Fall Festivities/Happy Halloween!

I LOVE decorating for holidays/seasons.  The problem is: I don't have any decorations.  And I have never had a house to decorate before.  So, instead of spending a fortune on Halloween/Fall decorations, I will just do a little at a time and over the years I will collect enough stuff.  I am also considering going out tomorrow or later this week and buying up a bunch of clearance stuff and save it for next season.

But for now, here is the cheap-o method of decorating the table.

Take some of these from outside my house...

Not exactly sure what it's called, but it's meant to cover up the ugly electric box thing outside...

 

And  put them in a vase.  Add berries from the bushes outside, put some candy in a bowl, and buy those little pumpkins from Michael's for $1.50.  TA-DA.

 

Easy. Cheap.  Happy Halloween!

Gallery Wall Part Uno

I have some cool plans for this wall in our living room:

There is such a pretty staircase there and it is totally ruined by the air intake thing-y and the temperature thing-y, too.  I would love to put a small upholstered chair (in a different color than the couches) there to block the air intake thing (but not prevent it from doing its job) and "frame" the chair with a wall gallery of white frames. I have become completely enamored with frame galleries lately.  Here are some of my favorites:

 

So, I am happy to say that I officially started the process of making that wall "mine".  I ordered this chair for $95 on clearance on Target's website.

I am excited that it's simple.  And that it's green-ish.  The product reviews are varied.  Some say "it's awesome" and "best chair I ever had".  Some say "hard to assemble" or fabric was ripped".  Well here's what I'm thinking: If I don't like anything about it... I will return it!  We want to incorporate lots of green and white and a little yellow into this room, so this chair is step one.  And lucky for us, many of the reviews say that the chair came in a little more like "green-yellow" than "sage" (which is what it is advertised as).  So, we will see when it is delivered.

Next step:  I gathered all of the frames that I wasn't using at the time and laid them out in a random arrangement:

I was happy.  So I removed all of the art and glass, took the frames outside and spray painted the crap out of them.  I really liked the look of brown and black frames together, but it didn't seem right.  So I went with all white.  I might do a brown-and-black-kind-of-thing upstairs someday.  I decided to label the glass and frames with post-its and permanent black markers.  I gave each one a number so I wouldn't have to spend all day finding out which glass went back into which frame.

After my spray painting job was complete, I found this little white guy:

Guess I sprayed that little spider and didn't even notice it.  He was frozen by the time I got to him.  So, step one is complete.  Next, I have to wait for the chair, arrange the frames on the wall and nail them in, then add art.  I would eventually like to add a floor lamp in that area, too.  One step at a time.

The best part: the wall gallery project has only cost me $8 so far for spray paint because I had all of the frames already.  It is my goal to keep the cost of all of the art under $10.  Think it's possible?  We will see...

$50 Night Stands YEAH!

Yesterday I mentioned how our bedroom is about .1% complete.  We have visions of a serene and calm place.  The truth is that we barely go in there.  We sleep there of course, and we go there to change our clothes but that's pretty much it.  We aren't the type to sit in bed and read or watch TV in there during the day or even nap in there.  In fact, if we take a nap (which isn't often) we usually nap on our comfy couches with blankets.  So I am not too worried about making our bedroom "functional" like most of our other rooms.  Instead, I will spend my energy making it feel peaceful and a happy place to lay my head.  Step Two in that process was getting some nightstands.  We haven't had nightstands since we moved in and Josh's side had that tall weird lamp (that we literally found in a dumpster one day and later found out that it is from Target and can be purchased for $60).  All we did was add a bulb!  And I just kept my stuff on the floor.

 

But we absolutely needed nightstands.  We wanted bigger ones to fill out the space between the bed and the walls.  Plus, I like chunky furniture (sometimes).   We searched and searched.  We really want to buy good furniture.  We want real wood and good quality.  And we are willing to wait until we have the dough to get it.  We are tired of laminate wood and crappy furniture.  So we found some nice nightstands, but even some clearance ones were at least $100 each.  Then, as I was scouring craigslist during my lunch at work, I found the answer.  Some used Ashley Furniture nightstands which were almost like new for $50 each.  Yep.  So we called, met the guy the next morning in a Food Lion parking lot, slipped him the cash and then he was on his way.  Problem:  the stands wouldn't fit into Josh's car.  So we tried mine.  And this was the only solution:

 

 

Yes, that is the leg hanging out of my window.  I pulled some sumo-like strength to get my car into drive and hit the road.  We love how they turned out in our room:

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We added some old lamps (which I hate, btw) just to finish them off.  Since we were in the mood for sprucing up our room, we added a few more things to make it feel more home-y, too.  Most of these things are temporary, but at least it's a start.

First of all, we hung the TV, put the nightstand under it and put some old decorations on it.

We still need to get the cords behind the wall at some point, but that's for later (probably once we decide to paint).  And my friend Kara gave us her old set of coffee table and end table when she bought new ones.  We are currently using the old end table as a night stand in the guest bedroom and decided we would like to re purpose the coffee table as an end-of-the-bed bench, see?

 Before:

 

After:

 

We just added those pillow and put a little candle-in-bowl thing in the middle for now.  But I would like to eventually paint it and possibly add an upholstered bench seat to it... maybe I will try making one?  We also took this HUGE thing and leaned it against a wall.  It's meant to go on a wall and it might some day, but we wanted it out of the garage, so why not, right?  Plus, we bought it at Bon-Ton for $12 a few years ago and this is the first time we are actually using it.

We are happy with our craigslist purchase and feel sooo much better about having bedroom that feels more like a bedroom than a bed in a room!