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...

The end of the radio silence

Hello everyone!

I know it has been insanely dead over here recently, but its not because I haven't been up to anything!

If you follow me on Instagram, you will have seen all of the thrift store/ craigslist hauls that I have been bringing in lately.

Among them, was this super fly globe bar.

It was featured on a couple of  different blogs, from the amazing Trisha over at Black and white Obsessions, To Brynne at The Gathered Home

I really appreciate them taking the time out of their day to feature me!

Thanks guys!

Speaking of, isn't it funny how you could be scouring thrift stores and craigslist for one thing and then when you finally find one, you find even more that could be even better than your original?
Yeah... That's my problem... Cause then I buy all of them..

That's the case with my globes.

Looked for months  just to find one, and then I found two and a globe bar cart all in a month.

Hopefully I'm not using up all my deal luck!

I also found that cool looking candle at one of our local thrift stores that was closing down. I have no idea what I am going to do with the stand when the candle runs out, but in the meantime, its a great conversation piece.

 But are you guys ready for some picture spam? Here you go! 

 Check out that cool faux wood grain fabric

This handsome man is currently a buffet/catch all in our dining room. He was originally a boring brown, but looks dapper with some cool herringbone!

 

 Yep, a vintage Eames chair in two pieces.

And finally, this chair got a makeover from blah to not so blah.

More info on him later!

Anyways, I promise that I will blog more often, if only to show you guys all the cool stuff I find. ;)

 as always,

Thrift store haul// Gold giraffe and Rattan

Hey guys :)

I know when you begin your journey into thrifting, it can seem a little daunting, especially when you don't know what to look for or where to begin.

Most thrift stores are awash in vases, candle sticks, fake flowers, and hideous clothing; so you have to really look to find the good things.
The best part is when  you find those things. It's almost like a treasure hunt, and you just want to show off your scores!

Here are some of my finds from this week:

When I go thrifting, normally my mentality is something along the lines of 

'If I saw this at Target, would I buy it?'

For those two giraffes, it was a resounding YES!

They are lovely, and incredibly tall. Perfect for holding bracelets or just hanging out sniffing my flowers.

-Plus, they help fuel my brass animal addiction-

I also spied those flowers hiding in the back of the bin. I know that fake flowers that size and quality normally run around $5 each at the craft stores, so at $1 for the bundle, it was a no brain-er. They instantly spring-ified our livingroom. Its amazing how much a little bit of greenery can change things!

I also found that beautiful gold trivet. We needed one anyways, but I think the hardest part is going to be not hanging it on the wall!

I also snagged some books from one of my favorite stores.

These were picked because of their entertaining titles or their actual use.

My favorites are:

It could have been a kumquat

How to get along with people

The 'adjustable' diet cookbook

I don't know what an 'adjustable' diet is, but it sounds fun!

Check out this bad boy right here.

For our wedding we are collecting hundreds of vintage teacups to turn into candles.

Someone else must have had the same idea, because these are wonderful. I think they went for a lilac scent as well, and they work fantastic in my office. :)

(please excuse Bandit the dog photobombing my pictures ^^)

And finally, what I am the most excited about, this rattan chair.

 Its similar to this one found on Amazon, but it was only forty bucks!

I will keep you posted on what happens with him, but I am taking ideas for what color the cushion should be.

Are you a fan of keeping rattan natural or painting?

All of these finds typically come from one of the four stores in my 'Thrift store rotation'

One is good for furniture

One is good for knick knacks

One for dishes and books

And the last one is usually a suprise. Never know what I will find there!

What kind of things have you found in thrift stores?

Do you have a rotation as well?

Well, that's all for today folks.

As always,

Hello spring! DIY moss letters

Hey Ya'll!

Spring is finally here in our little corner of the world.

There is nothing more wonderful than waking up to the sound of birds chirping and a beautiful day ahead of you.

Our home has been busy with all the crafts happening recently, as well as some spring cleaning.

So time for some fresh new spring decor to get us in the mood!

I have seen these all over the blogosphere, and I have got to say, I love them. Anything typography has my vote, and plus, you don't have water these!

Supplies needed:

1 moss mat. I picked mine up at Jo-anns,

I got the six foot roll, and it totaled 17.00. If you are only doing one or two letters, you could likely get away with only 2 ft.

Letters, Normally $3 each, they were a dollar off, so $10 on letters.

You will need hot glue

Green paint or spray paint

a sharpie

and scissors.

Total money spent on this project: $27 and about two to three hours of time.

To begin, Paint the backs of your letters with green paint. If you want to skip the drying step, feel free to use spray paint. I used plain acrylic paint and mixed 3/4 paint and 1/4 water to make a dark wash.

When the letters have dried, place them on your mat and trace around them with your sharpie.

Don't worry about marking on your letter, you will cover it up!

After your letter is cut out, you may want to shake it vigorously into the garbage for a second to remove any extra moss.

Hot glue the moss to the letter.

You will not want to cover the bottom of the letter unless you plan on hanging it on a wall.

Mine are just going to be shelf decor, so I left the bottom plain.

After I glued the front of the letter, I measured the sides and cut long strips to go around the border of each letter and add dimension.

And just like that, you're finished!

Ready to hang on your wall or shelves!

What kind of things do you do when spring comes?

Till next time;

DIY owl bookends

Hey ya'll

So the other day as I was browsing the internet, I saw these handsome things.

I don't know about you, but I am still totally in love with the owl trend, even if it is getting a little old.

I adore those book ends, but not the price tag attached.

So, a quick nip off to my favorite thrift stores and I made my own!

So, first off, You need to find two owl statues.

It doesn't matter the shape they are in or the color, so long as you like them

It helps if they are pretty solid ceramic or stone, because they are going to be holding up some books of course!

Supplies you will need include:

A spray primer (I used rustoleum white)

Spray paint of your color choice (I used rustoleum satin heirloom white)

Felt

And two owls

Here is a before of the little owl. He had some goofy eyes and the paint on him was chipped and cracked.

Not anymore!

Before you begin, set up the area where you will be painting.

If it is outside, you will need some nice weather and not much wind.

If it is inside, make sure all surfaces are covered in case of overspray, and open all the windows and doors.

Begin by spraying on your primer.

I love this one because it works on pretty much anything, and it lasts forever. 

 I only did one coat of the primer.

Hang out and let that dry.

After your primer has dried, spray on your spray paint with nice even strokes.

I did one coat of the Heirloom white because I wanted some of the age to show through and give it depth.

If you want it just solid, wait a while and do a couple more coats.

Both of my owls already had felt on the bottom, but if they don't already have it, you will want to hot glue a piece to the bottom to protect your furniture from scratches.

And just like that, you're done!

Its up to you if you want to spray on a finish, but for little things like this, I normally just let it be.

Happy crafting!

Till next time!

Thrift store finds//Wedding china

So this week has been a busy week, for both me and Ty.

Its only been three days and so much has happened!

First; I went to visit my family over at Sagecroft farms. This is where we will be holding our September wedding, and there is still a lot of planning that needs to happen before the date.

One of the decisions that we made was to hold our dinner on vintage china that we found from the thrift store.

Problem with that, we are expecting 230+ guests, and with each guest there needs to be three plates, a glass, and silverware.

Needless to say, as many times as I visit the thrift store each week, there is still a lot to be found.

One of the things I looking forward to the most with the wedding is turning all of these adorable little teacups into candles.

That has been my favorite part of the whole thing, seeing what fantastic designs we find.

That little blue one just might go home with me!

We chose to use lavender and vanilla for our scents for the candles, sticking with the purple and white theme

More to come on that in the future!

Today, I swung by one of my favorite thrift stores, a goodwill by my work

I saw this handsome man, and I was a little hesitant to pick him up at first. Where would I put a chair like this?

But I kept looking over at him, and I figured that it would be better to follow my gut and just snag it before someone else did.

I crammed it into the back of our little two door car, and took him home.

And I'm in love.

Look at the detailing! 

I think this is the perfect chair to learn to upholster.

More on our adventures later

As always;

Thrift Store Haul//Mirror mirror on the wall

Part of living in an apartment is living with a budget.

I would love to go to target and spend all of my money on the adorable things they have there, but instead, I have to make do with going to the thrift store or making my own.

Which is a lot of fun.

There is quite a few little thrift stores that are in my area, and yesterday I came upon some great finds at goodwill;

Check it out!

Scored two cute little anthropologie look alike teacups. We are collecting hundreds of teacups for our wedding, and I think these will look just fantastic turned into candles, no?

I also scored that wonderful mirrored picture frame.

Haven't decided what is going to go into that bad boy yet, but whatever it is, I am excited!

That jar currently has a home on one of our night stands and is holding whatever change Ty brings home at night. I love the bright colors and fun design! 

See that deer there too?

Another thrift store find.

BAM

And that awesome starfish tray has a home on our other nightstand, along with the deer's mate.

I am so in love with this tray though, pictures just don't do it justice. Right now it holds some jewelry,  but in the future I may just hang it on the wall!

Finally, that big gold and green mirror is just hanging out on the wall above one of these end tables until I find it a new home.

And that little blue and white ginger jar?

Thinking of using it to hold fish food! It would be much prettier than that plastic can for sure!

I think  my favorite part of all of this is finding out where to put our finds when we get them home.

Its so exciting finding that perfect piece to complement your existing decor. 

Plus, if you ever decide to change it around, you aren't loosing more than a few bucks!

What are your favorite finds from your thrift store?

Do you usually re-do the things you get or do you leave them be?

Leave it below in the comments!

Till next time;