{while you were out}

This past weekend Garett's parents went out of town for work and left us home alone. That is dangerous....haha! No we decided to pretend we were on the home makeover show "While You Were Out" and spruce up the house a bit! We spent a lot of time in Home Depot, Lowe's, Ross and on Craigslist. We replaced the seventies globe lights and eyeball track lighting with lighting from this millennium : ) 

Garett hung one of them and I hung the other two whilst he was sleeping so I could impress him with my electrician skills. It took me about 45 minutes to hang them because I had to clean up spider webs and dead spiders! I just swirled them around a screwdriver and washed them down the sink : ) We also tackled the family room and made the back part an office for his mom (I'll add a picture of the office space when I take one).

Then we took down the track lighting over the dining table and hung a chandelier. We got it at Home Depot for $50....it was originally $150! I love a good bargain! Garett can attest to this; I never pay full price for anything. Why not make your money go further? That is my philosophy. Anyway, from the picture you can tell that it is hung by a binder clip. Why, you ask? Well, we bought an anchor and when we got home we realized that the hook screw's thread was too big to fit in the anchor. Garett's parents were due to home in a couple hours and we wanted the chandelier up so they could see it so we got creative. Garett came up to me holding the binder clip and said we should use that....I thought he was joking. As you can see he wasn't : ) So he drilled the anchor screw through it and clipped the light chain to it. Perfect. We will get a hook eventually. Jerry (Garett's dad) says he likes the binder clip. Haha! 

I also wanted to get some pictures and decoration up on the bare walls so I made a picture collage on the entry way wall and hung up some stuff I got from Ross. Can I just say that I LOVE Ross?! Everything I own comes from that glorious store!

Above I mentioned that I spent a lot of time on Craigslist. That was true. For this little home makeover project Garett and I probably put in around 5 hours; between looking through all the ads for coffee tables, TV stands, lighting fixtures, couches and actually going to look at quite a few of them. Nearly everything we went and saw didn't work out. Except the TV table you see below.  I paid $25 for it and we bought new knobs for $20. So a grand total of $45 dollars went into this. After we bought it we were at a furniture store looking at couches for his parents when we saw the exact same table on the show floor. We were curious what this table new cost so we walked over to it to check it out. My jaw dropped....it cost $295! I just paid $25 for the same exact thing! Moral of the story? Craigslist is worth the time and frustration, haha! I also found a matching coffee table for $40 that is beautiful as well. We are going to put the extra new knobs on it as well so they will really look like a set (I'll put a picture as soon as I take one of it).  

 

It was a fun weekend overall. Garett's parents were definitely surprised and loved the changes! Garett and I are planning on refinishing their table, which is currently stained with a reddish brown stain. We want to sand it down and restain it a dark dark brown so it matches the living room furniture and the new lighting we put in. So stayed posted for those pictures : )

Just a quick update on our life....Garett goes into Costco today to fill out some additional paperwork. He has had two interviews there so far so fingers crossed that today he finds out if he got the job or not! He would start October 18th. That would be awesome! I have started playing indoor soccer again.....my first game was last night. We won but I am horribly out of shape. My lungs aren't cooperating with me. So we have decided to start a training program. It's the one I did for college soccer so this should be interesting haha. We will have to tweak it so we don't die the first training session. I am super excited to get into some sort of fitness regiment again. We love to be active and we are for the most part, but we just have a hard time finding time....or a better way to put that is that we have way too easy of a time finding other things to do besides exercising : ) We are going to start this program next week so I will keep you posted on our progress.

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