Update: (in sets of three)

Three famous people: Ed McMahon, Farrah Fawcett, Michael Jackson

Three medical concerns: Erika - CAT scan, Justin - broken wrist, LeRoy -MRI
(all within a 3 week time period and Justin has 3 breaks in his wrist)

Three families coming to visit us: Josh, Kate, Kellie
(making a total of 3 weeks of family visits)

Three cousins here to play for a week: Samantha, Amberle, Matt
(which fills our home with 3 giggly girls, 3 older boys rolling their eyes at the 3 giggly girls, and 3 boys under the age of 3)

Three cats hanging out in the garage: Harrison (ours), the cousin's kittens (I don't remember their names [the kittens names, not the cousins]) Did I really just use 3 sets of parenthesis?

Three projects: all completed in 3 days - really, and I didn't do it for a blog post, it just happened to work out that way, I promise.

I've had fun creating again. After a reminder of Elder Uchtdorf's conference talk on creating I realized that I was missing having projects to do. During the last week I have been planning on doing some projects to rearrange our house a bit and to add a little different color and feel to the family room. I had forgotten how satisfying it is to spend a few days in my ratty clothes messing around with tools, paint, and fabric and staying up to the wee hours of the morning to get my projects done in the beautiful silence of children sleeping.

The way I do projects is to mull over them for a few days while gathering all the necessary supplies and then I hit it hard. I don't fix meals, I let the house cleaning go, I let my kids watch to much TV and I stay up way beyond a reasonable time for clear thinking, with a grand giddy finale of showing off my accomplishments to my family.

Here are the before and after shots of the 3 accomplishments of my 3 days of creating:



This is a toy box that I built several years ago for Kellie's family. Before they moved to Virginia they gave it back to me, not wanting to pack it along on all their adventures in other countries (and I secretly wanted it back because I never got around to building one for me like I had planned).



And here is the updated version of the toy box turned into a window bench in our living room. Ok - it's more of a standing stool for Nathan and Hyrum to look out the window, but I enjoy it as a bench to sit in the morning sun. The top is a table runner that I pieced together at an Enrichment activity a couple of years ago. I had wondered what to do with it since it was an odd size and really to small for a table runner. Turns out it fit the box perfectly!



I forgot to take a before picture when I started this project so this is a picture that I found online that is similar to what I started with. This was originally bought for the kitchen in our other house. It landed its way in our current basement to set the DVD player on. Shortly after moving it to the basement the kids broke off one of the doors so I took both doors off and it quickly became a clutter shelf for anything that the kids were to lazy to actually put away.



And here it is with a new coat of paint (done splotchy on purpose to match the box and to give the worn look to it). I haven't figured out what to put on the shelf yet, but it's only been done for 2 days. Maybe day 3 will be magical and I'll have a brilliant idea of what should go there.



Today I re-covered the glider. I had never liked the blue but we got the chair for $15 on a Walmart clearance sale so I couldn't really justify complaining about it. After 9 years the padding had worn so thin that it really wasn't comfortable at all to sit in and the fabric was in sad shape.



So back to Walmart I went only this time I came home with $12 fabric instead of a new chair. I used some padding that I already had from previous projects and in about 4 hours (uhh, I should have had it done in 3 but matching up those stripes took some time) I had it cut, padded, sewn and put together. Tomorrow I will do the footstool to match it.

I just realized that I could wait another 3 days to post this and it would be 3 weeks between posts but that might be really pushing the subject, in more ways than . . . three.