Wrapping Up February

 Hi everyone. I hope everyone is having a wonderful weekend. 

Another month is quickly winding down. March can be winter or March can be spring here in New Hampshire. One never knows what to expect.  Yet with my yearning for spring,  I am glad to say February is just about in the books. 

Today I have my last page for Elizabeth's "What's Your Style?" challenge at Art Journal Journey. I had a lot of fun playing with style this past month. Thank you Elizabeth for this fun challenge.

My page today has a winter theme, but  I am hoping we are wrapping that up as well as the month also. I am saying goodbye to winter (at least in my art) with this page.

My page began with a torn out magazine page as my background and some winter jackets cut out of the Amazon clothing ad booklet.  I stamped a few things in white on the background, and then I added these die cut snowflakes. I cut them out of silver metallic paper. After gluing them on my page, I added a little dot in the middle. The words also come from the Amazon ad booklet.

The idea of playing outside though is great at any time of year, but after several months of winter, it will be even better when I don't need a puffy jacket. Smile.

 I also have a tag for Pinky's challenge at Tag Tuesday. Her latest challenge is BINGO.

I didn't think I'd be able to participate in this challenge because most of my craft supplies are packed up at the moment with my craft room being redone and under construction. Then I remembered I had some bingo cards in a cloth hanging pocket  on the back of the door that goes in and out of the room. Most of my bingo cards are larger (I got them cheap and use them as pages), but in my stack I found 1 smaller card that was the perfect tag size. Hurrah.

Since my journal page has a cold theme, I thought I would go with a more warm weather theme with my bingo card tag. Sorry my tag is only referring to bingo with the card, but I did use little black dots on the flower chain like you'd dot out your number on a bingo card. That's the best I could do right now with so many supplies out of commission.

The quote says 'I am little but I bee fierce". I will feel like I won bingo once there are some flowers blooming and once I see (thinking positively here) that my bees made it through the winter. Smile.

Similar the last few weekends, I've been working with and without my husband on the spare bedroom/studio project.  Last week  I had some easy scraping to do.

When the people who built the house put up the closet (that we just pulled down), they never fully finished the inside. They took joint compound and spread it roughly over the inside of the sheetrock (as you can see in the photo), but they never painted it. Since the inside closet walls are now my room walls, we first thought we might have to pull down the sheetrock and put up new smooth sheetrock, but when we realized the sheetrock had never been painted, we tried taking spray bottles of water and scrapers. Low and behold, the old joint compound softened and came off without a lot of effort, meaning now we don't have to pull off sheetrock and can prime the walls. Hurrah. Getting the walls in the area done was my week’s project.

I also went out this past week and bought the flooring for the room, even though we don't need it yet. Costco was having a sale of $8 off a box that ends today/Sunday the 27th, so I wanted to decide whether to go with their flooring choices or not. 

I went out shopping to see what I wanted, and I have to say, I was shocked at how expensive some laminate flooring was. I don't want a junk floor, but it is a spare bedroom. Plus I will be getting messy in there, so I knew I didn't want to spend a huge amount on the floor. I would have liked a floor with a white stained look to keep the room brighter, but the one I really liked was $70 a box. After calculating what was needed, which was 10 boxes, that would have been a $700 floor.  Nope, I'll save my money for a trip or some other house project (because we have several of those also). 

Costco online had 2 different white floors, but you had to have samples snail mail sent to you (seeing I couldn't find those floors anywhere else around me to see what they looked like in person), and they were hard to tell over the internet exactly what they would look like in the room. Plus, even though  shipping is free from Costco online, they charge a bit more online for the boxes of flooring to make up for that free shipping, but they are still half the price of a $70  box.

When I'd gone to Costco earlier in the week and looked at what they sold in the store, I didn't mind this brownish rustic hickory looking floor.  I thought it would work with our post and beam/rustic house. I didn't buy it then because I was still thinking white. After I did my floor shopping later in the week, I decided  the Costco brown floor would work, and I could save a bunch of money too. Off I went, and got my 10 boxes of flooring, which was $8 cheaper a box than the same floor would have been from Costco online.  Another thing checked off the list.

I'm hoping today we can get the ceiling ripped down in the closet area. That is also covered with this same textured sheetrock as the walls were, and we are going to put up a tongue and groove wood ceiling in this part of the room. Since my house is post and beam, half of the room already has  a permanent wood ceiling. I'm going to give this ceiling a light white stain to make up for the brown floor that is going in. We've done that in other parts of the house, and it looks nice.

OK, enough said. Sorry for babbling on so much in this post. Enjoy your what's left to your weekend.