Top Projects

Rhoda at Southern Hospitality is hosting a "Top Projects of 2009" Party today. As I look back over my projects from last year, here are a few of my favorites.

One of the first "before-and-after" blog posts I ever wrote involved an old wooden tray

that I transformed into this serving tray/vacation memento:

This summer I found a bedraggled ottoman at the thrift store

and turned it into a storage bench for my closet:

And in one of my thriftiest projects ever, I turned an Omaha Steaks styrofoam cooler

into an ottoman for my front porch:

One of my favorite large projects of the year was a makeover of my laundry room. It went from this:


To this:

I must say, though, that the project of 2009 that stands out most in my mind is the one that involved getting my husband from here to here. In case you're not schooled in reading ECG's, the first shows an example of an electrocardiogram strip from a person in atrial fibrillation. The second shows an ECG of someone with a normal heart rhythm--which is what my husband has now. Actually, we were most grateful for the a-fib. For my husband, the irregular heartbeat prompted a special visit to the cardiologist, and extensive testing revealed that he needed open-heart surgery. So now he has a brand-new stainless steel heart valve--and at his last check-up, the cardiologist said that his ECG looked like that of an 18-year-old. That was quite a project!

Now it's time for me to get busy on some new projects for 2010. Thanks, Rhoda, for the chance to look back fondly on what we accomplished in 2009!