Back on Track

I'm not sure how to explain it, but it seems that my...troubles last/this past week had something to do with not working on the house.

A few days before, I had asked J to do some project or other in the kitchen, and it ended up getting shunted aside for him to help R do something.

A few days later, I asked him to do something again. I remember saying that I was getting frustrated, with absolutely nothing getting done.
And then I turned right around and said he should go with or help R with what ever he was doing... He's been trying to work on his car, the one that the water pump went out. While he was in there he went ahead and replaced belts, seals, gaskets, etc.
Big job, and he needs his car...well, he has a truck he's driving in the meantime. I guess it's more like, still, my child's needs before mine.

But even though I told J that my project(s) could wait and he should help R, it didn't help me feel better, and I started getting pretty depressed. No energy, no desire to do anything. I made a list and printed some coupons, but then it was too much effort to go to the store.

Then a couple days ago, J was home on a day after R had worked all night, so R wasn't going to be getting up to work on his car that day. 
I jumped all over that, lol.

There are a ton of projects to choose from, but for no particular reason (that I can recall) we decided to work on sheetrock/trimming the small foyer at the foot of the stairs.

Most of the house door and windows are trimmed with 1x4 boards. Some of the new work we've done, we've bought fluted trim and block corners, but now I've decided to go back old school with it.

We didn't have any 1x4 boards, but we did have some 1x10 or 12 shelf boards that we'd gotten through Freecycle, so we cut those down to 1x4's on the table saw.

We worked until we hit a snag - another project that needs to be done before we can finish the trimming - but I was happy with as much as we had gotten done, and felt a lot better.

After that, I felt like making a craft: a Putz House.
(No clue as to how/why I decided that was what I wanted to do.)

I'm not going to do a whole tutorial here about how I did it, because, to be honest, I'm not too good at reading directions.
I read like the first line, then the rest is, "blah blah blah".

So, I made a lot of mistakes in making mine.
Mostly, there aren't any mistakes in crafting - you "customize" your version - but in this particular instance, I cut the windows/doors after I'd glued it together. I didn't put cellophane in the windows/door. My fence doesn't look great. There's no hole in the back for lighting.
Mistakes.

To make a Putz/Glitter House yourself, visit Little Glitter Houses.com for more detailed and correct directions.
This particular house is called the Little Charmer, but there's an easier version called The Cottage, to start with (of course I didn't start with the easy version!). 

The website provides pdf files of patterns for you to print. I found that printing directly from the webpage didn't work, and I had to Save and open the pdf file for them to print the right size.

I used a cereal box to cut out the main parts like the walls, roof, chimney, entrance.

I used thicker cardboard from a shipping box and cut triangles to go inside the pointed parts to reinforce the roo(ves), and the house base.

Eventually I used the thicker cardboard for the fence, too, but I ought not have.

I painted the entire thing white as a base coat, then after it dried, I painted the house blue, the chimney red with white "snow fall", and the fence a light pink. Touched up any white parts that needed it.

After the paint dried, I glued the house to the base.
I used my paintbrush to spread glue on sections at a time and sprinkled on the iridescent glitter.
The glitter looks different colors in the picture, but it's not.

Then I added my embellishments, stuff I already had in my craft stash, and a dude and a girl showed up in the front yard. 

Pictures really don't do this little house justice. Even with the ugly fence, IRL it's gorgeous (even if I do say so myself). I can't stop looking at it when ever I walk by it.
If I didn't know for sure I had made it myself, I wouldn't believe it.
I'm kinda un-humbly impressed with myself at the moment, lol.

Probably it was just a fluke, though, and the next one won't be as good.
Or, it'll be the same, because I don't have much imagination and I really like these colors.

Check out more Putz/Glitter Houses on Pinterest.