Sunday, January 31, 2010

Project One

So there is this amazing vintage store near our new house from which I bought two danish side tables that needed a little love from about a year ago.  The legs were splitting some so the owner gave me a break on the price.  My husband was coming home from a trip and I wanted to fix them up to surprise him with.  In my haste to make them amazing in a couple hours, I did a crappy job with taping off the metal trim and an even worse job painting them.   I definitely slacked on the gift but my awesome husband liked them anyway :).  When we got the house I found two incredibly great side tables at West Elm that I had my sights set on and these were finding their way to craigslist, but after my enlightenment, I can now only dream of you, wonderful side table delight.....

I forgot to take a full on "before" but you can see the bad paint job in the pictures.  In the first one you can even see I didn't even end up painting the back legs because I was bummed with how horrible they were turning out.  After full on cleaning each table (we have two) I carefully taped each one using the Sunday ads to cover the tops.  I used Rust-oleum's Lacquer spray paint in white.  I've bought so many cans of this product, it's really incredible.  Super shiny and fresh looking.  So instead of two sad and worn out danish duds, we now are the proud owners of two clean and modern danish dazzlers.  So that alliteration was a little damp.... Below is the cost breakdown.

Side Tables:  free-already had
Tape: already had it
Paint: 1.5 cans of Rust-oleum White Lacquer $8 
Total: $8  



Saturday, January 30, 2010

Oh, stimulus, how you tempt me.

Our first house that we can put in our own flooring, rip out a wall on a whim, and lay down some sweet sweet sparkling linoleum. No asking, no begging, just doing. It sounds like our previous landlords have been nightmarish but actually it's just been our parents. And they've been awesome. They've let us paint a room kelly green, a kitchen brick red (and badly), get an enormous dog, and ruin new paint jobs with countless nail holes. But now we are fleeing out nest, investing in a 1921 bungalow, and are free to do whatever the blazes we want with 1100 square feet. If that's as big as your master bath, just smile and say it's "cute".

Once we signed the contract for the house, my mind flew to the countless ideas, designs, and color schemes that had lodged themselves into my pyshe from two years of Dwell, Trad Home, and my favorite bloggers. My wish list was envisioned and before my husband could even ask me if we were planning on keeping our cerulean couch, I'd begun packing. With our move in date more than a month away I boxed everything I didn't think we need for that time. 15 packed boxes in, I began to ask myself, if I could live without these things for a month, why in heaven do we need them at all? We have so much stuff. And we aren't pack rats. And we (well, I) aren't sentimental. If we, the modern minimalist couple that has no need for quilted tissue box covers and the like, have boxes full of crap, what does the rest of the world hide in their homes?

Thus begins our promise, goal, resolution if you will. We, The Hires, pledge to not buy one single piece of new anything for our new home. If we have enough and our neighbors have enough to build the storage centers flooding our city then we are going to make a small dent in Tampa's junk by using only used things to fill our bunglow. There are some asterisks as my husband was not exactly thrilled with this goal.

-We have tons of gift cards we can use (why waste free money?) and sadly, not one is for a thrift store
-My husband did not want to buy a used TV
-Personal items will not be used (he was grossed out by another person's towel)
-we are putting new flooring in the house, salvaged was way too expensive
-gifts are fair game, why rob our loved ones from the blessing of blessing?

And so it begins. I will catalog every dollar we spend on either fixing up what we already have or splurging on someone else's goods. Our bungalow is going to reflect not just us but our community.