Friday, October 24, 2008

Check!

TGIF! It's finally Friday again, which means it's time for a brand new weekend. Tonight is date night, unfortunately the past couple of weeks have been date night free since we've had plans for something else, however, tonight we are determined to go out and have a great time just the two of us. On the flip side, it's been extremely rainy down here in S.Fl and the weather people predict it will be just that over the weekend. If that's the case, then I'm going to take advantage and start working on some other little projects around the house.

Speaking of projects, as promised I finally uploaded some pictures of last weekend's little DIY projects that we did around the house. First off was the "everything" closet. As it was, it held everything from wedding gifts to cleaning supplies. Since I don't have a lot of space in the kitchen, most of my kitchen supplies landed in here too. Here's a view of the before:

Not exactly the most organized space when your trying to find things in a pinch. We managed to keep things in their boxes so that we could tell what everything was and make sure it stayed safe. However, all of the big boxes were also most of the problem. I went to Bed Bath & Beyond and bought the shelf that I found a little while ago in order to store everything. Now everything is organized and much easier to find...I think the Hyper Homemaker would be proud!Now I can easily grab the cookware that I use often, while all of my serving platters and glasses are neatly tucked away. While I was shopping for the shelf at Bed Bath & Beyond, I meandered along to the clearance section, normally I don't really find anything that gets me excited, until I saw this mirror tucked away in the corner. At full price it was $200, but since it was beat up and needed some serious TLC, they marked it down to $50. You can't really see the damage in the picture, however some of the corners were chipped off and the paint wasn't all that great either. When I saw it, it reminded me of that amazing Eagan Mirror at Potterybarn. Since it had some serious issues, Mango decided to take out his power sander and create a clean slate for me to paint it:At Michael's, I picked up some brown paint, and two little bottles of black and gold paints. Basically, I knew that I wasn't going to find a super dark, espresso brown paint, so I mixed the brown with some black until I got the shade I wanted, then mixed in a little bit of gold to give the mirror a hint of a metallic finish (Mango was very impressed with my paint mixing skills...I wasn't an art nerd in high school for nothing!). So here is the finished product!Right now it's hanging on the main wall in the dining room where out buffet table will go. Think it's going to need something on either side since the wall is pretty big, I'm currently working on figuring out what would look best. Now that there's something on that wall, it makes the room look bigger, which is really nice.
Since we were tired from our weekend projects, we decided to walk around the outlet shops right accross the street. I'm a fortunate girl, because I happen to live across the street from the largest outlet mall in Florida...yeah, I'm happy. The mall recently opened a high end outlet section that includes everthing from Crate & Barrel to Valentino, however my favorite store is the Le Creuset Outlet! I love this store because you can buy these fabulous pieces at 30-75% off on top of the outlet price. Every now and then I pop in to see what pieces they have on promotion, specifically their black cookware set. I've been collecting the pieces in this set since since we've been married, it's like a hobby. When we walked in, the sales lady proceeds to tell me that they are discontinuing certain pieces in the black set and that those pieces are currently 60% off! I ran to the back and found the set of 3 mixing bowls that I have been obsessing over for quite some time now. I was able to score all three beauties for just $44!
While I was fawning over the bowls, Mango fancied this adorable spoon rest for the stove:

So our black cookware set is slowly comming along, up next, the lady told me that the casserole dishes and pie plates are going on sale...I'm so there this weekend.

Have a happy and safe weekend everyone! See you on Monday!

2 comments:

Aartee said...

The mirror looks awesome! I love getting hands on and putting my own touches to stuff that is diplayed around the house...You are so lucky to be living by the outlets I would be there every other day!

Anonymous said...

Hahahaha! I am SOO proud! The closet looks so much bigger even! GREAT job! And WHOA! Great score on the mirror! And a final WOAH b/c I just got the SAME bowls (in Dune) a couple weekends ago. Score!!