Yay! Productivity!

So, it would seem that in order to have a day of "getting sh*t done", I need to take a day off work.

I stayed at my parents' last night to dog sit, so today I am taking care of some things that are easier to do from their house as well as a few things at home!

1: Wash my car.

Didn't take any before pictures of this because it was gross...and I didn't think of it.
Yesterday my big sister told me that when she saw my car outside, she was tempted to write "wash me" on it. While my car was dirty, it didn't exactly have the layer of grossness required to legibly write "wash me", unless you somehow managed to write in the dog saliva on the inside of the back windows.
I scrubbed (and even Windexed parts of) my car to near perfect cleanliness. The paint needs some touch ups and wax, but those are not in the cards anytime soon. Well, maybe the wax.

I hoped to get back outside and vacuum out all the dog hair in the back seat, but since it got pretty hot today and I didn't want to stay at my parents well into the evening, this will have to wait until another day.

2: Paint my grandma's old mirror

I don't remember how long ago, my grandma gave me this awesome old mirror to put up in my bedroom. It's gold and doesn't really go with anything, but I like to have a kind of funky design aesthetic, so I put it up.
Almost 2 years ago, I officially moved out of my parent's house, so it was time to get pretty much everything out of there. I didn't have a place for the mirror at the time, so it stayed (I still have a lot of stuff in my old closet still too).
Last October, Tim and I bought our own place and we've been in a pretty constant state of mild renovation ever since. The living room was the biggest project since it took over a month and forced us to use the dining room for all things "living". 
It's still a work in progress, but we're onto minor details now, like the mirror. ;)
We were talking about putting a mirror up on the wall facing the front doors, and maybe adding some hooks to the wall there in case we needed to hang something. After a few trips to Target, Home Goods and Tuesday Morning with no luck, my mom proposed that we use the old gold mirror from my room and just paint it white.
She gave us the idea probably about a month ago, and today around 11am, I finally go to it.
Taping newspaper down to protect the glass was a paint in the arse. It's harder than taping for regular painting, because how are you gonna go back in with spray paint and touch it up? So I spent a good half hour to 45 mins just taping the damn thing.
After that, it was pretty smooth sailing. I discovered that you should give detailed pieces a good once-over for large chunks of fuzz and dust before you start painting, but that took about 10 minutes to remedy and I was back on track. Then over the next hour, I'd go back out and do another coat or some touch ups here and there, and then (like magic) it was done.
After I took off the newspaper, I noticed that I hadn't done a perfect job projecting the glass from the spray paint, so I had to go in with an exacto knife and carefully scrape the white off the mirror.
And then I packed it in the car and took it home to hang. :)


Taping down the newspaper.

 

Panda helped

First coat of paint

White paint on the mirror :(

Happily in place

3: Put up the tie-back knobs

A couple weeks ago, I found these cute butterfly knobs for $2.99 each at Anthropologie. I've been meaning to put them up this whole time, but we didn't have the right screws and we didn't have tie-backs yet anyway.
Last weekend we finally got around to picking up some tie-backs and the right screws, so I decided now was the time to get these things up! It took a whole 15 minutes to do all three of them...and they're all the same, so you don't need the whole process.
Here are some pictures:

And - because I realized I'd forgotten most of what happened in the seventh installment of Harry Potter as I walked in to the movie theatre for 7; part 1, I also read a handful of pages from HP7 while laying out by the pool. It was lovely.

Happy Weekend!