Moved In. Mostly.*

Well, we got moved in last Sunday and the builder/renovation guy finished the bathroom on Monday.** Though we have been unpacking this week (along with doing other random stuff like getting our recycling bin and the car window stickers that allow us to park in our neighborhood), we are still surrounded by boxes and living in chaos. Yesterday afternoon we hit up some retail stores and two thrift stores to try to find curtains, curtain rods, a bathroom mirror, armoire, medicine cabinet, etc.*** We had some great success on finding items on our list (and a few surprises not on our list!) but we still need to look at some other thrift stores for the remaining missing things.

One of the most satisfying deals from yesterday was our new bathroom mirror. We first looked at Canadian Tire and only saw a couple standard medicine cabinet options that were considerably more than we wanted to spend. Then we checked out Winners, which is like a Marshalls, and they had a good, large mirror with a black frame. However, we want a white frame since our new bathroom is very white and we are enjoying the breezy, airy feeling that white on white creates. So we were going to buy it and paint the frame white, but it was $39, which still seemed quite expensive to us, though I guess it is probably a decent price for a 33 1/2'' x 33 1/2'' mirror. But since we were not crazy about it, we decided to wait and check a couple more thrift stores before re-considering buying that one, and amazingly....our very next stop was a thrift store that had one mirror. A 31'' x 31'' mirror with a white frame.**** It had a couple stickers on it as it seemed to be previously owned by a teenage girl, but they came off with zero sticky residue. (I think they were perhaps static cling stickers?) So... a large, good condition mirror for only $5.99. Yay!

We ended our day with a sense of victory at finding good deals on quality items and the excitement of re-purposing discarded things to give them a second life.***** This makes me quite happy.

*Well....not our couch, chair, and dishwasher which are in the basement of S's dad's home.
**Well, I don't call it finished, but the guy said he is finished. There are some paint places he missed and one of our formerly yellow walls had a door ripped out and new wall added, so now the former door area is covered with white plaster stuff and not yellow paint, so we have some painting to do, I guess...? S also repaired the door which the guy did not hang very well.
***Yep, no mirror or medicine cabinet above the sink was put in during the bathroom renovation. Isn't that pretty standard?? Maybe it was forgotten? And I had to ask specifically about the shower curtain rod, because there was no rod. The guy brought a rod in on Monday.
****And oddly enough, this size is actually better than the other size would have been anyways, due to the size of the sink. I plan on eventually repainting it white to get the crisp white-white color we want, but repainting white on top of white will be much easier than on top of black.
*****We only bought a couple things at the retail stores. Like the plug thing for the dryer and the pull chains for the fan. We found almost everything at the thrift stores....including two nice wood curtain rods.