Wednesday, August 31

$4.25

Since hurricane evacuations cut the vacation with my in-laws short, we ended up at their house in Michigan for the weekend. Luckily I married well and my mom- & sister-in-law love yard sale shopping too! We hit the sales together Saturday morning and walked away with some pretty good finds. Here's what I grabbed:

$1.00 - metal basket (for organizing fabric) & blue metal tub (maybe for outdoor toys?)

$0.25 - basket. I love baskets. 

$3.00 - Nate the Great book, hanging toy organizer, & 2 hanging pendant lights for Baby B's room (I think I'll put them in place of the mobile when he's older)

My hubs also found a large mini fridge for his basement bar project for $40...sorry, no pic for this one. I call it post-vacation-laziness. It will pass. I hope. :)

Tuck & Run: My tuck in run actually came from IKEA this week! You can read all about it here. I'm still feeling giddy about the whole thing. :)

It was so fun to hit the sales with my other-mother & -sister! Hope to do it again soon!

Monday, August 29

The Happy Dance

What find at IKEA had me happy dancing all the way home this weekend?


After our family vacation to Outer Banks, NC was cut short by a hurricane evacuation, we headed home with my in-laws to spend our last couple days at their house. This left us plenty of time for a trip to IKEA, only about 5 minutes from their house. We did our shopping, then ran through the "as-is" section on the way out. And that's when my husband spotted it. In all it's enormous-white-shiny glory.  


Did you see that price tag?!? The sink of my dreams (first mentioned here) marked down 87% to only $39.  Be still my heart. I started happy dancing and my husband helped me load it onto a cart and we practically ran out of the store before anyone changed their mind. You can see it was marked down so low because the back corner is broken off, but the corner was with it and if fits back together beautifully. So with a little glue or caulk (we haven't decided on the best approach yet) I can have the otherwise unaffordable sink of my dreams. Yes, please. I'll take a little crack any day for a sink this awesome.


And I'm not kidding about this thing being enormous. It took up most of our back seat squeezed in next to Baby B's car seat. And we have a big car. We got it home and drug it into the house (it's also HEAVY) and I haven't stopped looking at it yet. Or touching it. It's just so beautiful. :) Before my dreams came true, we also picked up a few other things (we don't make it to IKEA very often, so we have to make it count!). :)  Here's what we got:  


  1. Metal shelves for the kitchen 
  2. Support brackets for the fold-down bar
  3. A shelf-thing from "as-is" that we're hoping will work for the bar (if not, I'll make art. Always a good fall-back plan.) :) 
  4. Curtain rods for the office/guest room 
  5. All the curtain ring clips they had left (don't go to IKEA on college move-in weekend! It was a mad house and lots of things were cleaned out! I wanted the ring clips after reading this blog post by Young House Love where they used them as a safety feature in case their baby pulled on the curtains. Such a good idea!)
  6. A fishy ice cube tray that I forgot to put in the picture. Now we can have little ice fishies swimming in our cups.
And that's why I did the happy dance.

Saturday, August 27

The Third Room

I don't think you've met our third bedroom yet. It's time to be introduced! This room has been pretty neglected since we moved in about 10 months ago. It's on the first floor next to the bathroom and needs to be multi-purpose to meet all the needs our other rooms don't. We want it to be functional as an office/craft room on a daily basis but also be a comfortable place for our many guests to stay. Let's start with the sketches I drew up, oh, I don't know, 2 months ago. Things move really fast around here. :)

Here is our office when we moved in:


And here is our long-term plan:


The Details:
1. Relocate the sewing table to use as a  nightstand.

2. Rotate the bed to a different wall and leave space on both sides. We are going to build a new bed based on Ana White's Hailey Storage Bed plan that will have storage underneath and upgrade to a full-size bed in the process to better house our many guests.



3. Add curtains. I'm thinking about yellow and maybe striped? I LOVE these curtains by The Nester and want to recreate them in a color that will work in this room. I'll either sew stripes or try this tutorial for painting or this tutorial for stenciling. Although now that I look at this pic again I still love the brown. Ugh. I'm so indecisive sometimes. :)



4. Paint the walls gray. Not a color I usually choose, but I thought it would be fun for this room!

5. Add a rug to define the sleeping area and add some comfort & texture to the room. I would love to do something like this from West Elm, but cheaper would be great. :)


6. Bring in a chair that used to be in the living room. It's an IKEA chair we bought back when we were first married.


7. Move the desk so it's not visible straight through the door. This is because it's usually a mess and I'm embarrassed to leave the door open. ;)

8. Add some built-in shelving in the closet to organize my craft & sewing supplies.

9. Refinish the original hardwood floors. We're working up to this one, too. The nursery floor is still too fresh in our minds and we aren't up to a repeat yet! The good news is that this is the last floor we'll have to finish. There is light at the end of the tunnel!

10. Paint the bookcase a lighter coordinating color and bring in the book shelves from the living room for even more storage.

So that's the plan. Hopefully I'll be back soon with some progress. And I realized I don't have any actual pictures of the room, so I'll work on that too. :)

Wednesday, August 24

$9.65

I managed to squeeze in only 2 yard sales last weekend. The first one was a dud, but the second one had tons of little boy clothes for $0.25/piece or $5 to fill a bag! I did all of my purchasing at this sale, trying to fill in some gaps in clothing before winter. Here's what I snagged:

L-R: 3mo, 6mo, 9mo, 12mo. (our 9 month stash is still a little sparse and they didn't have much in that size - hint hint to any grandma's or aunties who want to help dress Baby B for winter) :) My fave find of the day is definitely the whale jacket! (2nd row, 3rd thing from the bottom)

And these are all the 18 mo clothes I picked up. We were also pretty sparse in that area. This stuff is mostly long sleeved so it may not fit Baby B in the right season, but for $0.25/piece it was worth stocking up just in case!

$0.10 - Blue baby tin. I'll either use it on a shelf in Baby B's room or to organize his stuff in the bathroom.

That's it for me. I'm going to be so sad when summer is over and I can't yard sale all winter long! I'm trying to get all the clothes Baby B needs before then so I don't have to pay full price for anything. :)

Wednesday, August 17

My Family is Awesome

My sister, Auntie B, was in town last week helping me with our yard sale and then Saturday night the rest of my family was able to join us as well. This meant lots of fun family time along with some home improvement work. The project we they (I totally sat this one out. My parents & husband did a great job!) tackled this weekend was installing a vent in our main bathroom. It gets very steamy and damp in there when the shower is on and we are hoping to prevent any mold problems with a little ventilation! Here is a before pic of the ceiling above the shower where the vent will go.


It ended up being a bigger job than we bargained for (like so many projects!). We bought two vent kits at Lowe's. A Ceiling Vent Fan Kit which contained the vent fan for the ceiling, and an Exterior Wall Vent kit that included the ducts & valves to run the vent to outside (they also make roof vent kits, but that seemed much riskier to us!). There is a crawl space above the bathroom so we had good access to the ceiling, but the problem came when we were unable to vent through the wall from up there. Enter Plan B. There was much deliberation and we finally decided this was the best way to go. We installed the fan in the ceiling and made the exterior hole down in the bathroom wall. Then we ran the duct work down through the bathroom. I don't have a picture, but let's just say it wasn't pretty.


So after connecting the two square holes with one of those neat flexible duct pipes, we built out a box around it using 2x2s and drywall to hide all the uglies. It looks much better now, and it's definitely worth the funny little box to have a venting system in there! We still have to finish puttying the box, install the fan cover and paint it all but they made great progress for one weekend! I'm going to be changing the paint color to match the shower curtain of my dreams that I found at Target. It's going to be SO sweet.


My mom, the Electrician Extraordinaire, wired everything up for us and got the fan working beautifully! This is the one switch we had when she started.


And here is the new switch for the fan. She also put in an outlet (which we definitely needed) and put in a shiny new light switch (but that was after I took this pic. oops.). You can see some of the plastic tiles snapped in the process. I want to get them off the wall so bad and this just makes me want to take them off sooner! :)


Here you can see the little vent from outside, and can probably see why we had to run the vent so low on the wall because it's right under the eaves! And I didn't completely tell the truth earlier. I held the ladder once while my hubs worked. So I did help a little. :)


In between the work we enjoyed lots of good food, movies, ladder ball, a trip to the Indian Caves, and some chill time on the patio! Here are Gramps & Grammy enjoying Baby B's nap time:

And some of the aunties J, S, M & I:

 
 
 

 Ha! Auntie C hamming it up. Too funny. :)

And I don't have a pic of Auntie B, but this is what happens when I leave her alone with Baby B. I can't complain too much though, because I got a good nap while she was at it:

Three cheers for a totally awesome family!

Saturday, August 13

$14.55

I didn't do any yard sale hunting this weekend because I had a little sale of my own! I'll share some details about that later, but until then here are (finally) my finds from my shopping last weekend.

 $0.35 - Spool of ribbon & small bottle

$0.20 - Shirt for me and onesie for Baby B

$1.25 - 2 pillow cases & an oven mitt

$1.00 - Photo matte, caulk, and a set of casters

$0.75 - Tin full of buttons & and a froggy nutcracker

$3.00 - Set of glass jars. Maybe for pasta/rice in the kitchen?

 $3.00 - Chairs. I got the two in the middle for $3, then my grandma gave me the other two for free! Yes, they are begging for a makeover. And I'm happy to give them one. :)

$5.00 - A beautiful blue quilt. My friend is thinking about redoing her bedroom with blue, so I couldn't resist picking this up for her. :)

We were back home for the weekend so it was fun to shop with my momma and sisters again. Anyone else have any good buys (or do any selling) this weekend?

Tuesday, August 9

Giveaway Winner!

And the winner of the reversible shopping tote is......


Comment #2 - Rhetta, who said "My car stops for yard sales. My husband's car does not. Funny thing, though--it's the same car." Congratulations, Rhetta! Email me your address at morelikehome (at) gmail (dot) com and I'll get it sent out to you! Be sure to check out Rhetta's blog On Raspberry Hill to see some of her furniture makeover projects!


If you didn't win but still want a reversible tote of your own, you can make one! The pattern came from the book "Sew What Bags." It's really a great book for a beginning bag-maker. It gives you basic instructions to make several different styles of bags, but leaves room for you to customize things like size, number of pockets, and length of straps. I definitely recommend it!


Thanks to all who entered! Let's do it again soon! :)

Saturday, August 6

$5 Dresser Makeover

This is the dresser I picked up at a yard sale for only $5. It didn't look like much, but I thought some TLC would fix that!


The drawer glide on the second drawer was broken, so we took the one from the top drawer and moved it down to the second, attaching it in the same place. (in this pic the second one is taken out and the top one is ready to be moved down) That way we could eliminate the top drawer altogether and leave it open as a shelf instead.


Then I attacked those little bows. I pried them right off with a screwdriver. It turns out they weren't even wood, just plastic.


Then I sanded where the bow had been to make sure everything was nice and even. Much better! :)


Then we got to work installing a shelf in place of the top drawer. We just attached pieces of 1x2 to the sides of the dresser (using glue and a couple screws) to support the shelf.


Then we cut two strips of 1x8 and ran them across the 1x2s. They filled the space perfectly!


We reattached the loose trim piece that came with the dresser to make it a little more decorative.


Whew. Looking better already! We (mostly my husband, N, while I played with Baby B) made all the improvements in one evening. It probably took about 2 hours.


But there was one more problem. That hardware wasn't doing anything for me.


I picked up this hardware at Lowe's for about $3 each (I spent more on hardware than on the dresser!) and I love it! But it turns out I should have measured how wide the hardware needed to be because these guys came in a little short. Oops!


I decided it was worth a little work to use the hardware I liked so much, so I marked how wide the new hardware was, drilled some holes, and then filled the old holes. I let it dry overnight, then sanded it down before painting.


I picked out Valspar's "Honey Pot" and had it color matched in Olympic's no VOC semi gloss paint. I wanted a nice bold color that would contrast the rest of the room and be a focal point. I started by running over the whole dresser with sand paper because it was covered with a veneer and I wanted to make sure my paint would stick. Then I did two coats of paint using a small roller to get a nice even finish.


Baby B chilling on the patio and watching Daddy work. You know you wanted to see him. :)

Once it was painted I used some of the wallpaper I got at a yard sale earlier this summer to line the drawers for a nice little surprise every time I open them!


I bought a light colored basket for $0.50 a few weeks ago that fit perfectly in the top of the dresser. I removed the handles and stained it a darker brown using Minwax Dark Walnut (my fave! I pretty much always have some in the basement). I used a super cheap brush to work the stain into the weave and had a paper towel handy to wipe up any drips.


And that was it! Did $5 ever look so good? 


It fits perfectly between the kitchen doorway and the door to upstairs. It's also close to the dining table so we can use it to hold table cloths or extra dishes and I plan to run a power strip into the shelf space so we can charge cell phones & ipods in the basket. 



And for a quick comparison, here's a little before/after action for you:



I actually haven't put anything in the drawers yet, but I'm excited to get it all organized. It's going to be great storage for an otherwise unused space!

p.s. There's still time to enter to win this handmade reversible tote:


If you haven't entered yet you can find the details and join the fun here!

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