My Finds : Tales of Craigslist and Beyond

Guys, It has been a while since I showed you any of my SCORES!  If you follow me on Instagram you have seen some, but I thought I would pull them all together here. These have all been acquired while living in our "new" house (how long can you call it a new house anyway?).

Not everything has an official spot yet, but the hoarder in me had to grab now and place later.  Is that how you do it?  Or do you shop for a specific piece knowing exactly where you will put it??

This first score happened right after moving.  Four barstools.  And guess what?  We don't even have a bar in our kitchen. LOL  BUT WE WILL!! So I hoard until that day comes.

This deal doesn't come along too often, so I had to.

4 vintage Milo Baughman BRASS cantilevered bar stools. BRASS!! They are in very great condition, I might add.  (minus the horrible fabric, but that is an easy diy)  These things can be priced quite ridiculously.

For example, here they are on Charish for $1100 for just TWO!

Here they are at CB2.  These are not vintage but the Mack Stool is the exact same style for $299 each! 

Wait, wait, wait....How about paying almost $5k for four on 1st Dibs??  That is just ridiculous!

(1st Dibs is always ridiculous expensive - it is for people who want cool-ass vintage pieces and have no monetary restrictions - or Craiglisting skills for that matter.  Who knows maybe they have never even heard of Craigslist?)

Whenever I find a deal, I go to 1st Dibs to make myself REALLY feel good.

Are you ready to hear how much I paid for mine???
Drumroll please..............

$10 EACH!!! LOLOLOLOLOL  oh the LUCK!

Sorry 1st Dibs, I am going to stick to my search and find methods.

Take a guess how much I paid for a brass chest from Sarreid of Spain.....

This one is $1600 on Charish...

Mine needs some serious polishing but potentially will look like the shinny one above and I scored it for only $200 !!!!!

How about $3200 for a BIG set of embossed brass deer??

Or $50 on Facebook Marketplace - Have you used this resource? There is usually a lot of crap to wade through.....but ....BRASS DEER!! 

Yeah, these babies are perfect flanking a burning fire! 

Annnnd...Since we are talking brass animals, let me tell you a sob story. 

I found a set of HUGE brass giraffes on Craigslist.  Like 4 and 3 foot HUGE.  I was dying.  I had to have them.  The guy was asking a bargain price of $200, which is great, but being the bargainer that I am, he agreed to $180.  He lived 40-50 minutes north of Atlanta, but said he was passing through Atlanta on his way to Florida the next day.  What a deal and almost no hassle!  

Well, the next day, you know what happened?  I was raking my yard and missed his call.  I missed him by 10 minutes and he would not pick up his phone. He left me a voicemail saying "I guess the giraffes are going to FL"  I was frantic.  NOOOOOOOOOOO!!  WAIT!  STOP! 

I MAY have sent him five a couple text messages that portrayed me as a crazy-brass-obsessed girl. 

Also, this is one of those times that you DON'T want to look at 1st Dibs...cry cry cry

$4,000.  FOUR THOUSAND!!!!!!   UGH.

This was hard to get over.  BUT! Just like in a relationship, the best way to forget about someone is to find someone else. Ha!

Enter The. Brass. Herons

I mean who would pay $1,200 for these huge brass Herons....??

...when you could find them on Asheville Craigslist for $40 (bargained down to $30)??

And mine are better.  Look at the big bases!  They need a little shining, but aren't these 1970's Herons going to be AWESOME in front of my 1960's house, positioned just so in our new landscaping??  Can you see it??  CAN YOU??  What. A. Score!!  Possibly one of my best! 

One recent sale (found on estatesales.net) had a cool mcm house JAMMED full of ART from a renowned Atlanta painter. I was able to pick up a few portraits that spoke to me.  Im not sure WHY they spoke to me, but they did.  And now here they are, sitting.  Waiting patiently to be hung.

Sooooooo back in August, my brother texted me from a thrift store in Wooster Ohio.

Him:  "Is this mid century modern?

Me:   OMG! That is gorgeous!  Are the handles brass?

Him:  Yes. 

Me:  How much is it?

Him:  $249 for two night stands, tallboy, credenza with large mirror.  

Me:  WHAT?  I MUST have that.  Im going to buy it right now.

Him:  You're nuts."

And that is what I did.  I called up Friendtique in Wooster Ohio and bought it over the phone.  I had to wait 6 months to get it delivered, but it worked out fine. 

(on a side note:  I'm probably not going to use Paul's Shuttle anymore for furniture.  The service to and from the airport has always been fast, friendly and efficient, but it's somethin' different hauling long distances. Plus he told me he doesn't want my business anymore.)

I split up the set.  Credenza in the living room and tallboy/nightstands in the bedroom.  

I LOVE them so much.  I shined them up with Wax-N-Feed and they are beautiful!! 

Also, in the picture above is a rug I got off Craigslist. It is nice, but Im not in love with it.  I wanted a more tribal design..and maybe a little more black than red.  hmm

The HUGE vintage oil painting was scored in Asheville last year but we had to leave it there with my brother for a while.  Ernesto actually really liked it, too mostly because it is the Hotel Del Coronado, an old famous hotel in San Diego.

Remember my Craigslisted bed that I had re-built/recovered/tufted last year?  

Well, I wasn't into it anymore.  It was a monstrous STURDY bed, but from day one I was not happy with the tufting.  Also, the footboard drove me nuts-it didn't go with the headboard.  Turns out, I wished that I had not altered the original shell shape of this beauty.  (#designregrets) Oh well. It just didn't fit in my new house "plan"  anyway (right, like there is one, but..)  

I wanted something more...simple and streamlined.

When a perfect replacement turned up on Craigslist, I put the "old" one up for sale the next day. 

Luckily the blue bed was an easy sell on NextDoor, and this beauty (that looks identical to the $1000 Acorn bed at West Elm, by the way) was picked up by my sweet husband for just $100!!!! 

I am looooooooving the wood grain.

And it looks super nice next to our dark teal wall.

Are you still there?  Want to see another score?

I found a pair of these parsons ottomans at the same thrift store as the above bedroom set. (in Ohio)

Unfortunately they did not make it on Paul's Shuttle to Atlanta and are still sitting in my parents basement. 

I loved the square-ness of these but I do NOT love the fabric.  (It's not the flame stitch so much as the green and pink together) 

 I envision these beauties in this fabric.

Right? Right??

ANNNNNND.....Just for shits and giggles, let's take a look at a pair of these on 1st Dibs.

 Oh that is so satisfying, isn't it?  (ridiculous as that price is ha)

I'll try and do more of these posts since I am ALWAYS finding deals.
Which do you think is my best score???  Do you even like ANYTHING that I posted?? LOL
Oh well, to each his own.  I love what I love and hopefully once all these things are arranged in my house, you will see too that they are AWESOME!!! 

NINETEEN MONTHS {Paloma's Monthly Photo}

When you turned 18 months, I thought, "she is not saying much" but It is crazy mami, in the last couple weeks you have started spitting out words!  ( I will compile for next month!)

You  say  "OH" for "No" and firmly let us no you don't approve by shaking your finger back and forth.

You love to jump and you are climbing on everything.  There is no doubt in my mind that you will be just as daring as your hermanos.

You are a good sleeper,  but you've been cutting some HUGE molars and it has woken you up at night.  You don't want anything but one minute of comfort chi-chi and you are back to sleep.

Oh yes.  You still love/want chi-chi and I don't see any signs of that waning. Your mami actually doesn't mind at all, but I do see a struggle in the near future.  I have a "loose" goal to wean you this next month [before we head out to San Diego]  but sometimes I think....Why do today what you can do tomorrow?  I don't like setting myself up for failure, so I will set our ABSOLUTE cut off at 2 years. LOL

You have the sweetest personality and the cutest pucker queuing everyone its time to kiss.
Te quiero mucho.
mami

Our House: FINALLY- Paint Goes On!!

Ok, well we have been in our house for a total of SEVEN months now and I have not posted anything house related here on the ol' bloggy blog..  You might think you have a lot to catch up on, but noooooo....oh no.  Since we moved in a just a few weeks before the Christmas lights started up last year, we didn't get anything done.  

I lied.  One thing.

Ernesto whipped up these bunk beds for the boys.  I showed him a picture for inspiration and he ran with it. God I love having a handy husband.  

Obviously not finished here.  There is a bottom bunk, and the ladder is on the short end of the bed.  Of course now they sit unpainted (or stained?) in an unpainted room.  Turning this space into a fun and functional place for the boys is on "the list" of things to tackle this Summer.

Ok, maybe one more thing happened before lighting season.  Painting the ceiling and beams.  This was a job we actually hired out, something not too common for us.  It was going to be a tedious job though with caulking all the boards; it sounded overwhelming.  They are tongue and groove, but over the years, cracks have emerged and I feared it would look "Shabby Chic" with cracks.   

Put a ladder anywhere near this one (and the other boy for that matter) and they will climb. 
 "Ok, paint one board."

For the beams we sampled a couple colors.  I LOVED SW Urbane Bronze (left below) but thought maybe I would put another color (more brown) next to it for comparison.  Status brown (right) looked like poop.

Urbane Bronze is tricky to describe.  It's kind of charcoal-ish but with a lot of brown.  I didn't want it to look gray, and I don't think it does.  It looks nice against the white, not stark. (See bad iphoto below)

Once the the holidays were over and we had a month to recoup (ie: sit around and do nothing!), we got to painting. One of our lighting guys who has been working with us forever is a professional painter (in the off season) so we booked him to get things rolling.  Ernesto painted WITH him most days.  

Having him show up everyday at 10am was just what we needed to motivate us.  A plan!

I went with a white paint everywhere and the transformation was instant and BEAUTIFUL!  Good bye horrible tan paint everywhere! Walls, ceilings, and BEAMS!? UGH! No no no!

You would think white is simple but on the contrare..... I had a horrible time deciding.

I am not a color expert, nor was I SUPER worried about all this "undertone" business, but just google "choosing a white paint" and your head will start to spin.  The more you look at pinterest and the like, the more confused you will be.

Under pressure (painter was at our house waiting for paint color) I chose Sherwin Williams Pure White for the ceilings. It was the whitest white  of alllll my samples.

Ok don't go picking any paint colors for yourself based on this horrible picture, but you can notice the color undertones easily.

It took me several days to decide on the adjacent wall color.  I wanted to just say "screw it, paint everything Pure White."  But I kept feeling like it would be too stark.. This is my first time going white and I was confused and second guessing.  On a side note, I remember yeeeears ago saying that I would NEVER paint my walls white. "With so many good colors WHY would I pick white?"

Moral: never say never)

 SW Alabaster kept coming up as a softer white and color match to the ever-popular BM White Dove.  As soon as the first wall was done, I new I had made the right decision. Whew!

A little difficult to see here [in my iPhone pics]  but there is a little contrast with the two whites and I am really digging it.  Needless to say, the house was a little disheveled during the process, but I am so happy with the results. (I will have to get better pics to reeeeally show you.)

I had a gallon of SW Shoji White (see sample above) on hand because I thought that was "the one" after seeing it on a blog that I love.  Yep, I just went and bought a gallon.  Rookie mistake. 

Anyhoo, although not the right shade of white for our living areas, it really was not a mistake.  This warm white is very nice and perfect in Paloma's room.  The cutting in was not finished here, but you can see the difference from the tan paint, and it's much better.

I have a vintage Persian in there with bright pinks and some great colorful art (yet to be hung) and this is the perfect neutral backdrop. 

Also, remember the fabulous Craigslisted armoire I scored and painted turquoise (when I was pregnant with Mateo!)??  Well, it has a new life.  She is now a beautiful shade of pink. SW Koral Kicks to be exact.  This peachy-coraly-pink gives a subtle pop against the soft white walls, and it's not sugary sweet.

I LOVE it.  It's not quite finished.  Painting those front cutouts is time consuming to say the least.  Yes, it's taking me MONTHS to get to all of them. Whew!

The only wall with COLOR upstairs is our bedroom and we only painted the wall behind the bed. (the tallest wall)   I wanted to have some color opposite all the windows.  I debated again with several swatches on my walls.

I was really inspired by a couple catalogs. Both West Elm and Cb2 were showing dark teal and I was loving it.  I bought several samples, throwing in some greens because I was also considering something forest-y.


I ended up with Ben Moore's Oasis Blue. (top right color in photo above)

It is beautiful!  

Before the wood headboard didn't stand out at all.  

Ok, lighting has everything to do with that in this pic, but.....still, you get the point. 

I LOVE how it turned out! Very rich but not super dramatic.  Now, wood headboard pops.

So obviously you need a whole bedroom shot, but Im not ready for that.  Take this little sneak peak (frog tape and all) for now, and know that a full reveal will come!

A 50th Anniversary Party and Some Easter Eggs!!

50 YEARS!!!

This is impressive, right?  It had to be celebrated.  We are all so happy that my parents have kept their vows for so long.  Thick or thin, happy or sad, sickness and in health - they have set a great example of what a loving marriage can be.  

It was time to celebrate.

 Yep.  My sister threw together this cute little invitation and the plan was set.

We had an idea to throw together a "quick" video.  It was definitely a team effort.  Everyone sent in a short clip and I used imovie to piece it all together.

To make sure we had everything finished, Paloma and I flew up a day earlier than the boys.  My sister picked us up (instead of Paul's Shuttle-gasp!) and we stayed at her house that night. We wanted to sit down with Bill and brainstorm.  We were up late laughing, and it wasn't until my siblings went to bed that I really got anywhere on the video. Ha!  Ugh and when Paloma woke up at 7, I was pretty groggy.

BUT! Like everything I do, it all came together at the last minute. Oh the pressure!

The song that came to mind right away for us was Willie Nelson's "You Were Always on my Mind."  My dad LOVES that song, and LOOOOOVES to sing it!  The video ended up being over 12 minutes long and was a big hit!  Laughing and crying from the happy couple, which is a win in my book!

Feel free to watch the finished video. And note, I am not a professional producer. LOL.

 If you don't have time for the whole video, please just take a couple minutes to watch the intro by

If you don't want to take the time to watch this (I totally understand!) you MUST at least see the intro by WIllie Nelson himself my brother Brrrian .  He used Snapchat to make his face look like Willie Nelson and it is CRAZY FUNNY!  God I love him!

Unfortunately he and my other brother Tim weren't able to make it to Ohio, but everyone sent in a little something to say on the video and it was touching (to say the least!).  My parents said it was the best video (and party) ever!

They were totally surprised too.  They just figured it would be our immediate family because it was Easter weekend, but all of their friends and family showed up and it was a wonderful evening!

These aren't the best pictures (quality) but I hope I captured a glimpse of everyone there!  It was a beautiful day and there were a bunch of kids....luckily all outside playing soccer and running around! 

CUT TO  6  HOURS PRE-PARTY.....

We colored Easter eggs super early.  My mom had 4 DOZEN to color.  ha!  

These guys were happy to color the eggs and crack most of them while doing so.  Seriously probably half. 

I stepped out of the shower that morning and this was going on outside.  Noooooooooooo!

Mateo had been saying he wanted a buzz cut and I had been ignoring him changing the subject, hoping he would forget.  ha.  Well this boy doesn't forget and his papi listened.

I was not pleased (initially).  Of course I knew he would look cute with any hair...or no hair at all.  It's just I always love when his hair gets shaggy and feel a little sad to see it go (usually 2x per year).  But yes, I like it.  He looks super cute!

What? Marcelo's hair?  You noticed his self-cut?   Ugh right before the party where we saw lots of people we haven't see for a long time.  

Somehow he still managed to look cute as ever.  When I asked him why he cut his hair (he snuck the scissors to the side of the house to snip) he said "I wanted to put my hair in grandma's garden so the deer won't eat her flowers."  (something my mom actually does)

Oh that face kills me.  #sobiased

Also, this girl.

Right? Oh my. This dress. (thanks Beth for the perfect anniversary attire!)

Back to the party..... since there were a bunch of kids, an Easter egg hunt ensued.  A BUNCHHHH of eggs on the ground.

 By the way. do you see how many plastic eggs there are in the trees?  This is just two of them...there were a few more. (hundreds of eggs!)  This is one of the reasons why my mom is #1.  (Also, why I will never measure up.  cry cry cry)

 Paloma got the jist of the egg hunting quickly and had a good 'ol time filling up her basket.

 She actually said egg for the first time right here.....
Easter Sunday included an outfit change by these fashion bugs. ...but same game with the eggs.

It was a beautiful weekend and everyone wanted to enjoy the outdoors. We actually ate outside on the PORCH!  

The kids found their Easter baskets earlyyyyyyyy.  The excitement was fun to watch/hear.  (Mateo's was hanging in the laundry room, Marcelo's in the coat closet and Paloma's behind a chair)  And the candy was pretty much gone instantly.

It is a wonder how we were able to have these boys actually stop for a split second with that sugar high and get a family photo. 

 ALSO. STOP IT with this video mami!  I die of cuteness overload!

Meanwhile back at my house, we colored eggs for a tree centerpiece that has been making me happy all month!

I hope you guys had a great Easter weekend too!

EIGHTEEN MONTHS {Paloma's Monthly Photo}