a year of projects and great finds

It has been a year of home improvement projects and great finds off of Craigslist, garage sales, alley ways, and thrift stores. Slowly, we're piecing together a comfortable home, and we're grateful for how much we've been able to do on our budget.


This is the QB's Christmas present--a tv stand to hide all the wires and loose ends that the Little Bruiser likes to play with so much. Inspiration for the project courtesy Ana White, though the design is more or less my own. the cabinet is made almost entirely of scrap wood and spare hardware we had lying around the shed, and the paint is left over from a project we never started back in Ohio.

"You'll shoot your eye out"

When Mr. Baseball fashioned a toy wooden rifle out of a splintered old fence board in the backyard, I knew it was time to do something about his lack of toy firearms. I made these two wooden rifles out of scrap 3/4 inch plywood and sawed-off broom handles. The paint is from a garage sale and the design is from my noggin (with a few looks at some wooden rifles available online).

I did not build this ark (though I wish I had), but I did fix a few broken hinges and the QB and I stayed up late one night repainting all the animals from this garage-sale find.


Perhaps our most exciting Craigslist find. We've been talking about getting a piano for years, and we've been talking in earnest since Mr. Baseball started piano lessons in September. Its a 100-year-old Shoninger and it plays really well ( a little tinny, but considering the student who sold it to us let us have it for $25, we can't complain).


I built these shelves (there are two of them, plus the computer desk I'm typing at right now) last Christmas break, but they still haven't gotten any primer or paint. However, for Christmas this year, the QB got me a spray gun and I borrowed an air compressor, so tomorrow, I'm going to finally finish the job.


The find our boys are most excited about is the Wii. Santa brought it, despite my insistence to Mr. Baseball that Santa would not be bringing any such thing (and he wouldn't have if one of the Wal-Marts in town hadn't been practically giving them away during a special, unadvertised promotion that sent me speeding down the highway on a race to pick one up--a rare moment of impulse Christmas shopping that I neither regret nor wish to repeat any time soon.)



And finally, here's the kitchen table I refinished last May. It was a pealing and shabby garage sale find in Ohio, and we've been meaning to refinish it for a long time, but we finally got to it . The boys helped me sand down the chairs and the top coat of the table only took two tries (after putting on two coats, the finish began to blister and I had to start over completely.)