How To Find a Find: Our Thoughts on Thrift Stores

We got absolutely no work done last weekend. Instead, we went camping. We spent the weekend hiking, fishing and huddling up around a campfire with the dogs.

Our motto is, “Why do it when you can OVERdo it?” And that’s basically what we did last summer and fall. We were in a zone. Every week was spent working on work stuff, and every weekend was spent working on house stuff. There were entire months where we didn’t do anything but work, work, work. Remember how all-work-no-play made Jack Nicholson go all axe-wielding maniac? We decided we’re going to put a stop to our workaholic ways before we get to that point.

Instead of work-work-work, we’re going for a work-play-work. That way, we don’t totally burn out like we did this winter. Added bonus: getting out gives us the chance to score some sweet finds for our house. We’re talking thrift shopping, baby! On our way back from camping, we stopped at an antique store and took a look around.

We didn’t find anything on that trip, but we did recently acquire some vintage stuff that we later found elsewhere for more than what we paid. Remember these chairs that we nabbed for $6 a pop at a Salvation Army?

While we were sanding those puppies down, we found a manufacturer’s stamp:

It’s basically a little metal coin that’s set into wood so it sits flush. We didn’t notice it before because it’s in a really discreet spot on the leg. We Googled and found out that the W.H. Gunlocke Chair Company is now known as just Gunlocke, and they’re still producing chairs.

Based on the logo on our chairs, these suckers were built sometime between 1940 and 1969. A little more Googling and we found a few places selling those same chairs for way more than $12 a pair. A pair sold for $300 here. There’s one chair for sale on Etsy for $300. Yeah. $300 for one chair. And these are in “vintage” condition — they need to be refinished and reupholstered. So nabbing a pair for $12 was seriously lucky.

In case you’re wondering what the status on those chair is, we managed to completely sand one down before we ran out of sanding pads. We haven’t stopped by the hardware store in a while, so the chairs are just sitting there, waiting on us to get moving again. As far as fabric goes, we’re considering leather. Upholstering leather makes us a bit nervous, but we’re studying up on YouTube and trying to figure out where we can score some vintage cigar leather.

Another lucky find happened just a couple of weeks ago. Bradley’s boss owns a cabin in a teeny town in northern Pennsylvania. (We’ve been calling it Upstate Pennsylvania, but it’s not catching on.) We spent a week there in April, and learned the hard way that teeny towns don’t do street signs. We saw some people sitting around outside a barn, so we stopped to ask for directions. When we got a peek inside the barn, we realized it was actually an antique store. Way out in the middle-of-nowhere.

The people were nice enough to give us really detailed directions on how to get to the nearest highway, so we had to stop and take a look. They twisted our arm with their niceness. And this amazing pendant that was peeping out from a corner:

That’s a huge brass pendant. There’s a spot inside for a bulb and a hook at the top so it can be hung on a chain like a chandelier. The two pieces on the floor next to the pendant were removed at some point (probably for rewiring) and they need to be reattached. Easy fix.

We knew right away that this was The One — the fabulous lighting fixture for the top of our staircase. We walked away with the pendant and a huge gold frame (that we haven’t photographed yet) for $65. $15 for the frame and $50 for the pendant. We didn’t haggle over prices because a) they seemed like really nice people and b) we’re pretty sure that, based on the location of this shop, we were their only customers all week. We thought $65 was totally reasonable when we took that into consideration.

Cut to a few weeks later and we’re trolling through Emily Henderson’s blog for color palette inspiration. Emily is the host of HGTV’s Secrets of a Stylist, which we think is the only show on HGTV worth watching. We loooove her and her show, so we were kinda floored when we saw this pendant she posted about:

Source

Source

Pretty similar to the one we found, no? Only the price tag on this one is $375. Ours is a bit bigger and more ornate, but it’s basically the same style — and we spent $50! It’s going to take about $15 and 2 hours of labor to get ours fixed up. We need to weld two spots and spray paint it. We might also change out the wiring. Not hard, time-consuming or expensive. So we think we got an amazing bargain.

As for the frame, it’s going to be spray painted and turned into a mirror for the half bathroom downstairs. We just need to have a mirror cut for it. We haven’t decided on a color yet, but we’re thinking something bold like matte black. Or something unexpected like a bright teal. We’ll figure it out once we start renovating the bathroom. Pictures of that find soon — pulling it out of the garage to photograph has taken a back seat to a couple of other projects going on right now.

Inspired by our recent good luck, we’ve been making more frequent trips to thrift and antique shops. We know it can be totally overwhelming — how do you figure out what’s A Find versus what’s junk? Here’s what works for us when we go shopping for vintage housewares:

• Partner up.
  It’s inevitable: when we go to an antique shop, one of us will get all googly-eyed over something and the other one will give it a “meh.” We’re both designers and we’re both extremely opinionated on decor. A lot of time, those opinions clash. That goes tenfold for vintage items, which can be really bold statement pieces. When we clash on those, we really clash. We have a rule that we won’t buy something unless both of us agree on it. Getting a second opinion hasn’t failed us so far.
• Take cash. But not too much.
  We usually don’t go to antique stores with more than $100 cash on us. If we see something we love that costs more, we’ll go to an ATM and take out more cash. That gives us some time to think about whether we love-love it, or whether it’s a heat-of-the-moment thing. It really keeps the impulse spending to a minimum. And, so far, we haven’t even had the urge to go to an ATM.
• Don’t force it.
  We’ve found that one of the best indicators of whether something “belongs” in our home is whether we can imagine where it will go. Usually this is a gut reaction. We saw the brass pendant and immediately thought it would look great at the top of the staircase. We saw the frame and knew it was the perfect size and shape for a above-the-sink bathroom mirror. If we find something and can picture exactly where it will fit in to our house, then ring us up. If we find ourselves hemming and hawing over where we would put something or what we would use it for, we move on.
• Is it worth fixing up?
  The best deals we’ve gotten have been on things that need some work to restore. Restoration equals time and money, so we try to balance that out against the initial cost. The pendant, for example, needs spot welding and spray paint. We have access to a welder for free and spray paint is cheap, so we jumped on it. We’ve come across other objects that are awesome, but need a ton of work that we just weren’t willing to put into it. Why buy something that’s going to sit in the garage, right?
• The antique shop is not the boss of you. You don’t have to buy anything.
  A couple of months ago, we drove to a huge antique warehouse about an hour away. We made a day out of it. We took the scenic route, we had a nice lunch at a brewery nearby, and we planned on coming back with a car full of treasures. We looked at every frikkin’ thing in that warehouse, and it was a total bust. We didn’t find a single thing that jumped out at us. At one point, we felt like we had to buy something or the day would have been a waste. But what’s actually a waste is buying something that’s not right for you or your house just because you feel like you have to. We left empty-handed, but still spent quality time together and had a lovely day off.
• What’s it worth to you?
  Here’s the thing: when it comes to vintage stuff, the worth of something is pretty much a made up number. So we make up a number. If we find something we love and think it’ll fit into our home, we’ll mentally put a price point on it before looking at the price tag. Then if we look at the price tag and it’s equal to or less than what we anticipated, we’ll get it. If it’s way more than what we expected, it’s not such a great deal for us. There are lots of shops where they don’t have set prices and the owner will just ask “what are you offering?” Or they’ll throw out a number and see how we react. In that case, we might have to…
• Haggle like a pro with a conscience.
  When it comes to haggling, we kinda don’t. We hate feeling ripped off but we also hate ripping off the shop owner. That $10 that we might be arguing about is their livelihood. More often than not, these people aren’t exactly making six figures a year. We try to remember that we’re not haggling with a vending machine — we’re talking to a human being — and we all walk away happy. That doesn’t mean we’ll shell out more money than what we think something is worth. (Remember, you don’t have to buy anything!)
• Talk to the face.
  When a shop owner throws out a price we don’t like, we let our faces do the talking. They might see us pulling a =\  and adjust the price down right away. Or they’ll ask us, “what did you have in mind?” and we’ll tell them the truth. There’s no point in low-balling, because if we think a frame would be a great deal at $15 then it IS a great deal. If they accept our offer, awesome. If our idea of what something is worth doesn’t mesh with theirs, we politely let them know it’s out of our price range and walk away. If they’re willing to lose a sale, then it’s obviously worth more to them. We don’t feel ripped off. They don’t feel ripped off. No harm, no foul.

How about you? Find any amazing vintage goods lately? How do you feel about haggling?

Dressing Up Our Patio

It’s officially spring in our back yard.

To celebrate, we invited over our neighbor-friends to make S’mores over the first fire in our firepit. The only problem? We had nothing for them to sit on. Four hours before we were expecting 2 adults and 2 kids to join us for dinner, our patio still looked like this:

The good news is that we work really well under pressure. We drove to Target to scope out what they had going on. We ran to Lowe’s to do a little price comparison, and then back to Target where we walked out with a flatbed full of stuff. We drove back home and assembled everything. And then we died of exhaustion:

OK, not really. We seize any opportunity to ham up a photo.

We started by picking out the loveseat. They had matching side tables and other stuff, but we don’t like things to be too matchy-matchy. Instead, we found coordinated side tables that we liked. After that, we picked out the pillow:

We couldn’t pass on this cute little tealight lantern in the same blue:

To add a punch of color, we went with an umbrella in a bold orange:

We didn’t go into the store with a color scheme in mind, but we walked out with some pretty well-coordinated purchases. This is the beauty of Target. It’s really easy to throw a scheme together. We just picked a main piece that we liked in a neutral tone. Then we found an accessory we liked in a color that coordinated well with that neutral. After that, we just picked a couple more pieces in colors that either matched or contrasted with the first accessory. Easy peasy!

On the other side of the fire, we have the 2 Ariondack chairs that we finished last summer. (We snagged them at Home Depot on sale, then assembled, stained and sealed them ourselves.)

In the middle is a little glass table that we picked up at our local hardware store. And the beverage bucket on top of that was something we found at Lowe’s last summer, but didn’t have a reason to use until now. (It was eventually filled with ice, sodas and brewskies.)

We also picked up a little something-something for our porch.

To celebrate spring, we’re going to eat as many meals outside as we can. So we picked up these two wicker chairs and a table. The chairs barstool height, so every time we sit on them, it feels like we should have a margarita in front of us.

We picked up another tealight holder for the table. And we also added this cute porcelain milk carton vase from CB2. Our friends Zac and Cathy had these vases as centerpieces at their wedding in Florida. We flew back with several of these in our suitcases all the way back to New York. They’re awesome! The flowers, of course, courtesy of thee huge lilac bush in our yard. We’re currently putting them all over our house and loving the natural air freshener.

Soooo…if we were on the reader end of this post, we’d be wondering how much all of this stuff cost. Here’s a tally of (and some links to) everything we purchased:

• Loveseat
• Pillow
• 2 side tables
• Lantern
• Umbrella
• Umbrella base
• Outdoor dining table
• 2 wicker chairs
• Tealight holder
• Kid-friendly plastic dinnerware: 6 plates, 6 bowls, 6 glasses
• Galvanized white round silverware caddy

The grand total: $625

Not bad for the amount of stuff we got! Everything except for the plastic dinnerware and the galvanized caddy were on sale, so we saved about $150 off of the regular price. And we went from having just a couple of Ariondacks to having a full set of patio furniture and a new outdoor dining setup.

What’s next for our patio? We’re considering replacing the two Ariondacks with a couple of matching chaise lounges. We just ordered all of the supplies we need to insulate and drywall the dining room, and we’re about to be suuuuper busy with that. We might need a place to go pass out at the end of each work day! The Ariondacks are really comfortable, so we’re not sure if we’ll splurge on the chaise lounges this year. We’ll keep you posted.

In other news, we’re still stripping the stubborn lacquer and stain from those 1950s chairs we recently scored. Stay tuned for some more updates from the home front coming soon!

Fab.com is only kinda sorta fab.

Let’s just get this out of the way: we weren’t paid, comped, perked, hugged or high-fived for writing about Fab.com. We purchased everything we talk about in this post with our own moolah, and our opinion is biased only by the fact that we are very cheap & very picky. That’s how we roll.

Let’s also get this out of the way: Bradley doesn’t give a crap about flash sale sites, but I’m obsessed. So when someone sent me an invite to Fab.com, I signed up and found myself completely hooked. It’s sort of like Gilt Groupe meets The Foundary (two other obsessions), but waaaaay more well curated from a designer’s point-of-view.

I basically stalked the site every day, and then one day I found a couple of things that even Bradley agreed were too good to pass up. So we put in an order and a month later — yes, a full freaking month later — we got a box in the mail:

Cuuuuuute branding! I loved the stickers on the box and the gorgeous heavy paper cards inside. But, uh, I was a little peeved that it took an entire month to arrive. Are they shipping from the moon? I would totally understand a week or two — but a month is kinda ridiculous.

On to our purchases:

That is what Fab.com described as a “100% recycled leather kangaroo desk accessory”. It features a couple of pouches to hold whatever random stuff needs containment. Think pens, keys, paperclips, loose change, etc. The pouches are large enough to hold an iPhone and charger. The mouth is made to hold post-its or stamps.

I’m a sucker for anything that can get me organized, so I was sold. I snagged it in a cheerful yellow for $22. The MoMA Store sells it online for $38. With shipping, it ended up being just under $28.

Worth every cent. I can’t say much for the quality of the leather because it doesn’t look much like leather after being painted. It feels really durable, though, and the rivets aren’t flimsy. I ended up putting all of my pens in one pouch and using the other as an iPhone holder while I work.

Here’s where things get a little more meh. We found and loved these two prints from Rococco-LA. Here’s what they looked like on Fab.com:

Source: Fab.com

Source: Fab.com

Now, when I see “print,” I think screenprint. And these 11×14″ prints two are pretty sweet screenprints, right? We got both for just under $58 including shipping. They arrived a month later (boo, hiss!) and this is what we got:

We’re super disappointed. For starters, they’re not screenprints at all. They’re just prints as in from an inkjet printer. Sure, they’re on fancy archival paper, but I wouldn’t pay $58 for something printed on a frikkin’ inkjet printer. I could do that at home.

Also, both printouts are suuuuper pixelated:

It’s hard to photograph, but the images are really blurry and low-quality printouts. And the colors are nowhere near as bright and bold as what we expected. Even the black looks really washed out:

The worst part was that one of the “prints” arrived rolled up in a cardboard tube. It’s all bent and warped from being crammed in there.

We’re trying to flatten it out by setting stuff on it, but there are ripples on the paper that aren’t going to come out.

The octopus lady doesn’t look so bad at a distance:

All in all, we were super happy with the kangaroo and super disappointed with the crappy prints. We feel like the kangaroo was a great deal since it’s a good quality product that’s exactly what they described on the site. We think the prints were misrepresented and we can’t even return them since fab.com listed them as nonrefundable. The fact that it took a solid month to ship our purchase was also really lame.

Will we ever buy from fab.com again? Probably not. But one of us is going to keep checking in every day to get ideas and inspiration for stuff we can buy elsewhere.

While we’re in the office, check out the organized closet:

At the bottom: some home workout gear.
On the shelves: IKEA boxes holding all kinds of crap that, until recently, was scattered through the house.

I even whipped out the label maker to get everything looking crisp:

Not gonna lie: I love that label maker like it was my first-born child. I love it so much I named it Martha and gave it a whole drawer all for itself. Yep. Totally normal behavior there.

Fun Finds.

There’s a small, local shop in our town that sells everything. Literally everything. From candy to light bulbs to fabric — they’ve got it. A few days ago, we wandered in to check out their fabric selection (planning out a new project!), and found these:

We think they’re stocking hooks for mantles, but we’re not sure. We picked up both for $5 and we have big, big plans for one of them. Here’s what we’re thinking: remove the hook, paint it black, and turn it into an amazing finial to top off our staircase baluster:

I can’t believe the only picture I could find of our baluster was this hideous shot before we removed the carpet. Yiish. There might have been a finial on the staircase at some point, but currently, this is what it looks like:

We plan on painting the staircase black to match the floors. And we think our new DIY finial would fit right in. We admit it: we’re a little bit goth on the inside. Just a little. We embrace our inner Lydia Deetz:

We’re not sure what we’ll do with the second one, but we’ll figure it out.

Check out what else Bradley found:

Two stumps. And they’re the perfect size to make side tables for our couch! We love the way this one is shaped:

We need to dry them and strip the bark off the sides. Then we’ll sand them smooth and finish them off with a lacquer. It could take a while — just the drying is going to take about a month. To speed things up, we’re going to haul them inside and put them next to the fireplace.

By the time we’re finished, we’ll have something that looks like this:

Source

Except ours will be free. Whooooo!

We’re smack-dab in the middle of a big project right now. We’ll be back tomorrow with some updates. Stay tuned!

$50 dresser makeover.

It’s funny how inspiration comes out of nowhere and smacks you in the face. We knew we needed to give our grey dresser a major facelift, but we had no idea what to do with it. Here’s Old Grey hiding under a couple of wicker baskets:

We knew we’d fix it up right when we had the time and felt inspired. A couple of weeks ago, boom, we were inspired:

That’s the 1930s glass knob that lives on our bathroom door. It’s vintage and glamorous and sparkly and chic. In short: it’s a keeper. We thought it would be great to find a mini-version of the same knob to use as drawer pulls. I vaguely remembered seeing some at Anthropologie. And that’s when I remembered this Anthropologie cabinet from a few years ago:

Source

It’s grey on the outside, but opens up to a bright and cheerful yellow on the inside. I loved the secret pop of color. And just like that, we decided to paint the dresser a crisp white with teal drawers and throw some glass pulls on it.

Now that we had a plan, we started gathering supplies. We scoped out Anthro’s drawer pulls:

Source

Those bad boys are $8 a pop — not cheap considering we have to buy 10 of them — and they have mixed reviews. If we’re paying $80 for something, it better not be wonky, wobbly or off-color. And then there’s the whole brass thing. Not our style at all. Pass!

Next stop: the cabinet pull section of Home Depot. We found similar pulls for $3 each.

They look and feel just like Anthro’s version, and they’re bronze instead of brass. The catch? They’re acrylic, not glass. Not a big deal to us, since they looked and felt like glass. So we did a happy dance for saving $50 and walked out with 10 pulls. We also picked up a quart of paint for the drawers:

That’s Valspar Monterray Bay Teal in semi-gloss. One quart set us back $15. That’s all we purchased for this project. We had the rest of the supplies on hand: 220-grit sandpaper, wood putty, and half a gallon of the oil-based white paint we used as primer for our guest bedroom doors.

We dragged Old Grey up to the master bedroom (currently our workshop) and got to work. First, the before pictures:

That old thang has been through 2 moves with us. It’s survived being carried up to the top floor of a 3-story walkup, narrow staircase and all.

It’s definitely showing some signs of wear, though. Paint is chipped in some spots.

Hardware is still missing.

The black thingy on the left is actually an IKEA coat rack.

I needed a place to stash my necklaces because they were constantly getting tangled up. So I drilled holes in the side of the dresser and screwed the rack on. It wasn’t the prettiest solution, but this wasn’t the prettiest dresser either. Now that we have more space for storage, we can get rid of the rack and seal up the holes.

Bradley helped me prep the dresser for painting so I could take pictures of the steps involved. We started by taking the old pulls off:

The old pulls need 2 screws to attach to the drawer, but the new pulls only need 1 hole. So we used wood putty to plug up the holes we didn’t need anymore:

We’ll use the hole closer to the middle because it would feel more visually balanced. We also used wood putty to seal up the hole on the inside of the drawer:

Nobody would ever look for a hole on the inside, but we’re thorough like that. After the putty dried, we used our orbital sander to get all the old paint off:

A belt sander would also do the trick. So would a wood block wrapped in sand paper and some good old-fashioned elbow grease. Either way, the goal is to remove as much of the paint as possible and get a nice, smooth surface to roll paint on.

Next up, we wiped down the dresser using a clean rag soaked with paint thinner.

Water would work fine, too. We just happened to have paint thinner on hand so we used it. Here’s our nekkid dresser, ready to be painted:

Bradley moved on to another project and I started painting. When it comes to painting furniture we have a few tips that always give us good results:

• Use an oil-based paint.
  Latex is fine (we used it for the inside of the drawers), but oil is much more durable and long-lasting for furniture that gets frequent use.
• Apply paper-thin coats.
  A lot of people are really skeptical about painting wood because they think it will show brush strokes or have too much of a crafty / shabby-chic look. The trick to getting a smooth, untextured look is not to glob on your paint. We always do 3 (or more!) paper-thin coats instead of 2 very thick coats. Yes, it takes a little more time, but you end up with something that looks way more profesh.
• Sand between coats.
  This is absolutely essential to getting a super smooth finish. It also really helps with durability. Glossy paint doesn’t adhere well to glossy paint. If you don’t sand in between coats, your paint will eventually start flaking off. We use a 220-grit sandpaper or a sanding sponge before every coat. You don’t have to sand very hard — just enough to take the sheen off. Then wipe the dust off and paint the next coat.
• Let it dry completely.
  We’re pretty impatient people, but we’ve trained ourselves to walk away from the paint. We let each coat dry overnight before we went back to sand and paint the next coat. That way the paint has time to cure and harden, and we’re left with a really durable finish.

Just in case you’ve never seen a sanding sponge before, here’s what it looks like:

It’s great for scuffing up surfaces without sanding too much. I used it this on the inside of the drawers and on the curvy parts of the dresser.

Here’s one more look at the before:

And here’s how our dresser looks after a new set of pulls, 3 rounds of sanding and painting, and 24 hours of drying:

Hard to believe it’s the same dresser, right? The crisp white makes it so much more charming.

Then you open a drawer and — BAM! — you get an unexpected pop of color.

We love it!  And we’re still swooning over how the pulls look:

I took the after pictures on a pretty dark and gloomy day which is why they all seem a little dark. We can’t wait to see what the colors look like on a sunny day. And how the dresser looks in a room that isn’t a total disaster zone. Either way, it’s totally charming the crap out of us right now. We’re excited to put it in the guest bedroom and see what our visitors think.

Cost breakdown

• Dresser: $0 (found / reclaimed)
• Pulls: $30 for 10
• White paint: $0 (leftover from another project)
• Teal paint: $15
• Sandpaper: $0 (already had on hand)
• Wood putty: $0 (already had)
• Paint rollers: $5

Grand total: 50 beans. Whee!

In case you’re wondering how we reclaimed this dresser, it’s a case of NYC luck. We found it on the curb outside our loft building in Brooklyn at the end of the month. Leases end, people move, perfectly good furniture gets dumped. That’s when we swoop in and snatch up a piece we think we can work with.

We’re almost ready to move upstairs, folks. That means we have a ton more furniture-related updates coming up soon, including a pretty awesome IKEA upgrade. Stay tuned!

Flashback to June and sneak peak into October.

If you’ve been following the blog pretty consistently, there’s one thing you’ve probably picked up about us: we love a good deal. We also don’t believe in credit cards. Just like we don’t believe in leprechauns, unicorns and pixie magic, we don’t believe in Future Money. That’s our personal philosophy on money, and not a judgement on anyone else’s. We simply think we either have the money for a purchase, or we don’t. So sometimes we decide to make a big purchase and it doesn’t happen until we have the cash-money to pay for it.

Way back in June, we revealed that we wanted a fancy hybrid water heater — one that dehumidifies while saving the energy and the planet. It should really come with a superhero cape.

Source

Fast forward to September and we still hadn’t gotten our water heater. We had 2 very good excuses: 1) we’re crazy busy working on the guest bedroom / office / hallway upstairs so there’s no time for basement work, and 2) we were 67.5% sure it was going to go on sale soon. So we stashed away the dough for later.

Last week, we went into our local hardware store and bumped into Our Guy, known to the rest of the world as Ray. Ray loves Bradley. Bradley loves Ray. I love how his hardware store has free coffee and shiny things to stare at. Ray told us he’d been waiting all day for us to come in because it was time to buy the water heater.

GE just dropped the price by $300 and our electricity company just started offering a $300 rebate on hybrid water heaters. You just fill out a form and they send you a check. And  then there’s the $300 tax credit for buying an energy efficient appliance. Bradley gave Ray a big, fat kiss on the lips (not really), whipped out his wallet, and set up a delivery for this Friday.

Wanna know how much we paid? We’re happy to (over)share.

Original price: $1300
GE sale price: $1000
Minus $300 electric co. rebate: $700
Minus $300 tax credit: $400
Our final price: $400

Yup. We saved ourselves nine. hundred. smackers. Which, coincidentally just happens to be how much our next big purchase is going to cost us in October. (How’s that for a segue?)

We haven’t shared a view of our dining room yet because we haven’t done any work on it (we’re taking it one room at a time). Until now. Feast your eyes on this monstrosity:

Our dining room is currently our living room. And our living room is currently our bedroom. It’s a crazy-mixed-up world we live in. Here’s a breakdown of what we’re looking at:

That Hugh Jass hole in the wall wasn’t always there. It’s actually the first step towards renovating this room while simultaneously reducing our carbon footprint:

Source

That, my friends, is a wood-burning stove. We’re not sure if that’s the exact one we’re getting. We’re still in the shopping around phase. That one, though, is available at a farm supplier near us for $900 and we’re thinking about going with it.

We’ve been spotting old wood-burners in modern spaces more and more in lieu of brick fireplaces. There’s something about an old-timey cast iron stove that bring so much character to an otherwise modern space. It’s the interior design version of the Emeril Lagasse “BAM!”

So the hole in our dining room’s brick wall was to gain access to the chimney. Our chimney guy is making us a custom chimney liner so we can install a wood-burning stove in our dining room and use it to heat our house. We’ll still have our oil boiler to use as backup — in case the temperature ever drop below 50 degrees inside, our radiators will kick on and heat up the space enough to keep our plumbing from freezing when we’re not home. But for the most part, we plan on using good old-fashioned firewood to heat our home.

So our big purchase for September was the water heater we’ve been coveting and our big purchase for October is the stove / chimney liner / installation.

We’ve already started making a list of all the things we plan on redoing in the dining room:

• Expose the brick wall (the stove will sit in front of raw brick)
• Tear down the ceiling to expose the rafters
• Rip out the carpet, sand + paint the floors
• Make a dining room table
• Make a floor-to-ceiling built-in bookshelf with window seat
• Tear down all the walls, insulate & put up new walls
• Replace 2 windows
• Replace or repair the door to the porch
• Paint the 3 other doors in the room (they lead to the hallway, living room and basement)
• Make a radiator cover

We won’t get started on that for a while. Next on our gut-renovation list: the laundry room / half bath. Then the kitchen. We have our work cut out for us!

What we learned last week:

• It’s good to hold back.
  We have a million purchases we have to make to get our house looking and functioning the way we want. If we tried to make them all at once, we’d be broke. Or worse: in debt.
• Our one room at a time rule helps us keep our sanity, more money in our pockets and a cleaner house.
  If we limit our purchases to only whatever we need to renovate 1 or 2 rooms, we’re not starting projects all over the house and causing construction messes everywhere. We’re also not wasting money and space by hoarding supplies for projects that won’t get started till Spring 2012. Win-win situation.
• Know when to make exceptions.
  The stove and water heater are exceptions to the one room at a time rule. Our old oil boiler is really inefficient and really expensive — and winter is right around the corner. Both purchases also have the added benefit of alleviating our hippie-guilt over being reliant on oil.
• This is not the first wood-burning stove in our house.
  Way back in the 1880s, when our house was a young’un, there was a stove hooked up in the dining room and it was definitely used for cooking. The dining room / living room areas are the “old” part of the house. The kitchen area was added later (we’re thinking the 1920s-30s). So weird to think that someone used to cook their meals where we now watch TV.
• Confession: even though we’re very anti-credit card, we still use ‘em.
  When we  have the cash-money to make our big purchase, we put it on a credit card that gives us airline miles. Then we pay them off right away. Sometimes before it’s even due, because we’re anal like that. We’re saving up miles for a trip after the house is done. (Thailand, here we come??)

An update on those Ariondacks

Happy Monday, everyone! I’m sitting here a few hours before work starts, sipping on coffee and listening to the sounds of our plasterer sanding our walls smooth. I took some pictures of her first and second coats, and they’re better than our third coats. No joke. We can hang drywall with the best of ‘em, but put a plaster knife in our hands and we’re useless. I’ll share those pictures soon!

While our plaster-lady has been busy upstairs, we’ve been busy on the porch with our $18 Ariondack chairs. This is what they looked like when we assembled them:

Pasty! These chairs are pine, and they’re blindingly light in front of the red brick. They sit there screaming “HEY, LOOK AT ME, I’M AN UNFINISHED CHAIR!” It also didn’t help that it’s been raining buckets in our part of Pennsylvania. Unfinished wood + moisture = bad news. In between rainstorms, I gathered up some supplies and got to work.

L to R: gloves, stain, mask, cheesecloth.

Bradley got the stain from his usual paint supplier in Brooklyn. They screwed up an order he made, so he ended up with a glossy finish when he requested a matte finish. It was a disaster. He had to sand everything down and start from scratch. Ugh. When he went back to exchange the varnish, they gave him this can of extra dark walnut stain on the house. It normally runs about $20 a quart.

At first glance, it looks super dark:

I was pretty unsure about how it would turn out because this wasn’t the deep, chocolatey-brown I had imagined. I tried a little on a hidden spot just to test it out:

Annnnd it looked black. But before I could say anything, Bradley dipped his cheesecloth rag in the stain and smeared it all over the leg:

ACK! Too late to turn back now. Bradley went inside to do some electrical work and I covered every exposed area of pine with the way-darker-than-I-had-hoped-for stain. This was my first time staining something since 7th grade wood shop, but it was pretty easy.

Here’s what worked for me:

• Don’t use too much stain. I only dipped the tip of my cheesecloth into the stain — never the whole rag. A little goes a long way.
• Tear up a bunch of rags and swap them out frequently. When my rags got too wet, they were harder to work with. So I kept switching between 3 different rags, letting them dry out a little in between uses.
• It also helps to have dry rags to wipe up excess stain. You don’t want the stain to go on too thick. You want the wood to soak up the stain. So I had a pile of rags on standby and after covering a section of the chair with stain, I gave it a good wipedown with a dry rag to get all the extra off.
• If you’re using disposable gloves, make sure you have several pairs and change them out frequently. Why? Because this happens:

Bradley came out to check on me and he mentioned in passing that I should probably switch gloves. And that’s when I noticed that I’d rubbed right through the glove and use staining with my fingers. Oops. He said it happens to him all the time — he just forgot to remind me.

And that brings me to my last tip:

• If you get stain on your fingers, try dish soap first. I had to be at work in NYC the next day, so I freaked out when I saw my stained hand. I scrubbed it with orange pumice soap over and over again, and nothing happened. Well, they ended up super soft and smooth, but still stained black. I then tried wiping them clean with acetone, which cleaned off my nails but left my skin still blackened. And then I used Dawn dish soap — surprisingly, it got most of the stain off in one wash. Lesson learned!

Just like Bradley said, the stain dried much lighter than it looked when I initially put it on. Here’s how the stained and raw chair look in a little side-by-side comparison:

We gave the chair a 24-hour break to dry off and went back to check on it the next morning.

The color was definitely a brown (phew!), and it had almost a greyish tint to it. We loved how the wood grain showed through. That’s the reason we went with a stain instead of a paint — we wanted the chairs to have some dimension. Satisfied with the turnout, I went ahead and stained the second chair:

It dried for 24 hours, too, and then it was time to sand and varnish both:

The one on the left is unsanded, and the one on the right is sanded. The brown lightened up a little, but we were OK with that.

We got the varnish from our local Ace Hardware for just under $6. I started with the bottom first:

The wood went from a dull grey-brown to a very deep, rich chocolate brown. Exactly what we were hoping for. One thing we weren’t expecting is the way the wood grain turned out gold instead of light brown. It really popped against the brown, and we were so geeked about how it looked.

Here’s how it looked after the first coat dried:

After it cured overnight, we lightly scuffed it with 330-grit sandpaper:

Then I gave it a second coat of varnish using a soft paintbrush. Here’s how it looked half-done:

The second coat of varnish left the chairs suuuuper glossy:

We’re so geeked about this next part because it seems like forever since we’ve done a before-and-after. Squee!

When this was done, we were happy dancing all over the place. What we really wanted to do is sit down in them, but they needed to cure overnight before we could put them to use.

We think the stain + varnish job gave the $18 chairs a major upgrade. Not only do they look fancier, they feel fancier. In order to put 2 coats of varnish on smoothly, we had to sand the chairs twice: once before the first coat, and once before the second coat. So the chairs now feel silky smooth to the touch. And, even though we initially didn’t love the glossiness of the finished chairs, it quickly grew on us and we love how they look.

How much did this quickie upgrade cost us?

• $36 for the chairs
• $0 for the stain
• $1.50 for the cheesecloth
• $6 for the varnish
• $4 for the paintbrush

Grand total: $47.50, or $23.75 per chair.

Even if we had paid $20 for the can of stain, each chair wouldn’t have cost $33.75. And that’s a generous estimate: we only used 1/2 of the varnish and only about 1/4 of the stain. Throw in that $11 table we found at the local hardware sore and our little porch setup cost us $58.50. Cheapskates rejoice!

Besides our staining and varnishing, we’ve been working like crazy to get the upstairs ready to paint. More on our progress coming up. Stay tuned!

Impulse Buy: $18 Ariondack Chairs

We went to Home Depot to replenish our drywall supplies and ended up walking out with a couple of these:

Ariondack chairs for the porch!

We’ve been on the hunt for some outdoor furniture, but didn’t really find anything we were loving. When we spotted these Ariondack chairs on sale for $20 a pop, we couldn’t resist. They’re unfinished fir, and come flat-packed for easy schlepping. And with a 10% coupon we’d just received in the mail, we ended up paying $18 per chair. Cheapskates rejoice!

The chairs came IKEA style — flat-packed, unassembled, but easy to put together. And the best part was that we don’t even have to use wood filler:

They came pre-puttied. Score! It took about 20 minutes to put ‘em together, and we were pretty pleased with the end result. The only thing we couldn’t agree on was whether to put them side-by-side:

Or facing each other:

I don’t think Jabba’s too crazy about the second set-up:

Well, too bad, pug, that’s how they’re staying!

The only thing missing was a little table to go between the two. Something to set our books, beers and coffee mugs on. And that problem was solved the very next day when we went to the local hardware store — we spotted a small patio table on sale for $11.

It’s cheaply built and not all that great looking, but sometimes practicality trumps style. Especially in those precious moments right after you accidentally knock over and spill a freshly-brewed cuppa coffee all over the porch. We snatched up a table and brought it home:

Never again will a cuppa coffee be spilt by my clumsy oaf feet. Not on patio table’s watch! And certainly not that particular cuppa coffee, because it was empty:

Yep, I used an empty coffee cup to stage my new patio furniture shoot. I wanted to give it that authentic we-actually-use-this-stuff look. Even though we actually haven’t used it much since we’ve been in Brooklyn for work. Tricks of the trade, my friends. Learn it, live it, love it. Or just use the frikkin’ furniture so you don’t have to fake it.

Next up for the patio furniture: I’m going to stain and seal the chairs so they’re not so fresh-from-Home-Depot looking. That’s going down this weekend while Bradley continues his drywall rampage down the staircase. Also, after months of sitting in storage, my fabulous shoe closet is making its debut in our casa. Squee! Not a moment too soon. Our shoe pile is getting out of control.

Stay tuned, peeps. We’re back with a vengeance!

A new ladder for The Bradder!

We’ve been in the market for a new ladder for a while. Our old ladder is rickety, heavy and hard to set up. It’s also way too dangerous to use on our staircase. So we marched on over to Home Depot and walked out with a  Little Giant Select Step.

Home Depot’s price was marked as $199, but when we got up to the counter, it turned out to be $149. With the 10% off coupon we received in the mail, we ended up paying $135 for this ladder. Cha-ching! We saved 64 bones!

Bradley was pretty much ripping open the packaging as soon as we pulled into the driveway. He was dying to try it out on the staircase. In case you’ve never heard of it, the Select Step is a ladder that adjusts so the legs can be different heights. This makes is perfect for working on uneven surfaces like stairs. Here’s Bradley putting up furring strips along the ceiling:

Bradley’s a little less nervous about wobbly ladders than I am — OK, fine, I’m a paranoid freak who thinks every ladder is going to tip over and spill my brains onto the nearest floor — but this ladder totally gets my seal of approval. I had to squeeze between the ladder and the bannister to get to the top of the staircase for the second picture, and I’m happy to say that the ladder was sturdy as can be. It has heavy-duty rubber grippers on the feet, and they didn’t budge.

It’s also really lightweight and super easy to set up. And it has a bunch of smart design features that we were really impressed by. My favorite: you can attach a bungee cord to your tools and dangle them off of the ladder!

As the victim of several oops-I-forgot-the-hammer-was-up-there accidents, I think this feature is nothing short of brilliant. The ladder came with 2 bungee cords and a lot of other little holes and notches to store tools:

There are slots of all shapes and sizes (even one for a saw!), and there are spots for threading power cords to keep them out of the way. That big orange disc in the middle can be removed and happens to be the perfect size to house a cup of coffee. It’s technically supposed to be a place to hang a drill — but we’re kinda sold on the cup of coffee thing. The circle around the orange disc? That’s the exact size of a gallon bucket of paint. It just clicks right in! Genius!

Another great feature:

Bradley usually grabs a handful of screws and shoves them in his jeans pocket before climbing up the ladder. Occasionally he’ll forget the 1 or 2 leftover screws and toss his jeans in the washing machine, where they fall out of his pocket and end up making making holes in some of our other clothes (there was an incident with a new Gap sweater that I still haven’t forgiven him for). The magnet screw tray might be the best thing ever. Except that there’s this platform step, which is also pretty great:

About halfway up the ladder is a rung with a built-in platform that gives you a bigger surface to stand on. You can put both feet on the platform and stand straight up. This is awesome because the other rungs on the ladder are pretty skinny — they’re actually almost too skinny, but we’re willing to overlook minor flaw that because it’s not a huge deal.

The ladder has wheels on it, so you can roll the ladder instead of awkwardly carrying it. The wheels don’t roll while you’re standing on the ladder — they only roll if you tilt the ladder at an angle. Our backs are happy. Our wallets are happy. And most of all, our sweaters are happy.

- – -

Just in case you were wondering, we weren’t paid or perked for writing this post. We just love sharing cool stuff we find & buy with our readers. Also, if you buy this ladder and fall off while using it, you can’t blame us. Be careful up there, peeps!

Office Door

Wanna know a dirty little secret about the interior design business? A lot of designers don’t just get paid by the client — they also get a commission from the furniture designers they hire. They’ll take a certain percentage from each piece they sell to a client. Sometimes they’ll take a custom-built piece instead of a cash commission. And sometimes they’ll have a custom piece built and then decide it’s not right for their space so they’ll give it away. And that’s when we get to snatch up something really cool, like this custom-built door, for free:

That’s right. Free. Gratis. Zero dot zero zero dollars.

This beauty is a custom sliding door made for an interior designer that Bradley’s company works with on a regular basis. She thought it was lovely, but she decided she didn’t want a visible sliding door track in her space. So she gave the door back to Bradley’s company and it sat in a cold, dark basement until a few weeks ago when Bradley’s boss generously offered to let us have it (thank you, Andre!).

It’s the perfect height and width for the Smurf room office, and once we set it in place, we fell in love with how it looked. Here’s how it looks after it slides closed:

Feel free to oooooh! and aaaaaah! We did.

We may have overdone the leaning-against-the-wall bit. We were a little scared we’d somehow knock it over and break it before it ever made its blog debut, so we went overboard.

Anyway, we love how it looks next to the brick wall. We were originally planning on making a custom door and using chalkboard paint on the side that faces in to the office. Something like this:

Source

We loved the idea of being able to write stuff down on the back of the office door, but when we saw the free designer door in place, it just felt right. It looked more sophisticated than a simple chalkboard door.

The wood frame is a solid maple and it’s velvety soft to the touch. The handle is stainless steel. But here’s the part I love best:

The center panel is a thick opaque plastic with a corrugated look. It lets in just the right amount of light from the hallway. There’s plenty of privacy (not that it’s a big issue with just the two of us living here) but the room stays bright and sunny.

We also love that it’s sort of like the French door we put in the guest bedroom and the door we plan on putting in the master bedroom. But at the same time, it’s totally different.

Now that we have a door, all we need to do is mount it. Here’s a gorgeous sliding door I added to my Pinterest a while back:

Source

We picked up a similar sliding door mounting system at Farm & Fleet for $40. We just have to finish plastering and painting the walls and sanding and painting the floors. That’s all that stands between us and a finished office. ….a whole lotta work.

Stay tuned for that. We took the past 2 weekends off because we had some visitors one weekend and then we skipped town for a wedding the next weekend. We’re back and we’re chomping at the bit to get back to work. Lots of updates coming up!