A couple of weeks ago a good friend of mine from Wisconsin came to visit. I was super excited when she told me she wanted to drive to Iowa and hang out with Mike and I for the weekend. She and I met 6 years ago at a Scentsy event where we discovered that we had a lot in common, including our love of being creative. We didn’t really have any plans while she was here, we also have a gift to gab, so we knew we could fill the time catching up and hanging out!
She pulled in the drive on Friday night, jumped out of her car “Sophia” and gave me a huge hug and said, “let’s go see this house!” I kinda love showing peeps our home, especially when they take it all in. My buddy Tabetha did just that, I could see her taking pictures in her head of everything Mike and I had done around here and she listened to my long list of “ideas”.
After the house tour and some supper we headed out to the fire pit for a relaxing fire and a couple of drinks. Mike and I are pretty proud of our fire pit (you can check it out here) and the fact that Mike has learned to keep his fires under control enough that we haven’t met the fire department…………yet!
On Saturday we decided to head to town to shop for some fall decorations. First stop Michael’s. You gotta love Michael’s, they have EVERYTHING! We both dropped a load of cash in there and had two carts full of fall decorating awesomeness! Tabetha loves to find junk treasures as much as I do, and from her mouth, “make crap, Craptastic!”, so we headed to the second had stores to see what we could find! We hit the mother load on this day! Between the two of us, we filled up the back of my car and spent less than $100 total! Look at all these great treasures!!
I love buying pillows at the second hand store for $2.99!! No I don’t love the way they look now, but what you can’t see, is that they are feather pillows!! I will remove the covers and make my own! You can see how here. I found a cute wicker tray/basket that has already found a home on one of my end tables, and those chairs!!! My find of the day!! They are ugly now, however they have great bones!! Candle sticks, no mater the color can always be painted! I like painting them to look like wood, these were brass when I bought them!
Tabetha changed the look of some of her stuff by adding a coat or two of spray paint. The pumpkins started out as a pretty ugly wreath, but once we tore it apart she had a basket full of cute pumpkins! The galvanized tin was just a little too shiny, so we added some patina – I’ll show you how to do that in another post! While Tabetha worked on upcycling all her Junk finds I started on the chairs. They were FULL of cat hair (sorry cat lovers – but YUCK!!!) and they are well built! It took me 3 hours to tear ONE of them apart. I think there were 2 million staples holding the upholstery on!
More on the chairs later. Before Tabetha left we upcycled the old suitcases that she scored at Salvation Army for $7.99 each.
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We started by taping off the gold latches and lock with painters tape and spraying one of the suitcases black. For the other suitcase, I had this old book of maps just waiting for a project. Tabetha chose maps from states that she had traveled to and had special meaning to her. Next I applied the selected maps to the other suitcase using Mod Podge. We were careful to leave the brown edging of the suitcase to add some dimension and personality to the suitcase. This collection will be really cute if he finds one more suitcase of the same style (my parents use to have some) and paint it black leaving the edging brown…………..how cute would that be!
When Tabetha got home she sent me a text with a picture that said, “Oh…..and here’s the luggage. This is it’s temporary spot until I figure out where to really put it. But I think it will always evoke the question “you going somewhere?” To which I would respond, “always.”
Well buddy…………..I hope when you plan to go somewhere again those plans include another trip to Iowa!
[…] can read more about that adventure in this post Junk Treasures, Making Crap Craptastic. The red and green plaid upholstery and chair skirt covered in cat hair had to […]