Magazine Table

A couple of weeks ago a lady posted this adorable and very unusual magazine rack, as she called it, on a swap site online. I knew I just had to have it, so I paid her $30 and went to the ghetto to pick it up. Seriously. Anyway, yesterday I was super productive while Kate was with Yiayia and painted my little magazine cabinet.

I took a before shot! Well, sort of before. I had already sanded it here. It had a very slick finish so I decided to grab the 220 sanding block and go to town.

 Don't you just love the lines? The wood on the side racks is curved too. And the legs are perfectly detailed spindles. The lady I bought it from said that her grandmother or aunt, I can't remember which, bought it at an antique store in Illinois a long time ago. Of course you know I painted it Tropical Tide. It's my color.

 While I was painting I noticed a tag stuck to the bottom. It says "Magazine Table $135.00". Score!

 For my distressing today I whipped out the power tools and put my Dremel to use. This was the first time I've used the sanding tip on it, and it worked really well. So far I've only used my Dremel to carve pumpkins.

 Ta-daaa! A beautiful little magazine table.  We are going to use this to hold our printer in the office. I think it will be perfect!

Eerie Sunset

We had a beautifully eerie sunset tonight, so I grabbed my camera and drove to a wide open parking lot to get some photos. I wish I had left a little earlier so I could go to a better spot, but I'm happy with what I got. As always, you can click on a photo and it will open larger for you to see.

 You can see the big thunderstorm off to the right side.

 I even caught a tiny bit of lightening in the last pic, off to the right. It's concealed mostly by the clouds.

Kate-isms

Two days ago, Kate told me she wanted to take gymnastics. I figure when we move and get settled I should have no problem looking into that.  But she followed that up with "and I want to take princess classes too!" which may be a little harder to find.

Later in the day, Kate came to find me in whatever room I was packing in at the time and said, "Mommy, you don't need to come in the living room but you need to get me a washrag." Insert heart rate increase here. I went into the living room to find that she had smeared yogurt all over the arm of the couch, which is thankfully leather so it wiped up easily. But what possesses you to smear yogurt in the first place?

She's definitely something else, that kid.

Mother's Day 2013

I know, it was a week ago, but I'm just now getting the photos off my memory card. I've been busy with this little house-packing and furniture painting thing, ok? So I know I said back on my Easter post that those would probably be the last holiday photos in our current back yard, but I was wrong because hello, mother's day....and I had forgotten that was coming up.

That's Kate's Easter dress, you may recognize. It's her favorite dress at the moment. In fact she talked Daddy into changing her clothes before Bible class this evening so she could put this dress on. She then walked into the office and announced that she was "ready to have her picture taken" so we had to do a quick photo shoot before we could walk out the door.

To give you an update on the house moving situation, it's coming along nicely. I think with less than two weeks left now to moving day we are in pretty good shape right now. Of course I could totally change my mind in a couple of days and go into full-scale panic mode, but at the moment I'm pretty calm. We got a lot accomplished this weekend. Nick finally got his big executive desk cleaned out and I listed it for sale on a couple of swap sites. Hopefully it will go quickly- I've had a couple of nibbles. So far I've sold two bookcases, a wardrobe and nightstand set, a changing table that we were using as a shelf (that I totally picked up off the curb and re-did), some artwork, shoes, books, outdoor toys, green chairs I never got around to repainting, and a few other miscellaneous items for a total of $372, which I still have $192 leftover (the rest I spent on new furniture). Hopefully we can get the desk sold and another storage cabinet I have, and maybe a few more miscellaneous items gone. I don't want to move stuff that I'm not intending to keep, for sure.
This was the office wall (from now on referred to as the box wall) about 3 days ago:

and this is the box wall now, mostly two rows of boxes deep but in some places three rows:

Can you say productive? Oh! This is the awesome little secretary/desk/dresser/thingy I picked up on Friday...and I don't even have to paint it! This will be our new TV cabinet in the living room. I'll mount the TV above it, and then the DVD box, etc will set on the open part...and movies can go in the drawers. They'll all fit because a year or so ago I spent $60/70 on 3 giant DVD binders, removed all of our movies from their annoying and bulky plastic box things, and filed them in the binders. So that's all we have to store now. I recycled the DVD cases too.

Fired!

I picked up our finished ceramics from Van Grow Art Studio yesterday morning. I love the way they turned out! My plate is so stinking cute, and I am anxious to go back to make some more that match it. 

 Kate's princess is very psychodelic/rainbow. She's cute! Kate has already said that next time we go she is painting a mermaid. I think this may be a frequent occurrence this summer.

I finished my table!

Remember the table I bought on my big garage sale day adventure? No? That's because I didn't show it to you. And I didn't remember to take a photo of it before I painted it. In my defense, once I had man-handled it out of the back of my van all by myself, rolled it into the backyard and laid it upside-down, all alone, I did have a quick thought that I should take a before shot. But there was no way I was flipping it back over all alone (it's heavy!) and then the thought left me.

So imagine, if you will, four scratched up and ugly dark brown legs attached to a wood top that is for all practical purposes in really good shape. The legs, no, the top, yes.  Then picture me painting the legs the same blue color of the table in the living room, Tropical Tide I believe it is called, because I love that color. Then look at what happens after you go crazy with the sanding and the antique glaze:

 Just for kicks, picture me rolling the table up to the back door only to have Kate inform me that it isn't going to fit through the back door.  Now let's imagine that I have to roll the table back around to the side of the house, after I measure and determine that the side door is wider. Then picture me shove it up two steps in one quick motion and once I get this monstrosity inside, I realize there is no way this thing is going to go through our laundry room and into the kitchen.

 So yes, our table is sitting in the office because that's where it is. But I love the way the legs turned out! I wanted them to be extra "dirty" and aged...and I achieved it.  The top is staying brown because it really is in great shape. I screwed a board underneath to hold the table together because it originally had a leaf but the guy I bought it from did not still have that. Look at the placemats I found at an antique shop! They're not antique, but still, they are SO CUTE!!

Now I need chairs.

Dresser Re-do!

In my quest to get my money's worth out of the moving company we hired, I keep buying furniture.  This piece is going to be Kate's dresser. She has an antique dresser and trunk coming from Yiayia's house and Bill is painting the bed to match both of those pieces. But the antique dresser doesn't have much storage space, so she needed a little bit more. I was browsing Lone Star Antiques one day and came across this little guy for only $52. He was already the proper color, but once I got him home I realized that there was no protection on the paint so it was showing fingerprints immediately.

It was also flat paint, which meant that I couldn't just rub the dirtiness off...so I repainted the whole thing.

Because I could, and because I can't do anything simply, I also took a slightly darker-than-cream colored paint and stenciled a lovely little corner design on each of the drawers (I purposely did one off to the other side, thank-you-very-much) and then also on all four corners at the top.

I was originally going to take the hardware off and spray paint it, but those handles were NOT budging. I assumed with my luck I would damage the drawers trying to pry them off so they stayed as-is and I painted around them with a tiny paintbrush.

I finished the whole look off by rubbing some of my antique glaze over the whole finish, to give it that old "dirty" look.  Right now this piece is sitting in my bedroom and holding my clothes because I sould the black wardrobe and nightstand online that I was previously using. See, I'm not just buying furniture, I'm selling it too!