My Office Hutch ...

In my never-ending quest to get my office organized and looking purty (I am, after all, the only girl in the house... and this is the room where I can "do" purty, should I so feel inclined)... I set out to find an inexpensive hutch to put on top of our old golden knotty pine dresser. We recently ordered a beautiful king chest bed set in chocolate stained solid alder, so this old dresser was FREE to become my latest victim... err... project :)

I couldn't, unfortunately, find a solid wood hutch at any second hand store, so I found this laminate hideous being on clearance at Liquidation World for $20. A coat of primer and a few coats of ivory paint on both the hutch and the dresser, and voila!

The hideous hutch (notice the formed plywood chair off to the left.. I got 2 of them for $5.00 total at the Salvation Army! Can't wait to refinish them!)....

And the refinished set all loaded up in my office (yes, there's a couch in my office, not much choice there for the time being). I picked up the gorgeous glass knobs on ebay for a song and a prayer :)

These encyclopedias are my grandparents'... ca 1950. My mom (and myself in subsequent years) would spend hours reading through them... they're quite interesting.. and a nice deep teal colour, which makes me happy beyond belief :)

And I found those cool old glass electrical insulators for $1.00 a piece quite a while ago and thought they were mighty cool (they are, afterall, my colour! :)

I sure wish the pictures had better lighting, but it's 8 pm at night and artificial overhead lighting is only so good :)

Anyways, I am now in search of a new (old!) desk to redo for my office. I have this huge iMac and it's sitting on a dinky sofa table:) NOT comfortable on the back to lean over!!

Some of my past beauties :)

I am slowly transferring my projects over from my digital scrapbooking blog... I would like to keep the two entities separate :)

Some of you that know me, will know that I have a huge thread of thrift running through my veins... yet, I always get comments like "your kids are so well dressed" and "you must spend a fortune on clothes!". The answers to those questions are yes and no. In that order. While going through my youngest, Cole's dresser this weekend, I came to the realization that he has 42 pairs of jeans and pants that currently fit him, with a few more hand me downs on the top shelf of his closet waiting to grow into. FOURTY TWO! The vast majority are GAP and Old Navy, since I love the adjustable waistbands and those clothes just last through anything. Throw in there a spattering of Hurley, Quiksilver and Billabong, and you have the makings of a nice wardrobe! Yet, maybe only about 5-10% I buy new... I buy them all in "like new" condition, but very little of them come new. Even those that do, I find on discount by at least 70% or I don't buy them. The boys' closets are jam-packed with shirts hanging up.. a double closet each worth of shirts... Abercrombie, Hurley, Point Zero, Billabong, DC.... you name it. They're getting to that age (especially Blake, who's 12), where clothes are starting to matter. I'm not one for brand names, I never grew up that way, but if I can get them cheap, why not?!
Anyways, where I was going with this..... they have so many clothes that the closet system wasn't holding it all in an organized manner. I knew Blake needed a proper dresser but I couldn't afford to pay a lot. Enter a fantastic roadside yard sale one afternoon and I came across this beauty (and his twin sister, a longer, shorter dresser)

Okay, so apparently I need to learn how to rotate my pictures ;) And maybe it's not a BEAUTY, but it was $45 for this and the matching one I previously mentioned. They are solid wood and made in Canada, how could I resist. They were beat up, scraped and perfect! I paid the elderly gentlemen and he kindly delivered up the road to my house! (this is when being eco-conscious and having a hybrid instead of a pick-up can be frustrating... lol). Anyways, here is the transformation... a deep red, antique glazed perfectly functional, thrifty dresser that Blake is now enjoying in his room :)

And here is his twin sister, I went beachy on this one, and she was snatched up on CraigsList in 20 minutes!!

I already had the paint and supplies, so really, it only cost me the $22.50 for each dresser..... not bad, eh!?

Adelaide ... she hides my 'war paint' ;)

Okay, so anyone that knows me knows that I adore make-up. And thankfully, I have a hubby that buys it all for me, on his own, without asking.... and the good stuff, too. Bless his heart, he knows when I am low on mascara before I do. Or my Clinique toner... or the Lancome foundation he found.. the only brand I can find with great coverage and LIGHT enough for my pale, pasty skin. LOL.
So, up until now, I have been hovering over my makeup basket, applying my makeup on the bed, trying to hold a mirror and apply everything.

In comes a lightbulb moment. We had a wine rack in our dining area that we just weren't using. I don't drink, and the one or two bottles we had of wine were kept in hubby's man-cave.. in his beverage chiller thingy. So, I removed the wine rack, Eric put in a shelf instead, and I painted it my most favourite colour in the whole big wide world.

This was the beast before...

....and now, she brings me so much joy! LOL. I smile every time I look at her.. beside my bed.... so purty :)

Right now I am working on an old desk that's been in the family forever. It's seen better days, but it still has a lot of life left in it, so I hope I can do it justice :)

Oh, and also painted our ensuite a lovely muted turquoise... I've now officially painted the entire house.. all 2400 square feet of it, on my own. Whew!

Update:: This piece is now adorning someone's bathroom as a vanity, complete with vessel sink :)

Martha, pretty Martha....

So, I had this old dresser that's been hanging around our family for about 20 years.. it's a great little dresser, solid wood.. and after I moved into this most recent place, my mom let me have it (thanks mom!).... I was in a bit of a rush, so I painted it a distressed black. used wax as a finish and plopped it in my son's room. Well, turns out I learned two things with that. (a) my son needs more room.. he has over 45 pairs of jeans and over 80 shirts (it's a sick compulsion on my part, I get them all second hand or at least 70% off retail, lol). and (b) wax is a really crappy finish to put over paint. You could see the variations in sheen against the black really badly, no matter how much I buffed/polished.

Which leads me to Martha. I stripped her down of her dowdy black apparel, sanded, and used my brand new Campbell Hausfeld spray gun system (thanks to my wonderful hubby). I used a concoction of paints I mixed myself to end up with this beachy faded turquoise. This was a test in patience, because after the first coat of polyurethane (which said non-yellowing, by the way), I realized it was on too thick (didn't have the spray guide turned in the right direction), so I had to re-sand, re-paint, and re-polyurethane it. So here she is, in her new home in my dining room! I added a faint damask pattern to the drawers, added glass knobs and now she's ready to house all my son's homeschool papers and supplies! I <3 you, Martha. :) The only issue I have is that the so-called 'non-yellowing' polyurethane has yellowed in some areas.. and it bugs me, but I guess it kinda adds to her charm? LOL. Regardless, she brings character to our dining area.