What do you do with your spare time?

Spare time?? What is that?  Certainly, those who have extra time find something to do.  Something that makes them feel happy, relaxed, etc.  Or, they simply get chores done.  Do the things that life requires.

We've been exploring things that we like to do.  Things that make us feel good and relaxed.  Things that help us to get our chores done.

When we moved here, we disposed of all of the dressers we owned.  They were all old, worn and tired.  And, our U-haul was packed as full as it could be.  I'd been keeping my eyes open for dressers for the kids.  They need them more than Hubs and I do, because we have an awesome closet!!  The picture below doesn't even do it justice.  The shelves go all around the closet, which probably measures 8x8 or larger.

So, after having looked around for dressers and visiting the limited number of yard sales that this little town offers, I went to local thrift stores.  I found these two dressers for $15 and $20 each.  As you can see from the photos, they were in tired shape when I got them.  I think my husband must have thought I was pretty crazy.  But I had a vision.  When I got home, I went to work on Google to find ideas on what I wanted the finish to look like.  Ultimately, we ended up with this:

As you can see, the difference is phenomenal.  I let the girls pick their colors themselves and then they helped to sand, prime and paint them.  Daddy added the hardware and the mirror over the green dresser.  In their rooms:

 

As you can see, she has already adorned it with stickers (which I will be removing) and stuffed it full of clothes.  Excuse the rest of the mess, she has a friend over and I didn't care that they trashed her room.

She's really proud of how hers turned out.

We've really decided that we're going to refinish furniture to finish furnishing our home.  We may also continue to refinish furniture and sell it.  We both enjoy doing it very much.

These are our most recent acquisitions.  I think we'll do the bed to match the green dresser (we'll do the bed black and accents green).  The other dresser will be finished for the boys' room since I took their 'dresser' to use as my entertainment center.  I rearranged my living room.  I feel like the new look is more clean and modern.  Hubs was resistant, at first, but I asked him to humor me while I set it up.  The finish product made him quite happy.

He finally agrees that we can let the old set go!!  So, I posted it for sale on a local FB sales and trade group.  Not sold, yet, but keeping my fingers crossed.  That darn set was impossible to keep clean!

It had several (smaller) scratches in the top of the TV stand.  I took black glossy fingernail polish to it and you can't tell that it was ever scratched!!  I'm proud of that one!

So, the stand the TV is now on is what we were using for the boys' clothes in their room.  The smaller stand to the left of the picture is what we were using for Tiger's clothes.  Because I now have a more grown up living room area, I am without adequate storage for Ti's clothes.  It now looks like this

Yeah.  The crib in our house is a place to dry rugs, blankets and diapers.  It also holds all of Ti's clothing.  He never, ever sleeps in it anyway, so we're no worse for the wear.  In fact, I've been looking for a toddler bed, because all this thing is doing is using up space.



Last night was a hard night with Tiger.  He woke in the middle of the night and was pretty much inconsolable.  So, we marched our way into the living room so that Hubs would have a chance to sleep.  The boys had soccer this morning, and I had no interest in being out in the cold, so it was a fair trade for us both.  I stayed up with Ti, he slept and took the boys to soccer.

While he was gone, I cleaned and arranged the house some more.

I swept, scrubbed, mopped and cleaned all day today.  The majority of the house is hard floors and the exterior of the house is desert.  Sand everywhere all the time.  I'm fighting a losing battle.  Hubs is trying to clean up the back yard so that we can get something down outside of the doors to minimize the traffic that comes into the house.  We're only renting this place, so we don't want to do anything too costly or permanent, but I can't stand the mess!

One good thing about living in the desert is all of the rocks.  Hubs loves looking at and playing with the rocks.  I drove him up to Garnet Mountain a couple of weeks ago and left him there all day.  He spent the day hammering and chiseling rocks, enjoying nature and finding himself.  When I picked him up, he returned with these:

The black gems inside the rocks are garnets.  There are some good sized ones in this bunch.  He also found some pretty cool quartz crystals.  He had a great time.

Tomorrow, we're going to carve pumpkins...  Stay tuned for the end product.