Neat Finds

As it turns out, Habitat for Humanity has a neat little store of leftover and overstocked home items from building houses. It’s called the Re-Store; it’s kind of a Salvation Army meets Home Depot...? Tons of helpful stuff, they have a plethora of couches and light fixtures and blinds and doors and painting supplies and light switches and basically everything we need at the moment!

We found this cute little guy there, and it has now replaced one of the 2 fluorescent lights in our bedroom.

(Did I mention that 98% of the lighting in our house are fluorescents? Yeah.)

We also found (most of) a ceiling fan for $15 there, it’s only missing one of the bulbs and a mounting bracket (which we found at Lowe’s for 8 bucks). That’s replacing the last fluorescent, hopefully soon...

We’re definitely going to be frequenting the Re-Store, we still need couches and blinds (so many blinds) and a door for one of the rooms that is now occupied by a roommate... it’s a good thing he’s such a heavy sleeper.

We were actually given a door by a neighbor of my in-laws, but it ended up being 3 inches shy of the doorframe’s width. It would’ve been a total loss, but after looking at it sitting in our hallway for a few days, I realized that it could actually make a pretty cute headboard for our bed. I’m not sure how hard that will be, but I’m willing to try to take it on! If there are tips or tricks for this that I’m unaware of, I’d love to know.

Along with all of these restoration projects is our windows. Goodness gracious, some of these old guys need some help. They’re original, meaning they’re all nearly 100 years old, and they show it! They all have the little old latches that were apparently quite the rage in early 20th-century Ogden. They open on hinges, have very fragile, even crumbling wood, and are all single-pane. Because of this, our bedroom comes equipped with a second set of storm windows on the outside of these hinged wooden ones, which require a blood sacrifice and a prayer to open. Some of them have trouble staying open, and some don’t even open at all. One of the wooden hinge-windows is actually nailed shut, because next to it is a doorframe that was added over the edge of the window, so that it can’t open either. Add all of this to the fact that our bedroom is positioned higher than any other floor in the house (it has 4 split levels), and you just might be able to understand how hot this room gets.

And it’s only January...