A New Arrival + DIY Book Boxes

Last week, Mother in Law Scrimp took me to a new antique shop that opened up by her house. It's amazing. Everything in the store is purchased cheaply at estate sales and re-sold just as cheaply. I just had to take advantage of it.

Are you ready to see what we bought? Are you? 

Ok. :)

Excuse the grit on the floor underneath it. I didn't sweep up after Mr. Scrimp and his brother carried it inside. 

It's a lovely art deco-style buffet, with beautiful old hardware. There are some dings and nicks here and there but really it's in excellent condition. 

I think the thing I am most in love with is the beautiful, simple woodwork:

Pottery Barn Hacking

For those of you not in the loop on the latest slang, "hacking" in this sense just means copying something expensive and making your own for cheap or free. Want a good example? Check out this Pottery Barn hack by Angie of The Country Chic Cotttage.

Inspired by this Pottery Barn banker box storage set, Angie made these out of some left-over Christmas tins and some chalkboard paint:

Instructions here at Someday Crafts.

DIY Modular Bookshelf

I think one of the hardest things about apartment living is finding enough space to store your things. At least in the apartments I've lived in (and the ones my friends have lived in), it seems like there's just never enough closet space or shelving to hold the things that get collected over a year or two or three of just living. Someone gives you something, and it's great, but where on earth are you going to put it? Bookshelves are surprisingly expensive and it's tough to find the time to actually make something.

But I did find a project on Craftynest.com that looks like it would be a doable weekend project for not too much money--and you get a great bookshelf at the end!

This set of modular shelves was made from a salvaged pile of mismatched drawers that were painted, papered, and affixed to the wall with screws. Depending on where you find the drawers (you might even get lucky and pick something up on Freecycle), you can get pretty varied results, I think--all the same size, or, as in this photo from the Craftynest project, various sizes and shapes that are joined together by color.

As soon as I find some drawers, I'm definitely giving this a shot. We have an entire room worth of stuff that is simply sitting in boxes because we don't have shelves to put it on.

Link to the full project instructions is here.

Food Storage

My husband and I decided when we got engaged that getting married would provide the perfect opportunity to change some bad food habits. Neither of us lived in our apartment before the wedding, so getting married involved not only a big wedding but a big move and a big adjustment. What better time to change a habit than when you're already in the middle of a huge upheaval?

One of the simplest and biggest decisions we made was to stop using plastic for our food storage. That meant no tupperware, no plastic wrap, no zip-loc bags--but also no plastic water bottles or milk jugs, or anything like that.

We had several reasons for this. The biggest one is that we just don't believe plastic is healthy (see this link or consult Google for some of our reasons why). Anyone who's stored food in plastic for a few days knows that it eventually starts to taste like plastic. Have you ever wondered why? What chemicals are getting into your food to make that happen?

I also don't like to use disposable products more than I have to. It feels wasteful to me, which I have a problem with both for environmental and for financial reasons. If I'm going to pay something, I want it to last.

So, we decided to store our food in glass. We even try to pour our milk into a glass pitcher when we bring it home from the grocery store (we can't afford to buy the milk that comes in glass jars, delicious though it looks).

To make this easier, we decided to get several sets of Pyrex storage containers. These come in all sorts of sizes and have rubber lids. Target, Wal-Mart, and several other stores sell box sets of various shapes and sizes of storage ware.

The glass cleans off very easily and keeps food just as fresh if not fresher than food stored in plastic. And they're permanent! I can't even imagine how much we've saved by not buying zip loc bags, sandwich bags, plastic wrap, gladware, and all those sorts of things, and how much we're going to continue saving over the years.