So last week, I posted the run down of the swagger wagon clean out… Then within a few days, our daughter had a massive puke fest on the way home from church. Good times.

Then a couple of days ago, I shared the front porch freshen up, including some mulch love for the front garden… And within twenty minutes of completion, the sunny skies disappeared, and a freak, brief hailstorm rained down some golf ball-sized craziness in our neighborhood, pummeling the hydrangeas and phlox, and scattering the mulch.

I’ve never experienced anything like it before. I think we received more frozen precipitation in those few minutes than we had all winter.

Umm… Is somebody trying to tell me something??

These are the moments when I am particularly thankful I’m not superstitious or a karma person. If I were, I wouldn’t dare share the project I have planned for this weekend for fear of what could go awry!

But here’s the schpill:

I’ve been looking for a china cabinet for months, mostly on CraigsList. I wanted one the same style as our daughter’s dresser (above), classic and curvy with lovely feet. I had a pretty limited budget, like next to nothing, but I was holding out for the right one to refinish.

I started to settle at one point when I spotted a free one on CraigsList, but when my husband brought it home, it was in pretty rough shape… It wasn’t the style or size I was looking for… And it had been left outside for who knows how long… And my husband and friend had actually picked a lot of debris and pine needles out of it before loading it onto our friend’s truck… And it was sun damaged… And a little water damaged… And a pane of glass was missing… And one of the doors was broken and falling off…

And actually, these might not have been insurmountable hurdles for a crafty refinishing girl like myself (right??)… but my sweet husband gently said that if this was going in our home, we should really do it right. And I’m so glad he did.

I was disappointed, but I had to agree.

Dejected, I trudged over to my laptop to check CraigsList one last time.

And there she was in all her [potential] glory. The exact piece I wanted.

But unfortunately there was no price. So I didn’t know if the seller was hoping for a few bucks or a thousand. There was no haggling starting point. But I sent the seller my best offer and added that this is the exact style I’ve been looking for, that I think it’s lovely, and that I’d give it a loving home if mine were the winning bid…

…and she accepted! Huzzah!

Meanwhile, in other [related] news, we here at CampClem–or beige land as I sometimes think of it–are trying to inject a little color into our Neutral McNeutralson family room.

I put my vast design school experience and knowledge [read: hours of watching HGTV] to use creating a polyvore idea board to try to identify what I love. I gravitate towards a weathered beach cottage look.

I added a little saturated aqua color to my DIY herb trough.

And I added some more muted aqua blues in my fence plank word art piece.

Then this week I fell in love with the fabric I used for the stool slip cover. And I draped the extra bit of fabric over a sofa cushion to live with it for a day or two and see if my husband also liked it for a couple of updated throw pillows on the sofa.

Well, he loves it. [He loves it! Yippee!] So I went ahead and shot for the gold. I told him I’d love to paint the china cabinet the blue from the fabric. [That would be a pretty bold move for us here in the land of neutrals!]

And he went for it! Woohoo! [Does it make us hopelessly nerdy that we’re thinking of this as a bit of an adventure?]

Since Lowe’s couldn’t do an exact color match on the fabric (because it is not solid but woven with lots of light & dark variations), I chose three colors that “went” and brought them home to try.

I painted three large swatches onto a thin of scrap plywood. I *love* to do this because not only is it cheap (like under $3 each), but doing the samples lets me see the color in a larger area in the right light (so the board is leaning up against my dining room wall now where the china cabinet is going). I’d love to know which blue you’d go with!

So that’s what I’ll be doing tomorrow… You know, between wrangling three kids, preparing meals, Li’l Bro’s soccer game, laundry, and Big Bro’s baseball game, etc., etc., etc… Wish me luck! Wheeeeee!

So, do you have any big projects planned for this weekend? Do tell!

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*(And FYI, rather than add links here at the end, I’ve made several of the pictures in this post into links to their original posts in case you want to see more on those projects…)