Good Will, I Love You

Since Nate and I discovered that we had HGTV a couple months ago, Flea Market Flip has become one of our favorite shows. If you've never seen it, it's basically 2 teams of two who have $500 to buy old, cheap pieces, re-create them and then re-sell them for a profit.

And since new furniture definitely doesn't fit into our budget and we're always looking for cheap fun activities to do on the weekends we decided to do some flipping of our own... minus the whole resale thing. 

I've been on the hunt for a good pair of nightstands for weeks. I want to spend under $75 for an identical pair, and refinish them with new Anthropologie nobs and some shabby chic cream paint to display against the chocolate wall in our bedroom. No luck on such night stands but I did find this steal for $20 at Good Will.

It's the perfect size for our small apartment and goes perfectly with my rod iron scroll obsession. I felt like it had good bones. So, we bought some shimmery bronze spray to spruce up the rode iron color and some dark stain for the wood.

I have to be honest, it wasn't as easy as I'd thought - sanding this bad boy took a couple hours. Although I did learn that our power sander is one of my favorite tools, sanding on our tiny balcony in the heat wasn't the funnest thing we've ever done. And not to burst the DIY bubble, but stain and all that jazz wasn't as cheap as I was expecting either. But aren't all projects that way?

In the end, I think it has some character and a story behind it. I hope we still keep these little creations one day when we're super successful with fulfilling careers and tons of money (hey, it could happen).  I hope we never forget that these creations symbolize a time in our lives when we were young, broke, unfulfilled, but making the best of a dinky apartment filled with more love than we know what to do with.

I think Kenny Loggins said it best when he wrote,

And even though we ain't got money,
I'm so in love with you honey. 

My Favorite Room

My favorite room in our apartment is, undoubtedly, our kitchen. I have an addiction to buying kitchen appliances/serve-ware/table linens/everything from Sur La Table. It's bad. I can never have enough, I'm never satisfied. How un-yogic of me!

This addiction bears its ugly head strongest when Nate goes on travel. I stay up until 2am perusing the internet for  projects, furniture, things for our home, and of course kitchen gadgets.

I recently bought the Smitten Kitchen Cookbook. It's amazing and also a "2am my husband is in Seattle and I'm lonely splurge". There's a section in the book called "Make Your Own Smitten Kitchen". She says, "Keep a list- a list of things you are lost without or dying to replace because they are the bane of your cooking existence. You can't figure this out in a store; it's gotta happen in the kitchen."

She speaks the truth people. And this lead me to realize that the disfunctionality of our pantry needed to be dealt with. Since going veg, our pantry is stocked with beans and nuts galore, most of which are held by half empty plastic bags piled on top of one another. It was impossible to see what we had or to find things when I needed them most. My frustration partnered with the dozens of extra mason jars we have lying around lead me to this little 2 am project.

 

So now my pantry looks a little bit like mason jars on speed but it's made cooking way easier and more functional. I can see everything and just grab what I need.

Speaking of functional, I spent some birthday money on this bad boy a couple of weeks ago. The best part about it is it's expandable, so one day when our kitchen is larger than a closet, it will still fit.

Nate has always loved pot racks. We drool over them every trip to Crate and Barrel, but to be honest I was a little weirded out at the idea of having all our pots out on display and not perfectly tucked away but after a few weeks with this thing I can say it is probably the most functional thing in our kitchen.  It's freed up a ridiculous amount of space, keeps pans from getting scratched, and keeps me organized. 

Late night project numero tres. I repainted the very first creation I made when we moved into this apartment almost a year and a half ago. One of the few odes to NY we have displayed around our apartment. This sign also hangs on the wall of Clinton Street Bakery one of my favorite New York restaurants and home of the best pancakes in the world.