A Very Sweet Kind of Valentines Day

I'm just wondering how many people buy Valentine's Day presents that say THIS on the bottom of the box??

Lol lol lol

I thought that was so absolutely funny!!! Steve and I decided to buy each other a Valentine's Day present. We needed a new mattress for our bed. Vodeeohdodo! (In honor of Shirley Williams who passed away last week).

We decided that our memory foam mattress was going on 8 years and could probably stand an upgrade. It was getting a little too soft and too saggy.  So we decided to pick up another 12 inch thick memory foam mattress, this time made by Nectar. The reviews were good and we decided this would be our gift to each other. This sucker is really heavy!!!  A king size in the box weighs 90 lb. We had to use the dolly cart to get it into the house and up the steps to the bedroom.

Once we got the old mattress lifted up and off the bed and hauled out into the dining room, then we were able to open up this one. The very explicit instructions also came with a little cutting device, similar to a letter opener. It's to make sure you don't cut into the mattress when cutting off the plastic. This thing is shrink wrapped and compressed into a wrapped up tube. I made a video of us unboxing it:

It worked out wonderfully and our other mattress got a new home with someone who really needed one. It is better than filling up a landfill. A single mom who works hard at two jobs needed an upgrade. She lives nearby and we even hauled it over to her house for her on our flat trailer. She was quite grateful, and we were happy to pass it on.

Also on Valentine's Day, my darling Steveio surprised me with some beautiful flowers and a heartfelt message in a thoughtful card. I love the pussywillows in the top as accents.

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What would be a more fitting thing to do on Valentine's Day then attend an event called "Stitches of Love"??

I belong to the Oconto County HCE Homemakers, HCE stands for Home and Community Education. It is a division of the UW Extension Office from the University of Wisconsin. It's origins were a rural gathering of farmer's wives who meet regularly. They share educational skills, tidbits of hints and helpful information, homemaking and gardening skills, recipes and usually a nice lunch. I have belonged to them since 1997 when we lived out in the country on the river.  We get together on a monthly basis, but also we gather with a larger group from other areas as well. 

Two or three times a year we have a gathering called "Stitches of Love". We create fleece tied charity blankets that are given to hospice and cancer patients. We also sew book bags for a program called BooksR4U. This program supplies small rural schools that maybe don't have a lot of funding with extra educational materials for the children. They are given these book bags that are chock full of things like their own very own set of 2 hardcovered reading books, coloring books, notebooks, crayons, rulers, pencils etc. The little schools that are short on funding really appreciate when we bring these in to their students. It's a lot of fun making these and all of the materials are donated.

I bring a sewing machine and work on the book bags. Usually there are three or four other ladies that sew with me, but their main driver lady from their district had a medical emergency and couldn't come. So I was the only one with a sewing machine this time, kept busy working on the book bags.

The ladies spread out, putting groups of two tables together and work on double layers of fleece fabric. They cut slits into the edges all of the way around into tabs that are then slowly and carefully tied into knots.

There's a lot of chitter chatter and laughter going on, while we work on the fleece blankets or cut out fabric for more of the book bags. We take a break for lunch... someone makes a pot of soup, and everyone brings a sandwich cut in half.  We put all the sandwiches on a platter and we all take different ones than what we brought.  Someone also brings desserts and we have coffee and tea. 

There is always something to keep everyone busy.

I managed to get eight fabric book bags completed before lunch time. I hope the children that get these enjoy the treats inside and read their books over and over again.  Some of the rural schools up on the reservation land say some of these kids never owned a book of their very own until they get these from our program. They get to take the books home and they are able to get 2 new books for each child every year.  This is in addition to all of the other supplies that are included too. 

Most of the blankets have one side that is brightly colored printed fleece and the other side is usually a coordinating solid color. This one is so cute with the kitty cats scattered all over the front of it.

On my way home, I dropped off some little Valentine's treats to our kids and grandkids. Who wouldn't love a chocolate brownie adorned with a great big Reese's peanut butter heart and little jelly beans? 

With the leftover frosting I made a special treat for my darling Steve. He likes the leftover frosting spread between graham crackers. It was a fond memory of a childhood treat when he was little. His mom would make them for him and his siblings as a snack. On top of each graham cracker sandwich I stuck in extra jelly bean with a dab of frosting!

So that was how we spent our wonderful Valentine's Day together. And the big bed with it's new mattress in place is going to be a wonderful treat to sleep on each night.

Vodeeohdodo!

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We finished painting the living room and the dining room as I mentioned in my last blog. I still had some trim paint left over so I decided to give a fresh coat to all of our kitchen cabinet doors.  

The first step is that Steve needs to remove every single door handle and drawer pull so I can neatly roll a new layer of fresh paint over the top surface of the doors.

 

I was not about to paint inside and around every cabinet. Just painting the front surface of the doors where the grimy little handprints land. That's what happens when grandchildren and a certain husband who don't use the handles and drawer pulls. They shut cabinets and drawers with the flat palm of the hand, usually wet or full of food!   LOL  When you have white cabinets, this is kind of a yearly event!

After they dry,

then Steve puts all of the

handles and pulls back on.

I did manage to pick up two little sample jars of two different colors of a soft sage or mossy green color. I chose a lighter tone and a darker tone. I want to get rid of the same beige mauve color that was in the dining room and living room. It's also in our kitchen and the upper portion in our master bathroom.  

So I painted both samples onto this extra hunk of wood and set it up above the beadboard in the kitchen. I think the darker looks better. I was worried the lighter might be too light.

I also set it over on top of the wine cabinet by the coffee bar. I think the darker color harmonizes quite well with the counter-tops. So the winner is the darker color called Mossy Meadow.

During the next few days I will work on one little portion of a wall at a time. Everything will require two coats and some taping off around the cabinetry. But it will be nice to brighten it up and get a fresh color there. Kind of like we're doing spring cleaning before spring has sprung?

But amazingly, all of our snow is melted with this warm weather the last few days. There were a few flakes floating down today but everything on the ground has now melted away. This is so absolutely unusual for February in Wisconsin!

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On the quilting side, I have been working on this really bright fun multi-colored quilt. I think I'm going to call it something like Summertime Picnic in America or something like that or Picnic in July? It has such fun colors. These are fabrics from The Pioneer Woman series.

I put together 20 large blocks and actually I did 21 by accident. So there's one left over. Then I flip-flopped and switched around and arranged the blocks on my bed until I made sure there were absolutely no two pieces touching that were of the same fabric.

I think it's going to be a really cute quilt, and it will go up for sale later in my Etsy store. So keep tuned in to my blog to see when it is completed if you are interested.

Once I got the quilt all laid out, then I had to mark each 16" section with a number and a letter so I knew the order in which they needed to be joined together. 1a, 1b, 1c, and then 2a, 2b, 2c etc.

Then I take them back down to my sewing desk in the She Shed and work on my cute little antique Singer Featherweight machine. I put together all of the blocks into rows. Then I join the rows into one large quilt top. I will go around with a couple border pieces to set it off with an accent color and make it into a queen size quilt.

See my helper???

Well, that's about it now on my blog today. Just as I was finishing this up the mailman came with a big box for me????

One of my wonderful blog readers by the name of Linda, (you know who you are!) sent this beautiful box full of very interesting historic quilting and needlework books. What a delightful thing to read by the fireplace in the evenings as we finish out the rest of winter and wait for spring.

On a health update,

our family member is doing as well as can be expected, 

and we are doing what we can to help. 

Three Days to a New Look

Guess what happens when your husband watches too many HGTV shows? We have been binge watching some old seasons of our favorites, Nicole Curtis of Rehab Addict, plus Ben and Erin of Home Town.

We were innocently sitting in our kitchen the other night, and Steve just happened to look at our brown painted cabinets. They had gone through many, many years of abuse with renter's moving in and out and multiple coats of paint. They have a lot of battle scars to show it.

Here is how they looked in 2015:

Their most recent resurrection in 2018-19 by the previous owners before we bought the house from them in April of 2019. 

They were all painted with a deep rich brown paint and new stainless steel handles, pulls and hinges were added. Not to mention a center Island was added and new counter-tops. It looked really nice. We added the open pantry and the french door since we bought the house. But it was dark, I must admit.

Steve was intently looking at the dark cabinets, he suggested: “what do you think if we painted them white?” Now I would NEVER paint nice wooden stained and varnished cabinets. NO way. That is blasphemy!~ But these are rugged painted 100+ year old cabinets of a common farmhouse style.

If you've been reading my blog for any amount of time, you would realize that Steve does not like to paint. If he can avoid it at all possible he will. So that means... It was up to little old Me!

The more we looked at it, and the more we thought about it, it seemed like an interesting idea. So I grabbed a bundle of blank newsprint paper, and we taped sections of it up over the existing brown cabinet doors just to give us a visualization of what it might look like. 

Of course, this was at 9 p.m. at night. So we really couldn't get a good idea until the next morning. We agreed to sleep on it and left it at that.

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The next morning we looked at the pieces of creamy white paper taped up and thought the kitchen looked brighter. Even though it was a gloomy cloudy day, the brighter surfaces of the taped up paper seem to give us an idea of what it would look like if we brightened up the kitchen.

I happened to have 2/3 of a gallon of the existing trim paint that matched the trim in the kitchen and the trim in the rest of the house. It's a soft creamy white called String of Pearls from Valspar. It's a nice thick coating semi-gloss paint and I figured two coats would be needed to cover all of the dark brown cabinets.

I got out all of my painting gear, and Steve helped by removing all of the handles and pulls as well as stacking the drawers in the laundry room so I could paint their faces without having them still sitting within the cabinetry itself.

I decided to leave the doors on and paint carefully around the hinges. Normally, I would have taken the doors off and laid them flat on saw horses. But since it's winter outside and the garage is cold, there's no real place to paint these doors laying flat. I decided to paint them in the upright position still hanging on their hinges. Later I would carefully unscrew each hinge, one at a time, clean up any little boo boos, and paint the surface around the hinge that might be missed by my smallish paintbrush. Then screw it back into place without ever having to remove the door.

I decided not to paint the insides of the cabinets because they had all been recently done and were in good shape. Who cares if the insides are brown? They are neat and clean and nobody sees the insides except us!

The painting went really well and I worked my way across the uppers. I figured I would tackle the hard stuff first. Steve was one step ahead of me with his caulk gun filling in any little holes or cracks that would show once the cabinets were lighter. When they were dark brown we didn't notice a lot of that.

By later afternoon I was able to finish the rest of the upper cabinets with two complete coats. My back was aching and my feet were sore from balancing on the little step stool all day. I decided enough was enough for the day and I would tackle the next part after a long soak in my tub and a good night sleep.

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The next morning, it was time to tackle the lower cabinets. Again, Steve was ahead of me with the caulking gun filling in any of the cracks and I worked my way across while sitting on a little ottoman covered with a towel. This was sit-down work! It went much easier than up and down up and down the step ladder of the day before. 

I was able to work my way across the entire span of lower cabinets and give two coats to everything. A few areas needed a little more attention, and those got a third coat once we were done.

Again, that was enough for the day. Now that we are retired, I don't need to be working so hard, do I?

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The very last day it was time to attack the island and the coffee bar. The island is newer cabinetry that was put in by the previous owners to surround the new larger stove and the suspended hood vent. 

On one side we have pull out bins for the trash and recycling, and on the other side it is all cabinet doors and drawers. The hinges were different on this unit, they are recessed and hidden. So the painting went very easy. 

The beadboard sides of the island really show up now, don't you think? When they were brown you really didn't notice them.

I think we are going to buy a 4x8 sheet of beadboard and cut out side panels for the ends of the cabinets and the coffee bar to tie it all together. More "Farmhouse-y". Maybe even insert some panels on the three lower cabinet doors of the island as well. 

Steve changed the baseboard on each side to a prettier trim that is the same that we use down in the she shed.

Next Steve had to change the 2 island electrical outlets from brown to white. Two coats of paint went quickly and I decided to go back and also paint the toe kick white. That may be a mistake in the future, but if it gets grubby looking, I can always give it a fresh coat of paint.

Also on the last day, I tackled was my adorable little coffee bar / wine rack that we recently built. We re-purposed an extra piece of cabinetry left over from the other side of the kitchen that had originally gone over a stove on the wall. Since the stove was relocated to the center of the island, that piece of cabinetry was not needed.

I love to re-purpose and recycle things, so by turning it vertical, it made a wonderful addition to our kitchen right next to our open pantry shelving. There had originally been a space here for a refrigerator and that piece of cabinetry overhead was kind of awkward with just a blank wall underneath it. 

By adding the coffee bar / wine rack, it really filled in that space and made the kitchen all come together. I decided not to paint the interior of the wine rack area because that tends to collect dust and I think leaving at dark helps hide it. (plus I didn't want to remove all those bottles!)

I stood back and admired the work. In just three days it seemed like the whole kitchen had been transformed. Steve helped me put the drawers back after things had dried and he attached all of the handles and drawer pulls into place.

My oh my! What a difference!

It has been 3 very cloudy dull dreary days, but this really brightened up the kitchen. I am anxious to see what it looks like on a sunshiny day!

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There hasn't been a lot of other things happening. We are kind of hibernating in for the winter. I am working on a new quilt.

Since we haven't been doing any RVing, I decided I'm going to start posting blogs every day of our motorhome modifications. I start with A and go through till Z. I've done this twice in the past and I feel they are things that may be of more interest to my RVing readers. Recently, with the demise of the Yahoo groups, our Safari people have kind of meandered over to an IO list and some of the Facebook groups. Maybe by posting these blogs with my A to Z motorhome modifications, I will attract some of them back to reading the blog again.

Even though we're not traveling anywhere this winter, we still exercise the motorhome generator monthly. It's good to fire it up and get a load on it. We learned the hard way that if you don't use it, things go bad. At one point because we weren't using it enough, we had to remove it, have the electrical windings called the rotor rebuilt, and reinstall it. That will be one of my motor home modification posts. It was not a fun job. I guess when things sit for too long they don't work so well. By firing up the generator (and also the engine and letting it idle for a while), things get lubed up, used, charged up and exercised. We do have solar panels on the roof that keep the batteries charged, and Steve regularly goes out and brushes off the snow.

Now that we are done with the She Shed and a lot of the major house projects, we are looking forward to getting more camping and trips this summer. So stay tuned!