The List

I have been a homeschooling mom for the past 9 years. My eldest went to school in 7th grade. So now it's just my youngest, who would like to try going to school next year. Though somewhat bittersweet (I LOVE homeschooling) I think I'm ready for the change. He will still be home with me for the rest of this school year, but that hasn't stopped my mind from making "The List" - all the wallpaper that needs to come down, the kitchen cabinets that need new hinges , the rooms that need to be redone from floor to ceiling, and so on... You know, The List.

Every time I walk into a different room in my house The List gets bigger and bigger. So as a way to keep some semblance of sanity I intend to start out with a plan. One plan for each room. And me being me, it will all be in one 3-ring binder. As I go, I hope to blog through the experience.... so stay tuned!

(I also started putting up some of my already completed DIY projects...)

DIY Kitchen Table Refinish

We bought a little kitchen table years ago from a neighbor's moving sale. It started out stained with a light stain. Thinking it would look better a little darker we tried staining it darker. Clearly we did not prep the surface very well because it didn't look better - it looked awful! :)

I LOVE LOVE LOVE going to the "oops table" in the paint department of the home improvement stores. I found a can of off white paint for $2 and immediately knew I needed to buy it to repaint my kitchen table!  I was in such a rush to get this thing refinished that I completely forgot to take a "before" photo until it was already disassembled on the back deck!

It's just a basic table: square top with 4 legs, one at each corner, attached with nuts and bolts. Easy to disassemble and easy to reassemble when it was all done.

I tried using an orbital sander, but found that I preferred to sand by hand. Not sure why, but there was something about it that I just enjoyed - especially on such an easy, flat surface like the table top. I sanded the legs the same way.

I got it all sanded down using a 60 grit sandpaper. Then I gave it a quick sand with a 120 grit sandpaper. Because I wasn't going to re-stain it I wasn't super picky about how smooth the surface was.

Once it was ready, I primed it all using a water based primer. I don't know if it was entirely necessary, but because it would get a ton of use I decided to use it. Once that was done and dry it was time for the paint!

Because of the primer I only ended up putting on one coat of paint. Again, because this is a table that will get a ton of use I finished with a water based polyurethane. I gave the legs one coat of polyurethane, but gave the table top three coats. Because of the weather I had to move the table back inside for the finishing coats - too much wind!

All in all, I think it was a pretty decent first attempt at a DIY project.

Book Review: The Carols of Christmas by Andrew Gant

Leading up to Christmas I chose to read The Carols of Christmas: A Celebration of the Surprising Stories Behind Your Favorite Christmas Songs by Andrew Gant. As a lover of all things Christmas, especially the music (I put on the Christmas radio stations before Thanksgiving) I thought this would be a fun book to read as a way to add some historical background to the songs I love so much. 

Gant takes us from Advent through Epiphany with historical background on 21 different carols. Everything from O Come, O Come Emmanuel to Jingle Bells with lots of others in between, including my all-time favorite O Come, All Ye Faithful. Each carol gets its own chapter where the author gives a very detailed history of how it came to be, the variation in lyrics from one place to another, original language and translations (where applicable), and then the words and music of the most common version being used today.

All in all this is a very good book. But I do think it's probably not for everybody. Maybe the title is a little bit of a misnomer. Though it's subtitled "A Celebration of the Surprising Stories Behind Your Favorite Holiday Songs,"  perhaps a more accurate title would have been "the Surprising History..." because most of these read more like history than flat-out stories. Not a bad thing, but probably not something I would have picked up as a light read in the busy weeks before Christmas.

This book also assumes a knowledge of musical history that some readers may not readily have. More than once I had to go look something up in order to understand what I was reading. Again, not a bad thing; I love to learn when I read. But I probably would have waited for a less busy season to read this one.