DIY Chevron Metal Locker & New Furniture

Slowly but surely, we are starting to furnish our new home. We are decorating this home with the same mentality we decorated the last house, slow and steady. As we find pieces we can't live without that are prices we can't pass up, we buy.

Over time, this is proving to not only be an awesomely affordable method, but we are finding such unique pieces. Our home is such a blend of new and antique in and out...it really inspires me to find even more amazing pieces to put here.

This summer when we knew we would be moving in the fall, we started keeping our eyes peeled at garage and estate sales for anything we felt was special.

Somehow, this locker spoke to me. And I needed it. Also, it was $5.

Look at how sweet and imperfect it is?! How could I say no, especially for $5.

Well, it moved with us and has sat in our garage for months and finally Hubs took the bull by the horns and told me it's time to do something with that locker.

We desperately needed a solution for our toy/book overflow in the family room and this turned out to be the perfect vessel for those items.

Hubs had two weeks off of work around Christmas and New Year's so he worked like a dog and gave our cheap old locker a whole new life. All I did was pick paint and say "I think I want chevron stripes on the front" (which, I realized I"m kind of into chevron right now since I just bought LW chevron curtains but whatever. I'm on-trend, right?!) and Hubs took care of the rest. I am THRILLED with the result and cannot believe how adorable it looks. Plus, it's fully functional for our book storage in the family room. Did you hear me?! I said it's STYLISH, FUNCTIONAL and was AFFORDABLE. That's like, jackpot. Thank you, Hubs. You are the champion of all champions.

Now, this our family room after we organized the books in the locker and moved a majority of the toys into their new home, the living room:

So much nicer!! And cleaner. It's easy to just turn the light off after bed time in the living room and not need to look at the mess. When all the toys were in the family room it felt so claustrophobic. If I didn't pick them up, it was always a mess I had to overlook to watch TV. Now, I just have to toss a few books into the locker after bedtime and I use that teal bucket on the fireplace as overflow toy storage. So if any toys from the living room make their way into the family room, they go in that bucket. It's great!

And - you can see in that photo of the family room that we bought a new chair! We have a Macy's furniture clearance store about 4 miles from our house and we stalk it. Frequently. That beautiful little chair (which I commonly post on Instagram from) Was $150. It reclines and is unbelievably comfortable! It's the perfect chair for pregnancy, too because it's really supportive through my lower back. Such a beautiful thing.

Today, we bit the bullet and bought a couch we'd been stalking for months. We fell in love when we first saw it buying our chair, but didn't want to pay the price they had it marked as. Just by having patience for a few months, we saved $200 on the couch. Meet our $400 little number, which may look familiar :)

Recognize that? It's the big-brother couch to our little yellow $300 couch from the old house. Sure, it's green instead of yellow but we have never shied away from color. Eventually the little yellow couch will move into the new house and sit across this green guy in our formal living room. Here is a reminder;

We are hoping to find an occasional chair in a bold, fun print to seat adjacent to these couches in our living room along with our favorite estate sale find to date, our vintage chest coffee table. You can see that here, in one of our listing photos (with the cute yellow couch) in the old house:

And here from an older post:

See what I mean? Vintage and modern, all in one space. It makes my heart go pitter-patter.

The new house is slowly starting come together more and more! It's becoming more "us" all the time, which I love.

Eventually, the living room will be an "adult" space for entertaining and the toys will all migrate downstairs but for now, while we have little to no furniture, LW gets to run wild in there with all of his toys. With me working from home, it works really well. LW isn't big enough yet to play in the basement alone and I surely don't want to work downstairs all day anyway. This way we both get to enjoy all the natural light this house allows during the day and at night I don't have to look at toys and mess.

One more new chair recently came home with us, courtesy of a friend who I love buying hand-me-downs from. I've been wanting one of the Pottery Barn Kids Anywhere Chairs for LW for a while, and she happened to have one to unload. A simple patch over the name and we will be golden :) Or, I may try to find a slipcover for that chair with his name on it in a color that works a little more cohesively in our family room space (greens and browns). We'll see what kind of bargains I fall into.

LW clearly loves it, regardless of what name is on it or what color it is.