I Heart The Nester

Do you all know who The Nester is? She's an incredibly talented and funny lady who has a blog called The Nesting Place. Yup, the one over there on my sidebar. Her blog is all about how to find great deals and apply them in your home with minimal money or experience needed. Her entire motto is "It doesn't have to be perfect to be beautiful." Seriously, if you need some ideas for your house or office, check this chick out. She's fantastical.


Since I've been visiting her blog regularly for a few months, I've been getting ideas. This past week I finally put them into action (hence some of the blog hiatus this past week...Sorry!) One of The Nester's biggest things is doing "mistreatments" on windows. We all know how expensive window treatments can get. She shows her readers how to do the treatments themselves for little money. So here's what I've done...


See these?



Yeah, I know the picture's hard to see in detail. The curtains are beige with brown and maroon stripes in them. Not bad, but not what I wanted to stay in this room. They work, but aren't the best. So I put them here:


They work and are MUCH better than these:

Please don't look at the mess. This is from over a year ago and I still had a small infant then. Look at the arrow. Those verticals were cursed every day. They were stained, smelly, stiff and broken. Seriously, that's the most they would close and some of the slats were missing. Ugh. They were awful. So I replaced them with the curtains from upstairs. I would have liked something new, but when you have 2 huge 7' windows in your house, you re-purpose when you can. Unless you are made of millions.

So what did I do in the living room? So glad you asked! I made me up some mistreatments!

I just bought some fabric and cut it to size, hot-glued a fancy fringe to the inside edges, hung them with ring clips and put them to the window. No sewing, no lining, no nothing. It was incredibly easy and I think as a whole, the room has a lot more personality. And it helps tremendously that when Andy saw them, he got The Look on his face and said "How much did those cost?" Made my day.

I also did a mistreatment above my kitchen window. I was sick of the stiff lace curtain that was there when we moved in. I don't have a Before picture in this post, but you can see what I'm talking about in the post below this one. Here's what I did:

I bought the fabric, folded it in half and put it up with thumb tacks. Yup, that's right. No curtain rod, no clips, just a few thumb tacks. As for the fabric, I have a slight chicken/rooster theme in my kitchen. It's nothing too imposing...a set of framed pictures near the kitchen table, another cute pic above the sink, a canister set and now this curtain. I don't like when people go overboard and have their entire kitchen covered in something. But that's just me and this is my house. And for the record, I don't like chickens except to eat. And help decorate my kitchen.

The Nester has helped me with one other thing, too. I have always wanted a buffet table or something similar to help fill a wall in my living room. It's a big white wall that had a picture of my horse hanging on it (a friend painted it for me years ago) and I couldn't find the right piece to go under the picture. I called and e-mailed friends, I combed garage sale and auction ads, I searched on CraigsList. Finally, I found the table that would be perfect...but it was yellow. I don't think there is anything more than a tiny stripe or patch of yellow anywhere in my house. But thanks to The Nester, I thought, "I could paint it!" Never before has painting furniture even crossed my mind. If something wasn't right the way it was, it was all wrong. Not any more! So here's how the table was when I bought it.

Pretty on it's own accord, but not right for my house. I actually thought of my friend Jill because that's the perfect shade of yellow for HER house. But then I remembered paint. So I bought the table, headed to Home Depot for advice and drove home to get down to business. Here it is now:



I likey. I likey a lot. And if you want or need to, please ignore the deer skull on the bottom shelf. My husband lives here, too, and his friend did this for him from the buck Andy shot a few years ago. It's not my favorite thing by any means, but I can tolerate it and Andy wanted it displayed somehow. I thought this was better than hanging it on the wall.

So just for fun, here are some pictures of the living room, since I've done so much to it lately and it's my blog, so I can put what I want on here.




**I posted again, so look below...