Small Exterior Upgrade

We've done many exterior upgrades since moving into our little Rancher three years ago: painted our entire house, installed sod, painted of front door, upgraded our flower beds and more. Not long after we painted our house, we changed out the old dated light fixture (that's next our front door) into a chic black one. Total we have three exterior lights, and only upgraded one of them, shame on us! So on a recent trip to Home Depot, I stopped in the lighting department, which I almost always do and decided to was time we upgraded our fugly crooked motion sensor light fixture that rest outside our garage door that leads to our backyard. Here's our old light fixture, yikes right! I detest our ugly it is, its dusty and icky white outdoor lights in my book aren't a good thing.

 I decided to go cheap thrifty on this upgrade because its a sidelight, not seen from the street and matching it with our front door light fixture would have set us back 30 bucks, for this project um no. I found the perfect simple light fixture, a black matte jelly light fixture for only $ 6 bucks! We really like how black accents look on our grey house (black shutters, mail box, and hanging pots) Here's how new light fixture, sweet and simple! I love how it looks, we need to do a little touch-up paint around the light fixture our old yucky house color is showing. I'll tackle that 5 min project this week. 

I never thought a I'd love a simple jelly light fixture so much! lol

Next we plan on upgrading our Exterior garage light fixtures, and removing the over fuglly motion sensor light fixture. The one at least looks in better condition than the one we just replaced! We also plan on going from one garage light fixture to two. We like this light fixutre that compliments our front door light. Hopefully we'll tackle the light small exterior upgrade sometime this month. 

What do you think our simple exterior upgrade, much better huh? 

Spice Girl

First, sorry for my lack of posts last week. I had one of those weeks, where I got a lot done and never had a chance to blog about what's been going on {I even took off Friday from my day job
}  I had such a nice Friday being a mommy going for a pretty walk along the river and doing a little shopping. I'm glad to be back to share what's going on, I missed blogging. I really feel its my creative outlet and really helps my thought process and its my way to maintain my voice in my sometimes crazy busy life of being a mom to a tween and a baby about to turn one and wife to a husband I adore. I know you can all relate :) Life is busy, but fun! And now for my spicy post, lol. 


I'm a wanna be spice girl, no not the late 1990's Spice Girl kind, the all my spices are in pretty jars kind of Spice Girl. This post is sadly 7 months in the making, wow I admitting it took me 7 months to complete this simple upgrade I'm about to share. So lets go back in time seven months ago, I was getting fed-up with our spices. Everything was in mismatched spice containers and I could never find the spice I was looking for so most of the time I would buy another container. Because of that, I had three spice containers of cumin powder! which just means we were being careless and wasting money. I really wanted all of our spices jars the same, its just more pleasing to the  eye the spice jar then spice jar chaos. 


I mentioned to my friend Summer, I was in desperate need of a spice jar makeover and I wasn't loving the spice jars at Ikea. She suggested I check out the spice jars at World Market. I pulled out all my spice jars and did a count, I made sure to exclude the duplicates. Next I popped on their website, I liked the styles are the prices too! 

Before I left my house, I pretty sure I was going to buy the boxed set of four spice jars for $ 3.99.  I like the simple style of the upright ones. 

However, when I got there I decided on a different style of jars and the price was good too, only 99cents a jar! I loved them. I needed 20 jars and was only able to buy 12 at that store (I cleaned the store out!) So on my way to another Cost Plus Store where I bought the remaining 8 jars I needed. I planned on to starting my spice makeover (pun intended, lol) asap, but got delayed. So the jars I bought which I'll share in minute, sat in tow bags wrapped carefully untouched for seven months. Sad I know, but that's' life sometimes you get sidetracked a little or in my case a lot, lol. Remember when I mentioned I did a little shopping on Friday? Well I've been meaning to pop into Sur La Table forever and since Hasani had the day off and wanted to check out their BBQ stuff (they have great grill stuff) off we went. 


We spend a long time in the store looking around, I made friends with the sales person and he showed me their huge clearance section tucked in the back of the store. There I spotted the cutesiest ceramic salt  containers. I was stunned buy the awesome price of $1.99! They only had blue and purple left, I grabbed a blue one. They have them online for $ 3.99 on clearance the regular price is $ 9.99, you can check them out here. 

The Salt Jar Reads ' Terracotta from Tuscany Salt ' 

Back when I bought my spice jars, I also bought these little white ceramic jars for our salt. I love that I know have three separate salt containers, one for table salt, sea salt and kosher salt. 

So after our trip to Sur La Table, I decided that night I found finally give my mismatched spice containers a makeover. I used a funnel to transfer the spices into the jar. It made the process so much smoother and almost mess free. 

Here's a better view of the spice jars I bought. Simple glass jars with a twist on metal top, they come with a removable insert. For now I used simple white mailing labels and and wrote all the spice labels. In the future I want to use a heat transfer on glass and do more text. Kind of like these cute jars, I pinned a 'How To' a while back here. For now I like how they look!

I love that i can now keep my sesame seeds in a jar!

Next I want to upgrade all my baking stuff to glass jars , I'm so over bags! lol. We have some nice metal containers we keep our flour, sugar and coffee in, but I like the idea of glass because you can see how much you have left. 

Have you done in a spicy upgrades recently? What do you think of my makeover? Are you shocked it took me seven months to finally finish, what was supposed to be a quick makeover? 


Lastly, how do you keep your spice jars?