This weekend.

Where to start?

A lovely dinner with friends Friday night.

Saturday kicked off with my husband wanting to make these pipe shelves for our library (which I’m so excited about).  Yes, we call it the library even though there isn’t one shelf or grown-up book in the room.  We’re visualizers.  And dreamers.  Haha.  I think you have to be when you live in a home that’s one-hundred and fifteen years old that you’re re-doing yourself.  Survival, you know?  Because you know (most days) that you’ll get there someday.

S0 Saturday morning, hubs was on the horn and up early ready to head to Lowes.  No showers, we set out…with our toddler.

We make it to the plumbing aisle–do you have a list, I ask him?

“No”

He has a wildly determined look in his eye, parts start being pulled and piled, they were out of this and that and I’m looking at this project thinking, we in trouble.  You can imagine.

“Ok”

And this is when you know God is real, because here comes a Lowe’s guy around the corner. I asked him for a pen to draw out said shelving and start counting parts.  I start drawing and he asks what are you building?

Thank you, God, for that guy because he knew numbers and measurements and where things were.  AND. And. and.

He was kind.

So, thank you to Jeff at Lowe’s Marion, IND store.

We make it to the car and off to the next hardware store for more parts we went.

“Can we go to the antique mall after this?”  I needed some therapy after all the hardware part shopping.  Lord.
I haven’t been to an antique mall in forever and this one was so fun.  I snapped a few random photos so you could see.  It had all the things you want in an antique mall/flea market.  Piles of stuff, collections of this and that, oddities…..  SO fun…even with a toddler.  We are overhauling our house on a budget and I’m looking for neat pieces for our walls and a few things for work.  Of course, I get a little side-tracked by sparkle and ephemera too….

And then there are these Simpson collector plates and I wonder who owned those?  And someone’s treasured Elvis lamp that they probably painted themself.  If these things could talk…My bachelorette self really wanted the Elvis lamp.  It was about 2 ft tall, people.  I would’ve added a few flat-back crystals to his suit.

Instead, I came home with a couple embroidered linens that were stained.  I will cut them up for pendants (stay tuned), a metal canteen to hang on the wall and a brass embossed box.  That is all.  Because I’m only looking for things that are “on the list.”

On Sunday, we got up again (this time, I took a shower) and we went to yet another hardware store for the last round of shelf parts and some grocery shopping.

We made it home, the weather was beautiful, so we worked on our garage.  It made me a little ill, to stop momentum on the shelf project, but honestly, I had a pile of boxes to go through that had been in storage that were also making me ill (if truth be known).  Blah.  Cleaning and going through old stuff is about as much fun as tweezing my eyebrows.  But I did go through ALL of them and I feel better today for it.  Getting started is the hardest part and I told myself, I will go through two boxes….  Two boxes fueled the whole project.  Funny how we have to play games like that with ourselves, but I don’t care because it worked.Spring cleaning is upon us.  Should you find yourself with a job of purging, this quote really hit the nail on the head for me.  Going through box after box of old sketchbooks, collections, and such….  I enjoyed those things during the time and now I can let them go.

Those new “library” shelves will be filled with things my family treasures.

Are you purging anything?  I’d love to hear your stories…