Makely

Let's Make Life Awesome

Meet the Porter Family {Home Depot Gift of Good}

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On Veteran’s Day, the Home Depot surprised myself and 8 other bloggers with the opportunity to change a local military family’s life.  Each blogger was asked to solicit nominations for a family in our local metro area who a) had a member that was either a veteran or was actively serving in the military, b) owned their home, and c) could greatly benefit from winning a $20,000 home makeover.

As you can imagine, the nominations just poured in.  I was honored and humbled that families and friends of families where sharing their stories with me.  During the selection process, I laughed and I cried.  There are so many deserving families in my area, and I had a great deal of difficulty deciding which family would benefit the most from the grand prize.  Although each of the 9 families ultimately selected by the DIY and military life bloggers would receive $500 in holiday decor from the Home Depot, I knew that the $20,000 home makeover could improve a family’s life tenfold.

Friends, I’d like to introduce you to the beautiful Porter Family from Killeen, Texas.

The Porter Family has served our country through five tours of duty, living separately from dad Tony due to housing issues.  Not only are they living far apart, but they are in a very small house from which they are busting from the seams.  In her first email to me, mom Tina described their living situation very well:

My husband, SFC William Porter aka Tony, has been serving in the Army as an Active Duty soldier since Feb. 1996. He has been deployed to Kuwait before the war, to Iraq twice after 9/11 and is currently deployed to Afghanistan. He has also done a tour in Korea. He received a Purple Heart during his first deployment to Iraq and a Bronze Star during his second along with other various medals over the years. My husband’s current unit is at Joint Base Lewis McChord in Washington state.  However, we own a home in Killeen, and that is where myself and six of our seven children are living.

SFC William Porter, before deployment to Iraq in 1996

Our home in Killeen is a small little starter home we bought while my husband was stationed here from 1999-2008. It is a three bedroom, 1434sq ft. single family home. Over the years we have lived in this home off and on and also rented it out a couple times. Last year while we were stationed at Fort Knox KY, we even put it on the market thinking it would be better to sell than to keep up with it as well as whatever home we were living in away from here. After a year of it setting empty and putting every extra penny we could find in to updating per our Realtor’s suggestions we made the decision to just move myself and the children back in since my husband was deploying again anyway.

So why am I asking for us to be the family you choose for the Home Depot Gift of Good? We still have a list of things we need to do to this house in order to live in it comfortably. Our main issue at this time is our foundation. The house had had issues before buying it and was re-leveled sometime after it was built but before we purchased it. Upon returning to the home we found one whole corner of the home up and out of the dirt!  It seems as though since we live beside a ditch our yard has been eroding away from this side of the house. One way we were told we could fix this would be to put a retaining wall along side the home, ditch side, and refill the yard with fill dirt. I called around and did get a quote for about $7,000 to do this. Without this fixed our foundation is highly likely to end up having more issues which will end up costing more.

Another issue we are having is rooms in the house. At this time I have three boys, ages 13, 11 and 5 in one room, my two youngest girls 9 and 7 in our smallest room and then my 16 year old shares the master bedroom with me. This is working now but at some point we are hoping my husband will return to the area and it is really going to make things tighter trying to accommodate. Since our garage has never really been large enough to fit our vehicles in we figured if we could ever afford to we would convert it into another room. That one extra room would allow us so much more comfort for our children!

Lastly, out of everything we’ve had repaired, replaced or updated in the house our AC unit is still the original from when it was built. Having our ducts replaced and cleaned has helped with our bills and keeping the air flow adequate through the home but it seems each year we are paying for repairs to keep the old unit going. Replacing it would be a great benefit to us and allow us to put money elsewhere.

My family would be grateful to receive help with any of these home issues. We have been trying our best to keep up with updates and repairs, but it would be awesome to just sit back and relax a bit in our home without worrying about how we are going to get these things completed without taking away from other things our family needs.

The voting kicks off in the Home Depot Gift of Good contest on Tuesday.  For two weeks, you will be able to visit Home Depot’s Facebook page and vote on the family you most want to receive the $20,000 home makeover.  I desperately want it to be the Porter family, so I will be harassing you for your vote (you’ve been warned!).  This family has given so much to our country, and I know the Glue Gun Army will give a few mouse clicks to them.  If you haven’t already, go ahead and “like” the Home Depot on Facebook so you’ll be ready when it’s time to vote!

Tomorrow, I will share with you my family’s surprise visit with the Porters.  Their wonderful spirit was just one of the things we had to be thankful for over the weekend.  I hope you had a great holiday, too.

P.S. – My One Project Closer giveaway for a $50 gift card to Home Depot runs through tomorrow.  If you haven’t already entered, go and do so now!  Lots of great tips have been shared for saving money during the holidays.

{Handmade Holiday Gifts} Kitschy Kitchen Towels

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It’s time to start thinking about holiday gifts, if you haven’t already done so.  I usually don’t get my shopping done that far in advance, but this year I decided that I’d like to create a few of the gifts on my list…which means I need to get started now.

I am turning a few of my handmade gifts into tutorials for you guys.  The first one that I want to share with you is a set of DIY Kitschy Kitchen Towels.  This a great gift to give as a set, or you can break them up into individual towels to include in other gifts.  Per popular demand on my Facebook page, I put together another free downloadable template to make it easy to replicate!

DIY Kitschy Kitchen Towels

I always have a cute kitchen towel hanging from the handle on my oven.  My little decorative towel collection ranges from darling ones that I’ve picked up at Anthropologie to ones that I’ve made for $2 with items from the Dollar Tree.  We don’t use these towels to dry our hands and wipe up messes since we have a whole drawer full of junky kitchen towels for that, so I always want them to be something very special and quirky.  The set I put together I’m actually keeping for myself (the worst part about handmade gifts – I always want to keep them!), but I’m going to make a few more sets to give as gifts this year.

Supplies

  • Flour sack towels – 3
  • Fabric paint – 3 bright colors
  • Freezer paper
  • Craft paint brush
  • Decorative trim – 3 yards in bright colors
  • DMC Embroidery floss to match the trim – 3 colors
  • Washable fabric glue
  • Embroidery hoop
  • Sewing needle
  • Iron and ironing board
  • Scissors
  • Pencil

Directions

1.  You need white flour sack towels for this project.  You can find them at Dollar Tree for $1 each or buy a set of 4 at Target for $3.99.  I personally prefer the quality of the Target towels over the DT towels – I have found the ones at DT aren’t ever cut completely square.

Wash and dry the towels to get them ready to be painted.  I recommend ironing the towels when they are damp so that it’s easier to get the wrinkles out and make them crisp.

2.  Print out the free template download from here.  Trace the pieces of the template onto the non-shiny side of your freezer paper (I found mind next to the freezer storage bags at Walmart) by putting the template under the paper.  Don’t worry about tracing the words yet.

3.  Cut out the inside of a silhouette and speech bubble and iron it shiny side down onto a towel.  I centered my design and put it about 2 or 2 1/2 inches from the bottom edge of the towel.  Leave enough paper around the outside of the design so that you don’t have to be super careful with keeping the paint inside the stencil.

Ironing the freezer paper stencil to the towel is the biggest key to this project.  You need to make sure that every edge is firmly adhered to the towel.  I put my iron on the cotton setting and pressed down hard.  When you think it’s on there perfectly, iron again.  🙂  There were a few edges that weren’t perfectly pressed down, and I had some paint bleed.

4.  Lay your towel on top of a piece of cardboard and put a piece of freezer paper (shiny side up) underneath your stencil.  With your craft brush (I LOVE my big flat brush like the one in this package), paint a thin layer of fabric paint onto the stencil, making sure that you cover all the edges really well.  Let it dry for a few minutes and then apply a second layer.  I used paints from the “So Soft” line from DecoArt, but I think the new Martha Stewart craft paints would work great, too.

5.  Carefully peel off the freezer paper and let the towels dry.  If you have a place to hang the towels to dry so that they don’t touch anything, that would be best – the paint will be wet on the back of the towel, too.  I let my towels dry overnight.

6.  Cut out the phrase from the template that corresponds with the silhouette you painted.  Pressing hard with the side edge of a sharpened pencil, color in the back of the phrase paper.

You can then center your phrase on the speech bubble and trace the word with your pencil.  You should be able to see that the phrase has transferred to your towel.  If you want to create your own phrase, you can obviously write it out by and with a pencil directly onto your design.

7.  In the photo above, you can see that I had a bleeding issue (because the stencil wasn’t iron down well enough), which we can mostly fix with this next step.  Put your towel in the embroidery hoop so that you can work on the speech bubble.  With embroidery floss in a contrasting color, embroider the words with a back stitch (tutorial here).  Also, stitch a back stitch around the edge of the speech bubble – you will be able to hide some minor paint bleeding with this stitch.  If you would like, you could also stitch around the silhouette, but I left mine plain.

8.  With your washable fabric glue, attach a strip of trim on the bottom of the towel.  I chose a fun pom pom trim in a matching color as my embroidery floss.

I created three different designs for this project:  1.) a Granny who says, “That’s not my recipe, dear.” 2.) A young Queen Elizabeth who says, “I trust that you have some crumpets.” 3.) And my favorite – a dog who says, “I’m going to eat that when you aren’t looking.”  That is so something that my dog would say.

These towels are washable and make perfect holiday gifts!  Which one is your favorite?