You know how there are those things in your house that are in no way pretty or fun to look at, but they’re functional and kind of necessary so you deal with them? You know – things like toilets, trash cans, and televisions. Well, this is one of those things. I swore up and down for years that I’d never have one of these in my house. But I caved…

Yup, we got a doggy door.

If you’ll remember, our back door used to look like this after we replaced our original door (which is the one that’s BACK on now) with a door Corey’s parents gave us.

I loved all of the natural light, and it looked fabulous, but there was a small issue…

Our dogs had completely and totally destroyed the outside of it with their scratching. Honestly, it was my fault because I rushed through the job originally and didn’t prepare the door properly, but in the end I just couldn’t handle the scratches. I’d been dying to either fix the door or go back to the original one…and then we got Hadley.

You see, this dog loves to be outside. She’s obsessed – which is weird for us, because neither of our other dogs are huge on hanging out in the backyard (especially Cullen, who would never go outside if he could help it). We weren’t used to getting up and letting the dogs out as often as she was wanting to go outside and, lest you think we’re just lazy, she was so bad that she would frequently ask to go outside less than a minute after coming in.

It was annoying, to say the least.

So, we finally broke down and decided to get a doggy door so that she can go in and out as she pleases. I hated the idea of ugly-ing up our dining room, but in the end, functionality won out.

I’ll admit, I was surprised at how easy it was to install the door – I’d imagined it would be some huge ordeal, but all it took was an afternoon and we had a brand new (or, not at all new, but different-looking) door!

First – we tested out the size of the door to figure out how big of a hole we needed to cut, then Corey traced the door with a pencil and got to cutting.

And soon? There was a giant hole in our door.

Not gonna lie – at this point, I was a little freaked out. There’s something slightly disconcerting about having a hole in the door you’re planning on hanging in the back of your house. But, I powered on and got ready to paint the door. We decided not to paint the outside of the door yet (though I’m sure we will in the future!), and we wanted the inside to be black again, since we loved the look on the other door.

This time, though, I took a few precautions and prepared the door a bit more than I had the last time.

I used liquid deglosser to wipe the door down before I did anything – I didn’t see much of a difference after doing this step, but I’ve heard it’s what you’re supposed to do, so I did it. The idea is that it cleans the door off really well, and it’s supposed to cut down on some of the grime that can build up and help the paint stick better. I also primed it with Zinsser Bull’s Eye primer, which is the only primer I will ever use.

A coat of primer and two coats of paint later, and we were good to go. Corey installed the doggy door (all there was to do was put both pieces in and add some screws – no problem!) and then installed the actual door.

And just like that we had a new(ish) door with a doggy door that would hopefully make our lives a lot easier.

The dogs weren’t so sure about the doggy door at first…

But with a little coaxing and a ton of treats, they got the hang of it!

We’ve had the door in for a few weeks now, and the dogs absolutely love it. Cullen (of course) won’t use it unless forced, but that surprised no one. Hadley and Ranger, though? They use it all the time, and Corey and I no longer have to argue over who has to go let the dogs out.

And, really? In the end, it doesn’t look nearly as ugly as I thought it would.

We still have a little work to do to the door – there’s a weird glass enclosure over the window that has blinds built into it, and I hate the look of it – but I’m pleasantly surprised by how it turned out. And, really, even if it was super ugly, the added functionality is enough to make me completely and totally love it.

Have you ever done something in your home you swore you wouldn’t? Anyone else have a doggy door and love it?

 

 

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Remember how I told you that I bought two canvases and I was working up the courage to actually do something to the second one?

Well, I did it! That’s right, I finally got around to finishing up the second canvas, and I’m a bit embarrassed about how bit of a deal I made about it…it was so easy! You ready for the how-to? Here goes…

I borrowed a projector from my brother-in-law and set it up in the dining room. Then I found a silhouette of a deer that I liked online and got it as big as I could on my computer screen. I hooked my laptop up to the projector and, voila!

Instant art (well, almost). I traced the outline of the reindeer with a small brush and some red craft paint, then I was able to turn the projector off and get to filling in.

It took me about an hour to get the whole thing painted, and that was all there was to this project! So! Easy! And it makes a pretty big statement in the room too – and matches the rest of our Christmas decor much better than the regular floral print.

I also wanted to share our table setting for Christmas – Corey and I are hosting Christmas day at our house this year, so we spent a lot of time focusing on making an elegant table. We wanted to keep it relatively cheap, so we did our best to add in a few small pieces to accent our standard white dishes – we just grabbed some cute faux bois gold chargers at Target, and some graphic appetizer plates from Crate & Barrel, and we had a place setting that was Christmas-y and cheap to boot!

We also got some faux bois placemats and some red napkins from Target. I like how it ended up being a good mix of woodsy and glam – my favorite combination for Christmas!

Of course, a Christmas table isn’t complete without a centerpiece, so we grabbed some burlap for less than $5 a yard and cut a table runner (I didn’t even sew it – just cut it down to size and plopped it on!) and some mini trees and gold papier mache reindeer to fill up the table. I love how it looks, and it really makes me want to find a nice simple centerpiece to keep on the table year-round!

We had a pretty hard time deciding on what we wanted to do for our Christmas place settings, but I’m thrilled with how it turned out. We ended up with a simple display that will hopefully be timeless and last us for a very long time! I’m excited to get to use it all when everyone comes over for Christmas dinner!

Do you have Christmas plates? I’ll admit – I got a bit obsessive about tracking ours down this year!

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This is one of those projects that was definitely not on our list of things to complete anytime soon. Our back door wasn’t anything special, but it certainly wasn’t bad enough to actively bother us, and we really had no plans to change anything about it anytime soon. Why would we, when we have so many other problem areas that need fixing first?

Well, all that changed with Corey’s parents decided to buy a new back door and offered us their old one. Theirs has a much larger window (which is exactly what we eventually wanted), so we figured why the hell not?

We got the door from them quite a while ago and it’s just been sitting in our garage – like I said, it wasn’t high on the priority list. But this weekend we finally decided it was time to get it done, so we ran to Lowe’s, grabbed some paint, and got to work.

We decided to go with black for the inside and yellow for the outside. We already had some yellow paint from doing our front door last year, so it was a pretty easy (and cheap) decision to make. We were originally going to go with white for the interior, but at the last minute Corey decided that he wanted to try something new and go for black. I’d been trying to talk him into a black door for a while so I of course jumped at the chance to get my way!

Of course, we ran into a small problem with the yellow side of the door. It’s impossible to tell in the photo, but the coverage was awful. We used up the last bit of yellow paint that we had and we still needed at least one (possibly two) more coats before it looked anywhere near okay.

So, at the last minute we decided to scrap our plans for a yellow back door and go with black on both sides. It was cheaper (we already had the black paint and wouldn’t need to buy any more yellow) and had the added benefit of being MUCH better at hiding dirt. Our dogs are constantly jumping and scratching at the back door, so we knew yellow was going to look pretty grimy all of the time. Hopefully the black will hide the dirt a bit better!

I painted the door on Saturday, and once it was dry it was time to hang it and apply the window film. Our old door had an attachment with blinds in the window, but we hoped for something a little prettier this time around, and we’d really like a full view of the backyard from the dining room. Since the new glass is double-paned, we’re hoping that with some solar-blocking window film it will be enough to keep our dining room from heating up. But you know we’ll let you know if it doesn’t work out!

To install the window film, we just followed the directions in the package. It sounds simple because it was! It was a two-person job for sure, but it wasn’t nearly the nightmare that I’ve heard window film can be. Just clean, spray, attach, and squeegee out the bubbles!

Installing the door was very easy and quick. All we did was pull out the pins from the hinges and pull the old door off…

…then we paused for a minute to watch the dogs play as they dashed outside to wrestle. Ranger is just now starting to get comfortable enough with Hadley to actually play with her (he’s either been exerting his dominance or ignoring her since she got here a month ago), so it was a bit heart-warming to watch them all play together. Or, at least, to watch Ranger and Hadley play while Cullen ran in circles around them and barked.

Once we got back to work, all there was left to do was transfer the old hinges to the new door (Corey measured and had to make new holes for the hinges since the doors didn’t have hardware in the exact same spots)…

…then we just lined up the hinges and replaced the pins and we were good to go!

And just like that, we’ve got a shiny new door in our dining room! This door makes a much bigger impact to the room as a whole and I feel like it actually adds to the room rather than just being a boring old door. I’m always a fan of a pop of black, and that larger window makes me swoon!

The view from the outside is a bit better too!

It still looks a little silly since the color of our house and trim is not at all something that we would have ever chosen (and it doesn’t exactly go well with the black!) but this is a major improvement from the previous color, which was exactly the same as the rest of the house.

(Why hello there! This new window film is very reflective in the evenings!)

So that’s our quick and easy back door upgrade that we weren’t planning on, but we’re so glad we did it!

Have you ever done a project you weren’t planning on, only to totally love it? Anyone else do some door replacing this weekend?

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…into the dining room.

Finally!

Y’all, Corey and I have worked hard on our dining room so far. We found the dining room table of our dreams, painted and reupholstered some cute chairs, added some curtains, and built an epic light fixture that is the star of the room. We’re also in the process of reupholstering our head chairs (and it’s turning out to be a never-ending process since I am so busy with school). So, all that to say, we’ve put a lot of work into this room so far.

But up until this point, it’s still been severely lacking in color. We had to be careful with the curtains because they’re so close to the bright and heavily-patterned curtains in the living room, and we wanted a dark fabric for the chairs so that dirt and food stains don’t show. We have plans to eventually bring in a rug with some color, and of course the upholstered head chairs will help a little, but in general this room has just been lacking some fun.

Which is exactly why we were so excited when we were at Ikea this weekend and found this absolutely gorgeous, incredibly colorful, super large canvas print for only $40!

(Via Ikea)

It has all of the colors we are using throughout the main floor of our house and it ties in nicely to the plates we keep on the dining room table. It’s next to impossible to find any prints or canvases this large for that good of a deal, so we were thrilled to be able to snatch it up! And once we got it in the room, we knew we had made a good decision – it looks perfect!

I’m oh so in love with how this print looks in the room, and it feels so good to have some color in here. This print is also scaled much better than the old yellow canvases were – they’re really cute, but they are so small that they really just looked silly on such a big space!

I feel like this room is one giant step closer to completion! We still need to do some much more large-scale things like upgrading to wood flooring, adding some fun texture to the fireplace with faux stone, adding a rug to bring in some more color, and several other things that I’m sure will pop up as we work. But, I feel like we’ve done a pretty good job with our progress so far, and I’m so excited about the direction this room is going in!

Have you bought any fun art lately? Anyone else have any rooms that are dying for some color?

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I’m so excited to finally share this project with y’all – it’s been a long time coming! Oh, and this post also just happens to serve as my participation in the Pinterest Summer Challenge! If you haven’t heard of it, Sherry from Young House Love and Katie from Bower Power dreamed it up, and every season they challenge everyone to actually complete a project you pinned on Pinterest.

I’ve only been able to particpate once so far (with my DIY Silhouettes for the guest room), so I was crazy excited to get the chance to link up again this season. Katie and Sherry are hosting along with Kate from Centsational Girl and Michelle from Ten June, so be sure to check out all of the blogs when their posts go live tomorrow so you can see all of the amazing projects!

But, without any more babbling from me, let’s get on to the project.

When we left off last week, Corey and I had been inspired by this gorgeous light that we saw on Design*Sponge, and we were bound and determined to create a similar light on our own.

(Via Design*Sponge)

 The only question was how. Well, it took a lot of time and planning (and a lot of crazy looks from the poor employees at Lowe’s), but we did it and survived to tell the tale. And today, I’m gonna tell you all about how to accomplish this look on your own for LESS THAN $300. Seriously, I’m not even kidding – we spent about $250ish on this project (I intended to do a budget breakdown, but lost a bunch of the receipts, so you’ll just have to trust me on this one).

This is a pretty long and involved post, but I promise it’s worth it for the beautiful photos at the end. Plus, I’ll give you a tiny little sneak peek of what’s to come, just in case you’re thinking about not sticking around.

Trust me. You’re gonna want to see this.

To make our light, we started off with a 6-foot 1″ X 12″ – it looked a little something like this:

We cut it down to 5 feet, because that was the size we felt worked best with our dining room table (which is 9 feet long). If you choose to do this on your own, any length will work, you just may have to adjust the number of light bulbs accordingly.

We had an idea of how many light bulbs we wanted to do, but we wanted to see how they lined up on the board before we actually made anything official. We chose to use globe light bulbs (we used these from 1000 Bulbs, to be exact) rather than regular ones, but of course, this project would work fine with whatever kind of light bulb you want to use. We lined up our lights on the board to see how many across we could feasibly fit, and we ended up deciding that four light bulbs filled it up just enough without being too crowded. (Keep in mind, the lights are going to hang from different heights, so even though they look a bit bunched at this point, they won’t once the light is complete.)

Then, it was time to mark off for our holes. We started 1 inch in from the edge and marked every 3 inches after that (so we had marks at 1″, 4″, 7″, and 10″ – our board was technically only 11 inches wide, not 12, so we had to adjust for that).

We made marks on each side of the board, then used our straight edge to draw four lines down the board.

Next it was time to mark the rest of the rows and figure out where the working lights would go. Our bulbs were 3 inches across, so we decided that 20 rows of 4 lights would work best, so there are 3 inches on every side of the holes. We went down each line and marked every 3 inches to indicate where the rest of the lights would go.

Then came the part that hurt our brains a little – deciding where the working lights would go. We had decided on 20 rows of 4 lights, which meant there would be 80 light bulbs. Obviously, we weren’t interested in having 80 working light bulbs – that would be not only entirely too bright, but I don’t even want to think about how much it would have cost us to buy 80 light sockets. So, we decided that 10% of the lights would work, meaning we needed to mark spots for 8 working lights.

I’d love to give you some awesome method for figuring out which lights should be working, but it was a lot of trial and error for us. We played around with a bunch of different configurations (marking them with a pencil) until we found one in which they were all nicely spaced and looked pretty random (even though it totally wasn’t random) and we marked the lights with by circling them with a sharpie.

Then, it was time to construct the box. As I mentioned in our last post, we wanted something with a nice, large base (obviously, since ours is five feet long) that would camouflage the fact that the light socket hole in our ceiling is wildly off center. We also needed room for a ton of wires since we would have 8 working lights, which meant we needed it to actually be a box that hung down from the ceiling. We played around with some different measurements and decided that having it hang down about 6 inches from the ceiling looked the best, so our next step was to construct a wood box (the final dimensions ended up being 60″ long, 11″ wide, and 6″ tall for those of you following along at home).

Corey used our Kreg Jig to create pocket holes to keep it all together, and we also used wood glue to make sure it was nice and secure. I don’t have a lot of detailed photos of the process of putting the box together, but if there’s enough interest we can come up with some plans and a detailed explanation for y’all. But through the magic of the internet, let’s skip the box-building and go straight to the completed product:

Yup, it’s a box. It was time to stain, but first we wanted to make sure that the box actually worked in the room – we didn’t want to get all the way through and realize it looked ridiculous, so we brought it inside to check the dimensions in the room.

Looks good! So, after sanding it down to make sure all of the edges were smooth, it was my turn to step in so I could stain it. I used my trusty Minwax stain in Dark Walnut (pretty much the only color I ever use). Two coats later, we were good to go.

Then came the fun (or really awful, depending on how much you like being tortured) part. We had to hang it.

We used a couple pieces of scrap wood that we cut down to fit perfectly inside the box, and then we mounted them to the ceiling.The hard part was figuring out where exactly they should go. I won’t go into too many details because I’m not the math person in this relationship and it kind of hurts my brain to think about it, but we basically hung them so that the finished box would be centered on the table both lengthwise and widthwise. It took a lot of measuring, leveling, and a little bit of cursing (isn’t that an important part of any DIY project?) but soon we had ‘em hung.

(You can see the sadly off-centered light socket hole on the left side of the photo.)

Then, it was time to hold our breath and hope that we had hung them right so the box would fit over them (they had to be perfect since they were cut to fit exactly into the box – if they weren’t even with each other or if they were hung slightly crooked, it wouldn’t work).

It fits! Of course, we couldn’t actually hang it yet since there weren’t any, um, LIGHTS on it, but we’re getting to that.

Next up it was time to move onto the more fun parts. As I mentioned before, we have 80 light bulbs on our fixture but only 8 of them actually light up. So, 8 of the lights are hung with a light socket and wire, but the other 72 didn’t need to be, and we had to figure out an alternate solution for them (since we weren’t about to spend a million extra dollars on light sockets and wires that we didn’t need). We figured out that the light bulbs just so happened to fit perfectly into 1-inch electrical conduit (the same stuff we used to make our DIY curtain rods), so we decided to see if we could make some faux light sockets out of that. For reference, here’s what our real light sockets looked like:

(Via 1000 Bulbs)

We made our faux light sockets 2 inches long to match the length of the real ones as closely as possible. We started by using our reciprocating saw to cut the conduit to 2″ lengths – 72 of them, to be exact. Yeah, Corey had a blast with that one.

(As you can see, we used an electrical conduit strap to attach the conduit to our work table while Corey was cutting so the conduit wasn’t bouncing all over the place while he tried to cut it. Simple, but effective!)

Once they were all cut, our little faux light sockets were looking like this:

But they needed a top. Obviously, the light bulb would go on the bottom part, but we needed something on the top so they could be attached to the rope that we bought to hang them from (we’ll get there in a second). So, one night while we were watching television, we laid ‘em all out…

(This isn’t all of them, just the ones I was working with)

And we grabbed our materials…

And got to work! We used 3/4″ knock out seals for the top, and we needed the pliers and hammer to get them in there, and the super glue to make sure they didn’t go anywhere. Here’s a closer look at the knock-out seal so you can get an idea of how it worked.

Voila! Just like that, we had little faux sockets. We drilled a hole in the top to be able to string the rope through…

And then we spray painted all of them. This was a slightly unnecessary step, but the conduit and the knock-out seals are slightly different colors, and the conduit has some writing and random lines on it, so we decided to go ahead and spray paint ‘em a metallic silver so that they are nice and uniform.

Once we were done with this step (I know it looks quick and easy in a blog post, but just know that cutting and putting together 72 faux sockets is NOT a quick process!), it was time to piece it all together. We knew that we wanted all of the lights to hang from varying heights, so we had to figure out exactly how we wanted to do it. We decided on five different lengths, with the longest being 3 feet and the shortest being 2 feet.

You can see the breakdown in the photo a little better, but what we chose to do was 20 of the three foot length, 15 at two-and-three-quarter feet, 20 at two-and-a-half feet, 15 at two-and-one-quarter feet, and 10 at two feet. This was a bit of a random decision and there was no real method to it other than it just felt right to us. Once we decided on the lengths, I drew out a map of the light on a piece of paper and we color coded it so we could ensure that all of the lights fell in a random pattern. Here’s what it looked like:

The circled X’s are the ones that will light up – we decided that we wanted them all to be inside the light rather than on the outside edges and we didn’t want any of them to be the longest or shortest length – beyond that it was random. This was definitely a process and it took quite a bit of time to figure out how to do it, but we ended up with a light that looks like it was completely random, which was the goal, so we’re happy!

We bought the thinnest black rope that we could find for our faux lights – our wire is a vintage-style braided wire, so we wanted to match that as closely as possible. This is what we ended up with:

Again, for reference, here’s what our real wires look like:

(Via 1000 Bulbs)

I cut the rope to the right sizes and made piles of each length, we burned the edges so they wouldn’t fray (and so we could actually get them in the holes), and then we were ready to put them into the light. We plopped down on the couch, put the light box in our laps, and got to work.

All there was to this part was to push the appropriately sized rope through the pre-drilled holes and tie a knot. We had our little map sitting in the box the whole time and we each worked from opposite ends working to the middle.

As you can see, we left the circled ones alone for now because those are where the working lights will go and that needed to be wire and not rope.

As we worked, we randomly tried holding up the light to see how it was looking, and we were pretty happy with the progress we saw!

Once we got them all in, it was time for the wiring. Now, I need to pop in a quick disclaimer before I explain this process and let y’all know that neither of us are electricians and we have no idea if this was the “right” way to do this. Corey did some research and we felt like this was a safe method that we were comfortable with doing in our own home, but, uh, if you try it at home and blow something up it’s totally not our fault, mmmkay?

Here’s a little diagram I made of how the light wiring worked for us. Again, there are different ways you could do it, and this is just the route we chose to take.

And for a little perspective, here’s a zoomed out photo so you can see how they all connected a little better.

Clear as mud, right? It’s a bit confusing, but once you get doing it you can start to make sense of it!

Once we were all done wiring, it was looking a little something like this:

But, um, we had no idea if it was actually going to work. Luckily, we still had some wires with plugs left from when we did the paper lanterns in our guest room, so we quickly attached that, popped the sockets on, and put some light bulbs in. Then we both held our breath and crossed our fingers, toes, and eyes while Corey plugged it in…

Success! We were so excited that it actually lit up, and this was definitely the moment where we realized this might just actually work. We did some celebratory dancing and high-fiving, then we decided it was high time to get this thing hung. We brought it into the dining room to get it up on the ceiling. Corey had pre-drilled pilot holes in our box in the exact spots where the mounting pieces would be, so all that was left to do was drill the box in and hope it didn’t come crashing down (spoiler alert: it didn’t, although we totally spent a good three days with our couch cushions on the dining room table just in case!)

 

It worked! At this point it was late (as you can see by how dark it is outside!) and we went to bed. The next day we came back to it to finish up…you see we had a whole box full of these:

And they needed to be added to the light!

I did most of this next part on my own, so I don’t really have any photos, but from here on out the process was incredibly simple. I just stood on the table and grabbed a faux socket, strung the rope through it and tied a knot. Then, I grabbed a light bulb and put a few dots of super glue on it, then pushed it up into the socket and held it for a few second while the glue dried. Then I (slowly) let go and admired my handiwork! There were a few sockets where I had a hard time getting the light to stick into the socket, but with a little extra glue and a lot of patience I managed to get them all in there. I was careful not to add more than a few dots of glue in each socket because I wanted to be able to pull the light back out relatively easily if necessary.

Turns out, it was a good thing we were careful with the glue, because once we were done and stepped back, we realized that there were a few areas where several lights were all hung at the same height in a grouping, because even though we had planned the ropes to all be at different heights it was impossible to keep all of our knots the same size so the lengths weren’t exact. But it was no problem to pop the light back out, tie the knot a little higher on one or two of them, and see how that looked. We played around with it until we couldn’t see any areas that looked funny, and then we were done.

You ready to see? If you’ve actually stuck around for all 2,700 words of this post (geeze, I talk a lot!), then you totally deserve it. And if you just scrolled to the bottom to see the photos, then I totally don’t blame you, and you deserve to see it too. Let’s get to the pretty part.

(SIDE NOTE: We replaced the head chairs in our dining room a few weeks back and I haven’t talked about it yet because we haven’t gotten around to reupholstering them. Just know you aren’t crazy, they are different, and I’ll tell y’all all about them later.)

We are so in love with this light.

It’s exactly what we wanted, and we love that it’s completely unique and something that absolutely no one else has. We constantly catch ourselves just staring at it while we’re in the living room watching television or something, and we can’t get over how perfect it is for us. We also love how nicely it ties into our Ikea light fixture in the kitchen – the globe lights subtly mimic the shape of the light, and they coordinate nicely without being too matchy-matchy.

We also love how it looks from underneath – we tossed out a lot of our original ideas because we thought they would look bad from underneath while you’re sitting at the table, but this guy looks just as pretty from under it as it does from the side!

And, of course, we love the how it looks when it’s actually turned on. The light from the 8 bulbs that actually work bounces off of all of the other lights, and there’s an illusion that the whole thing is just glowing. It’s hard to capture in photos, but just know it’s beautiful! I’ll have to have you all over for dinner someday so you can see how it looks in person!

Yeah, I think we’ll keep it!

Now that we’ve got this guy and the curtains done, we’re finally getting close to feeling like our dining room is complete. We still need to reupholster the chairs and add a few accessories, and then way far down the line we plan to add a ceiling treatment, get rid of the carpet, add a rug, and do a super fun treatment to the fireplace wall, but for now we’re pretty pleased with the progress we’ve made!

If you could create your dream one-of-a-kind light fixture, what would it look like?

Pinterest Challenge graphic via Young House Love

** I’m linking up with Addicted2Decorating’s Addict’s (not so) Anonymous link party - check it out here! ** 

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