MAKING SOMETHING OUT OF NOTHING

Cori and I have been busy this past week, with church sales, estates sales, and thrift store finds.  The garage is staged with quite a few items to take to the store tomorrow afternoon.   Unless we made some sales late Saturday, it looks like most of what we will bring will have to go to our storage area at the store until there is room to display it properly in either one of the two spaces we have.

We've had the most fun, during some of our down time just sitting in the garage talking about our business and ways to find and create new stuff, figuring out how to make some decorating items out of just left over stuff that we had lying around.  We've had some old chunky legs that were cut off of a table that we purchased at a yard sale last fall that we couldn't pass up for a few bucks.  After having them lie around for awhile, we finally screwed two of them onto a wood base, painted, and then distressed them.  We took it one step further, and added a little porcelain, glass, and metal knob on top of each one, and then wraped some cooper garland which we bought at JoAnn's for 70% off, at a cost of  less than a dollar on each one.

We think they turned out just great for a little accent with some height on a table or mantle.  We then looked around and found an old wood frame just being neglected in the corner.  We wrapped some burlap around it, and used the same copper garland and wrapped it around the burlap to create a great looking wreath.  All of these projects were completed in less than an hour's worth of time, and with very little out of pocket costs.

While I'm at it, take a look at this cute little lamp.  Sorry, I don't have a before picture, but it was purchased for $1.00, and had a bare wood base and a ho hum shade.  We painted the base white, distressed it and put a brown glaze on it.  Cori recovered the lampshade with some upholstery material we had left over from covering a chair seat, and added that ribbon with the cute little beads hanging on it around the bottom of the shade and some seam binding tape around the top of the shade.

This week we will start on one of our biggest projects so far, a china hutch which we are excited to get started on and try a new technique on, but before we try it on the hutch, we'll attempt it on a large mirror frame we have ready to work on tomorrow.  I'll have some pictures in the next few days of that completed trestle table, along with a lovely vintage baby crib we gave new life to.