I think they call it "nesting"

I spent all weekend painting, sewing, or making lists of things to paint or sew. I was awake until almost 5 am on Friday night because I couldn't sleep for thinking of all the projects I want to work on. You would think that my bouts of pre-baby nesting would involve cooking, but I have an urge to make things- like curtains and refinishing furniture.

I blame it on the NHL play-offs. Hear me out. Tyler was watching his Flyers on Friday night, so I started casually looking at Design*Sponge for ideas for the baby's room. Four hours and many bookmarks of things from their DIY section later, I was hooked. Fast forward to 1:00 am- I am wide awake laying in bed, thinking of all kinds of other DIY things that I can do around the house, so I get up and watch DIY Network for a few hours. I now have a list of about 15 things I want to work on.

We went to Habitat for Humanity ReStore on Saturday and found all kinds of cool stuff to make over. A console table for $5? Sold. Sure, it needs some major sanding and painting and tightening of bolts that hold the legs on, but it has all four legs at least. For $5! It will be perfect for to hold a laptop and printer in our home office. Paint in the exact colour I was looking for to paint our bedside tables for $5? Done. Three shelves for $15? Cha-ching. These I think are actually remnants from cabinet-making, but are the perfect size for shelves and all I have to do is figure out a way to hang them.

Saturday night when other people are out partying and hanging out with friends (my husband included), found me in the garage painting a chair. Look at it! I got this chair at a garage sale when we bought our first house almost 5 years ago, and it was U-G-L-Y. Now it is pretty and happy. How could you not be obsessed with making something cool out of junk?

Here are a few things that I hope to have completed in the next week or so:
- Make an apron out of the material I cut off the curtains in the kitchen
- Finish sewing those curtains back up and get them hung before Tyler kills me for messing up the curtains
- Make fabric covered box valences for baby's room
- Re-work the old cabinets from my parents kitchen reno into storage benches (really excited about this one, but probably won't get this done this week!)

Since this is a food blog, I leave you with this recipe for BBQ Pork Kebabs. These are so good and easy- we have them for dinner with rice and grilled corn quite often in the summer, and even a made them couple of times for guests. Some recipes for grilled corn say to grill them in the husks- I like my corn husked and put right on the grill so it gets browned in spots and nutty. I think it takes about 20 minutes to cook on the grill over direct heat, turning often.

Aloha Pork Kebabs from Chatelaine Magazine May 2006