Furniture freebies and yearly canning progress

A few weeks ago, I got a call from a friend. "I'm helping some friends move and they've got some furniture they can't take with them, do you want it?" Like she needed to ask. A little while later, I was home with a solid wood bench and a corner bookcase and no real plans for either.

One day, I hope to refinish the bench. It had previously been used on a covered back porch and that's where it ended up at our house.

After thinking about it a bit, I couldn't find a place for the corner bookcase (also solid wood) in our home, so I listed it on Craigslist and found it a new home a couple days later.

About a week after I picked up the above furniture, a friend of ours called and asked me if I wanted an old coffee table. There's a ton of new home building in our area and he told me that he'd picked up the coffee table at a model home auction for $5 a few years ago. I offered to send my husband over with our van (I've yet to find a piece of furniture I couldn't make fit in our van) and our friend was skeptical, "I don't know that it'll fit. It's a bit big," he said. That was an understatement! It's 4 FEET square. It's huge!... but it fit. Here it is in our living room.

After staring at it and watching my boys play on and around it for a day, we moved it up to our loft. I've been rearranging our loft, since I can't leave well enough alone. I'm thinking of making the coffee table into a play table for the kids. I wanted to see if it would fit and not crowd our play room before working on it. So far, I love it. It's got just enough space under it to store 4 of our 5 kid-sized beanbag chairs and my boys have built train tracks, trios, duplos, marble runs and more on it's surface.

Now, I'm just trying to decide what I want to do with the table - a Mario table, or a car/truck/train table of sorts? Or just leave it be, since I know it's going to get beat up anyway?

I'm slowly working on my fall canning. All my fruit is prepped and I've got a couple of batches of jam/jelly I still need to get done soon. The rest of my fruit is prepped and in my freezer waiting for me to get around to making pie fillings. A couple of really awesome friends of mine came over every day I needed it and helped me prep my fruit. Together, we prepped almost 180 pounds of peaches, apples and pears over 4 days! So far, I've made apple sauce and apple peel jelly (yummy!), bottled peaches, peach jam, peach blackberry jam, peach raspberry jam, peach vanilla syrup and peach jelly, and bottled pears. Oh, and we dried some apples and pears - my husband loves dried fruit. I still have apple and peach pie fillings to make, along with my cherry stuff - cherry pie filling, syrup, jelly and jam. This week, my friend, Morgan is getting bulk fruit and I'll be helping her prep/can it.