I have always wanted to start my own blog, well here goes. I am a mother of 3 two Grown daughters that have children of there own My oldest daughter has a 5 year old son, 4 year old daughter and a 3 year old daughter. My youngest daughter has a 4 year old son, and I also have an 11 year old son. I divorced in 2000 from my first marriage (My girls dad) Then remarried in 2002 to my son's dad. I again divorced from his dad in 2006, He had a son before we were married and I now have legal custody of him. Long story! He will be 18 in a couple months. WOW how time flys. He was only 4 when I got with his dad. I am now married once again, they always say 3rd time is a charm! He has 3 children himself. 2 son's and 1 daughter. His oldest son is 28 and has a 3 year old daughter. Yes we are like the Brady bunch. But all is fine.
Since we have such a big family we need to save money but we love to have nice things. So my husband and I love to create great things out of something that doesn't look as good as it could.
My husband is a carpenter and sometimes when he remodels houses, they give him there "old" things and replace with new things. SO we take the "old" and make it OUR new.
My first project that I will show you will be our fireplace. We are very pleased with the turn out. I just hope you are too.

We went to a clients house that wanted to replace there mantle, and staircase. So we took the mantle down and all the banisters, rails and spindles. WOW what a job! We brought home everything and decided, that we wanted to put the mantle up in our dining room.
We love our house that we built but feel like it was missing a fireplace. So we took the old one and made it our own! The top one on the left is at the clients house, very nice fireplace. Then the one on the right is the same one but we spoofed it up a bit.
How we spoofed it up
1st thing, Painted the whole thing white
2nd, Went to lowes and bought some paneling that looks like brick and one that looks like rock
3rd, My husband measured the opening and cut the rock one to fit the whole opening with the top part cut out to put the insert in. Then he cut the brick paneling for the inside to look like a "real" fireplace,
4th, he built a box for the bottom, the same width and depth of the opening with a little curve to give it a 3D look.
5th, I painted the bottom part of the box black (the part with the curve) Once he had all those pieces cut, he put the box in, then put the brick paneling on top of that, then put the rock paneling on the front, with trim around the opening.
6th, He then added some more molding to the sides to bring out the insert a little more.
7th, We added the little scrolly things to the center and to each side, on each side we added a few rosettes and to the bottom part some more smaller rosettes.
8th, we bought some fake logs that light up to put on the inside.
9th, we put some chair moldings up on each side of the fireplace on the walls, painted from the chair moldings down then put smaller trim to make a box and painted the whole thing white,
It took us about 6 hours to finish the whole project. But we went from a plain wall to a beautiful focal point.

Well I hope everyone loves it as much as we do.