DI Couture

I was reading a talk from Elder Holland recently about parenting and motherhood and, to paraphrase, he brought up the fact that for the first several years a couple is married, many couples are forced to be extremely frugal and decorate their homes with such styles as DI couture etc. I thought, "this is me". When I look around our apartment, I can find only one piece of furniture that we bought new, a bookshelf for $50 from Staples that we spray painted incorrectly, and now it looks like it was a hand-me-down. Everything else is second hand. So lately, I've been working on more projects to make the most of our...style. It's super fun for me, like a game almost. One day, when we're millionaires, I think I'll still shop at DI and other thrift stores for projects. If you want to read the entire talk by elder Holland, look up "Because she is a Mother". It's one of those talks I should read every day.

In the kids room I....

Hung some stuff on the walls finally. I found this flower/branch/wall hanging thing at DI. It was really gold and cheesy, but I fell in love with it, so I brought it home and painted it. I got the idea to make a mobile from a website, but had to tailor it to what I had on hand, which was string, embroidery hoops, paper and hot glue. :) Fancy right?


On Miles side, I found a small shelf at a garage sale and painted it, stacked some cool DI books and Richie's old pinewood derby car on it. Found a small map of Oahu from Richie's mission. I also found a big map at DI and placed it in the "travel" corner next to his 2 suitcases (also courtesy of the DI) and his horse. The circle things are actually embroidery hoops that I found at the DI. I painted them and used scraps of fabric I had on hand to go in the middle. We didn't want to put lots of holes in the wall hanging them up, so I figured I could use that blue sticky tack. I'm rethinking that choice every time I get Miles out of bed and he has a chunk of it in his hair I have to cut out....any suggestions?




Remember this bookshelf? We didn't want to put huge holes in the wall at this apartment, so we opted to make it a planter on our front steps! I really like it that way! Never mind that half of the flowers are dead, I took this picture after we got back from our trip, so they probably didn't get enough water.


A friend of ours was moving and was getting rid of things. She graciously let us take this entertainment center so we could set our TV on something somewhat substantial instead of it teetering on a little block. I sanded, painted and distressed it.