More Saving, More Doing. That's the Power...

It has been a while since my last post, and a lot has happened since then. I flew to NYC for a visit and explored the city, I put in my notice at work, I built furniture for the apartment. Yes, furniture. And THAT is what this post will revolve around because I'm so very proud of it.

Last weekend, I drove to Rob's place in Twentynine Palms to celebrate both his birthday and Valentine's Day a little early. We had been researching some blogs here and there to get ideas on  how we'd like to decorate our place, and both of us love the look of reclaimed wood. We started looking into buying some furniture, and WHOA! The prices were unreal. So we thought, what if we built it ourselves and found some reclaimed wood from a vendor in San Diego? Even then, the wood itself was somewhat pricey. So Rob dug a little deeper and found a few great blogs (shout out to Shanty-2-Chic) that showed you how to make your own new wood look reclaimed. Perfect. And within the budget. :)

Rob got the technique down and soared ahead with making a beautiful headboard before I even made it up for the weekend. Once I got there, I got started on the work for our coffee table, sanding the edges down, beating up the wood, and applying a staining technique to make the wood look weathered and worn. Once that was done, Rob constructed the table (taking a break from the bed frame he was then getting to work on), and I put a coat of finish on it.

We then took a trip to Home Depot for some hardware... what, oh what to make the legs out of? There's a bar here in Encinitas, Union Kitchen & Tap, that I had fallen in love with the look of creating a contrast of old wood with industrial items. So, we found some steel plumbing pipes, and with a couple caps, were able to fix the pipes to the coffee table.

And wallah. After two full days of sawing, drilling, sanding, beating, staining and priming. We have our finished products. I can't begin to describe how proud I am of our work. Once the finish dried, we moved the furniture inside, and seriously stood back in awe. It looks amazing and fits our taste perfectly. I'm in love with these projects and grateful to have a partner who is on board with the do-it-yourself movement. He is amazing and we love our work even more knowing it came out of our own two hands.

So take a look, what do you think? Now we just need to find an apartment that fits our massive coffee table!