Wood shim sunburst mirror

Alright guys.  I have a confession to make.
I am a cheapskate.
Maybe it comes from all that farm living,  family thriftin' upbringing,  but when I see a how to on something I love,  I just wanna make it cheaper.

Such is the case with the sunburst mirror.

I have made one once before,  in fact,  it was my first ever blog post.
But I want to make a bigger better one.

And I love the look of the wood shim mirrors.
I just read a tutorial on how to make a mirror with paint sticks,  and I REALLY  wanted to try it.

So I hopped off to Lowe's to try and score some paint sticks.

Enter in road block number one.  I had this vision in my head of how I wanted it to look,  but the lady  would only give me three paint sticks.
Three.
I only had 25 bucks in my pocket,  and I was determined not to spend over that.
She pointed me in the direction of the shims,  and after I wandered around Lowe's for 30 minutes of looking I finally found them.

And they only carried one size.
And it was 1.57 a package.
For 12.

I grabbed 5, not knowing exactly how much I would need,  and went hunting for a piece of plywood.

They didn't have any pre cut scrap wood,  but an employee was willing to cut me off a hunk for next to nothing.
I asked if I could have a 10x10 square,  figuring that would work perfect.
We found the right piece of plywood to cut down,  and he cut me a rectangle.
He cut me a 6x10 inch rectangle.

I didn't want to complain about my 5 cent piece of wood,  so I left Lowe's,  $8.53 lighter.

Next up was Michael's.
I walked in right as the door opened,  and was able to pick up a 10 inch mirror,  a 10 inch needlepoint hoop,  and thankfully  a 12x12 inch piece of thin plywood.
 It came down to $9.57

Grand total spent on supplies: $18.10

I am not adding in the things I already had on hand.  If you are pretty crafty,  you will probably have a hot glue gun laying around somewhere.
If you follow many DIY blogs,  I am assuming that somewhere in your home there is a half empty can of spray paint or stain.

If you don't have those things,  may as well stock up.

First order of business? Lay out your crap.

I didn't shoot off a picture of this because I didn't realize that this would be a blog post until I was about half way done.

But for real.  Lay it out.
 I laid my mirror out and then grabbed every other stick and brought them outside to spray them.  A quick dose of gold paint later and they are good to go.
I repeated with the other half of the sticks,  this time with gold paint.


While you wait for those bad boys to be dry to the touch,  get your mirror ready.
I found about the center of the plywood and hot glued my mirror there like mad.  You could of course use gorilla glue and wait over night with books on top,  but I am impatient and like to live on the wild side.  So we use hot glue here.

After that,  take the inside of your ring and glue it on top of your mirror.  It will almost perfectly fit.

If you want,  you can spray paint the ring as well.  Before you attach it to the mirror.

You should have something like this.
Now go and grab your painted shims,  and lay them out a second time,  just to make sure.

Then,  go crazy with the hot glue.

For the hanging bit on the back,  I just glued it on.


Pick a spot on your wall that is bare and hang it up!

I'm pretty tickled with how it turned out.

Overall,  it cost me less than 20 bucks in supplies to make,  and maybe 2 hours of my time.
That's always a score in my book!

Bedroom changes

The best part of starting out in design is seeing how quickly your style can come and go.
I imagine that we would all have fabulous homes if we had unending budgets, (wouldn't that be great?)  but the Amazing thing is how to take unwanted or inexpensive items and turn them into something that people love.

This little corner of the internet is just getting started.  In fact,  at this time last year I didn't even have a blog!
So this is just a post looking back,  just to see, that yes  I have actually made progress.

This is our bedroom just five months ago in may.  I had just learned how to refinish furniture,  and had recently refinished both of these that we were using for bedside tables.  I can't tell you how extraordinary proud of this room I was at this point.  

I had DIY ed the canopy, and we actually owned a headboard that I had gotten for free.  

It was pretty exciting stuff. 

This is our bedroom at the moment.  It's not where it needs to be,  but it's getting there! 

Both of the side tables were a thrift store find.  Originally I just had one for each side,  but with dogs who love to move things around for us,  we had to change that quickly.  

I am searching for a mate for my chrome craft lamp.  I hold out hope that it will be one of those happy endings and I won't have to pay full retail price for one! 

Overall,  I'm pretty proud when I look back and see how much my style has changed.  Its good to see progress,  and I know that it can only get better from here! 

Moving forward

My favorite thing about our living room?  The fact that it changes every few months.
Tyler is currently employed by a company that delivers Ethan Allen furniture.  So when someone orders a couch online,  he is the gentleman that delivers it to your door.  He loves his job,  and I love the fact that he gets a pretty hefty employee discount.
But because of that,  he is constantly bringing  home new furniture and we are selling  things to make room for it all. In the last six months we have already gone through 3 couches!

We just sent our fancy leather sectional home with a sweet older man.  He came and picked it up the same day we listed it,  declaring that it was so hard to find good leather and that his dog would love this couch. 

This sectional was my favorite by far! The room looks so cozy here.  We gave this one to my parents after they FINALLY threw away the 15 year old broke down sofa. I can still visit this one at least. 

And this sofa was just last year.  This picture was taken before I owned a camera or knew how to decorate anything.  Before I even read a single blog,  can you believe it? 

It's funny to look at all the pictures and see how much everything has changed over such a short period of time. 

It's nice to think that at this point last year,  we didn't even own a rug,  and I'm pretty sure we didn't own a single lamp either.  

So really, if you are starting out with interior design.  If you just want your house to look nice and you have these big dreams that things can be blog worthy,  I guess you are closer than you think,  huh? 

Till next time.  

Functional Bridal Shower

With the wedding soon approaching, naturally, my maid of honor was going to throw me a bridal shower.

We sat together and were trying to come up with different ideas for games or themes.

One of the top ones was a ment to be honeybee theme.

Then my mother came up with the best ideas ever.

This will be a very pictureless post, mostly because I forgot to snap pictures while all of this was happening!

We decided to do a work bridal shower.

Basically, instead of bringing gifts that I didnt really need, we would prepare freezer meals.

so people would bring ingredients for the freezer meals, instead of body wash or plates.

We ended up simply picking a whole bunch of freezer meals from pinterest that sounded good, such as lasagna and cafe rio pork roast.

The idea was for all of these to have as little prep as possible, basically throw the ingredients into a bag, shake, and freeze.

We had maybe 10 people show up, and all together it took less than an hour to make them all.

We of course chopped all of the vegtables and chicken before hand to save on time.

At the end of the shower we all got together for some snacks and cheesecake, and I walked away with 22 ready to cook meals.

It was a more priceless gift than anything else I could have asked for.
They were able to gift me the gift of time to spend with my finacee, instead of working in the kitchen for long hours to make a meal.

For the shower favors we gave out glass jars of thyme.

Blog Overhaul!

Hello to those few people out there who may happen on this.
This blog is currently under construction whilst it's owner tries to learn HTML and make a new layout.
In the meantime, please enjoy the strange sights, such as a mismatched blog title and header and other goodies.

As of 1 week ago, The blog has gone from sunlightitup to the Gilded bear.
I felt like the new title fit better with what I was blogging about!
Keep posted for more goodies coming your way!

Shell chair makeover

Hey everyone!

So I am super excited to share this with you today.

If you follow me on instagram, you may have seen this sad little creature when I brought him home from craigslist.

The craigslist ad showed a blurry picture with the chair and base intact, and said it was a vintage Eames chair. I was beside myself with excitement, and dropped everything and ran over there.

Upon arrival, a young guy came out with both pieces separate.

"Yeah, in the ad I forgot to mention it was in two pieces. But we love this chair, it works just fine like this"

I didn't want to leave empty handed, so I forked over my forty bucks and shoved it into the back of our little car.

When I got home, I had a chance to look more closely at it. The metal base was rusted, and the whole thing smelled like seaweed. It looked like someone had marked up the seat with sharpie, and there were no screws to put it back together.

I was a little frustrated, and was worried that I had wasted my money.

So I stuck it into our storage room for a week while I figured out what to do with it.

And here is the new version:

(Yes, that is a fish tank on our patio)

I am in love with it. The red back gives it just enough pop with our other chairs, and it works really well at the head of our table.

It ended up not being an Eames chair at all, but actually a chrome craft chair. 

I don't mind, I love how comfortable it is, and it was still super inexpensive.

To connect the base with the chair, I ended up using some simple superglue. I was going to test it out first, and so far it hasn't failed. 

I suppose if someone sits on it and it collapses it will make for a good story, eh?

As always,

Living room mood board

Hey guys,

I wanted to try something different, and since I really have no direction with our living room right now, I put together a mood board to try and figure out what I am looking for.

I needed to figure out what ways I could use our leather sectional to look best at the moment. 

it's not our favorite couch, but Ty got it from work for a discount and he enjoys it, so it will have to do.

I was trying to incorporate elements that we already had, such as the lamp, couch, and mirror.

As a reminder, here is what it looks like now:

Getting there... slowly...