Simple Side Dish

Wanted to share a recipe I have made a couple times. Hubby loves and I do mean LOVES rice and this one he really loves! It’s very easy to make and fast to!

Really and truly you could probably make a meal out of this by just adding some small pieces of boiled chicken if you’d like to have a whole meal. I would have to have a piece of cornbread with mine though. ;)

 

Broccoli and 3 Cheese Sauce with Rice

I use brown rice because it’s healthier for me, but you can use white rice if you prefer. Brown rice takes longer than white rice to cook. I usually cook more than what I need for this meal because hubby loves the rice so much. Cook about 1-2 cups of rice. You may not want as much rice as I put in ours. You may only want 1 cup. Try it both ways and see which one you like best.

Then get you a 24 oz. size of Green Giant Broccoli and Three Cheese Sauce. It’s the bag you steam. Go ahead and stick it in the microwave and steam it.

When it’s done and sit as long as the recipe on the back of the bag says to do, mix it with your rice.

Hope you enjoy this recipe!

Treasure In the Making

Well this would should be really fun!

My sister remarried her 1st husband and he has a daughter from another marriage. I hate to call children step children! So I’m not going to do that! Anyway she is getting married shortly and needed a home for beginning her new life. I WISH I had thought to post before pix of it but didn’t think to!

Well let me back up, you wont know what in the world I am referring to!

Stephie’s (young lady to be married soon) her step Dad does repair work and he acquired this trailer. Stephie is going to fix it up for their home and it’s a neat trailer! I am SOOOOOO excited for them!!!

Anyway this place was just left after the tree limb went through the roof and her step Dad, Dad and future hubby are going to fix it. From the looks of the trailer it was like time stood still after the tree limb went through the roof because the lady just left things as they were in there.

There were lots of stuff in it along with furniture etc. Lots and lots of stuff in it! It's just so neat for them to be starting out their new life with so many things that make a house a home! You would not believe the clothes, shoes, and magazines this lady had! There was a 55 gallon bag of shoes! Anyway I went over to help them on Monday and we got a truck load that was over the cab of the truck out that day. Then they got out another large truck load the next day.

I talked to my sis last night and they were shampoo-ing carpets and washing down the walls. I will probably be going back today so maybe I can get some pix if she doesn’t mind me sharing them on here.

I love seeing the before and afters of things like this turning into a treasure. That is sooooo much fun to see the after shots!

OK got to run….. more to continue on this subject later. :)

OK update on the place. They are really working on it and they're putting the porch on as of last week. Even started putting on some of the skirting as well because the part where the porch goes needed it's skirting. All this came with the trailer which is soooo cool. When we, my husband and I got married we bought a trailer and ours didn't come fully furnished with all the things you need to start out a new marriage. So I know how hard it is to get the things you need and that's why I am just so excited for them and they can make this place their own and fix it just the way they like which is also really cool. I wish them all the best in the world for the most happiest marrage ever!

Bargains

Well I did it again! Well let me back up there just a little. ;) God and I did it again! I KNOW very well where my blessings come from and am always in mind of it. So with credit where credit is due, He helped me find this bargain as well.

I’ve been wanting some of the wide blinds for our house for quite some time and finally found them a couple weeks back. As you know I love to shop the thrift stores and found these, the whole buggy load was 5 bucks. They were all tangled up but I knew I could get them untangled and I bought them. There were like 15-20 blinds in this buggy!! The guy that donated them told the store he had paid over 500.00 for these blinds. WOW and I’m soooo excited to have gotten them! God is SO GOOD AND AWESOME and I might add, He is good ALL THE TIME! :)

 

Dining room pic….

We finally got them up over the weekend with my sisters help. We’ve still got to put up the little valance things that cover the hardware and metal part of the blinds.

I want to take the curtain rod holders down but I haven’t done so yet because I will have to touch up the paint when I do take them down.

Dining room pic…….

My plans are to repaint the kitchen and dining room. When I painted the dining room this color I decided it was much too yellow for me. And like I usually do, it takes me quite awhile to decide WHAT I want to do when one of my projects doesn’t go the way I had it in my head. But I have decided I am going to tone down the yellow with some white so it will have a tint of yellow.

kitchen pic……

and last but not least, the back door one……

I wound up with 6 blinds that fit these windows and 2 more that fit the living room windows. I have 4 windows in the living room and will have to find 2 more for the other two windows. So that’s not even 1.00 per blind for the ones I got. I gave my sister several of them and she and her husband put up one very long one over their wide dining room windows. It also looks VERY good.

THANK YOU SIS for all your help!! I LOVE YOU!

Rose

Beach Bedroom Roman Blinds

Well I finally got those roman blinds made for our bedroom a couple weeks ago. Then just realized I hadn’t even shared them with you all. They were fairly easy to make but just took a lot of time.

I am leaving the printed swag for right now because I should have made the blinds just a little wider so you couldn’t see around the sides of them. I can fix them I think.

I am going to starch some battenburg lace I have and hand stitch it on them here and there to dress them up a little. Then I want to use a battenburg lace dust ruffle on the bed.

I wanted it to be really dark so when I sleep late it will be dark in there. Then when I want light I can raise the blinds. I sandwiched some of that darkening fabric in between the layers of cloth.

I made a few boo boo’s along the way but now I know how to do it now and will be making 4 for the living room as soon as I can. This should help keep the rooms warmer in the wintertime. Next time I make them I will put the darkening fabric all the way to the edge and not following the directions on that because it really needs to be all the way to the edge.

I am really enjoying the wall color. It makes the room so light and airy and have decided I would like this beach look all through out my house. lol

Family and Blue Haired Dolls

I bet you’re wondering WHAT? Blue haired dolls? ;) Just bare with me, you’ll see.

 

 

My Southern Belle…… This is my daughter Cindy.

This is my sister and I. It was my birthday as you can see from the cake on the table. We had gotten these dolls for Christmas the year before. Mine was blue hair and hers was pink hair. We dearly LOVED our dolls as you can see! Don’t think we had many of them. Check out those headbands!

A school pic of me. I don’t know how old I was here. And here is another headband!

This is my Daddy and one of his friends horsing around. This is when he worked for the trucking co. in Lakeland, Florida in May 1952. He had a cigar in his mouth! I never saw him smoke one of those.

WOW How Things Change

Back in Jan. of 1988 we started building us a house and last night while going through photos trying to find this one certain one of MawMaws house on Presley St. I came across this pic of ours when we first started our house. Man it looks so little and sooo close to the pond, but actually it’s not that close. Oh and that little bitty oak out front there, well lets just say it’s huge now. I don’t remember it being THAT small! Now you can’t even see the house at this angle for the trees.

This shot was taken 3/28/88.

All I can say is wow!

Bloggers and HOME

I just had to share this link with you all. As some of you know I have been looking at beach blogs for a couple days now dreaming about HOW MUCH I’d LOVE to own a beach home!! Ahhh man I could live there in the summer and be home in the dead of winter when it was too cold to walk on the beach and hunt seashells. :) Ahhhhhhhh WHAT A LIFE!

Anyway this Beach Vintage blog caught my eye in someone’s list of blogs awhile ago. As I started reading, her home sounds like MY home. ;) She said she furnished her home with things from thrift stores and E-bay, same here but I also need to add friends to my lists. As I look around my house it’s so nice to see things friends gave me they knew I’d like and they didn’t want anymore. One friend really comes to mind because she has given me loads of things that I can’t part with. That wonderful friends name is, Tammy. I’ll have to share a pic or two with you one day of a sofa and chair she gave me. I just LOVE this set, it just screams Maw Maw to me!

Here I am in one of her chairs when I was only 6 mo. old.

Then here is my Daddy holding two of the babies. I think the babies are Andy and Mike. Notice the phone book hung back there on the wall by the phone. ;)

It is sooooo me because I love old furniture and I think one reason why is because as I was growing up as a kid my Maw maw Harrison had old furniture it her home and it was always so homey to me and always said home. Her home was so peaceful to me. Even with the paint peeling off the walls in the living room THAT was STILL and always will be home to me. She lived in an old house with no halls. I’ll never forget it as long as I live, all the rooms had doors that opened from one from to another room. It had a wonderful old front porch and I dearly loved those wide steps going up to it. It was a fancy home at one time for those days. It even had a concrete walkway as well. But back to the inside, all the rooms opened up to each other and when you walk up to the door there was the living room. This living room had 4 windows in it. One window on each side of the fireplace and 2 windows on the front. When you walk inside, off to your left was a door heading into a bedroom which had 3 beds in it.

There were 2 double beds and a twin bed and Pawpaw and Maw Maw slept in those double beds and Andy slept in the little twin bed. My sister and I would sleep with Maw Maw and Pawpaw when we were there. There was another door in that bedroom that led to another bedroom and it had 3 doors leading off from it. One led to another bedroom and one led to the dining room which was a nice size room as well. Maw Maw had her a large table in there for her large family and it was so neat. She also had a china cabinet that was out of this world. The legs on that thing were 2 inches thick! She had it filled to the brim with dishes and whatnots.

The dining room had two doors in it and one led to the kitchen. The kitchen had 3 doors leading off of it and one was to the dining room, one to the neat back porch and one to the middle bedroom where my Uncle Mark slept.

Each one of the rooms had at least 2 or more windows in them which I loved because it made the rooms light up because they weren’t dark. In the dining room there were 4 windows in it but someone had added a bathroom on the back side of the house on part of the porch so that covered up the back windows in the dining room. Maw Maw had that fixed really neat to. She had curtains on BOTH sides, in the dining room AND in the bathroom so it looked like windows leading to the outside.

I think my Maw Maw loved the outdoors and that must be where I get mine from. As you can tell this Maw Maw was always my favorite and made me feel like I was somebody. She never criticized me or put me down in any way. I always felt loved by her and she also had a gentle and quite spirit about her that I dearly loved.

Anyway when I was reading on Beach Vintages blog I though how much we had in common with fixing up our homes using thrift store items that someone had tossed out of their homes because they didn’t want it anymore and all I can say is yipeeeeee so happy they decided they didn’t want it. ;) Go check out this ladies site.

man I want me a beach home………………….

This is my Maw Maws old house. see the old chair? Look at that floor covering! This is me in the pic.

Me again with another old chair of my Maw Maws.

This next one is not a good pic but you can see how the paint on the wall is peeling in this one. My Daddy is the closest one to the camera person and my Uncle Mickey is the one behind him. Look at all the old family photos on the mantel. Everyone seemed so content in this old home. It was just the best!

Daddy giving Paw Paw a bottle to check out. ;) They were all sitting around the fireplace in the middle bedroom that was closest to the dining room. Maw Maw must have been in the kitchen cooking.

I hope you’re having a great Labor Day!

Beach Bedroom

I wanted to show you all my wallpaper I found the other day for .75 a double roll. Since I have been trying to redo my bedroom in a beach theme I also wanted to do our master bath as well.

I thought one small wall would be really neat done in this wallpaper. I really really love it and I was even thinking about something else as well. You know those door mirrors that are narrow and long that you put behind a door? I was thinking it would be neat to get 2-3 of those and take the mirrors out and put the wallpaper in the frames and hang them on the small wall side by side. That way I wont have to be pulling wallpaper off the wall in years to come when or IF I get tired of it. Or better yet I could make myself some frames out of some thin molding, hmmmmm decisions decisions.

I took these pics at night in my dining room so they were dark and I lightened them up some so you could see all the sea shells, so the background color isn’t really true. It’s a very light sand color.

Last but not least…… check out those pretty sea shells! ;) I just LOVE sea shells and even more, I love finding them on the beach!

There are some really pretty colors in here. I think a brown would be pretty to put with it and the blue color I already have our bedroom painted.

Idea for Changing Chairs

to match all your tablecloths……. without spending a fortune on fabrics.

This is the idea I was referring to Cindy about the chair bottoms. You could draw out the pattern for YOUR chair bottom on paper and then also make you a pattern for these pieces that hang down on the edges. As you can see these aren’t for these chairs but for ladder backs but the idea would work for our chairs as well. We just wouldn’t do the back piece that hangs down and we would square the corners where it curves on this white fabric to fit our chair bottoms. Then on each side in the back piece where the white fabric is, you could just do a tie to tie them on the chair with so they would stay put. I plan on making some for my chairs so I can change them out as well because my chair bottoms don’t match all my tablecloths I use.

See the one below I put on the floor so you could really see how it’s made? Naturally the hang over pieces (printed fabric) would be wider to cover our chair bottom and the hang over pieces would be wider and closer together at the sides where the legs are since they would be wider.

Anyway this wouldn’t require lots of fabric and naturally you would want to do it all in one color. Plus you could get some cheap solid beige fabric and make one to see how you like it first before you spend lots on good fabric. Plus you would be able to see just HOW MUCH fabric you would have to have.

My friend that gave me this wants me to make her a pattern from it so I can make her some from fabrics she has bought. She has a tea room and she wants to be able to change it out to match her tablecloths.

Setting a Beautiful Table

Cindy over at My Romantic Home inspired me with her beautiful table settings yesterday.

I had seen some drapes yesterday at the thrift store and got an idea for them this morning and decided to go back to see IF they would happen to still be there. Well they weren’t. :( Oh well, I SHOULD HAVE went ahead and gotten them yesterday evening when I saw them.

While I was in town I decided to run by one of my favorite places to shop and this is what I found. I decided to get them and play with them to see IF I could set a pretty table to.

There wasn’t but three of them  and only for .25 each. I knew I had some solid green saucers and some off white ones and thought they might hopefully go with them.

See what I came up with?

and……

I am still playing with them but that’s about all I have that will go with them. I would really like to find me a small set of off white plain dishes to play with like this. Most all my plates are printed with roses or some sort of fruit. I don’t have much room to store many more dishes. lol

Anyway do check out Cindy’s beautiful table settings at My Romantic Home and also the rest of her blog. I really don’t think you will be disappointed because she has an awesome home!!! She and I have lots in common because I to LOVE linens! I just need me a place to store all mine now. ;)

I hope you have an awesome weekend!!

Rose

Pool Pump

Well my pool pump finally came in today for the pool my sister and brother in law gave me. I’ve been looking online for ways to hook it up so it would be better because the heavy valves hang from the sides of the pool and they wiggle a lot when the pump is on. I KNEW it would even be wiggling worse with this stronger pump because they said the water shoots to the other side of the pool out of the pipe on the other side.

I’ve been looking at a forum for weeks trying to find some ideas. Well when the pump came in hubby started playing with the fittings that came with it and he came up with this. The pics I had printed off from the forum shows hard pvc pipe hooked to it all and then these valves you have to shut off to clean the filter is attached to the hard plumbed PVC pipe. When hubby hooked them up like this I was like now WHY didn’t I think of that? He just screwed them onto the pump itself. This pump is really huge, it doesn’t look like it but it is.

 

See how he has it attached to the pump? Now when I need to clean the filter I wont be tugging at the walls of the pool making them leak. The flex-able hoses will just screw right into the valves and then just screw right into the piece on the wall of the pool.

This is my ottoman the large box for the pool pump is sitting on. The pump and filter fills up the box. I had no idea it was going to be this big, although I am happy it is because maybe it will work really well.

Before I forget, in case anyone is interested, (I don’t get anything for promoting this, and I don’t even know the person selling them) it’s the 4000 GPH Intex pump. They had them on Amazon but they also had them on Ebay. On Ebay this guy had everything I needed to hook up the pump. All the fittings and even some I already had. On Amazon it didn’t say if all these fittings came with the pump or not. I even got a filter for it as well.

Now to get it all hooked up. :)