Tuesday, October 26, 2010

Distressed

Mexican furniture has become our favorite style. It has an old world, rustic look which is, unfortunately, not cheap. This has prompted some creativity on our part. We bought a $30 bookshelf on Craigslist that was in descent shape but a little worn and NOT pretty. Distressed furniture is a staple of Mexican style and something that really isn't that hard to do. We used some of our left over paint and did bright colors with a blue undercoat on the edges and faces. I used a fine grain sand paper and some paint thinner and rubbed some of the green overcoat off and voila!

Sunday, October 17, 2010

Time to blog

When I moved back to the USA I thought I would be blogging one interview after another and one DIY project after the next, but I've had no interviews and I haven't completed one of my DIY's!...but you can only go so long before your blog gets shut down from inactivity so I thought I'd better say something. Finding work has been more difficult than predicted. I haven't gotten desperate...yet, probably because we enjoy being in Tucson so much that it is hard to rush out of here, but the money will run out eventually and it would be good to check out of here before that happens.

As you've seen from Dana, we've been remodeling our kitchen. Originally, we were getting ideas from one of the kitchen stores in town regarding new cabinets and counters and the estimate was well over $10,000. Coincidentally (if there is such a thing), Ryan and Yun took us to a rustic Mexican furniture store where we saw punched copper inserts for cabinets. That was the beginning of the end of the idea of getting a "new" kitchen. Copper is quite expensive and difficult to find in the sizes we needed and tin is apparently unavailable North of Mexico so after MUCH searching we decided to use aluminum...cheap! The next phase was to find a way to "age" the aluminum so it didn't look like the inside of a soda can...headache! Finally we found a way to spray paint the inserts to make them look like tin and away we went, making designs and punching them in. This is what we came up with.
















Needless to say it was not as easy as we had anticipated, but it was phase one of our remodeling project completed.