2012 A Wonderful Year!!!

As the year winds down, I am truly grateful for many blessings. 2012 has been an absolutely wonderful year for our family. As I look back through my blog, I am delighted that I was able to complete so many projects. We were able to travel a good bit. We had a trip to Arizona, including the red rock canyons of Sedona and the Grand Canyon; we took our “last” spring break trip to Disney World; I spent the month of June preparing for a three week teaching trip to China which was in July; we had our usual week at the beach; we had several weekend trips to the Washington, DC area including Old Town Alexandria; and lastly, we had a short trip to New York just before Christmas.

  I am delighted and humbled that both of my children graduated from college in May!! (Can you say cha-ching!) We welcomed a very special niece into the world in June and a special nephew graduated from high school in June. In December, another special niece graduated from college, the first person in her immediate family to do so. All of these were tremendous blessings this year. In addition to travel and lots of celebrations, I was able to pull off a few projects.

Last January, we started a major reno of our kitchen. I still have not posted the big reveal but I did post snippets along the way. This post is about my experience purchasing my new microwave and this post is about how I got the best prices on my new refrigerator and range. I shared here how I transformed my existing dishwasher from this

into this.

This post shows how I transformed our pantry doors.

The “before” picture above also shows where we had started removing the carpet for new hardwood floors.

I also painted all of the trim in our kitchen and den white where it had previously been stained dark walnut. It took 2 coats of primer and 3 coats of paint and a LOT of patience!

This post showed how I repurposed one of my kitchen cabinets to use in my laundry room.

The before shot shown above was taken in the garage. No wonder my car is always dirty!

I shared several lamp transformations,here, and here.

I did a tutorial post on how to make a slipcover for a lampshade here.

As I am very slowly updating the living room, I also updated the lamp tables here.

Our powder room went from this

to this.

Click here to read the powder room post. I also updated the built-in cabinets in the den here.

My last big project was updating the guestroom here.

I completed several furniture projects, the biggest probably was building this entry table from parts of my grandmother’s piano. You can read about it here.

I also rescued these French chairs from a thrift store and updated them, shared here about my Annie Sloan dining table project, and updated an armoire here.

A couple of favor small projects were this DIY sunburst mirror

and this cute little tool caddy built by one of my children several years ago

that I updated here.

Our summer cottage has been an ongoing project and I shared some details of construction here and showed part 1 of the tour here.

I have had a very busy but very productive and rewarding year. I am looking forward to another wonderful year in 2013!

I’ll be linking to Metamorphosis Monday at Between Naps on the Porch and to Wow Us Wednesday at Savvy Southern Style. Click over for lots of inspiration.