Reno Update

Someone asked me how the basement renos are going, and I realized I haven't posted pictures since it was framed and we put the insulation in.

We now have walls. They are currently being mudded and sanded.







That's the hallway coming into the basement. The door on the left is to the guest room.




Lots and lots of Mudding going on in this house. Andrew did the first layer of tape and mud, and then we decided to hire a family friend to help us out. Basically, if Andrew was going to do it all by himself, it would have taken him all summer to finish. He works full time, and Coral is only awake for a little over two hours after he gets home, so he spends time with her. Then by the time we put her down for bed, he would only have (maybe) two hours to work down there. And that's if we/he had no evening plans. So, it seemed more practical to hire someone that could come during the day to work on it.

The big room is almost finished (just needs a final sanding) and then we will prime and paint it while the guest room and bathroom is being worked on.

The best part is, the guy working on the basement has a vacuum that sucks up all the dust while he is sanding. There has been hardly any dust at all upstairs! Woo hoo!

Guilt-free spending

I love to shop for my home. That's no secret to anyone who knows me. Sometimes it can be difficult to control my urge to decorate, but it has to be controlled, because we have a budget of basically zero to spend on unnecessary stuff.

Entire kijiji and yard sales. Lately I have managed to redecorate our sitting room on our main floor, floating shelves upstairs, and entry, simply by selling stuff on kijiji and at my parents yard sale, and then buying new stuff with the money I made. It's simple, if I want new pillows, I sell my old ones to buy the new. If I want a new area rug, I sell the old to buy a new.

The yard sale money is always a complete bonus. I ended up making $80 at my parents yard sale, by selling stuff that I considered junk and was cluttering my house. I got rid of the clutter, and got to go guilt free shopping after.







I got elephant book ends for the floating shelves upstairs.







A huge lamp for the sitting room downstairs. As soon as I saw that I could put two light bulbs in the lamp I was sold. That room doesn't have a light in it and the natural lighting is minimal. This lamp lights up the whole room.




I also got a classic captains chair from Value Village. And another chair from Value Village.








Out with the dark green pillows, and in with the light blue (don't mind the giant tv behind the couch...ugh basement renos).




I also got a new area rug. The other one had the ends all chewed up from Kaya when she was a puppy, plus I wasn't diggin the dark squares on it. This is much more light and fresh.

I also got a new picture for the play room upstairs to replace the one that was there. Since Coral will be in her big girl room soon, the play kitchen had to come out (or she would literally try to bring the whole kitchen into bed with her). The painting we had there before was the one my mother-in-law did for us and it was to big for the space once the kitchen was put there. Plus it's my favorite piece of art that we have, so it's new home is going to be in our entry where everyone can enjoy it.




And lastly, but not pictured (hopefully soon) I was able to get a bench for our entry from Ikea, and fabric and pillows to go on the bench.

And there you have it. Redecorating practically for free. I guess the decorating will have to stop once I run out of things to sell. Meh, there's always free stuff at the curb for me to switch things up with eh.

Weekend Find

Ok, here's how the junk hunting went this weekend.

The yard sales were a total bust. It was cold, and windy, and the sky was full of clouds that promised rain. That being said, not that many people in the villages decided to have yard sales, and the ones that did were not very good. The only thing I ended up buying was some clip-on earrings to add to Corals dress up collection.

Our yard sale ended at around 2:00 pm, and my sister, mom, grandma and I jumped in our Buick to find some free stuff. Wow, that was exciting. I got so excited about so much stuff that the baby was kicking like crazy. Every time I saw a new pile of stuff the baby would go bananas inside of me.

There was a lot of JUNK. But there were also a lot of treasures. I sort of have this thing for chairs. I LOVE chairs. There were chairs everywhere. From retro leather chairs, to old rockers. You name it, it was on the side of the road. I found a couple of really neat things that I wanted, but in the end, the Buick is only so big and could only hold so much stuff (keeping in mind we have our weekend luggage as well).

So, I ended up only getting one thing. A chair. A big beautiful green retro chair. It's perfect. In perfect condition, after a good clean, and is really comfortable too.













I love me some retro. The place where we snagged this from had a HUGE pile of stuff. They had a bunch of funky chairs (orange fabric one, blue and green ones with huge flowers on it, another green corner chair) and they were all super retro. If I had more room in our car, more would have come home with me from that pile. But only taking this one chair was worth it.

What do you think? Do you love chairs as much as I do? Not bad for free eh!