DIY | Operation Home

Hey guys! Long time no blog!

As mentioned in my last post, we spent the past week on a much needed vacation in Mexico. Joey and I traveled sans kiddo for our first real vacation in five years (HUGE thanks to our amazing parents for wrangling Lucas for us in our absence). I’m sure it goes without saying that the vacation was just what the doctor ordered. I mean, laying on the beach at an all-inclusive just can’t be bad no matter how ya slice it. The original plan was for us to return on Thursday and for me to post on Friday. Unfortunately (or fortunately?), my plan was quickly (or not so quickly) derailed after we spent eight hours at the Cancun airport due to delays only to have our flight home cancelled. So, we ended up having to spend an extra night in Mexico. At first we were pretty irate and so disappointed that we wouldn’t be smooshing Lucas’s face with kisses until the following day. Then, they announced that the airline was taking our entire flight to spend the night at the resort we had just come from. Which was amazing. Seriously, I can’t recommend the Dreams Riviera Cancun enough if you’re looking for a place to go. We were delivered to the hotel around 7:30 pm, so we still had time for dinner before bedtime, which ended up being a fun meal spent with some cool new friends whom we would have never met had our flight not been cancelled. So, in the end, it was okay. Here is a little sneak peak…

And in case you’re wondering where Lucas gets his silly picture-posing skills, please allow me to enlighten you…

This is what’s known as “pulling a Joey”. When we were dating, I was once forced to frame a picture of him biting my head. It was the most serious pic I could find at the time. He is handsome, though, no? 😉

Anyhoo, we are now back, safe and sound. Woo-hoo! So, onward!

And today we’re talkin’ trays….

Yep. Not sure if you’ve noticed, but I’ve developed a thing for trays somewhere along the way. I can’t help it. They’re so useable. “It looks cluttered”. Put it on a tray. “It looks lost”. Put it on a tray, “Needs more style”. Put it on a tray. “Needs more function”. Put it on a tray. Really… wine, coffee, and trays could solve the worlds problems. Just sayin’.

I currently have a few trays going right now. Like here…

(actually there are two in this pic… can you spot ’em?) And here we have the tray that I altered with a bit of fabric and Mod Podge….

And now two more have come into my possession. I visited a few thrift stores several weeks ago and finished off the day spending a grand total of $4.15 (plus tax) for both of these beauties. This one was $3.15…

And I paid a whopping dollar for this hot pink, preteen gem…

I know. They’re not much to look at now, but just wait… Spray-paint swoops in at lightning speed and saves the day (Somebody get that can a cape!). Anyways, this gal got the oil-rubbed bronze treatment….

Aaaand she is a teeny-bopper no more….

She’s now rustic and textural.

Then, my holiday-spirited guy got a coat of classic white spray-paint for versatility, along with a good caulking along the seams…

(It was windy and a losing battle when I caulked, which is why the seam looks dusty. It cleaned up perfectly in the end.) Anyways, I’m pretty sure that white trays are the gift that keeps on giving. They can be used anywhere to add a smidge of class and style since they pretty much go with everything. For example…

So, what do ya think? Not bad for just over $12 total, eh? It was $4.15 for the trays and 8 bucks for the oil-rubbed bronze spray paint (of which I still have a bunch left). The white spray-paint I already had. And now I have two more tray-loves to add to my repertoire. Oh, how I love trays.

Hello, friends!! So, remember this guy??

He’s our Goodwill breadbox turned toilet paper holder from our bathroom makeover. I’ve been meaning to write a post about how he came to be for a while now, but for whatever reason, I’m just now getting to it (and also, I sort of forgot. Sorry.) 🙂

It all started when I found this breadbox at Goodwill about six months ago for eight bucks…

I had no idea what I was gonna do with it at the time that I purchased it. And once I got it home, I still had no idea, so the cheapo in me berated my inner-self for wasting the money (I know… this is how cheap I really am).

Anyhoo, as I was working on styling our guest bathroom, I searched the house for pops of red and came across this badboy, shoved way into the back of No Mans Land (aka: our spare room). And I realized that it would be perfect storage for above the toilet. Retro, bright red, unique. Oh, yes. I was all in.

The actual mounting of the breadbox was pretty straight forward. Joey did most of it. We simply located the studs with a stud-finder.

Then, I held the breadbox up to the wall while he marked the stud locations on the inside of the breadbox to determine where the holes needed to be drilled…

Next, he removed the breadbox’s door to keep it from becoming damaged, and drilled four holes into the back of the breadbox. Good drill bits were key here as the metal was pretty challenging to drill through. We stacked the box on top of a piece of scrap wood covered by a rag to avoid damaging our floors and/or the finish on the breadbox. He started by drilling through the inside…

Then, went back through the holes on the outside with a slightly larger drill bit to make the hole clean…

Once the holes were drilled, he held the box up along the wall again, and I marked the hole locations on the wall with a sharpie…

Yep. I totally just showed you a dot on the wall. You are welcome. 😉 At this point, Joey reattached the top…

Then, used heavy duty anchors, and screwed the box to the wall using screws and washers…

The inside of the box looked like this…

And we were left with this…

Which is when I realized that we should’ve removed the rubber feet. They made the box scream “Hey you! I’m a random breadbox screwed to the wall!”. So, I set about removing them. They were glued on pretty securely, so Joey suggested that I heat the glue up with a hairdryer…

Which I did. I heated up the feet and carefully pried them off with a razor. It was pretty slow going, but I got them all off eventually. And was left with this residue…

I gently scraped the areas smooth with my razor, but little black smudges were still left behind. So, I busted out the red craft paint and touched up the black…

The paint is still wet here, but once it dried it blended right in. I’ve mentioned before that I’m a detail-person. It drives me bananas when a project of mine looks haphazard. So, when I say that I can’t tell that these spots ever existed, I mean it. It was totally serendipitous that the red craft paint that I had on hand matched the breadbox to a T.

And here he is today (after some post-reveal styling)…