Finishing stuff

I decided to make this the year for finishing things instead of starting more, as much as would like to make some pillows like this or start another quilt like this. Pinterest has given me so many projects to work on! So today I got a few things done that I've avoided, put off, or got tired of looking at in the closet, and just did it.

I found this pink thing at an estate sale and it was exactly what I've been wanting to use for a few old books. Some of them are my old books, and some vintage books I've picked up. I'm kind of proud that I eyeballed this and got it centered and level, no tools! :)

And I saw this a while back when I first started hunting for vintage sheets, and I've been wanting to do this ever since. I pulled out a few of my favorite sheets and some embroidery hoops. . . easy, thrifty wall hangings! I want to get a couple more up there, but I need to get some more hoops.

We also cleaned out part of our basement and set up the bed. Also on my list are a couple of painting projects, selling some stuff on ebay, and hanging a shelf in our bathroom. Stephen hates it when I put more holes in the wall.

Vanity

Memaw, Rebecca & I went with Stephen to the Capitol last week. After his meeting we stopped at an estate sale where I found this great vanity! I don't really like the color. It's a light bluish-gray. I want to paint it as soon as I pick out another color. Other than that I love it! Finally the folding table & plastic drawers can come out of the bathroom! Now I'm working on convincing a little girl that things on my vanity don't need to be moved.

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Wall art

I've seen lots of vintage dress patterns as wall art lately. (I'm still kicking myself for not buying that box of vintage patterns a few months ago!) I found these images and printed them. I had 3 matching wood frames, and painted them blue. That's the color spray paint I had, so that's what I used. Now they hang in my closet. :)

Rebecca's updated room

I packed all of the Noah's ark stuff away and put up the more girly stuff I got last spring. I think the curtains were $4 and all of the bedding (with lamp shade I need to get a lamp to go with) was $10. Stephen finished painting the cubes for me. I put 4 coats of primer on them, have been procrastinating adding a coat of paint for a long time. I wasn't looking forward to putting them together, but they make great storage! I have more plans for Rebecca's room, like everything else in the house. I just need more time!

Home improvements

We've been making some small home improvements at our house. I've wanted cabinets over our washer and dryer, but I don't think that's going to happen for a while. So we have a shelf now instead. It's so nice to finally get all of that stuff off the dryer and the floor!

We finally have a headboard over our bed. I bought this piece at a flea market a while back. I'm not sure what it's intended use was, but as soon as I saw it, I wanted it in our room. I just wish it wasn't missing the decorative part on the right. I thought about white washing the whole thing, but it has a great old wood patina, and I would really hate to lose that. Despite the fact that Steve does not like it, he hung it anyway. I guess he likes me more than he dislikes the headboard. :)

Updated house pictures

I haven't posted pictures of our house in a long time, and things look a little different now. We finished a few projects, and have lots more left to do. A few months ago I painted the coffee table I got at a yard sale. We moved the furniture around in our living room for Rebecca's birthday party. We like it a lot better this way, so we left it.


You know you've come full circle when most things in your house have come from a yard sale, and most of what you sell at your yard sale came from a yard sale. Is that sad? I don't know, but it's okay with me. :)







Still have a few more cubes to finish painting. . .



Finally a mirror! And since Stephen hung this one, my dad hung another mirror in our bathroom for us. I hope to one day replace our cardboard box of medicine with a cabinet. :)

Cubes!

On our recent trip to Florida, while visiting our friends the Hazelwoods, Amanda introduced me to these fabulous cubes. I thought they were really nice, then she told me what she paid for them. ONE dollar!!! A DOLLAR!!! Then I thought they were fantastic! My mind was reeling with the possibilities. I had to find a way to get some of these! Unfortunately the store she got them at, Solomon's, was closed the entire week we were there. But Amanda was willing to pick some up for me when they were open. So then I just had to get them back to Arkansas somehow. My sweet mother in-law was willing to store them for me for a little while. But I was hoping she wouldn't need to and that I could get started on using them. Enter my sister Joy. It just so happened that Joy was going to Disney World two weeks after our Jacksonville trip, and she offered to pick them up. Of course, I had also promised her some cubes, so she may have been hoping to claim them all as her own. . . . :) Anyway, I got my 10 cubes and gave six to Joy.

I put one together Tuesday since I'll leave some of them plain. They are solid wood and can be painted, stained, etc. There are doors that go with them, but Solomon's didn't have any. Each cube has one open side and three sides that have a panel that is the perfect size for a 12x12 sheet of paper. I'll put paper in some, pictures in some. I know they're designed mainly for storage, but I think they'll be great night stands, end tables, etc.

Here's what some of Lisa Bearnson and Becky Higgin's cubes look like.

More pictures to come on my finished cubes.

The Lettered Cottage

I came across a blog that I am loving. If you like shabby chic, cottage-ish kind of decorating, check out The Lettered Cottage. There's some great ideas on there! But just a warning, it may cause you to develop a strong desire to buy stuff you see on there! Or you could do it my way and go to yard sales and get the broken down, neglected, and otherwise ignored variety and revamp them yourself. I don't think much at our house was bought new. I'm kind of proud of the bargains I've found:)

I miss yard sales! It's been raining so much here, I haven't been able to go much lately, or have one of my own for that matter. Our yard sale stuff is all packed up and ready to go to my sister's house if we ever get a rain free Saturday morning. I'm hopeful about tomorrow. . .

4-25 Yard Sales

I got these old wooden spools at a rummage sale Saturday at the high school. I'm sure many people would look at these and think "Uh, why?". I love them, and everyone knows I like old stuff like that. Antiques are cool, okay.


They fit well on top of the armoire in the guest room. Steve's great great grandmother's armoire has at last found it's home upstairs. After my parents and Joy and John moved here, it finally got moved. I love this armoire! I know it's at least 75 years old, maybe older.


And I got this bench for our porch. I need to make a cushion for it. I know, another project to add to my list. :) Notice Toby in the picture. He followed me all weekend.


Joy and John and my parents all went to Memphis this weekend, so we were dog sitting this weekend. Puppies are high maintenance! (hence the newspaper on the floor in the above picture) But he's more cuddly than our cats and he likes to be held. Steve says we can't get a dog, but I really don't want one. I'll just have Toby come visit once in a while. He likes our cat food for some reason. I didn't starve him. I really did feed him his puppy food!

House pictures

Paula mentioned a few weeks ago that I did not have many pictures posted of our house now that we've moved in. I keep hoping I can post pictures of the house finished. But it's still not finished, so I might as well post pictures now. This is our laundery room. I want cabinets to go over the washer and dryer so we have more storage. And we need more shelves in our hall closets we can keep our towels there. Until then, they rest on top of the dryer.


Our living room. . .I plan to redo our coffee table, but being pregnant has put a hold on any furniture refinishing. And we eventually want to put a fireplace behind the couch. And our beam (in the vaulted ceiling) still needs to be wrapped to look pretty. And all of the rooms still need window trim and crown molding.


And here is our kitchen. We just need a backsplash and crown molding on the cabinets, but other than that the kitchen is pretty much done. Oh, and we need to get a new microwave to mount over the stove.




And here's our spare bathroom. This room is probably the only room that is finished. I just want to get a small cabinet for storage. Oh and we still don't have mirrors.



And this is the front bedroom, which will be the baby's room. There's not much in there right now. Just a bookshelf and a mattress on the floor for company.


And this is probably the room with the most projects left to finish, our master bathroom. Our bathtub still needs to get some more trim on it and get repainted. It has red chalk lines all over it now. And we have no mirrors.


I hope to one day have a vanity where my sewing table now sits. I also hope to one day have a door for my closet. And maybe soon our doorways will all be painted, and we can take down what's left of the blue tape around the door frames.

New (old) cabinet

I got this cabinet for our kitchen last weekend at a flea market. I really like it, and I think I got a good deal on it. I don't like the paint job someone did on it, but maybe eventually I'll work on that. But for now it will give us more food storage. Because lots of Walgreens trips like this:


has resulted in very crowded kitchen cabinets. This trip to Walgreens I spent a total of $9.41. Not bad. I haven't been much since then though, I'm sure to the relief of the Walgreens cashier that doesn't like me. There just haven't been as many good deals. I'm sure I'm on some kind of black list now because of all my couponing. :)

I'm still a bargain hunter, but I did not go out shopping this morning before work. After my experience last year I decided it wasn't worth it to me to rush through a couple of stores and then go to work at 8:30. Maybe one year if I don't have to work I'll go back to my traditional Black Friday shopping.

Welcome Fall

It's cooling off in Arkansas, and I've been putting out the fall decorations. I just love fall. And I just realized that everything in these pictures came from yard sales. I haven't been going to yard sales lately, and I miss it!

$2 swag

$2 centerpiece, $1 table cloth

$10 chandelier, $1 swag, and .25 cents for the leaf garland


I may be addicted. :)

Rug

It was rainy Saturday, so there weren't many yard sales. But those are the days I'll usually find bigger, though fewer, items. This was the only thing I got this week. I've been looking for a couple of rugs, so I was pretty excited. A good sweep with the vaccuum, and some spot cleaning, and it looks great! By the way the big brown spot is actually just a cat toy, not a spot! :)

Dining room

I hesitate to call it a dining room because it's not really a room, but you know what I mean. Saturday night we had our first dinner at our new table. Actually I think it was our first time actually eating in the dining room at all. I know that's bad, but until a couple weeks ago we didn't have a light there, and I still had a lot of stuff sitting on the table waiting for a more permanent home, and Steve was keeping some of his tools there. Target had a lot of their stuff at the dollar spot for 50% off. I got some small wodden hangers, which I'll post pictures of what I did with those soon. Anyhoo, I got these cute lemon wedge ice things that we used Saturday (notice the colorful glasses). But Steve still wanted his can of Sprite. Oh well. :) This weekend I'm going to work more on our china cabinet (another yard sale find). It will go on the long wall of the dining area/room where the air compressor now sits. I started stripping the paint off the cabinet Saturday. It has five, yes five, different colors on it! These include red, blue, green, gold (on the top piece only), and white. Gold? I'm not sure what someone was thinking when she painted the top piece only in gold. Maybe she painted the whole top and decided she didn't like it and painted the whole piece green, and later white. I'm not sure. All painted over the varnish that was never sanded off and the hardware. It's looking better, and I'm hoping to finish getting all the paint off this weekend. There's so much I would love to store in it, and it will look so nice decorated for fall this year!

House stuff

Steve put in a couple of doors last week. The only one left is the basement door, which we don't have yet. I painted some of the door frames this weekend so Steve could get in some more baseboards. After painting two coats of primer and one coat of paint on 15 doors, I really, really wish he had gotten the doors that had the frame already primed.



And here's the curtain I got for the back bedroom. Steve said it's 'girly'. But the room is pink. This is the room in question. I still haven't been able to get that white stuff off all of our windows.


And our cat Nova likes to climb on our roof and watch the world go by. Actually she likes to climb anything.