no longer going to the dogs

From dog bed to headboard in a couple of sunny days? Gorgeous hunk of mustard colored goodness, your life has taken a turn for the best.

There were already boards running horizontally along the top and bottom of this futon/dog bed/headboard, so we added "legs" and made the heard board rigid by adding three vertical boards {no, you're not crazy. there are only two boards pictured}. Our blue print was nothing you couldn't have come up with yourself if presented with a $10 dog bed and $7 worth of pine. :) I believe in you.

All of our normal bed linens are in the wash so you're getting a kind of incomplete, but still entirely accurate, picture of what our bedroom currently looks like. We still need to paint the walls white. Blah blah blah. :) You know the drill.

But as far as the headboard goes? I could not be more happy with the way it turned out, and for less than $20, I promise to love it for the rest of my life. Really. It makes me all smiley inside and out.

What have you transformed lately? Do you also have classy sandal tan lines on your feet? Have you recently realized the hidden potential in all things canine?

you may call me mary

Yes, that was a nursery rhyme reference.

I should probably get pregnant before we start officially decorating the nursery. Here's the good news {?}: We have no extra room to be the nursery, so we're currently safe there. But, I can't pass up an awesome child's toy. Especially if it's a giganormous lamb that's able to hold its chubby, fleecy body up on its own four feet.

Nowak babies are going to be like, "Huh? Most people ride horses? I always go for long adventures on my trusty lamby."

Yes, my kids {with the help of this lamb} will be that awesome.

thrifty thursday: tinkling brass

While I was studying for a semester abroad, we lived in a brick, three story farm house. It was exactly as you picture a farm house in England should be. Sturdy, well worn with age, and covered with an almost reverent air. Whenever a professor wanted to meet with us, we were signaled by the clear, strong sound of a hand bell tolling. No matter what we were doing, it was a summon to come downstairs for a meeting. It was a rallying call for camaraderie. When the wafting smell of potatoes and rolls was already calling you downstairs, the sound of the hand bell confirmed your stomach's cry. Many skype calls to Matthew were interrupted by the clean, pure sound, and I remember often saying, "Oh, there's the bell!"

I told him then that someday I wanted a bell to ring at our house, to summon our children. Whether it was school time, or dinner time, the bell is meant to say, "Hey, good looking. I need to see you in here."

So imagine my delight when among other ugly hand bells, a little brass owl bell looked up at me from a thrift store shelf and said, "Ring me. I'm beautiful." And she was right. She has a soft chime. Like a spoon on crystal, or {more relatable} the sound my iphone makes when it gets a text message. We snatched her up and brought her home for $2.50.

"Not only am I capable of eventually calling your children in from the yard, in the mean time, I make a beast bookend."

tufted headboard

Months ago I pinned this picture.

source

I love two things about this headboard. It is tufted and mustard colored. In my spring cleaning post I mentioned that we were going to diy a tufted headboard eventually, but I was thinking maybe before the summer ended, until we stumbled upon this....

At the thrift store down the road, they had mislabeled this mustard colored futon cushion as a "dog bed" and were selling it for $10. What monstrosity of a dog sleeps on a bed that is 6'x4'? But seriously, check this out!

I'm not saying they're the same, but could they be anymore strangely similar? 

Mustard colored. Check.

Tufted. Check.

Huge. Check.

Gorgeous. Check. 

Clean. Drat. 

Vacuum, vacuum, vacuum. Scrub, scrub, scrub. 

You'll be a headboard soon, you gorgeous dog bed, you. :)

Here's a picture of the headboard in our home. Because it's a futon mattress, it has boards in it occasionally to keep it rigid. We used those boards and another board which we cut to use a french cleat to mount it to our wall, screwing the fixed french cleat to the wall, and the floating french cleat to the back of the headboard. It's crazy secure, and we've had no trouble with it for years now.

summer's scent

Do you taste it? The semester is {finally} almost over and I can officially smell the sunscreen. Only four more class days and then four finals next week, and we'll call my Junior year a wrap! Then we're only a couple of weeks away from a trip back to Virginia Beach, which will always feel like home. How about you? Where do you know there are open arms waiting for you and a senses overload of memories every couple of blocks?

My Life Story: Part Two

Before you read this, please read Part One.

I have a compassion for sinners that most "Christian" people don't have. I put Christian in quotations because Christian means "little Christ" and if we were truly "little Christ"s we would have immense compassion for sinners like He did. My compassion comes less from a Christ likeness and more from an understanding. I've been there, in the proverbial mud. I rolled around in it, and to be honest I enjoyed it. The Bible says there is, "Pleasure in sin for a season." and the Bible is entirely true. It is fun in the moment. Like skydiving without a parachute, there is something beautifully exhilarating about the fall until it all comes to a deadly climax. After all, "Sin when it is finished, bringeth forth death."

So there I was, a eighteen year old Christian girl who was being a light to no one. I had taken my light and covered it in skimpy clothes and empty smiles so that when people looked at me they could not see it.

You can't see it in the pictures. You might be able to see my attitude, but you can't see the filth I was living in. Understand? I was hiding it as well as I could. I still went where my parents went and wore what they let me wear, but when they weren't around I was meeting up with several guys a day. Disobeying at the least, but it was more than that.

Most of you at least know the gist of the story if I say "The Prodigal Son". It's a story in the Bible about a man with two sons. The younger son takes his inheritance from his father before it is time and leaves his family to go into the world. There he wastes his substance with riotous living. He partied hard. He rolled in the glitter and sucked every drop of poisonous pleasure out of the world. You know how I know?

It's my life story.

I took my heavenly Father's gifts and ran off to live on my own, putting my desire above the life my Father was offering me. When everything was over, my boyfriend and I had been kicked out of the Christian college we had met at. The people who I thought were my friends only wanted me for the same selfish reasons that I wanted them and so I stood alone. Alone with my mask of lies.

There was so much Christ-like love shown to me in this time. I admit that there were sideways glances and whispering words from many, but my family loved  me selflessly. When I was honest with my parents, they forgave me. They disciplined me, but they loved me to pieces. Especially my father, surprised me in his reaction to my sinful failure. He loved me with no condemnation. I think that was a large part of the healing that took place; My entire family was there for me with open arms.

In fact, it was my brother Chris who asked me the question. It was my brother Chris who turned me back toward the Father.

Amanda, what are you doing with your life?

He wasn't asking me what I was going to major in if I ever went back to college. He was asking me why I had taken all the goodness of God and traded it for a couple summers of stomach wrenching "fun".

He invited me to a Game Night that he had been attending and I reluctantly showed up. I found a joy in these teens that I hadn't experienced in years. Their innocence was like a warm fire and it drew me in and invited me to stay. They stayed out just as late and had just as much fun as I had enjoyed the summers before, but with one huge difference. No one drank. No one made out. No one told inappropriate jokes. They were Christians. All they did was play games with each other, have Bible studies, and laugh with hope and peace in their eyes.

It was so attractive.

Just like the Prodigal Son, I knew that I had given up the peace and hope for my own pleasure and I sheepishly headed back toward home. As the Prodigal Son began his long walk home, his father saw him a long way off and RAN out to meet him. Just like that, as I did my slow u-turn I know my Heavenly Father was watching for me. He had been waiting for me to turn around. I was His child, always.

When I was nine years old and I asked Jesus Christ to be my Savior, I became a child of God. Not because suddenly I was righteous, but because suddenly I had Jesus Christ's perfection placed on top of me. When I turned my back on God, I was still His child. All that changed was my position toward Him, not His position toward me. He was always turned toward me with arms wide open.

It was like a cleansing and forgiving wave. I was able, by God's grace, to give up the things that had become habitual. This new group of teens became my close friends and I don't know if they ever knew what a difference their innocence made in my life. After months of attending, I fell in love with the man in charge of it all. He is God's gift to me.

While I was busy dating all of his peers, Matthew was busy saving himself for his future wife. He was loving me, when I was spitting in his face. Neither of us knew at the time, of course, but we were living out another story of God's grace. He, just like God the Father, loved me even though I had failed him. He forgave me.

It's all history from there. God gave me a husband who knows every single one of my secrets and forgave me.

Want to see something sad?

Remember that picture from Part One? I didn't tell you that that was Matthew. There he is. I was nine years old and he was two feet away. I wish we had fallen in love then. I wish he had been my first everything like I got to be his. I wish I had loved him my whole life, but I didn't.

I'd like to take this opportunity to sum my life up: I am so thankful for forgiveness and redeeming love.

Over ten years later, about twenty feet from where the camera had snapped our first picture together, Matthew proposed to me on the playground in the pouring rain. Next month it will be a year that we have lived together as husband and wife. Neither of us are perfect, but we love each other like crazy and look forward to what God wants to do with us as we stand in our place and let our lives be large flashing signs that scream, "For God so loved you that He gave His only begotten Son."

My life story: Part One

For months now I've been sending words out into the world wide web, mostly for the benefit of my mother and others at home who I don't call as often as I should. Every view and every comment still makes me giddy like a child on Christmas morning, but I want to share some real thoughts with you.

So here's a little bit of myself. Who I am, and where I've been have never been typed out before. I feel like until I give you that much, you can never know where we're going. So here it is. My life story: A picture of redeeming love.


Life was easy for years. I was the oldest of three kids. The leader of the pack, and the top of the pecking order. My father was an engineer in the navy, and we lacked for absolutely nothing. My brothers and I spent our days playing outside in our cozy Virginia Beach neighborhood and amusing ourselves with small toys and huge imaginations.

My parents were both Christians and raised us with the morals that they found in the Bible. We learned Bible verses with our ABCs and prayed for missionaries daily. My mother chose to leave behind her multiple degrees to homeschool me and my two brothers. Everyone has some pre-concieved view of homeschooling. Homeschool {like any form of education} depends largely on the teacher and the time that is given to education. My mother jumped in with both feet. We had bulletin boards, calendars, maps, desks, pencil boxes, and name tags. I can honestly say that I don't feel like I missed the "classroom experience".

Well, other than being socialized that is. I had zero friends. Just kidding. :) I had tons of friends. There were church friends, neighborhood friends, and sports friends. We were blessed enough to be raised in an area that had hundreds of other homeschool families and full sports leagues who played against each other and a dozen private schools in the area. Socialization has never been a problem. (I'm on the bottom row, second from the right. Yep, the bangs.)

So there I was, a homeschooled kid in a Christian family who mostly did what my parents wanted me to. But I wasn't a Christian. To be honest, Christianity wasn't something I thought much about. After all, I knew what I needed to do if I wanted to be a Christian. Every church kid knows, "Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and thou shalt be saved." I knew, but I hadn't done it.

One day I was at a Vacation Bible School and I heard a man preaching through one of the most well known verses in all the Bible: John 3:16.

He said "For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son. That whosoever believeth in Him, should not perish but have everlasting life." 

He told us that we could insert our own name into that verse to make it personal.

For God so loved Amanda, that He gave His only begotten Son.

Me. God so loved me. He loved me enough that He was willing to make a way for me to be with Him eternally. I had already chosen my selfishness over His salvation. I had known the truth and yet not accepted it for myself, but that day I felt Him reach out His hand and say, "I sent Him for you. I offer you the gift of eternal life if you'll accept it." And I did. I told the Lord that I knew I had fallen short of perfection and needed a way to be made for me or I would never get to go to heaven. I thanked Him for the perfect substitute He sent in my stead and I asked Jesus Christ to stand in my place so that when God the Father looks at me, He only sees His perfect Son. He saved me from hell that day, of that I am sure.

But life didn't end there. He left me here for a purpose. The purpose of every Christian alive today is to show Christ's love to others. That's all. Our only job is to be a great big flashing sign that says, "For God so loved you that He gave His only begotten Son."

It's an all encompassing redeeming love.

A couple years later our little church merged with a bigger church and suddenly I was a just a piece of sand in the vast expanse of the ocean front. Without a heads up, my world got pretty big. A few years later, when I was eleven years old, my parents announced that they were pregnant with a forth child. The sister I had always wanted, came a couple of years late.

We transitioned smoothly into a six person family and life continued on. Then something huge happened. My father sat us down and told us he felt like the Lord was calling him into the ministry. He was leaving his job as an engineer to be the assistant to the pastors at our church. Through a series of unplanned events, my father was quickly promoted to pastor, and suddenly I was a baptist pastor's homeschooled daughter. How's that for a stereo-type? I mean, yikes.

I was not eager to fit that mold. I wanted people to think I was doing right, but I didn't want to be labeled as "homeschooled pastor's daughter" by my peers. So I broke away from the mold that I felt had been created for me. While trying my hardest to wear my "good girl" mask in front of adults, I showed my peers a different side of me.

This paragraph is awkward and hard, but how will you know what Christ has done is my life if I don't tell you how far I ran away from Him?

For two years I did nothing but run. I was still in the choir every Sunday but on the week days I was lying to my parents and spending long nights out drinking and messing around with boys. I filled my days and nights with lies rolled up in fun. Unless someone saved a picture or a text that never made it online, there's no proof that any of it happened. When I went off to college, my parents believed I had never even kissed a boy and I hoped I'd be able to keep my secrets forever. The Bible says, "Be sure your sin will find you out." and in my experience, it always has.

Here's Part Two. :) I promise it's better.

updated house tour: apartment eight

Can you believe it had been four months since I've shown you around? I admit, not too much has changed, but enough to make me giddy when looking at the comparison. If you want to see the comparison you can look at the "house tour" tab {now located on the right side of my blog}. 

But, without further ado, here's the tour. :)

Welcome to apartment number eight. You are now standing in our living room, looking down through our entire house. Living room, kitchen, dining room and then bedroom. Come on in! 

That wing back is new since the last time you were here. I grabbed it for $25 at a thrift store in Nashville. Also that calendar above the wing back is new {and definitely one I want every year}.

Take a quick glance to your right as you walk in. We moved the diy heart art over there and I think it helps balance the green carpet on the other side. 

As you turn to your left you'll see the area where we would mostly likely entertain you. Go ahead, pick a seat. :)

Just kidding, don't sit down. I have more house to show you. Let's head through the door way behind the wing back to the kitchen.

Yes, those are clean dishes that need to be put away. What do you know? It's like real life up in here. 

On the right hand wall, there's a chunky, cluttered with pyrex goodness shelf that will someday be transformed into three skinny, uncluttered {but still covered in pyrex goodness} shelves. We're in wait mode for that... oh, and this room needs a coat of white paint too. The door you can almost see there is the pantry/coat closet. I think sometime next month I'll give you a tour through all the cabinets and closets, just so you can see how awesome our organizational skills are {mostly kidding}.

If you turn back toward the living room, you see this wall.

Nothing exciting, but it's only fair to show you the whole house {including our scrumptious generic frosted flakes}.

On to the dining room!

You've seen all of this before {in fragmented pieces}, but it's nice to get it all in the same place. We painted this room white, put the maps up, got new art, and moved things around. Wanna come over for dinner? I make really good pasta. :)

From where you were standing in the dining room you can turn around to get this view of the "hallway".

Left to the bathroom, right to the linen closet. I put our song lyrics on that painting, and used the same idea to add a chevron detail to that globe.

Here's most of our bedroom. The largest change in here is the huge blank wall to the left.

This room also needs a couple coats of white paint. I already have my plan for that wall, but everything takes time and money. :) We'll get there eventually.

Well, that's the house tour. You may now head back through the house. Here's your view as you reenter the living room on the way out.

The white walls really improve this room for me. :) And all the treasures on the bookshelf. I wish you had time to really look around. :)

 Well, that's our home. Thanks for taking the tour with us. :)

thrifty thursday: reading lamp

Springtime brings change, and the birds introduce it with their cheery voices. The mixture of cool breeze and sunlight stirs something in my soul and invites me to begin again in a way that even the New Year misses.

I adore change. It's an opportunity to throw off the weights you cling to and move with freedom. We've been getting rid of things like crazy. It actually surprises me what things have entirely lost their importance. But, I'll get to more of that tomorrow.

Matthew and I both enjoy reading. We also have the same taste in writing and have been reading through books together. As the paint dries, I read to him. As dinner simmers, he reads to me. At night, we take turns reading to each other in our comfy bed.

Do you see it?

We used to have just a reading lamp {on my side of the bed} and it was a dull light that didn't particularly  promote diving into the written word. In the thrift store down the street, we stumbled across the long neck reading lamp and brought it home for $8.00.

My favorite part about the lamp is that I can picture it in so many different rooms. Right now, it's perfect for reading in bed, but in the future it could be in the living room or a kid's room with no trouble at all. I had thought about painting the lamp brassy or gold, but I've decided to let it be until more things in this room are permanent. Eventually we want to diy a tufted headboard and we'll have to see what color we settle on and move from there. It could be a year before we make that decision, so I'm enjoying its beautiful crispness for now. 

If you want something to be the focal point of the room, it shouldn't be white, but white is the perfect background color. Perfect on walls, for example. :)

I really think it makes rooms look so much more cheery. The change makes me want to step close and examine the beautiful things on our shelves. Nothing's on the walls yet, but I'm enjoying sorting through things and being picky about what makes the cut. You'll get to see it all tomorrow. :)

As always, I hope you have a very thrifty thursday!