I'm back!

Wow, Hi guys it's been a while! :)

The new computer is here so I can finally blog, fb and google things again.....like a plumber to snake out our main line today-who just happened to be my sister in laws hubby- now that's a happy surprise in a (literally) crappy situation! Hooray for technology.....and my forthcoming iphone!
Yes, I will be joining the rest of the world and getting a smartphone.
(So excited for Instagram!!) 

Every Saturday morning from May through September you can find me rushing the boys out the door and to my parents house at 7:30 am. The boys, my Mom and I pile into her car with some snacks and movies (for the kids), the newspaper and some cash (for us) and hit the garage sales.
My Mom drives, I navigate.
We always have a blast and usually come home with a car load of great stuff!


-Some recent acquisitions

Anyone else spend their summer Saturdays like this?? 

Scored any great finds lately?

PS-We made a tire swing...

and Ruthie Sommers has a blog!

Check back (hopefully) on Monday because I have an awesome giveaway to announce!!

Happy Weekend

The ones that got away

Any of you who garage sale/thrift store/Craigslist can look at that title and know exactly where this is going. 

Tears.

Heartbreak.

Most of the time the story reads like this:

I'm not sure if I need that __________ so I'll come back in a few days.

*When do we ever NEED these things?!?

You decide you can't live without it, (aren't we so dramatic), so you go back to buy it but alas it's gone.

Sold out from under you while you were stupidly considering where you could put it.

My Mom and I found ourselves in a similar situation recently but instead of the other buyer being the villain it was the shop owner.

We'd been eyeing a set of brass and chrome end tables with mirrored tops at a local antique store since spring. They were gorgeous and only $36 for the set but I seriously had no where for them. Every time we went back in we always admired them but never pulled the trigger.

Last week I was searching on ebay and just happened to come across this listing.

Ok so these aren't the exact tables but golly are they close.....and $800!

I immediately sent the link to my Mom.

Smart mom I have!

Saturday finally rolled around and we all but ran to the antique store. 

*Sidenote: said tables were in the upstairs portion of this building so we had to carry Isaac in his stroller up the stairs, like so:

That kid is heavy but those tables were worth it!

Except they weren't because they were gone. :(

We haul the kid back down stairs and ask the owner about the tables.

She tells us that they had been there for two years and she "doesn't like to sit on stuff" so she scrapped them.

Yes, as in took them to the scrap yard.

Let me tell you peeps, it was a sad, sad day!!

So, let this be a lesson to you.

DON'T THINK ABOUT IT JUST BUY IT!

RIP brass tables, RIP.

P.S.

(Sorry for the crappy listing pic)

Snagged this chrome table base (laminate top had seen better years) for FREE the other night. Planning on having a top made for it at some point.....will be perfect in our dining area when we add the banquette.

Doesn't get better than free people!

Brain dump

Sorry for these random sporadic posts lately but I've been a very busy little bee, finalizing bathroom plans, homeschooling the boys and babysitting my friends four month old baby two days a week. 

B-U-S-Y!!

Our bathroom remodel is set to start the first week in October and I'm going to do most of the demo myself (great money saver if you can manage it!).  I've already started removing the tile, trim and wallpaper. However, with Stanley working two jobs and me homeschooling and watching little Miss P two days a week time is a luxury. A luxury best spent doing dishes or catching up on laundry since all of those things have taken a back seat as well. Yesterday I was able to escape to the garage to sand down the dresser and drawers real quick. It didn't take long thankfully. Next is stain and then a finishing wax, I'm really anxious to see how it turns out!

Last week we had a custom top made for the dresser out of this Wilsonart laminate. 

It fits perfectly and once I do this little paint trick to cover up the seams, 

images

it will look like a million thousand bucks.

The hardware that I originally ordered didn't work with the dresser (screw holes were off) so I searched high and low online and local for hardware but I wasn't feeling any of it. Okay, I take that back but I'm not paying $20+ per drawer pull, can't do it. 

Champagne taste, beer budget here people! 

#firstworldproblems

Anyway, I ended up ordering these bin pulls, only $5.10 a piece-check em out, they come in brass ($4.90) and cast iron ($2.85) as well. 

This brass towel bar is in the mail.

Yum

I snagged a vintage chrome extending mirror for $2 on Craigslist and found this same brass rope shelf at a thrift store for $7, it will be getting a little Rub 'n Buff so it's more antique brass like that gorgeous towel bar and less Liberace.

That's all I got today, back to the grindstone aka making dinner (zucchini "lasagna" with shrimp, kale and swiss chard). I'll post a recipe for that soon, it's beyond amazing! Also I may or may not be upholstering my dining chairs with pillows cases....stay tuned.

PS-Check out the art selection at Little Paper Planes, this Gem calendar that gives you 12 gorgeous prints and these Cuban movie posters on ebay. Yay for beautiful and affordable art!

Recent finds and revised bathroom plans

I hope you all had a great long weekend. 
Can you believe it's September!? I love fall but man this summer flew by! 

Last Friday the guy who will be working on our bathroom came by to have a look and chat with us about what we wanted to do and set up a start time (beginning of next month). We found some mold in the bathroom cabinet so we decided to get a new vanity. Bath tub and shower are happening too. Yay!

Friday night I spent about an hour online looking at 5ft. bathroom vanities. I hated them all and they were really pricey. There's a guy in town who could custom make one for us but his quote was around $400-$500, which is a really great price for a 5ft vanity but more than we wanted to spend.

I started thinking about a piece of furniture instead of actual cabinetry, looked but there was nothing on Craigslist.

Saturday Stanley stayed home with the boys while my Mom and I went to some garage sales (got a set of antique flatware for $15), antique stores, grocery shopped and went out for lunch. 

Such a fun day!

We also went to The Barn, an antique/vintage shop. I found this great rug for $45 it's about 3'5" x 7'. It is the perfect size for our kitchen......when we remodel in ten years.

 We also found this dresser for $85.00

It was perfect for our bathroom and exactly what I'd had in mind!

Picture it kind of like this....

I'm planning on sanding it down, it won't take much it's pretty rough already, and staining it a little warmer, not so yellow. 
Like this:

I'm going to leave the finish real matte but I need to seal it...Briwax maybe?? Let me know if you've used it or know something else that will work.

Anyway, here is the revised bathroom plan.

We're going to do vertical planking on the bottom half of the wall, just like what we have now with the tile. I'm actually planning on reusing the wood trim to top off the planks. Planking/trim and walls/ceiling will all be Behr's Swiss Coffee. New tub, shower surround and toilet. We'll be getting a laminate top made for the vanity and we already ordered the vessel sink above.
 Two sconces on either side of the mirror. Different mirror than the original plan too, moving it from another room so no money spent. :)

We have this storage set up behind the door (which will be painted high gloss black).

There will be about 9 inches between the new vanity and the wall since it's smaller than the existing one. I'm planning on taking the doors off of those cabinets and having open storage, hamper in the bottom cabinet probably.

Stanley and I are really excited that we'll be able to take a shower upstairs!

It's the little things you know.

Birthday weekend recap

Hope you all had a great weekend! 

Mine was fantastic! Saturday was my birthday and the boys and I spent the morning hitting garage sales with my Mom. We got some great stuff! After that we ran some errands and then it was lunch/nap time. The stars aligned and I got a birthday nap, you never want/need a nap more than when you're a Mom-am I right!?

For dinner we went to my parents house and had a bbq with two of my best friends and their families.  Between our 11 kids and the kids across the street all running wild it was a little Lord Of The Flies.

Great food, great company, GREAT birthday!

Sunday morning the boys and I went to church and after Stanley got home from work we went out to dinner with his parents. Since he had worked all week, we hadn't been able to get together with them for our birthdays. We had a great dinner and narrowly missed Isaac having a major blow out...always fun.

After dinner Stanley took the boys home and I got to go spend some birthday money by myself. Ah shopping alone-doesn't get much better than that!

 No sarcasm there, I'm dead serious. 

When I got home he had also done all the dishes and cleaned the kitchen: BEST HUSBAND EVER!

I forgot suppressed that I still had one wall to paint in the living room, so after painting all day Monday one of my other besties took me out for dinner. We had a blast, as always.

 True story-we were really good friends in elementary school but lost touch over the years. We randomly found each other via Facebook a few years ago and picked up right where we left off. So fun!

Here are some of the treasures I picked up on Saturday:

Sorry for the blurry phone pics

BIG (37x37) vintage abstract $3.50 The painted parts were originally yellow, navy and tan but it really needed an update. (I checked to make sure it wasn't a priceless piece and then proceeded.) Green paint and a foam brush to the rescue! The frame is a little rough so I may end up painting it, probably black or white.

9' x 12' vintage rug from France $15

Phin laying in that position to watch a movie:priceless

Vintage original oil painting $7

The lamp, one of a pair, was also a garage sale find from earlier this summer ($5 for the pair) as was the alpaca ($1)-very Jamie Meares, no?

Arrows $10 (in a vase I stole borrowed from my Mom) a la Emily Henderson:

source

 I scored this very old piece above for $3, it's about 1.5 ft. by 3.5 feet. The elderly woman I bought it from told me that it was from her Great Grandmother. The frame is beautiful in person!

This pendant, next to an apple for comparison, was $4. I'm going to have my Dad swap it out for the mint green chandy that's in the hallway.

I just ordered a new coffee table (BIG thank you to my in-laws!!!!) so I will be doing a big post about our updated living room when it gets here. I also have some updates to Isaac's nursery, the boys' room, our master bedroom and the basement to share....for all that spare time I have. 
On top of that I'm just starting to work on our upstairs bathroom. This will be a budget upgrade just to get it liveable/useable until we gut it (in 20 years :) but I'm really excited about it. 
More on that later.

Happy hump day!

Confession:

I love garage sales, flea markets and thrift stores like a fat kid loves cake. 

It's true. 

I love finding a great bargain, a treasure in a pile of junk.

Erin said it best: Bargains are my crack.

Here's some crack I've recently acquired....

Textile will upholster a little ottoman and make some pillows, bamboo table needs a real top-not plexiglass and a cute little footstool tucked under it. Ceramic froggy reminds me of my Grammie (great-grandmother) who collected frogs, folk art is stunning in person! Black and white art will be getting a nice frame soon and the coffee table is begging for some lacquer-not sure on color yet as it's probably going in the basement TV room.


If you follow me on Twitter you saw this earlier this week:

Scored a bust similar to this one for $13 today, giving him a makeover. #ilovegaragesales #whitespraypaint http://t.co/uYDMiav2bs
— Katie Waddell (@KatieRWaddell) July 28, 2013

Here he is, all spiffed up with some white spray paint, on my nightstand.

He watches me while I sleep.

#creepy

I also snagged another kiddie guitar for $2 to hang under this one in the boys room.

Kind of like Jenny did:

                                      source

Their bedroom is so close to being done, just need to figure out a bookcase situation. I can't wait to share it with you!

 In the meantime, I have one wall left to paint in the living room and then I'll be moving on down the hallway and into the dining room. Then I have all the doors to do. 
I'm really looking forward to having this all done soon, I'm SO.DONE.PAINTING!

Tonight I'm taking a break and we're heading to the MT State Fair with the fam.

I'll be back next week, hopefully with some pictures. 

Have a great weekend!

Weekend recap

This weekend I....... 

 scored a pair of these vintage embroidered dish towels(?) for $1. They are huge, 20x20, and I'm planning on making them into a pair of euro shams for the boys bunk beds.

did some puzzles with these two cuties

let the boys play with their food, string cheese to be exact.

got inspired by blackberry juice. Watercolors here I come!

.....and made this ottoman out of a wood pallet. 

Hope you had a fabulous weekend!

Thrifty art

Wow, it's been a LOOOOOOOOONG week. Isaac decided that five am is the time he should get up for the day and it's killing me! Until now he was sleeping all night and getting up at six every morning, both of which I enjoy. (Nothing like getting a work out in and showering before the older boys get out of bed!) Last week he got an ear infection though and it's totally thrown everything off.

It's a good thing he's so cute!

 He usually takes his naps in the swing and gets put to bed in the swing and then moved to our room. Yes, my eight month old is still in my room AND in a baby swing. I said that I would keep him in there as long as he slept well but it looks like that's over. This morning I played mean Mommy; retired the swing and made him nap in his bed (in our room) and cry it out. He did really well, only cried for about 10 minutes and slept for about 40 minutes.

Baby steps people, baby steps.

The hubby has worked a lot this week on top of all that. Yesterday he was off and in the morning I went and ran some errands while he was at home with the boys. I really wish I would've stayed home since he got called in to work at 3 and didn't get home until after we all went to bed last night. We saw each other for about 2 hours yesterday. What a sucky 'day off'! Anyway, while I was out I swung by the thrift store on a whim and found quite the treasure, well I think so at least.

Not the painting of course but the canvas. It's kind of hard to tell but it has a really nice frame.

Sorry for the awful picture it was 6 am and still dark! :) It's HUGE, like 4x4.5, so big that I couldn't fit it in our van. BIG thanks to my Father in law for picking it up for me!!

 Here are the boys with it for scale....

and the best part is that it set me back a whopping $14.95! I'm planning on painting over the canvas and the sides of the frame, which are yellow right now.

Really inspired by these pieces right now.......

Source: Uploaded by user via Katie on Pinterest

Heather Chontos

                                                                           Source: milkfarmroad.bigcartel.com via Katie on Pinterest

Heather Chontos

                                                     Source: theestateofthings.com via Katie on Pinterest

Meredith Pardue

          Source: moma.org via Katie on Pinterest

               Willem de Kooning

                                                                          Source: katiewaddell.blogspot.com via Katie on Pinterest

Last year I painted over this canvas, inspired by Caroline Wright's work.

I really, really enjoy painting! Such good therapy!! I'm hoping I get to work on it a little this weekend.....after pics soon!