Spring

Ah, the dawn of Spring. If you live in Utah you know that Spring seems to finally have arrived. Also, if you live in Utah you know that there will probably be a blizzard next week. That's how we roll here. But at least for one weekend, the sun was shining and the skies were clear and blue (and for the record, can we eliminate the phrase "Spring has sprung" from the lexicon? Is there anything more annoying than that expression? We don't say "Winter has whinnied" or "Summer has summed it all up!" So why does Spring have to spring? Anywho...)

I used to be an autumn guy. Love the sweaters. The Hot Cho. But I think Autumn is a single man's game. When you have small kids, there is nothing greater than being able to send them outside and have them stay out there for a few hours. It's spring all the way for me, baby.

Saturday happened to be my day off and the nicest day of the year so far so we spent the afternoon cleaning the yard and getting the trampoline put back together. Even though the kids on the trampoline together usually ends up with someone crying, it is so blissful for those few minutes where they are playing and laughing and not asking me if they can play the iPad.

Here is Lila with some awesome trampoline hair:

While the kids played, Amy and I sat on lawn chairs, sipped Diet Cokes and read. It was, in a word, heaven. 

What's that, you ask? Did we get new super awesome lawn furniture? Yes. Yes indeed we did. We found them at a vintage store. They were a bit rusty, but nothing that a little paint couldn't take care of. The vinyl cushions are all original with the TAGS STILL ATTACHED. They are comfy and wonderful. Here is a close up (in kinda bad lighting.)

My favorite part about them is that the shapes are just so great that even if the cushions wear out, they will still look awesome. 

On that same shopping trip we also picked up this little treasure:

Its a brass bar cart with Formica shelves. I'm in love. Amy always has 1.5 million books stacked next to her bed that she is waiting to read, so we thought this at least could corral them into one place. And look shiny and retro whilst doing it. 

And because they were there we picked up these gems (Sorry about the blurry shot.)

They are aluminum and bright orange and look great. It is also the first time that we have kept baking ingredients out in the open and it is super convenient. We didn't use to drink coffee or tea, but now that we have bins for them we have taken that up, so that has been pretty fun, too.

Happy Springing to you all!! If you haven't been to my other blog lately, please check us out. There is some pretty funny things over there. Also, we are doing a giveaway this weekend to win an autographed copy of my book!!! You have until Monday night to enter, so click on over and enter!

Magnifying my consignment

In the spirit of meeting my "300 words a day" goal, I am posting again about my furniture. It may be that this blog just becomes a place where I talk about all of the things that Amy and I purchase at consignment shops. You guys are cool with that, right? Good. I thought so. We're all friends here.

I blogged about this once before and the more we shop in antique stores and vintage shops, the more I love it. It just seems like you find cooler stuff, the price is usually lower, and you can feel some sort of self-righteousness that your are repurposing items that already exist instead of increasing your carbon footprint or something. And once we started looking, we found there are vintage shops everywhere. Seriously. Even Spanish Fork has one. So that is your assignment this week. You guys don't mind if I start giving weekly assignments, do you? Good.

Our kids broke the lamp in the loft. And what is more annoying than spending money to replace things your kids broke (i.e. the video camera they broke a couple of weeks ago trying to smash a spider?) But then we heard Amy's grandma had a lamp in her basement she wasn't using, so we went and got this treasure..

Its a tension lamp, which means it is spring loaded and you wedge it between the floor and the ceiling. Originally the room we were going to put it in had too high of a ceiling for it to work. So we bought that little light box to put underneath the lamp. Then we decided we liked the lamp better in this room so we just put some stuff on the light box.

Here is the lamp all lit up and a closeup of the light box, which had a weird orange vase on it that we found at a vintage store. Isn't she grand?

And as long as we were buying a light box, and a vase and a pair of boots for Amy (not pictured) we decided we needed to spruce up the kitchen, so we got this super awesome bread box and little tin bucket utensil holder thing.

Shabby chic? Perhaps. But it looks grand with the yellow owl butter dish. 

So that's all I got. No profound statement on the meaning of finding old things and making them new. No commentary about illuminating our homes and our lives with things from the past. Just some more pictures of furniture I like. This 300 words thing could get pretty boring pretty quick. Someone get me a book deal!