Being Frugal

Hi Friends ~ The hubs and I spent the whole weekend working on the flooring in the house and have finally made it out of the bedrooms and into the living room, THANK GOODNESS!!  I promise I will post some pics soon of the progress of that, but I wanted to pop in quickly and show you something that I had been wanting to try.
You see, the house came with all those construction grade light fixtures.  The ones we have all seen a million times....shiny gold and not so much my favorite.  I thought immediately about just pulling everything out and getting all new.  I'm drawn to all the exposed Edison bulbs and the industrial look and getting new would make life much easier, except I started adding up all the costs of the light fixtures and wow, I could easily spend over a thousand dollars replacing everything!!
I saw this spray paint by Rust-Oleum called Forged Hammered Burnished Amber and thought, well why not try using what I already have.  The only thing I had to lose was the $7 something I paid for the spray paint.  Can I just make the light fixtures that are there look industrial and add those cool Edison Bulbs to them???

Here is the result.  I'm going to keep it until I move everything in and see how it looks with my furnishings.  I'm also going to paint the shiny gold ceiling fans and I'll let you see how that goes.

AND......It works great on shiny gold door knobs too!!  I'm so excited (and a little addicted) about this spray paint!

Keeping Focused

Anyone else get distracted easily when designing a room?!!  I'm pretty sure I have it all together and then I get out to the stores and bammm, there I am walking out of Home Goods with a red ceramic elephant that has nothing to do with where I was going in the first place!!!  I mean Home Goods is one of the best stores on the planet,  but again, I'm easily distracted.

So when I'm working on a big project, like this new house, I have found putting together a design board works wonders and keeps me focused.  Ya, sometimes I feel ridiculous walking around with it, but it saves me time & money (2 things I am fond of) when I'm out wandering.

I'm still pretty busy giving all the rooms a fresh coat of paint and Kurt has been busy laying the wood floors when he can.  This house seems to be taking us the longest to get done, not because it's hard, it's just hard to find the time.  The plan this weekend is to get a majority of it finished....floors, new base trim and painting....so we can at least start moving.  

Then the fun begins, the actual decorating!!!!