Getting ready for Christmas

So sorry I have been away from my blog for awhile. Garage sale season has slowed down around here BUT I am back to my blog and I cannot wait to share what I am doing with all my garage sale treasures from this year!

It's the end of November and we are preparing to decorate for Christmas!! All summer I scooped up a ton of Christmas decorations at garage sales and packed them away. Now it feels like Christmas day for me to open up all the boxes of new decor. I am ready to fill up our house! I picked up this gorgeous, ivory, antique vase for $4. And I found these lovely, red flowers at Michaels!

This is our family wall in our dining room. It makes me happy every time I see it. 

Our Home - Dining Room

This is our Dining Room BEFORE we moved here in 2004. I will be posting AFTER pictures. Or should I call them DURING. Because we are not at all finished decorating and updating our home that was built in 1979. I have added a tab at the top of this site called OUR HOME where I will be telling this story of personalizing our home with garage sale and estate sale finds!! 

Dining Room

The dining room is in the background. It was setup as an office. We installed a new sliding door, removed the ceiling fan and ripped off the carpet from the stairs. The chair is facing the living room.

Some treasures for this room are:

Click on the picture for the story of the item. 

Another New Table (from Craigslist)

I finally found our perfect dining room table! After weeks of searching on Craigslist it showed up one day and I called on it. I knew I wanted a dark color, rectangle table with round legs. I had traveled out to see 2 other tables, before finding this one, that were nice but were not 

THE ONE.

This is perfect. I LOVE the curved edges! It is 70" x 39". I had to take the legs off to fit it in my car. It was only about 30 minutes away from our house. And I paid $125! Now I need to find 2 benches and 2 chairs to go with it. I just know I will find them this summer SOMEWHERE on my garage sale/estate sale adventures!! (or maybe on Craigslist). 1 new table this year + 6 NEW TABLES from last year = do I need anymore? (maybe)

Wall of Frames

My project today! I have been thinking about creating a wall of picture frames! I knew exactly which wall I wanted to use. The empty wall in my dining room. I have boxes and boxes of frames from garage sales. I picked out 12 of my favorites of all different sizes. Then I arranged them on the floor and measured the entire collection. 

6 ft wide x 3.5 ft tall. 

I marked that area on the wall with painters tape and started hanging all the frames. (please ignore the white furniture, it's the top to my daughter's desk that I still need to finish painting. and yes we have an air hockey table in our dining room right now. We got it as a Christmas gift and it needs to make its way down to the play room.)

ACTUALLY after I hung up the frames I "had" to make a trip to HomeGoods and found this wonderful sign (for $6.99) with a very meaningful saying. I hung it up in place of one of the frames in the center.

I have always loved this saying!!

Enjoy the little things in life, for one day you'll look back and realize they were the big things.

I LOVE LOVE LOVE this project. Next I will fill the frames with my favorite photos. Probably print them all in black and white. And I would like to paint all the frames. Maybe all black? Or maybe print the photos in Sepia and paint the frames with a chocolate gloss paint. I would love to paint all the frames in white but our whole house is filled with dark brown trim. I think the bright white frames would stick right out. Hmmmmm..... maybe I will try it! 

This was so fun to do today!

I paid 50 cents to 3 dollars for each of the frames!!

P.S. We need a table (and chairs) for our dining room. I have my eye on a table on Craigslist right now. And I found a delivery service that will charge $85 to deliver the table to me (about 25 miles). I love this! Because I do not have a truck. I cannot lift a table by myself. And I always have 2 little girls with me, which makes me nervous about taking them to a stranger's house.