Thrift Shop Christmas

I have been spending a little time trying to get the house ready for Christmas. With four weeks to go until visitors descend, the clock is ticking.  As we don't have much money this year, I am going to be making a lot of gifts for people.  I am sure this will turn out fine, but I am worried about how long it is going to take me, as there is going to be quite a lot of work involved.  It would certainly be a whole lot easier to sit down with a large glass of wine and spend a load of money on the internet!  But hopefully my hand made gifts will make a welcome surprise.

By the way, you may remember the birthday card I made for my nephew, LJ, along with the magician's magic trick cards?  Well it turns out that he loves both of them!  He was really impressed that I had spent so much time and effort on his Mario card and has been practising his magic tricks in time to impress the family over the Christmas holidays!  I am so pleased! 

Anyway, back to Christmas.  Last year we didn't have enough coffee tables for everyone's drinks and nibbles and I had to borrow my brother's set.  That would be okay, except he lives three hours drive away and had to bundle them in his car along with his gifts and travel bag, so not ideal.

As luck would have it, the other day JW and I were walking past a charity shop, when JW spotted a cracking coffee table for the princely some of £5!  We promptly bought it and took it home, where I gave it a clean up and new coat of varnish and it now looks as good as new.  It is a really solid piece of furniture, so hopefully it will last a long time.  And we can feel a bit smug as we have done our bit for the environment and supported a charity at the same time.

The other thing I have managed to do is re-pot some of my poor house plants.  I managed to do this while only spending £5 on a bag of compost.  For the pots I needed, I salvaged and reused and re-jigged ones that I already had.  One that I am particularly pleased with, was a bog-standard black plastic pot, which I then sprayed silver with some spray paint that I had left over from a previous project:

Before

After - The one on the right, looking nice.