Some stuff I love.
Hi friends and family! (Mostly family. I don't have that many friends.)For those of you who don't know, Pete and I just bought our first house. After five harrowing weeks of renovations, we finally moved in and I was able to start decorating to my heart's content. I found that after moving here from NYC in August, I don't get the same creative satisfaction from dressing like a loon, so instead I'm outfitting my house like a loon.
I'm pretty sure those who do know me, even a little bit, know that I am about the cheapest woman on the planet. I'm a quantity-over-quality kinda girl, at least for now. I hope to change that at some point, but I don't see it happening. In the rare instances in which I have paid full or close to full price for something, I don't get nearly the same satisfaction out of it. But $4 for a dress? $0.50 for a painting? Sign me up. Stick with me, dear audience, and you will see how quickly $2 begins to seem like an enormous amount of money relative to what it can buy at a thrift shop.
If you were to take a tour through my house (I don't know why you would, just play along), I could tell you when, where and why I bought just about everything. Sadly, I would also tell you exactly how much I paid for it because I am tacky and think everyone is as fascinated by frugality as I am.
Anywhoodle, in the spirit of introductory posts, this one will just be a little bit of a mish-mash of crap I've bought recently that I love. Future posts will hopefully have more of a focus, although that sort of conflicts with thrifting in general: you never know what you'll find! I keep a general shopping list in my head, but at the moment I'm furnishing a house that's three times the size of our NYC apartment, so anything I like that's cheap comes home with me, whether or not it has a purpose.
One day you will all find me dead under a hoard of brass junk, old picture frames and vases. Don't bother ransacking anything except my jewelry box; everything else is worth about $5.91 all in.
Without further ado...
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| I got this painting at a weird basement antique/thrift store on 13th Street. I had seen it once before and passed it up, and then couldn't stop thinking about it. The frame was a NASTY old brown color, so I spray painted it with Rustoleum's Safety Red. Love that stuff. I wish the painting photographed better (well, it's not the painting's fault I can't take a decent picture) because the colors and textures are so cool. Definitely worth the $10.00 investment. |
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| Safety Red makes another appearance, though on a different wall in the living room. We found that trunk at Goodwill, taped off the hardware and trim (goodbye, child-bearing years!) and brushed on the Rustoleum paint. It was my first time working with oil-based paint and I love the finish. So shiny! The junk of top was curated almost exclusively from thrift stores, including the two chinoiserie-esque vases. The lamp shade is so fun in person, sort of a bark cloth print. See that little black chair off to the side? $5 at Thrift World. It's a gorgeous mid-century modern style. Come to think of it, the chair awaiting reupholstery on the other side was also $5 from a thrift store... |
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| Close-up shot of my brass animal menagerie. I forgot to include the tiny brass bunny my aunt gave me. I got the weird mouse guy at Goodwill last week and the set of deer at a different thrift store a couple weeks ago. I especially love the one with its nose in the air. It's haughty. I think I paid a few bucks each for these guys, but I have a little collection going and they make me happy so I think it's worth it. |
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| This is a side shot of the gallery wall in our living room. The sunburst mirror was a freebie from my sister Mary and everything else (except the watercolor in the dark brown wood frame) came from thrift stores for no more than $1 or $2. |
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| Here's a close-up of my favorite piece on that wall. The first two times I saw it I passed it up, which was obviously incredibly foolish. The little bamboo frame is so cute and I love the colors. It's so happy! |
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| I didn't get a "before" shot of this monstrosity, but I should have. Those are the shelves to an old bar cart I got recently. It was covered in filth and rust and possibly tetanus. We're painting it yellow and white and its new home will be in the kitchen to supplement the sad bit of counter space we have now. |
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| I shamelessly knocked off this project from one of my favorite bloggers, Jenny Komenda from Little Green Notebook. She can do no wrong as far as I'm concerned. I bought these buttons on Ebay for a couple dollars and glued them to some scrap burlap I mounted in frames from the dollar store. They'll go on the currently naked walls in the guest room. |
xoxo,
Leigh
