Learning from History
I was lucky enough to take a summer trip to Spain with my husband – I just flew back last night and whew are my arms tired! Yeah, I know – but you expected it, didn’t ya? Anywho – can I just tell you what great architecture that Spain has? Back hundreds and even thousands of years ago, they had the forethought to build buildings that not only withstood the test of time (yes, most are still standing today), but the attention to detail is outstanding! Here in America it seems that we tend to throw it up and hope it sticks, but they took years, and sometimes hundreds of years to complete projects. In fact, in Barcelona, the Sagrada Familia (church) was started back in the late 1800’s and they’re STILL working on it today! Some may say, “But how are you to get anything done if it takes you that long?” But to that I say, certain things just take TIME. You can see samples of Antoni Gaudi’s amazing architecture at the official site at http://www.sagradafamilia.org.

Oh, just wait for my photos…
Either way, I’m back – and I’ll be posting some photos for you all and will show you some of the great designs and functional living spaces that the Spanish use that we could learn from. Oh yeah – they walk EVERYWHERE! No wonder they can all afford to have a sangria and café con leche for lunch! 

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Lesson Learned
Why is it that when you move into a home, certain things end up where you placed them on the very first day? And then 8 years later, you’re sitting there wondering why the dumb TV is still precariously perched on top of the dresser with a quarter of it hanging off. Why is it that when you watch TV at night, you’re forced to look OVER your husbands ample rump to see the top half of the TV? Why is it that you’ve never gotten off your own rumpus to fix the situation? Well that was my situation and I was finally done with it. We found a going out of business sale at a local Circuit City and purchased a flat screen TV. My husband wanted to hang it on the wall, but I had other plans. We needed a place for the receiver box to go and that wasn’t about to hang on the wall and I wasn’t about to just stick it somewhere again.

My Aha Moment
So I came up with a solution. An 8” deep shelving unit that would go on the wall across from the foot of our bed and not only hold the TV, but would also hold some of the night time reading books that we had strewn all over the bedroom, it would hold the components for the TV and it would hold photos of our wonderful boys. Yeah, I had a project!

Getting Dirty - or Should I Say, Dusty!
My inspiration came from a photo in Architectural Digest and I just made some minor changes. This one was really quite simple, it’s just 4 long boards joined with upright boards or 'stiles' to support each long shelf. I placed some of them symmetrically and some just randomly. Some of the resulting boxes I gave a back to and some I left open so that the wall color would show through. Then sanding - a LOT of sanding. The building of the unit wasn’t the issue, it was the painting.

Have You Ever Heard of Plan Twice, Paint Once? Well Me Neither. Obviously!
Why is painting so hard? Well, it’s not. It’s selecting the colors and style that I wanted to paint that I had a problem with. As you can tell below, I went through several different iterations before I ended up with a simple and straight forward color theme. After experimenting with colors, designs and painting effects only to leave a big fat mess, I sprayed the entire thing black (except for one box which I painted purple with a black drybrush on top for affect) and then painted the back panels a soft green. It’s now sitting at the end of my bed and looks AWESOME if I do say so myself.

Yeah, even this old dog learns new tricks every now and then.
Moral of the story, don’t live with what you don’t like. Do something about it. You’ll be surprised at how creative you really are!

Before the TV just hung out on a dresser, cluttered and just plain ol' ugly.

Here's the blank wall where I decided to put the TV and my newly created display shelf.

I built this piece out of scrap plywood so I had to finish the edges with edge banding laminate trim. You simply iron it on then trim it flush to hide the ugly edges of the plywood.

And here's the finished piece before I messed it up twice with paint before settling on something I liked.

This was my first attempt at a punch of color. Looks like I got punched and it affected my vision. Yuck!

Ha! Here's one of those 'what was I thinking?' moments. Yikes!

Finally, a nice subtle and classy finish that will blend nicely into my bedroom. I left one block purple for a bit of unexpectedness - cuz I'm like that.

And here's the finished piece in my room. I really like how it looks and for whatever reason, it really makes our bedroom more cozy now. Which - is a VERY good thing!

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I’m finally getting to ‘Be Jane’, and it’s been a while so trust me when I say I was going through withdrawals! On my hit list were the following:

Convert the pantry to pull out shelves – see before, during and after photos below.
This one was awesome! So easy in the overall scheme of things. Just took the shelves out, cut them down a bit, added sides, a front and back ‘lip’ to them and then installed drawer glides to make them all now fully extended pull-out shelves. LOVE IT! I can find my macaroni now!

Fix the doorbell – done!
Was just a matter of buying a new doorbell button for a whole $1.39 and taking the old one out (rusted to high heaven) and reattaching the wires to the new unit.

Painted the shed the RIGHT color.
Brown on the top just sucked. So now it looks much lighter and brighter – photo also below.

Today I went to my friend’s house and am teaching her how to Be Jane.
We tore out her old carpet, took up the carpet tack strips and tomorrow we’re installing Pergo flooring. I told her to first buy some QuiKrete cement patch since we found a bunch of cracks in her foundation. Have to start with a level foundation. If we were doing hardwood, then we'd have to use leveling compound, but for Pergo, the patches should be good.

She and her sons have asthma so the wood flooring will help out a lot. The carpet was old and disgusting and with a dog, just held lots of yuck. So this will be much better. Plus, her mom is in town and they’ve been being Jane all week. They’ve painted pretty much the entire interior of the house and it looks AWESOME!

On my hit list for tomorrow is teaching them both how to install Pergo and use a miter saw. My friend’s mom will then go home and she wants to install it in her manufactured home up in Seattle so she’s excited that she’s getting to learn here.

I’ll post photos of the new floor once it’s done – it’s gonna look awesome!

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First off, how on Earth did it get to be June already?! Didn’t I just have a Christmas party last week? Either way, I’m getting back to my list of to-do’s and when I look at it, it seems a bit overwhelming at first. Like how come every time I look at it I add two to three more items? How am I going to pay for all these projects? How do I get started? But then after taking a short walk and breathing deeply a few times, I just start at the top and face each item one by one.

I think that as women, and natural multi-taskers, we tend to think about a clump of thoughts rather than a single-focused idea - which is good and bad. It sometimes makes it hard to tackle the project at hand because all we can see is everything that’s associated with it and everything else that will need to be changed. But if we look at it with that amazing forethought but only focus on one task at a time, we’ll actually get through it much better and will have an understanding of how all the pieces fit together without thinking we have to tackle everything at once.

So with that, I’m happy to announce that yesterday I was lucky enough to cross five items off my list. I cleared my mind and focused on the project at hand and whaddya know? The house is still standing and is starting to look pretty darn good if I do say so myself!

Whenever I build furniture, I get very excited and love to watch it take shape. I usually have a general idea in my head of what I want it to look like and then experiment along the way. But when life gets in the way, my creativity suffers. To go with the Specials Board. I was tasked with framing out the menu board for the ice cream shoppe. Since I used pressed tin as a wainscoting along the bottom 3 ½’ of the dining area, I figured I’d tie the tin into the menu board. After several different concepts, I finally ended up with this (see below).

Is it great? Eh. Will it look good in there? Yes. Do I just want a big fat scoop of ice cream with a cherry on top to make all the yuck go away? Definitely!

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Sometimes as good as my intentions are life just gets in the way. I had my wonderful list of to-do's that I wanted to get done this weekend, but then I was thrown a curve ball. On Friday I received an unexpected call, well not so unexpected, but still it knocked me back a bit. We all have these times when we had our neatly planned out path and then you hit a speed bump that you didn’t see and you’re left duct taping the car together until you can make it into the shop. Well, my duct tape is out and I’m tearing it – fast!

I think the true test of character is how well we deal with change. Now I’m not a fan of change when it first hits, yet I always seem to end up better for it. You got it, I’m gonna bring it around to home improvement, but its true. You’re in the middle of a project and you hit a speed bump. You’re ready to throw in the hammer, but then look at your project from a different angle – a different perspective shall we say. And you try something that you never even considered before and whaddya know? It actually turned out better! And you learned something about it (and yourself) in the process.

I am so looking forward to the 3-day weekend that I’m giddy. Not only will I get to spend time with my family, but I’ll get to sleep in (oh so nice) and get to some projects that I’ve been wanting to do for about the past month but haven’t had literally a spare moment for. And with that, here’s my laundry, uh, to-do list:

1. Fix the ding-dang doorbell that won’t dong
2. Paint the top of my garden shed the appropriate color – yellow.
3. Match the paint in my bedroom around the patch for the new light switch I installed last weekend (or should I say, my husband gets the kudos for that one!
4. Fix the broken tile on my garden border that the kids knocked off by dancing on top of it.
5. Put a funky border of pressed tin on my neighbor’s ice cream shop sign without ruining it (yes, the same ice cream shop that the specials menu is for – see last week’s post).
6. Paint the gawd-awful faceplate for my front door intercom.
7. Now I’d also love to clean and reseal the slate tiles on my patio, but I don’t think that’s gonna happen this weekend. :-)
8. Then on Sunday morning, we’re all going to the firehouse to have a pancake breakfast with some hunky firemen! My hubby doesn’t mind a little gawking!

Is it just me or are most women into list making? I thought I was a completely anal person for my incessant list-making, but then I learned that a lot of my friends do the same thing because we don’t want to forget what we have to do. But why is it that not many men make lists? Perhaps they just live more in the moment and we’re constantly living in the past or the future? I’m working on that ‘live in the moment’ thing, perhaps I’ll add it to my list.

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Ha! Thought that would get you! You're all already shaking your head in the cross-body fashion, aren't ya? I love my husband but I don’t think he really knows his age. He’s a total sports junky (aren’t they all?) and plays a lot of basketball. I like that. It’s good. It keeps him in shape and lets him blow off some steam after work. However, within the past two months it also sent him to the Urgent Care Clinic. The first time, he went up for a lay-up and landed on his foot wrong and tore a tendon. Not much you can do but ice it and elevate it. But last night, after a long day at work, I’m on my way home sitting in traffic and my phone rings. A sheepish man (my husband) on the other end says, “I’m on my way to the hospital right now, again.”

Construction Artist du jour
So in my role here at Be Jane, I am often called upon to help in construction projects which I LOVE doing. My prior life was one of a self-proclaimed ‘construction artist’ and I basically built whatever I dreamed up. Well it’s one thing to build it, but an entirely different thing to try and teach it.

Our In-Person Tooltorial Winners
We have some wonderful women coming to Los Angeles from Denver (they won an in-person tooltorial sweepstakes a while back) and besides showing them how to use tools, we want to actually build something with them so that they can see how all the tools would work together on a project. We’re thinking of building a Pottery Barn-style storage chest (check it out below). It looks expensive, but is in fact quite easy to make. So I volunteered to write up the step-by-step instructions of how to build this. We try and write all our projects assuming nothing so that it’s clear to anyone who reads it, but that sometimes is as much work as the project!

Step 1: No problem, Step 2: uh…
I started off with the tools and materials list, not bad. Then the cut list, what size do you cut the wood to. A bit more difficult, but I got it. Then came the part about how to join the wood together – it’s not hard to show someone, but to explain via words – phew! And I’m just trying to tell them how to put the boards together – what edge to join to what side!

We’ve only just begun
Alas, I’m sure I’ll work my way through it and the women will come out of this experience having the confidence to know that they can create the home of their dreams with some basic knowledge. Hopefully this is just the beginning of many more great things for them! Stay tuned, they’ll be here mid-June – I’ll let you know how it all turns out.

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This apparently is not my week for electrical stuff. I had hung some pendant lamps a while back in my kitchen and had to pull the lines myself – all was good and they’re beautiful (see below). Then I had a plumbing leak from the upstairs bathroom through the ceiling and into the kitchen and wouldn’t you know it, water finds the easiest path of escape – through the lights. Well, after about a month of dealing with insurance, doing drywall repair and repainting, I had to re-hang my pendants. They’re piggybacked three in a row and the first two worked but the last one wasn’t working. I’ve been so busy that I told myself I’d get to it when I had time. Well this weekend I had time. I took it down, rewired it and re-hung it. No go. After scratching my head for a bit a cosmic idea came to mind – perhaps it’s the light bulb. Yup, of course. What a dope!

Now I swear, I’m also going to tell you about all the brilliant things I do, but this week has just been goofy, or maybe I’ve just been goofy. Either way…

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