To Paint is to DIY + Giveaway!

***This giveaway is now closed!***

Lovelies! How good to see you! Welcome to day #2 of our top five favorites when it comes to making our/your house a home, the DIY way! We use to not like to paint. It was a long and painful process. Then after a few rooms we started to figure out tricks and tools to make it go quicker. Things to make it look better. Things to not ruin everything surrounding us. Eventually we got a little adventurous and even started to stencil full walls.

So let's talk what makes a good paint job. We never used a drop cloth. Ever. Until I noticed tiny little paint dots on our 80+ year old floors. They were a killer to "pick" off the floor. Enter the canvas drop cloth. I love canvas so much, I almost want to make curtains out of them. Purdy is our brush of choice because you never get any strays with them and they tend to last longer than other brands we have tried. As you probably already know we love our Scotch 3M tape, I almost feels it's part of the decor sometimes. If you peel it just before the paint dries, you get a perfect line every time! Now for the major moments, Shur-Line makes awesome rollers. Remember this mess? I think we bought every Shur-Line roller and Scotch Blue at True Value.

We thought for day #2 of our awesome giveaway week courtesy of Stack Exchange, we would doll out a sweet painting kit to a lucky reader! Everything you need but the paint to get your next room done line a pro! How do you get a smooth finish when painting trim? Click here to see what's a buzz about this question and other about painting perfect rooms and DIY in general.

Giveaway info:

• Prize: One (1)  care of Stack Exchange: Home Improvement One (1) complete 9-piece kit, One (1) pack of extra rollers, a canvas drop cloth, an extendable roller frame, three rolls of 3M Scotch Blue Tape, and a three pack Purdy Paintbrush set.
• How to Enter: Tell us what you dislike most about painting! Spill it!
• Extra Entry: Follow @StackDIY on twitter, come back and tell me you did!
• Giveaway Ends: Monday October 3rd at 9:00pm EST
• How Many Lucky Winners?!: One (1)
• Ships to: US Only
• Also: Please only enter once, with the exception of the extra entry. We select our winners using random.org and will select a winner by October 6th and notify by email, so use a real email address! 

Let's Talk Dirt(y) + Giveaway!

***This giveaway is now closed!***

Hello! How are you? I am jamming to The Verve Pipe - Freshman. I am also currently missing Joey at 4:37 am NYC time. This is the longest we will be apart from one another. It's been a totally gross level mush fest of love notes and text overload. You would think after seven years we would stop acting like teenagers, but no, we are totally besties. I wouldn't sleep until his plane landed, it's just how I roll. But you. I hope you are well. I hope you are sleeping. Or at least on some sort of normal schedule. In honor of Joey, and our passion picks, we have a super awesome giveaway for you today! Let's talk about the dirty a second.

So, as you may have read, our basement flooded along with some leaks in the ceiling. We lost quite a bit of laundry. Bye bye Dwell Studio duvet set. Bye bye Orla Kiley towels. Bye bye pretty clothes and sheets. It's been raining a lot in New York and the water table just couldn't handle it any more. So Joey filled up the shop vac 20+ times to save the basement. He had some questions if the Vac could be used in this fashion and thanks to this awesome Q & A, it was like someone was reading his mind and his questions were answered. 

If you are wondering, yes. The Shop Vac can double as a water pump if your basement floods. Instant gratification at it's finest. Yay community knowledge!

Oh yes. The shop vac. You have saved us so many times. You have made Joey's workshop bearable. You have sucked up so much water and sawdust, I am surprised you are still living to tell the story. We love you. We want to share you with the world. If you don't have one, you need one. It's not a "sexy" tool, but it's been used so often, we deem it product we cant live without #5, to kick start our week of favorite tools giveaways. 

Yep! This week, all week, we will be giving away a favorite item a day to kick start our season of giveaway! Thanks to a wonderful company, StackExchange.com, and their AMAZING Home Improvement vertical, they will be sponsoring all the loot!

What is Stack Exchange? Glad you asked! Stack Exchange is a wonderful place you can go to ask questions and get/give answers. Their Home Improvement/DIY vertical is what I suspect you will get A LOT of use out of. We encourage you to check it out! Get some karma points by answering DIY mysteries or ask a question and get that answer. But right now, get yourself in the game to win a Shop Vac, you have no idea how bad you need one. 

Giveaway info:

• Prize: One (1) Shop Vac with accessories care of Stack Exchange: Home Improvement MSRP $53.49
• How to Enter: Tell us your favorite tool or accessory which helps you get "the job" done! Don't forget to tell us why you love it!
• Extra Entry: Follow @StackDIY on twitter, come back and tell me you did!
• Giveaway Ends: Sunday October 2nd at 9:00pm EST
• How Many Lucky Winners?!: One (1)
• Ships to: US Only
• Also: Please only enter once, with the exception of the extra entry. We select our winners using random.org and will select a winner by October 5th and notify by email, so use a real email address! 

I Miss You, So I am Making Up For It...

Dear Blog, I miss you. I miss running to you every moment I successfully complete a project. I miss being silly with you. I miss reading comments and keeping track of what we get done around here. I am sorry. You see, life has been kind of insane - I can't believe it myself. My basement flooded. My ceiling is leaking in two rooms,  my sewing machine broke twice while working on the guest room curtains, I had this really long road trip which I wanted to tell you all about, but when I got back I had a lot of work to do on Emily Henderson's Holiday Guide. Then I simply couldn't miss out at the amazing Brizo event with incredible designers and Jason Wu. I feel shameful because I have cheated on you with Twitter a lot these past days. Did I forget to tell you I am moving to LA in 48 hours? Oh yea....That's kind of a big one. Please forgive me. I promise to come back and tell you all about it. Like cross my heart, hope to die type of promise. 

My guilt is taking over, and I would feel much better If I could share something that makes me happy and has assisted with tackling some of our problems around here. So keep reading because there is a story and a pretty sweet giveaway laced in these words.

Joey and I drove to St. Paul for his cousin's wedding (I will post all about that soon), and when we returned, we came home to this:

Has your ceiling ever had a massive zit? Yea. Gross. So while trying to figure out how that got there, and what is may be filled with (spiders? water?), Joey was the smarty pants and suggested the gutters may be overflowing and the water built up and pushed itself into our dining room ceiling. The gutter was gross, so he asked to use my 3M Tekk Painters Gloves, and which I grudgingly agreed. I love those babies because they kept my manicure clean while painting the guest room and didn't make my hands feel gross. 

  
 
  

I have now officially given those gloves to Joey because "he needs them more".  I don't know if you remember over a year ago I bought some gardeners gloves I used for everything?....I really love my gloves, I think I am going to steal them back. So after he cleaned out the gross gutters, we decided to pop the zit.

It was water. Better than spiders, but not awesome. So we let it drain, then pealed the paint back and sanded down the area with some 3M sandpaper to make the blemish less depressing. 

As if we didn't have enough going on already, the raw looking paint made me think. Do we have lead in this house? It was built in 1930...

So we Grabbed our trusty 3M Instant Lead Check Kit, and played the roll of detectives a moment. 

With our luck these days, I was pretty sure that the little swap was going to turn red. And if I can be serious for just one second:

Friends. Friends about to have babies, with babies, anyone, even if I don't know you and we haven't spoke: If you live in a place which was built before 1979 DO A LEAD CHECK. I tell everyone I know, seriously. Joey's cousin suffers from a hearty case of autism because her parents were lied to about lead paint in their child's room in a Brooklyn apartment. This is serious stuff people. We did our bedrooms before we moved in. You don't want to be sleeping next to this stuff. It's life changing in the worst way. 

It's SO SO SO easy and quick to do. Buy the kit. Pop the stick. Rub for thirty seconds. Wait to see if it turns red. Done. 

Let's just say we were over the moon happy to see that little swab stay yellow. Do it. Now. 

3M has provided us with a lot of awesome products to test out, and we have been so happy with all of them. We used their Scotch Blue with Edge Lock to make the guest room walls looks crisp and professional while wearing our 3M respirators, their Sandblaster hand-held sandpaper blocks to help fix a huge floor foul, Joey loves the Tekk safety eye ware for when he uses his saw, and of course the painters gloves I am sneaking back. It's stuff you never think to buy, but truly makes a project easier when using quality products meant for the job. You can't DIY safety and efficiency most of the time. 

Even though I say things like "use the stick thingie to rub the wall and see if it turns red" and Joey looks at me like I am a nut bag and asking him to start a fire on the wall, we seem to get things done at the end of the day. Speaking of which...have you been clicking the 3M links above? They will bring you to this magical place where you can win a $250 daily prize, or 2 $5,000 grand prizes to share your silly stories of communication while working on your house. Couples Speak, and you should be one! After all you are kinda sorta special if you are reading this right now, you can totally win. 

Also....we shared how much these products have helped lower our blood pressure over the last few weeks despite the chaos and miscommunication and want to host a giveaway, right here, right now, just for you, the lovely MAHAH reader.

Giveaway info:

• Prize: A prize pack from 3M: 2 3M LeadCheck Swabs, 1 Roll of Scotch Blue, 3 Stages of Sanding (green, maroon, gold sandpaper), 1 gloves, respirator, eye wear 
• How to Enter: Go here and Like the page come back here and give me a funny translation of some DIY miscommunication (real or made up!)
• Extra Entry: Enter the video contest and come back and share. This is for FIVE extra entries!
• Giveaway Ends: Monday September 19th at 9:00pm EST
• How Many Lucky Winners?!: One (1)
• Ships to: US Only
• Also: Please only enter once, with the exception of the extra entry. We select our winners using random.org and will select a winner by September 25th and notify by email, so use a real email address!