On the path to quirkiness!

This weekend's garage sale turned out exceptionally well. I have to admit, at first I was a little scared that it was going to be a bust, apparently our community is not made up of garage sale enthusiasts. The sale was scheduled to begin at 7am, I began setting up at 6:30am knowing that there would probably be those early birds, people who dedicated their entire life to "garage sale-ing" . Since it rained that night, I strategically tried to put our items on the dry sections of the drive way, and then all of my efforts were thwarted when the sprinklers came on...it seemed like a sign, mainly because I was the only one on the street selling. I decided to wait for the evil sprinklers to finish having their fun and walked around the block to see if I had any fellow sellers. There were a few here and there and all of them looked at me in surprise, with their hand on their hips asking, "Where is everyone?".

When the sprinklers finally stopped I was able to put out my items and wait, in hopes that someone would drive by. Next thing I know we had a steady flow of customers who favored our shady driveway since the sun had decided to come out in full force. We managed to not only sell practically all of our items, but score some free ice cream from the local ice cream truck thanks to our home owner's association president. So after a long day of selling, you were able to find Mango and I at the ice cream truck, shoulder to hip with the rest of the little kids in our neighborhood!

Afterwards, we walked into the house and sat on the sofa exhausted. As I looked around at our semi-empty house I realized something, our home needs some quirkiness! So far we have been concentrating on painting and installing things like shelves and curtains, however I realized that the house needed a little bit of "us" in it. Now that all of the basics are in, it's time to start punching everything up with those little things that make a house a home. I decided to start off with putting some fun art prints in our bedroom. While looking through the design blog Sfgirlbybay, I stumbled upon her mention of a wonderful artist named Cathy Nichols. Her art is wonderfully quirky and colorful, so I was so happy to see that she had a store on Etsy where she sells her prints at affordable prices. As I looked through her pieces I found hard to pick out exactly which ones I like more, I think it was her use of color and movement that made me a fan of her work. To be honest, even though I love looking at art and I appreciate it's importance, I have never bought art before, nor do I know how to start. However, I remember hearing an art aficionado on my beloved HG TV say, "Pick something that you like and speaks to you, who cares if it's dogs playing poker!". While I would hardly parallel the art work of Cathy Nichols to "dogs playing poker", I have to say that these pieces are some of my favorites and are definitely becoming part of our home!