A reader of The Inspired Room, Jessica, sent me these photos of her staircase. The stairs at her new house were in bad shape, but a coat of black paint brought them back to life and looking classy again!

Thanks Jessica!

So let me just say this was a very very long but eventful and busy year. As the clock ticks down toward the end of 2009, I thought I’d recap the year for people new to The Inspired Room or for those of us who have short memories like myself, shall we? Come on, humor me people. We’ll start with a few personal highlights and move on to remember some random projects of the year.

As most of you probably know, our family moved over the holidays last year during a freak snow storm. Our kids all started new schools and we tried to get life settled in a new state.

I spoke on the topic off Blogging at the Blissdom conference last February with my buddies Nester and Simplemom (and yes, Blissdom was crazy enough to ask us to speak again this February!). I’ll share more about Blissdom soon, I hope some of you are planning on being there?

I shared my heart and story at A Woman Inspired Conference with Alli from Blissfully Domestic.

We waited nine agonizing months for our house to sell before we could buy a new house.

In July, I had to have a life threatening emergency surgery. Just to spice up the summer a bit.

In the fall, I was honored to be invited to join the writing team at (in)courage. (in)courage is an amazing site by DaySpring, a division of Hallmark. Not only do they share encouragement for women, they have cool products too, look what I made (above!). You can make your own here.

We started a church from scratch in September called Voyage (i.e. we didn’t know anyone when we moved here in January so we had to meet people first and make the whole thing up ourselves, here is the result, VOYAGE). I keep up the website, do e-newsletters, facebook pages, host events and meetings and help oversee a lot of the ministries for the church.

I started two new fancy specialty channels on The Inspired Room, which I promptly ran out of time to keep up. One was the DIY channel, and the other one I was going to use for random posts. Meh. Blog fail. Don’t worry, I haven’t forgotten about all the new DIY posts for the DIY channel!! Life has just been, well, a little crazy!

And somehow by the grace of God and a 100 gallons of coffee and a few too many scones, I managed to find a bit of time do just a few minor DIY projects around my new house. Nothing fancy mind you, but the fact I got anything done around the house at all is somewhat of a miracle to me. So, while they are not anything to write home about, here is a round up of my projects! Not all of them were documented, but these were some of the highlights.

I made my first ever moss ball topiary.

The birdcage got a fresh new outlook on life.

The Pottery Barn chairs got springy with a paint makeover in our first every Procrastinator Party.

The front door got a wintery new decor.

The oak dresser and hutch got a makeover during our second Procrastinator’s Party.

A quick and easy makeover…the kitchen cabinet doors came off the cabinets.

The cabinet doors morphed into shutters above the fireplace, first they were blue now they are green.

The antique stained glass church windows got primed and hung in the dining room. I don’t think I ever did a post on these since they were painted, but it got done nevertheless!

I made some felt garland.

And put together a spur of the moment, easy, use-what-you-have centerpiece using nesting pedestal dishes, leftover moss and a random bird. No “DIY post” instructions required for that one.

And of course, we took time out from the craziness to wrestle a few more giraffes (we have a long history of dead giraffes around our house) and get chased by giant swans.

PHEW. I’m kind of tired now. I think I’ll take a nap before the New Year.

Do I have any thing exciting planned for next year? Hmmm….I’ll let you know after my nap! I can tell you for sure that I have a fun bedroom makeover to show you from by one of the winners of the  $200 HomeGoods cards on The Inspired Room awhile back! This January you’ll get to see what she did with her winning card! yay!

What were your best projects this past year?

If you do a 2009 project round up, you can link them up on Friday!!
We’ll do a Year in Review Round Up this Friday!

shared with Kimba for DIY day

A few of you asked about the felt garland (inspired by one I saw in Country Living) in my Christmas Home Tour post. You are all so sweet. It is so easy it seems hilarious to me to write a DIY Craft Post, but I’ll be a good sport and pretend I’m all Martha Stewart. Seriously, would I ever do a complicated craft? Um, no. So if you come here for complicated or fancy, look the other way because this is MY KIND OF CRAFT.

I make some sort of easy Christmas garland every year so I’ll share the past three garland crafts here too. Just for fun. Don’t laugh at my crafts. They are fun to do with your kids when they say “I’m bored” over the holiday break. And being prepared for these projects will totally will make you feel like mother of the year. Then if you are a blogger like me you can blog about them and you’ll feel like the most crafty blogger mom out there.

These crafts are good for your self-esteem, good for the kids and good for your home.

FELT GARLAND

1. Buy whatever color of felt you like. I used rectangular felt from the craft store.

2. Cut into squares of any size, no need to be perfectly square or straight. Mine are 2 inch squares.

3. Thread dental floss (the BEST string for garland!!) onto a needle and poke through all the squares.

4. Tie ends, leaving enough floss to hang.

5 Hang bells or balls or other trinkets as you wish, using Christmas tree ornament hangers. By adding the decorations with Christmas ornament hangers you can easily change the garland up if you want to try something else with it next year, or if you want to keep it up year round!

5. Step back and admire your craftiness.

Now that you are on a roll, how about making one of these easy garlands?

PRETTY PAPER GARLAND

Last year my son and I made this garland. Simply use cookie cutters to create holiday shapes with old Christmas cards or scrapbook paper. Cut out and punch a small hole in the top of the paper shape. String on a ribbon and hang!

COOKIE CUTTER GARLAND

And when you are done with the cookie cutters in the last project, string them on some ribbon and hang ‘em up!

Aren’t you amazed at my crafting genius? But wait, there’s more!

BEADS & POM POM GARLAND

Stand back in awe. The beads and pom pom garland. This one was really pretty in real life. We made it a couple of years ago with some sort of jewelry string and sadly, it broke this year. Now we are all about the dental floss. String beads and or craft puff balls (do these have a name?) on the floss and hang.

Easy peasy.