Continuing on to our second date in August, it’s technically our stay at home date. My husband and I love to go to thrift stores, you cant beat the price and sometimes you walk out with some pretty amazing things. Obviously, not everything you find there will be your style or suit your needs; and often times you find things that are outdated or just plain ugly. For this date, that is exactly what I was hoping for. I planned to go to as many thrift stores necessary to find a junker and turn it into something beautiful or useful. I went to Michaels craft store and purchased a $15 gift card for the hint for this date.
To be honest, I had no idea what we would even do. A few of my friends have posted pictures on social media of older chairs they purchased for a few bucks at a thrift store and they stained or reupholstered to revamp it. I didn’t necessarily think we’d be doing strictly furniture, however, I knew we could apply this sort of creativity to something else if we desired. My husband was a little confused at first, he didn’t know why our “at home” date lead us to a thrift store. After explaining what we would be doing, he was all for it and more exciting than I expected. Initially, I figured we could each get our own item to revamp, but the pieces that I wanted would be too much work for one for one person. So, I got my husband on board and we bought a few pieces to complete one project; teamwork, how could you go wrong with that? I got an old vintage style dresser mirror and it was an awful mustard yellow and pea soup green with red flowers painted on it. The wood around the mirror was chipped and the paint was coming off (though, given how ugly it was, I’m not sure that was a bad thing). I also purchased what looked like an old chicken coop; honestly, I have no idea what it was but it was on sale. Green Tags were 50% off on that particular day, yellow tags were 10% and both of the items on got were on tag specials, 60% off my items was such a great deal.
Next was our trip to Michaels, which happens to be right next door to In-N-Out Burger, so we stopped by there to bring food home. When we got home we set everything out on a card table in the livingroom, ate and discussed our ideas and what we wanted to do with the pieces. My entry way has a picture, but I felt as though it needed something extra and as soon as I saw that mirror I knew I needed it.
First thing we did was sand it down and completely remove all of the paint. My house colors are pretty neutral, so we have different shades of browns and color pops of teal. I wanted to apply the same look with the mirror and chicken coop. The mirror would be an overkill if I covered the whole thing in teal, so we went for a softer suede color, there were little swirls in the wood at the top, and I outlined them with teal, lightly sanded it so dull the color and it turn out beautifully. The chicken coop was too big and bulky for the area, so my husband literally cut the entire thing in half. So we had the front two legs, we added some hangers on the back and mounted it to the wall to appear that it was standing on the floor. The entire thing was painted a shade darker of the same tanish color, we painted the inside of it a bit darker.We removed the chicken coop wire from the two doors in front and replaced it with decorative diagonal balsa wood and painted those the same teal color from the mirror and lightly sanded them as well for the same dull effect. We had so much fun working together, combining our ideas. We agreed to do this again very soon, but this time we would have a contest, who could find the ugliest item and revamp it the best. During this date, we even took it a step further and used some old wood from a 2×4 that we had in our garage. My husband cut the wood into different sized blocks, we used our plotter to cut Vinyl letters and made some “family” blocks to sit on top of our new entry way table. Never again would it be called a chicken coop.
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