Shopping Your House

(and that really means just moving stuff around and having my wonderful fantastic handsome talented husband do all the really hard work for me.  Thanks sweets!)

On June 1st we will be in our house for 3 years.  In that 3 years I have been pregnant twice, had an infant and now a toddler, buried a daughter, and helped nurse a Type 1 diabetic/husband back to good health.  It's been a very busy 3 years.  That busyness is my excuse for not doing much decorating around my house.  Time is not an excuse I have any more.  My excuse now is money.  Lest you forget, I am unemployed(and actually quite content if I do say so myself).  So I have the desire to change a few things and am learning to do so on a much tighter budget.

I have wanted a mirror over the fireplace for a very long time.  But I wasn't about to drop $100 and up on a mirror.  I wouldn't do that if I were still employed.  Personally, for me anyway, that's just crazy.  I could get like two 1 hour massages in our area for that.  I paid $20 instead.  It's not the best quality.  But from where it hangs you would never know that.  And it serves its purpose quite nicely.

JoJo on the left and Clayton on the right.  These used to hang where the mirror is now.  I like the look of the black and white.  I feel kinda bad for Clayton that his picture is smaller that Johanna's.  But then I probably have 30 pictures of Clayton hanging in different places.  And that's not an exaggeration.

I got these frames at the same discount department store as the mirror.  They were $5 for the smaller ones and the larger one was $10.  I have $20 in this wall and I love it.  I was needing something for this wall in our dining room and I wanted to put up more of Johanna's pictures.  This served both purposes(I do see that the frames need to be straightened).

More walls in our dining room.  I told you that I had a lot of pictures of Clayton. All of these pictures were about the mantle where the gigantic mirror now lives.  I like the crazy hanging look.  I just need more pics to fill up the walls.  And I will fill up those walls.  Oh yes.

Baseball.  All baseball.  Chad is a New York Yankees fan.  And he really likes the Yankees teams from the 50's and 60's.  There's just something iconic about that era. This wall is in our kitchen.  And yes our kitchen is Yankee blue.  The kitchen is huge(but laid out really strange) so a dark color is very nice in here.  And the two smallest pictures on the top and bottom are from Chad's baseball career(elementary but whatever).  They are adorable and fit nicely on the wall.

Goodwill $9.50  It's OK to be jealous.  I love this chandelier.  I love it.  And I do believe love is an appropriate emotion for this particular chandelier.  It's amazing.  I almost passed it because it had these really ugly canvas shades over the lights.  Once I got it home and Chad took off the shades(or broke them) I was hooked.  And it's really bright.  We can now see my horrible cooking.

And a new light in the kitchen.  And it came from the Habitat Restore.  It was a hanging light until Chad removed that hanging parts and made it a flush mount.  It looks much better this way.  That's the rest of my oddly formed kitchen behind you.  Those cabinets are useless.  They are so tall and I'm so not tall.  Most of them are empty and I have a storage shelf in the laundry room(which I will never show you because my laundry room/office/storage/bookshelf/coupon center is hideously cluttered).  I can not keep that room clean.

That's all of my recent bargain shopping.  I got new lights, picture frames, and a mirror for $75.  I have been collecting these things over a few weeks.  I'm officially hooked on Goodwill.  I shall never pay full retail again(if I can help it and as long as The Children's Place isn't having a $3 sale).