Girl In Gold Boots

So the general rule is 5 days sitting atop a trash can = free stuff, right?

Our neighbors (who are either moving out or in, I can never tell) left this little beauty out amidst their refuse. For nearly a week.  I kept eying it and their house, hoping I'd catch someone outside and be able to ask if they were indeed getting rid of what seemed to be a perfectly good item.  T'would be silly to simply knock on their door and ask, right?  I get over anxious about the weirdest things.

  

As my husband is in charge of taking the pups out for their evening business, he waited until dark and snagged it.  So, it's technically pilfered, but if it was being thrown out its okay, right?  RIGHT???

Although I recognized it as a book stand, I'd never seen one with the angled lookit-my-spine shelf before.  I nearly choked on my summer salad when I looked for a similar item online and found this one, retailing for the low low price of over a grand.  *cough*  Uhhh, whut.

Imagine my surprise when I flipped the thing over to remove the felt pads that were making it wibbly wobbly:

Ethan Allen! Quality furniture! Huzzah!

Now it's in perfectly good shape and has a nice finish to it, but you know I can't let sleeping furniture lie.  This thing needed some COLOR.     

                   

Ey. Ey gurl.

Spray paint is my favorite. :)

Digging through the boxes in our cluttered garage, I found my gold spray paint from my MST3K Crow costume and decided to give this odd little item some classy feet.  Meet the Girl in Gold Boots:

My one conundrum was determining where it should go. Should I relinquish it to the boys for their game guide collections?  Stash my cookbooks on it near the kitchen?  Fill it with bathroom reading material?  So far it's just occupying the empty transitional space between the living and dining rooms until I get nice hardbound copies of the Harry Potter collection.  :)

Time and Realtive Doors in Spaces

If you follow my other blog or my work on Unreality, you already know about our break-in.  Let me splain - no, there is too much, lemme sum up.  Matt and I were both sick for a week, and the day we returned to work, our house was robbed. You can read about our exploits in recovering some of our pilfered belongings here, but there was more to be done than simply replacing electronics.

When the punk ass bitches fine upstanding gentlemen kicked in our door, they left a gaping hole in the drywall from the doorknob and tore the damn thing off the frame.  The door was locked, but that made no difference to their size 13 shit-kickers.

Our front door before. Blah, but intact.

See that pretty mostly glass door?  Yeah, the glass held, the frame didn't.  It was toast.  Our landlord and neighbor patched it up with plywood for the night and the next day replaced it with this sturdier, yet non-matching, equivalent.

Look at this door. Isn't it neat. It doesn't match and it isn't complete.

Hey, I know beggars can't be choosers.  And it didn't bother me (too much).  Until about 6 months had passed and my OCD and nesting tendencies got the better of me - I had to do something about it.  But painting the door wasn't going to be enough.  I didn't want to simply match it to the drab brown sidelights again.  Pinterest and Tardis blue to the rescue.

Project start - supplies at the ready.

I began by painting the trim and sidelights an eggshell white.  It was an immediate improvement, but I wasn't about to stop there.  Oh, and it took 80 gajillion coats to cover up the poop brown.  It's an actual equation.  If z + y = x , where poop brown = z and white paint = y, solve for x. (Hint - it's 80 gajillion).

A little bit further now...

I had a hard time deciding between a red or blue front door.  Ultimately blue won out due to the reddish tiles on the front stoop and my attempt to not clash.  I didn't even realize it resembled a police box until someone pointed it out, but all the more reason to love it.

It's bigger on the inside.

Sexy.

 It gives me something I'm happy to come home to every day. And no, a sonic screwdriver won't work on it - it's made of wood.

Hello, Sweetie.