remodeling this life

This time in my house though. I wasn’t feeling well for a few days last week. The fact that I couldn’t do much made my house a total dump come Sunday afternoon. Although I was still not feeling totally stellar, I couldn’t take it any longer. I cleaned up, moved around some furniture and decided to spruce up a wall in our dining area.

I bought a green shelf at goodwill a couple weeks ago for $2. We’d been to the beach earlier in the week where I collected seashells to put in a glass bowl from the dollar store. And I had a sea shell themed thingy that I got at a yard sale a few months ago during a final sale day “everything you can fit in this bag for $5″. I had hubby hang the shelf. He was so nice about it. I only had to glare, mumble, grumble and proclaim I’d do it myself before he finally jumped in to protect his beloved walls.

Since we’d been to the beach a few days earlier, I had fresh off my camera a bunch of family pics at the beach and decided that since it was beachy with the seashells theme I should print some of the photos and put them on the wall too. Off I went to CVS to print photos. Their buy 2 get 1 free special on printing 8×10s was over the week before. But some genius there didn’t take the sticker down off the printer. I printed 6 8×10s and some 4×6s and 5×7s and expected to pay about $20 for the who shebang. I got to checkout and was charged $57!!! Well, I made them give me the buy 2 get 1 free since the sticker was right there and all. And then we discovered that not only had I gotten charged for all of them, but I’d been charged $3 more per 8×10 than I should have. We got it all sorted out and I walked away a happy woman with my photos for the price they should’ve been. You know what is sad though? Not so long ago, I’d have just paid the $57 and assumed I was stupid and did something wrong. I was assertive and asked why the heck it costed so much and saved myself a bunch of cash. While it was all going on, my kids only terrorized the store a little bit.

Off we went to Marshalls for photo frames. I only needed a few since we had a handful at home already. Drew proceeded to terrorize Marshalls as well while I chose the frames.

Got home and did some more mumbling and grumbling to get the photos hung after I arranged them so nicely in their respective frames. And now I have a cute little personalized beachy wall in our dining area. So much better than before where we just had one big photograph of El Capitan in Yosemite. I mean, it’s really cool and all but a bit boring. You can see that in the sidebar to the left.

And now here is what I did to spiffy up our dining area.

Please try your hardest to ignore that there is stuff on my floor that I didn’t pick up before photographing. I am human afterall and have 2 small children who love to fling things around. And the dresser-as-buffet doesn’t have that stuff on it at the moment. I don’t even really bother to spend time arranging and decorating stuff in places the kids can reach because it never lasts. Right now there are a few bowls and golf balls up there. Every buffet needs golf balls!!