International Day of the Girl Child

Dear Lovelies,

We are so blessed. I’m going to assume that we all have had the gift of education. Some may have less formal education than others, but I’ll take the leap to say that we are educated. Education is power. People struggle with  many things including communication, healthy living, equality and acceptance of others. Education helps you conquer these struggles. The pen is mightier than the sword and some do not want that power and ability to be available. This is especially true for girls.

Today is the United Nation’s second annual International Day of the Girl Child. This year’s Day will focus on “Innovating for Girls’ Education.” There has been a lot of buzz about Malala Yousafza and with good reason. She is a Nobel Peace Prize nominee at only sixteen.  You should watch her interview on the Daily Show from Tuesday here. Extended interview part two is here. Extended interview part three is here.

Make sure you watch her speech in front of the UN too.

There is a lot of information out there about the fight for education. The movie “Girl Rising” is said to be a good fit with International Day of the Girl Child. I’d love to see it, but there are no showings available. Girl Rising tells the stories of “9 extraordinary girls from 9 countries, written by 9 celebrated writers and narrated by 9 renowned actresses” to deliver the truth: “Educate Girls and you will Change the World.” You can read all about it here including information about The Cause and The Campaign.

There are many ways to be involved. From social media to hosting a screening. I made these Facebook cover photos, you’re welcome to use them. You’ll need to click on them to open them in the correct size.

Original slides are from here

Some facts about girl’s education:

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I’ve inquired about being the leader in organizing a viewing of Girl Rising in Nashville. I’ll keep you posted on if it comes to fruition.

Be good. Be safe. Be lovely.

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Two toning it

I plan on painting some of the dresser I shared on Monday. I don’t want to paint the whole thing, but the sides are scratched up and it needs some love.

Mid-Century dressers, due to their clean lines, seem to take two-tone paint jobs pretty well. More traditional dressers don’t look as good.

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One of my favorite examples of a two-tone dresser is this one from Amber Interiors.

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I’m not a big fan of this dresser, but it’s going in the right direction.

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Young House Love has a detailed post about how they refinished a dresser and painted the top of it here.

I plan on painting our dresser black around the edge. I looked for a piece like it, but this was the closest I got to it.

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Obviously, we’ll skip the peeling paint portion of this DIY.

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Weekly Thoughts

“What I did this weekend” posts are now posts to help you get through your week. I’ll likely still include things done over the weekend, but I’ll have a little bit of extra (quotes, pretty photos, tasty food, music, good shit) for you. Basically, it’s a weekly “Random Thoughts with RA.”

I hope you’re enjoying your long weekend and relaxing. Actually, my mind set on relaxing is usually closer to “ain’t nobody got time for that.” It’s something I’m working on.

Not only is the image found here but  it’s from a post titled “Finding Success in Your 30s.”

The Mister still talks about this performance.

He’s not a RiRi fan but he loves a green screen. It is hard to stop watching.

If you ever want to know “What would Rachael Anne like to do?” the answer is “brunch.” Well, brunch and style someone’s coffee table. Last week, I ate a Crab Cake Benedict at The Green Room in Greenville, SC.

It was a poached egg on top of a crab cake on top of a fried green tomato. They serve brunch everyday.

We can’t all be Kevin Durant, but we can likely donate something to the American Red Cross. You can donate to the disaster fund here or to a local chapter. Additionaly, you can always text “REDCROSS” to 90999 for a $10.00 donation.

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Inspiration: Horizontal Fences

We have chain link fencing around our backyard. Our backyard is big folks, so we don’t want to replace the entire thing. I’m not made of money. Additionally, four of our neighbors back up to our fence and I don’t want to let the dogs out. (Get that song out of your head.) Replacing the front of the fence or the section that faces the road would be a huge improvement. So, that’s what we plan to do.

We considered strapping bamboo fencing to the existing chain link. However, the look doesn’t fit our house.

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We’ve looked at the sections of wood fencing at Home Depot and Lowes.

Original photo here

Then, The Mister decided it was cheaper for him and his dad to make a fence. His dad has done such a thing (they have a farm) so it’s not completely out of the realm of possibility. Of course, this caused me to step back and ponder if we could do something interesting.

A home within our neighborhood had a horizontal fence for well over seven years (since I remember first seeing it while dating The Mister). However, they took it down last year and replaced it with the basic wood fence you’re used to seeing. See the Lowes example above. I miss the horizontal fence. This is when I started looking for inspirational photos of horizontal fences. Here is my horizontal fence moodboard.

All photos can be found here

I have a few other ideas for the fence that we’re talking out. I’ll share those moodboards later. Moodboards 4ever!

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Inspiration: House Paint

Today, The Mister is buying the paint for the exterior of the house. It is a big freakin’ deal. We’ve had little squares painted on the house for months. Our travel schedule and the weather are finally allowing the painters to get to our house the week after Thanksgiving. (Please, keep your fingers crossed for us on that.) They were going to do the house last week but we were on vacation. So, now we have to wait. On the bright side, the wait has allowed us to catch Sherwin-Williams Veteran’s Day Sale which is 40% off and better than the contractor price. We had the roof replaced over a month ago, which I haven’t shared photos of.  It’s gray and you’ll see it later.

Here are my inspiration photos for our exterior color scheme.

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Paula Deen’s Savannah Guest House

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This is one of my favorite blog posts out there on The Internets about painted brick. A couple of the photos above are from it.

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Inspiration: Gingham walls

I recently saw this article that included the photo below on Pinterest.

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I like gingham but The Mister is not into painting stripes. It’s not that he’s ever done it nor would I want him to do it alone. Painting is more my thing. So, of course, I searched for photos of gingham walls because they seem to be the jam. I need to potentially build my case.

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Ignore the desk by the toilet, though I too have questions about it.

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Then, we have a Lilly Pulitzer showroom.

It really makes me want to do gingham paint or wallpaper somewhere.

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Craigslist Fairytale: Using overlays

Recently, while trolling my friend Craigslist I found an old office credenza for $35.00

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I’m sure these pop up on Craigslist fairly often and they can easily be looked over. However, with such simple lines and flat faces it’s a great piece for an O’verlay. O’verlays are  fretwork panels that can be added to furniture to customize the look. Here are some examples from their site:

IKEA Lack Table Overlay Kit

I’d choose this option.

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Paint it and add some pull hardware then you could have something that looks like this.

 

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You better work it!

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Black out

Since the kitchen renovation is not going as planned, we decided last weekend to conquer smaller projects to make us feel better. We’re way behind on letting you know what’s going on in the kitchen due to a mixture of me being on the road more than usual, this being The Mister’s busy season at work and depression/upset/disappointment.

Here is our quick kitchen summary: We made our custom cabinet guy fix some of his issues. For example, he thought it was acceptable to rip off our window molding without asking and wanted to cut it around the kitchen cabinet he didn’t properly measure. This is just the tip of the crazy train that we’ve been riding for six weeks. Plus, we had to kick one of his “workers” out of our house and I had to tell him to stop cutting me off and not be rude. It’s gotten out of control. It’s a million little things. It makes me feel especially stabby. We’re now working with someone else to fix the kitchen – correct the stain, get us some doors, molding, etc.

So, lets change the subject. I’d like to paint our front door black. Here are inspiration photos as my Pinterest is full of photos of homes with black doors:

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Would you leave the back of the front door white, as usual? Or would you paint the front and back black?

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Inspiration: Tiled kitchen walls

Our kitchen cabinets will be installed on Thursday and Friday of this week. We have a lot of posts to write to let you know how we decided on what and what we did. One of the last things for us will be the backsplash. Since Monday was a holiday, I gave you a post on Saturday containing marble backsplash inspiration. We’re still doing a marble backsplash, but we haven’t finalized what size of tile or when we’ll do it. Of course, I’m using this time to try to convince The Mister that we should install tile all round the window of our kitchen. This is after I was already turned down for my idea of tiling all the walls.

Does that sound crazy to you? It sounded odd to me too, in the beginning. Then, I kept finding photos to support my additional tile work. Here are some of them.

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Now, the image that is most like what I’m trying to convince The Mister of now.

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What do you think?

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Inspiration: Marble Backsplash

We’re in the midst of making kitchen decision and still have our backsplash to worry about. We’ve looked at a number of options and plan to do something we can DIY. Should it be DIO (do-it-ourselves) opposed to DIY (do-it-yourself)? Get back to me on that after you look at this eye candy. I tried to focus the photos on just white counters (as that is what we’ve decided to do) and marble backsplashes or vice versa. However, some are all marble.

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Here is the backsplash tile we plan on using.

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Here are photos of a marble subway tile. 

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This is the Elle Decor showhouse’s kitchen designed by Palmer Weiss.

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