Taking a Second to Brag...

I know it has been forever since I've written, but things have been pretty anticlimactic. Until today. I know that there are a lot of great husbands out there, but I like to think mine is the very greatest and bestest.

Came home to a spotless house and dinner reservations. What could be better than not having to lift a finger to clean or cook? Like I said, he's the very greatest and bestest.

Why couldn't I just put that as my Facebook status? He deserves a blog post. :)

I love you, Jordan! It's been an amazing 3 years...

DIY Weekend and the Big Reveal!

I've been hard at work since last night (well, I was collecting all the stuff all weekend) to get these things on our walls. The walls have been so bare!

In total, both projects cost less than $50, if not less than $40, and we're pretty excited as to how they turned out. DIY is definitely trial and error and they aren't perfect, but they were made by hand and that's pretty special.

All done and the centerpiece of our living room!

This gives a really great look at the grain and depth of the wood.

Last night's project... the "U" is from Joann's and the "J" & "R" is from Kohl's.

From the bottom, up!

Scrapbook paper glued to pieces of spray painted wood.

Onto the banana bread I'm baking... enjoy the pictures!

From Goodwill to Our Family Room

Well, a lot of our family and nearby friends have heard our excitement over our little coffee table. And we're more than excited to share it with everyone else.

Searching for new furniture when you are on an extremely tight budget can be hard and totally time consuming. Especially, when your taste has more to do with designer and less to do with Walmart. Enter... driving to every second-hand furniture store on an seemingly endless search until you find it. And I will not take the credit, as my loving husband will not let me... it's truly, until your husband finds it. Because, honestly, I walked right by it and as I was walking by, I said to him, "There is nothing here..."

Our timing could not have been better, because a man who walked in behind us was so disappointed to find us paying the hefty price of $10. He said to us, "Do you know how lucky to find this? With all the pieces? You don't know what you have..." And to two 24-year olds, we thought, oh wow, we must be lucky! Especially, when we took it to Home Depot and the paint/wood lady gawked over and ogled our find.

What did we find, you wonder? A pre-WWII solid oak, paneled, "card" table with detachable wings/leaves. May the pictures speak for themselves. I'll add some instructions on how to get from point A to Z if you every find something similar or want to do something similar! (P.S. If any of you know what exactly this thing is called, we would love as much info as we can get.)

Stay tuned for the finalized picture, along with the other little DIY projects we've been doing! In the meantime, we love our table and hope you do, too!

Unfortunately, all of the pieces of the center were falling apart by the time we got it home. We do not have a "before picture" of the whole thing.

This is how the "wings" come out.

The first step was to strip the wood. We used a soy based, biodegradable stripper from Woodcraft.

Here is all of the wood, it needed to lay out for a few hours covered in the stripper.

We used water, scrub pads, and paint scrapers to get the stripper off.

After letting it dry outside for a while, we moved it in to finish drying. This is the original oak!

Our first piece of dyed wood (see the last picture for info on how we dyed it).

Jordan had to work really hard to get into all of the grooves on the base.

Top and base, all finished!

These are the things you need to dye wood. You over saturate the wood with an old t-shirt dipped in stain, then wipe off the excess with a paper towel. Yes, it is that easy. We do not have a picture of the finish we used. It is the same brand as the dye, but a water-based polyacrylic. We put 7 coats (same method as dye) on the table top and 4 coats on the base.

 

 

 

The End of Our Wedding...

Well, that's it... it's over. Our wedding is officially over. I unpacked our final wedding gifts today, the china. You'd think that I'd feel special, that I get to stretch my wedding out for 14 months, leaving all kinds of presents to discover that I kinda forgot I received. But, I'm sad about exactly that, my wedding is over :)

At the end of the day, the unpacking of these boxes is kinda like marriage. Your life together starts out like this...

unpacking all these boxes, figuring out how to deal with the mess that you came together as...

you start to find the treasures, put yourselves, your "new" selves together over the year...

and you never quite make it into even rows, perfect in all ways, but you make it work. Even 14 months later, when the wedding ends.

Today...

I woke up at 8:00, to walk into the dining room to my husband telling me it was a day we needed to fast.

I agreed, but turned around and went back to bed because I knew I wasn't going to make it 10 hours without the STRONG temptation to eat. One of those "remove temptation from you" decisions, if you know what I mean.

11:30, I missed a call from ANAD, the company I was interviewing with because I was cleaning the house, but I called back as soon as I saw that I missed the call (I got their voicemail).

1:30, they returned the call and extended a job offer!

We're extremely speechless... all we can say is: Thank. You. Lord.

More next time on what exactly ANAD is and what I'll be doing :) In the meantime, thank you to all of you for your prayers yesterday and this morning. Prayer works!