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.

New "Nightstands" and an update

I mentioned here that I recently found new nightstands for our master bedroom. I have been looking for almost a year for matching bombe chests the right size and price for our room. I saw a couple of beautiful silver leafed bombe chests on Little Green Notebook and fell. in. love. I also really liked these nightstands from Little Miss Penny Wenny.

So, here's my before of the nightstands:

The gray one I picked up for $80. I couldn't figure out the huge price difference (original price was $180) at Home Goods. When I got it home, I discovered that the back leg had apparently broken off and been reattached with glue. It's sturdy, but there's a small, visible crack all the way around the leg. I couldn't bring myself to pay $180 for another one, so I originally picked up a square table that was about the same dimensions as the bombe chest and reasoned that I could make that work. After staring at the two of them together for a couple of days, I just didn't like that idea and told my husband I was going to take it back. He was relieved since he didn't like it either but wasn't going to say anything. He's such a sweetheart! Anyway, when I went back 4 days after getting the first one, there were only 3 left in the whole store! (There'd been more than a dozen on Tuesday.) Not sure why, or how I missed it on my first trip, but the pink one above was mis-marked to $150 - the most I was willing to cough up for a nightstand.

So, I'd love to show you my afters, but I seem to be hopping around a lot lately. I've got my 4 drawer dresser half sanded and the leg crack on the gray bombe chest filled and sanded and the original hardware holes filled (I really want 2 knobs per drawer, not 1 on my nightstands). I still have my french provential bench to finish up (haven't touched it since I first blogged about it) and I started cutting the vanity support off the first of my 3 drawer dressers that I finished the drawers for weeks ago. That's just my furniture projects!

I've got my yearly "crazy person" canning next week that I'm getting ready for so all my furniture projects are being put off so I can prep for that. I'm hoping to finish up the nightstands, and a couple other projects by the end of the month though. We'll see how fast I get it all done!

I was featured!

I was so thrilled this morning when I checked my blog and found a comment from Allison at House of Hepworths that she featured my gradient green dresser! It made my day!



Go check out the linky party. There were tons of really fun stuff this week to go along with my dresser!