Old Furniture, Clean House

I thinking cleaning might be the one area where we're not really interested in overdoing it. When it comes to tidying and cleaning, we're more in the "do a little as possible" camp. That said, we did finally give in and clean the house up after weeks of chaos and bathroom renovations and half-unpacked rooms. Now we've isolated the chaos to the garage and the still-packed-ness to half of one room. 

Pictures or it didn't happen:

I'm loving our loud rug and red living room accents. The walls are sadly bare, but that's a project for another weekend. I do have a whole pile of pictures and art next to the tv stand waiting for said weekend. 

Oops, Devon's jacket is annoyingly reflective in these photos. Anyway, the dining room has a dining room table in it now! How novel! This is the table we made when we were living in Mountain View. We need to make or acquire chairs at some point. 

The kitchen is still on the chopping block when we have the time and money to redo it, but for now it's in a pretty usable state. 

This would be that still-packed bit I mentioned. We set up Devon's desk, but my desk still needs some sanding and another coat of finish. All of my sewing stuff and yarn is still boxed up, for the most part. The closet in this room is still a mess. We'll get there, though!

The bedroom. I love the headboard and rug and I love the quilt my sister made me, but they don't quite go together, huh? A new quilt made from the wedding table runners is on the list of things to make someday. 

And, chaos. We ran out of time to clean the garage. We need shelving and a bigger work bench. We need to do something about the cavernous crack in the floor. We need a garage door that works. We need a better way to access the loft. Really, we need several months to work on the garage alone! 

This brings me to the photos I didn't include above. What? You're sick of looking at boring photos of our house? Too bad!

New (old) dressers! While we fully admit to being big Ikea fans, we are not fans of their dressers. We decided that since we didn't like the Ikea fare and didn't feel like spending a lot of money on boring furniture store stuff, we'd look for antique or second-hand dressers.

I went to Oakland to visit the Habitat for Humanity ReStore back when we still needed lots of things for the bathroom. I didn't find a single thing in the ReStore, but I did find the dresser on the right in the St. Vincent de Paul attached to the ReStore. Jackpot! After sending pictures to Devon, measuring the dresser and the car several times, and making sure the mirror would come off for travel, I bought it. I found a nice guy from the salvage store next door to help me load it. A rent-a-cop also helped. He took one look and bet me $20 that the dresser wouldn't fit. I agreed and was very pleased with myself when it slid right into the car. It was an oversight on my part to not have a counter bet in place! I did have to take the mirror apart to get it in the car, and I couldn't see a single thing out the back of the car all the way home from Oakland. Still, I love the dresser!

We had a less dramatic journey to pick up the dresser on the left, which we found on Craigslist. We got it from a very talkative guy who was moving to a smaller place. He regaled us with the virtues of the dresser, but really most of the handles are a little bit broken. It's still very cool overall, so we're keeping an eye out for new handles. 

Here's one more photo of the living room (looking towards the dining room) which shows our very favorite furniture purchase - a mid century hutch. At least, I guess it's a hutch. I'm not really sure what to call it. This was a lucky or stupid Craigslist find, depending on how you look at it. I saw it listed for $100. If you've ever tried to buy a mid century anything, you know that's a steal! These sorts of things go for at least $800 around here. The catch was that it was in San Rafael, which is at least an hour drive north. And it's all one piece, so there is obviously no way it would fit in our little hatchback. 

We hatched our genius (stupid) plan and set out the next day. On a Saturday morning, we rented a U-Haul van at something like 7am and drove up to San Rafael. The woman we bought it from was moving, so she had  couple of movers there. Luckily, they carried it downstairs for us. It's quite heavy! We loaded it in the van and strapped it in with tie-downs. We got a late breakfast and headed home, and the whole ordeal was over before noon. The U-Haul rental was more than the price of the hutch itself, but we still think we got a deal. 

That's it for today! I'm off to do anything that isn't cleaning or driving too far to buy furniture.