Frugal Fri...er, Saturday

I've been feeling a little uninspired for Frugal Friday lately - it's hard to feel frugal when you see dollar signs racking up above the heads of your construction crew. Tom participated in a 5k run this morning, so Clara and I hit a few nearby yard sales while he ran. As I mentioned before, I've been thinking a lot about the fixtures and finishes for the second bathroom. Pretty, affordable, and appropriate is apparently hard to come by in a new light fixture. I found several options and wasn't crazy about the prices, but I would have ponied up the dough anyway. These were the contenders, just to give you an idea of what I was going for:

Didn't like the chrome, and it was probably too mod for the house anyway. Sparkly and pretty, though.
$80.36

Top contender because of its price. Simple but appropriate.
$41.17

Probably my favorite aesthetically, but the most expensive and therefore least likely.

$96.76

As luck would have it, the second garage sale of the morning had a light fixture that I scooped up for $4. Of course it's used and not exactly like any of the options that I posted above, but I'm happy with the purchase.


I'll have to see how it looks in the space before I do anything to it, but I'll probably tone down the brighter brass with a little Rub n Buff. So the Frugal Friday tip (I know it took long enough for me to get to it) is to be flexible. Even if something isn't an exact replica of what you have in mind, it can still be great and save you money in the process! (And I bet you thought the tip would be to go to garage sales!)

Attic, revisited

This is what our attic room looked like a few days ago:

And this is what it looks like today:


And the other side:


We decided to have the hired help do this work since I'm unable to haul heavy OSB upstairs, and my ability to climb into the attic is diminishing daily. While they were measuring and marking and cutting and attaching the studs, I worked on hanging insulation and attaching metal plates between the new studs and the old roof framing.

The dark wooden post in the last picture could not be removed, so we had to angle the wall to avoid it. (If we had been able to take it out, we would have built a bench seat over the ductwork.) From there, it goes straight back to meet the other wall at 90 degrees. It'll be a trick to frame that angled portion (attaching it to the roof framing, specifically), but fortunately it's not going to be my brain cells grinding together to figure it out.