I get to enjoy a pair in my home! I laughed out loud, when Summer said I like all things white! So true, I love love white dinnerware, bake ware, cake stands etc. The fabric is a perfect addition to my fabric stash, I love the bold navy print. I'm looking forward to making a pillow or napkins like she suggested.

My favorite has go to be the mini parfait glasses! They darling and perfect for parties! Makes me want to throw girls night in party at my casa soon, just so I use the petite spoons and serve me friends yummy mini treats. These are a hit!

Everything Summer sent me was so thoughtful, I really loved participating in the favorite things gift swap! :) Check out Brandi's blog here, for the entire list of all the bloggers that participated in the gift swap. Thanks again Brandi! I had so much fun :)