The ReStore (and other updates)

Yesterday I made my first trip to a Habitat For Humanity ReStore. Hello mecca. It's like the Goodwill's household section..... on crack. Lots of new things, lots of used things, lots of junk.... ect.

Here are a few of my favorite pieces I spotted (and may go back today to purchase!)

HUGE bolt of fabric.... $30.... may purchase & save for the beach!

Houston, We Have Fabric.

Back in May I placed an order (kinda on a whim) for 11 yards of Robert Allen, Bella Porte in charcoal for my office curtains. At $12.98 a yard it was by far cheaper than anywhere else I'd found it.

I got a call the end of last week that it was in! I trekked down to Mary Jo's in Gastonia to pick it up. While there, I decided to hunt for new fabric for my wingback & the pair of chairs. I found some nice solid white for the pair of chairs and some snazzy hot pink for my wingback!!!

I'll be shipping off the pair of chairs to Johnny.... a guy that is dirt cheap for upholstery work. I'm going to try and tackle the wingback myself :-)

I've also decided to once and for all paint my desk white. It's something I wanted to do a long time ago, and then chickened out.... now I'm doing it!


Fence Update:

The fence is complete!!!!! We cooked hot dogs outside last night & had drinks while the puppies played!!

Fencing in the Yard.

A while back Jeremy & I discussed having our yard fenced.... we decided it wasn't worth it given the size of our yard. But back last fall maybe we had a fence co. come out and do an estimate. It was the fence co. that everyone else in our area of the neighborhood had used. They wanted over $1800 to fence our yard.... crazy town.

Our Tiny backyard before we bought the house

We decided fencing the yard just wasn't going to happen. Well... summer arrived and we started cooking out more, and our puppies would stand at the back door and cry. If it wasn't too hot we would put up the baby gate so they could be closer.

After Jeremy got his job this spring, we decided to revisit the idea of fencing the yard. I emailed about 5 companies in the area to get quotes... only ONE emailed me back. (One other did call me, but I specifically asked to be emailed so I didn't return their call). They came out, and quoted us.... $300 cheaper than the first company!! So we paid our deposit & waited to be scheduled.

We were on the calendar for July 1. Then I got an email saying they were bumping us up to June 28! We didn't have to be home for the install, but I felt better being there. I left work just after 1PM yesterday to get home in time to see it being finished. I pulled up and this is what I saw.....

not happy.

They'd had an "emergency" but were on the way to our house. They worked about 3 hours, and didn't get as much done as I'd hoped.

They better be back out there today finishing it as I type.

Bench Seating.

Remember how much I love a bench at a dining table....

here
here
here
here


Well..... I went to a little store in Cornelius to see a wingback settee I'd seen online. It was sold.... BUT.... they had this little cutie! It was 50% off and then the owner took another $25 off :-)

$100 was too perfect a price. I measured it. 54".... perfect!!! It had to be less than 58" in order to fit on the side of the table.

Admittedly, the back is a lot shorter than I wanted. (I love all the high back stuff!) but for that price, I had to take it home.

Jeremy HATES.... I mean HATES the floral.... but I think it will look particularly awesome once it's reupholstered :-)

If my table ever gets cleaned off (full of office stuff right now) I'll take a photo of it beside the table...

..... I think it has lots of potential! Look at this one....

Apartment Therapy

Come, See!

So, my wide angle lens came back from the Nikon repair on Wednesday! Yay! I finally got to take half way decent photos of our house :-)

So.... you know you want to come down, see the house & make an offer on it!!!

Specs:

1281 Square Feet
Open living space
3 bedrooms
2.5 baths
Neutral paint
Brand new flooring throughout (tile in both full baths)
Full pantry with new shelving
Outdoor storage room
Rocking chair front porch
Back patio

NOTE: The stainless steel fridge stays with the house, as do the surround sound speakers & BOTH flat screen TV's!!!!!

Downstairs:

Living Room

Living Room

Kitchen

Kitchen

Dining (1/2 bath & laundry in door on the left!)

Dining (1/2 bath & laundry in door on the left!)

Upstairs:

Master Bedroom

Master Bedroom

Master Bath

3rd (middle) bedroom

2nd (back) bedroom

White Chairs?

Bought the sprayer last night.

Bought paint at 745AM this morning.

Painted chairs till 1130AM.

They are in poopy shape. Shoulda sanded them & used oil base paint :-(

Before.....

After!

I included the photo of the table top so you can see the wood inlay pattern :-)

They're staying as-is for the moment. We fly to Vegas at 6AM, and we were tired of battling the wind.

Gus likes them :-)

Chairs!!

I made a little trip over to The Real Deal Variety Store last night to find my chairs....

They are in much better condition than I thought they would be.... they are also a little bigger than I thought. Dara and her husband and daughter met me over there, super nice people. Highly recommend you check out their goods.... freaking awesome deals!

Hello, I got FIVE chairs for $55!!!!!!

The leaves are in the box on the table :-) SO excited to start working on these chairs!..... speaking of.... does anyone have a paint sprayer I can borrow? Or know of a cheap place to rent one? I think spraying them is a better idea than spray paint, or using a brush.....

Pantry Project!

We have a serious love/hate relationship with our pantry. I love having a pantry, but hate the use of space. The morons that designed our home decided it was a bright idea to put the hot water heater in there, which elliminates all use of the storage area under our stairs... BLAH! Anyway... we had still been using the sexy wire shelving that came in the pantry, along with a wire rack Jeremy had before we moved in.

I tried numerious times to "rearrange" things to make better use of the space, but it never worked out the way I wanted.

In THIS post I talked about how I bought lots of storage containers to use, and organize things. Good in theory.

Ex:

The crates were too deep & things just got lost in there. We would forget about the things we had and buy duplicates.

In came Honey & Fritz last week. She recently redesigned her pantry with the Elfa system from The Container Store.

BEAUTIFUL!

We were heading to Raleigh on Saturday anyway, so decided to make a trip to the Container Store. DISASTER! I will never go in that store again.... it was awful!!! We decided to check out Ikea's storage systems before we made any decisions.

So... Sunday- we went to church & then over to Ikea for breakfast & shopping :-)

$147 later, we had 3 shelves, wall mounts, brackets, 12 spice holders, and a rolling cart!!

3 hours later, our pantry looked like a grocery store!

I took the idea from Honey & Fritz to put the cart in the pantry with my mixer. It (and the juicer pictured) had been living on top of our fridge.... not ideal. Now we can just roll it out into the kitchen when we need it. The shelves on the cart are filled with baking stuff - flour, sugar, chocolates, oil, ect. I want to get some nice containers to house all these things so they don't fall when we move the cart.

The top shelf is kinda hart to see... but it holds our pottery barn beverage jars, cake plates, paper towels, and lunch boxes.

Middle shelf is breakfast items on the left, then sauces (liquids), jar items (peanut butter, salsa, ect) then canned items.

Bottom shelf houses all our snack items (in the white bins) and dry pasta, beans & rice on the right.... I want some pretty jars to put these in!

You can kinda see the fire extingisher on the right... it's actually sitting on top of the hot water heater.

 So, what's missing?

The microwave.

to the right of the cart, another shelf is going to be hung & the microwave will sit on it. :-)

PS.... don't you love that I own thousands of dollars worth of photography equipment, but routinly use my iphone for blog photos.... haha!

I'll take some better photos once it's all complete!

Oh.... and those spice jars.... see the aprons hanging to the left in that last photo? Our spices are going to be hung there! I bought one of those picture ledges from Ikea a while ago to go over my desk.... well, I just got a giant canvas print to hang over my desk, so the ledge will come down. We'll cut it into 3 sections and hang them on the pantry wall.... like this (far right!)

http://jengrantmorris.blogspot.com/

Check out Jen's blog for some great organizing tips.

Almost Done!

Jeremy & his dad got the flooring down in our bedroom yesterday! We put the new rug down, and our bed back together last night (although, we couldn't push the bed to the wall yet). They have to put down the quarter round this morning, then the room will be finished!

The doggies LOVED the new rug I bought 2 weeks ago :-)


Who needs an SUV to haul things? Not this girl! ..... from when I bought the 8x10 rug from the TJMaxx over at Concord Mills a few weeks ago.

Here are the doggies loving the new rug last night :-)   sorry for the poor photo :-(

The Married Couple Saturday

We had the stereotypical married couple Saturday- We went to Home Depot. Sigh....


We have several house projects that we are working on accomplishing soon (see list in sidebar).
So we made a trek to the Home Depot with a gift card we received as a wedding gift! Jeremy has been wanting to install shelving in our outdoor storage closet for a while now. He finally got to work on it Saturday!

We still need another shelf, so he'll be making another HD run this week sometime- but here's a picture of our disastrous back yard while Jeremy was working!