Nine Days In... Already???

... Seriously, I cannot believe that we are already nine days in to 2013 !

Happy Belated New Year!

A few images of our Christmas Season...
It was so much fun to have College Girl and friends around the house!
But now it is quiet again!

We were so busy and the time just flew. I got all of my painting orders out the door in time and then we just had fun cooking, buying a real tree, watching movies, reading, going out to eat, seeing friends and more. The time flew and then it was the new year.

And it was time to earn my stripes...
 

College Girl decided to rearrange and purge while she was home this break. She has sorted and purged before but she got a part time campus job and it will mean being on campus all Summer. so she decided to get organized now for her move out of the Chi O House this Summer and then into an apartment with her bestie. Crazy as it sounds, this will be her longest break for a year. So she got organized and then went back to campus for New Year's Eve celebrations. I had a quick celebration with friends and then I started to paint!

We have bought for and decorated a dorm room, an apartment, a house she shared with a couple of her sisters and a room extrordinaire in the Chi O House . I didn't really want to invest much in a redo at home but I did want it to be nice for those quick visits
and to freshen things up.
The most cost effective decorating tool around??? Yep, paint. And yellow is her favorite color and we have 2 yellow comforters that we have accumualted in all the moves and bed size changes from place to place. Perfect - 1 comforter for home and one for the move this Summer. So I bought 2 cans of yellow paint. I had the deeper yellow mixed full strength and then had it mixed at 50%. I marked off wide stripes with painters tape and rolled on that cheery yellow paint.

 

I love. love stripes. I love to paint them, too. :) It's fun and there is a simple trick to getting those perfect, clean edges.

After you mark off the width of your stripe and tape off the edge you simply paint the edge of your painters tape with the wall color. Then whatever bleeds under the tape matches the wall. After it dries you simply paint your stripe color. The tape edge is sealed with the base color and the stripe color doesn't bleed under. It is one extra step, you have to wait for it to dry but there are zero touch ups with a brush while you try to steady your hand and wipe up wobbly brush marks. The stripes come out clean every. single. time. I striped my downstairs powder room and it was a breeze. I could paint stripes everywhere.
 I have to control myself or my house will look like the children's book,
" A Bad Case of Stripes"!!

 

Clean. Fresh. Cheery. (and economical)

A great way to start 2013.
It was all finished by the time College Girl came home on New Year's day!!