Craigs List Find of the Week

Carly is always searching for deals on furniture for our new home.  Every week we get closer and closer to moving in and even more excited!  One of the things we are looking for is a new table and chairs.  We like to entertain and have friends over whenever we can and sometimes there just isn't quite enough space to eat.  Carly holds a monthly book club, link to that blog, and they have dinner while they discuss the book and we consistently use folding chairs and table to accommodate all the guests.  A new table and chairs is something we really want.

This week Carly sent me an email asking if we should jump on this deal for six dining room chairs.  We had been looking for a while but everything was a bit too expensive so when this deal came along we had to get it.  Driving out to the seller's house we took a look at six beautiful dining room chairs!

For only $10 a chair we had to have them, we bought them on the spot, loaded them up in my Jeep, and took them home.  They have a few dings in them and they aren't the color we really want but they are in great condition and with a new paint job will be awesome.  Now all we need is a new table!

First make it possible.  Then make it beautiful.  Then make it fast.

Eric

2009-2011 Yearbook

So I have recently been introduced to a blog called Young House Love and I am addicted.  It is a young couple in Virginia that are all about DIY projects.  Last month they posted about a 2011 yearbook that they had created for their family.  It went through the entire year and showed all of their vacations, events, and other random things that had happened.  I loved the idea.  Looking back through our photos I realized that Eric and I had a ton of pictures just sitting on our computer that needed to be printed out.  I decided to put together our own yearbook only I went back through 2009 and put multiple years into our first book.  I tried using mypublisher.com for the first time and really liked it.  They had a sale going so that all extra pages added to the book were free.  The classic hardcover book with 20 pages starts at $35.  Typically it is $1 per page for anything over that.  Our book turned out to be 45 pages and thanks to the sale I saved $25!  Cha-Ching! :)  I guess they have these sales/coupons pretty regularly so keep an eye out for them if you decide to do something similar.

I'm going to show you a few of the pages from our book.  Please excuse the poor photo quality.  Maybe once Eric sees these I can convince him to let me get a new fancy camera!  It's worth a shot.

Front Cover

Back Cover

& Some of the inside pages

We got the book in the mail today and I've already looked through it about 4 times.  It's great to finally have some of our pictures off of the computer and out where we can actually see them.  Plus, it gives me a reason to take even more pictures in the coming year so that I can fill up an entire book for 2012.  I think it will be fun to see how our family progresses year over year.

Do any of you have yearly photo albums or ideas that work well for you?

xo,
Carly

Building an Entertainment Center

Last time we attempted building our own furniture we made some nice shelves.  We learned a lot from that project and hoped to put that knowledge and experience towards our future furniture building plans.  For our next piece of furniture we were going to create an entertainment center!  Until our house is done those shelves we built have been acting as an entertainment center but we have other plans for them in the future.  Carly found a guide online and we set off on another adventure in furniture building.

Just like last time, my dad was willing to help us out with this project too, though we think he may be helping just so he can have an excuse to use some of his tools.  We spent one Saturday buying all of the boards, screws, and everything else we needed to get this project done.  Unfortunately, we started a bit too late in the day to get anything other than that done.  The wood sat in my parent's garage until this Saturday when we all got up early, went to the gym for a class or two, and then set out to build some furniture.

I won't bore you with the exact details about every step in the guide, I'll let you take a look at them on your own, but I will attach a ton of pictures below of what we did!

We spent a lot of time making sure that everything was sanded, cut, and connected well, more than we did with the last project.  Spending a lot of time on these finishing touches will make it look great when we get down to really making it look pretty.

We needed to connect all the pieces of wood together and to do that we needed to drill a lot using a Kreg Jig to drill pocket holes.  Easily my new favorite tool.  It was really easy to use and I got to use it a lot to get the holes drilled to screw the pieces together later.  The next picture shows all of the holes I drilled in just one piece of the entertainment center.

Sadly, we weren't able to finish it on Saturday.  We made some really good progress and it looks great so far.  The shelves we built were so exhausting completing them in one day.  Splitting this project up into multiple days has been really nice and I think will give us a much better looking final product!  Stay tuned for more updates on our new entertainment center.

First make it possible.  Then make it beautiful.  Then make it fast.

Eric

First-time Thrifters!

Eric and I would like to introduce you all to our newest friend Roberto (make sure you roll the R).  He is our very first Thrift Store purchase!  On Friday we found ourselves downtown with a few hours to waste so we decided to check out some of the local thrift and second-hand stores.  We found a store that was so fantastic.  It's called Elemente and it's on Pierpont Ave.  They had the coolest stuff.  We saw quite a few things that we might use in our house once it's completed but for now we left with this guy.

Pretty great, right?  At least we think so.  Most of you know Eric and I met in Spain so we have a fondness for anything Spanish so when we saw this Matador statue we couldn't pass him up.  I'm not a huge fan of his current color so we're trying to decide if we should paint him.  Any suggestions on color?  I'll definitely send and update once we we're all finished with him.  So excited!

And just for good measure here's another shot of Roberto.