Fabric and Frugality

Talk about a lot of impact for very little money!  Brennan's room is coming along, and I made three significant additions this week for less than $75!  

First, I bought the plain navy blue curtain panels at Wal-Mart, on sale for $16 (for the set, not each panel).  Then, I bought some cool plaid fabric to jazz them up and coordinate them with the bedding.  The plaid fabric plus the rod and hardware all came to $27 at JoAnn Fabrics, thanks to their crazy Fourth of July sale and some coupons. The strip of red fabric is the same fabric I used to make the bed skirt.  The best part of these curtains?  They're dark and cause Brennan to sleep almost an hour later every morning! I may still line them someday so they look less cheap, but for now they are doing the job, and all to the tune of about $45.

For the bed skirt, I decided to cut up some red twill curtains I had made for our family room in Dallas.  When I had made them as curtains, the rod pocket was too small and it was impossible to move the curtains across the rod.  So, I didn't feel bad repurposing them. They were just in a storage box, since I only had two panels and our living room here has six windows.  Total cost for the bed skirt? Free!

The barn star was so lucky.  A good barn star isn't usually cheap and can be hard to find on sale, so I was pretty ecstatic when I found one at Cracker Barrel in their country store for $19.99.  It was really ugly - painted red, silver, and blue for the Fourth of July, but I knew that a can of spray paint could do wonders.  I wanted to wait and see if the star would go on sale after the holiday, so I went in on the 5th and hit pay dirt.  $11.99 plus tax!!  I headed straight to Michael's where I used a 40% off coupon on a can of red spray paint, making the whole barn star about $18 including tax!

So there you have it. I now need to finish the photo art (I took Sheli's suggestion...stay tuned!), purchase a new lamp, and possibly hang a bulletin board (Great idea, Sara!).  I also want to get extra clutter out of the room, like the big red car that Brennan doesn't use anymore, and I want to raise the red airplane.  The view of that right corner of the room annoys me because it's too busy. My goal is still to finish this room before August 1st so I can work on the nursery. (I am in major "nesting mode" and time is ticking!)  However, the fact that the room isn't done doesn't seem to bother Brennan. He loves playing in there now!