Rainy day retail therapy

So, it rained the entire first week of the school holidays. In order to stay sane we hit the shops and scoped out all the big toy sales so I could sneak back later and have it all stashed away for Christmas and birthdays. And a few little things came home with us. The crochet apple cushion I had been coveting for a while, realized it would take me all year to do myself, and it was half price at Adairs Kids.

 Would you believe that wonderful wooden tea seat complete with tray was only $12 at Kmart? Miss Liongirl traded several weeks of marbles for that one (I am happy she has moved on from trading her marbles at the Aquarium shop for extremely tacky pink fishtank ornaments).

 Roboboy is still trading for fish. Every few weeks he has enough marbles for a new guppy- I think my love of vintage is rubbing off on him, the latest fish is called "Retro" cause of his groovy colour scheme. We are pleased that four months on, this reward strategy is still highly motivating the kids to behave well.

And I was obviously inspired by that tea tray because look what came home for me. I only own two coats, hard to justify more in Brisbane but it was more than half price and it is probably the prettiest thing I own. About five years ago I tried on one of her coats in a red cherry blossom print and have regretted not buying it ever since.

Miss Liongirl was quite smitten by the ballerina lining, I think she will be borrowing this one in a few years.

And we even managed to shop up a storm for Betsy. Not quite so glamorous to get your garments from the demolition yard but every girl needs quality flooring. Betsy has original wide honey coloured pine tongue and groove flooring throughout most of the house. In a small section of our lounge room the boards change to a narrow hardwood. Below is the worst section of join in the house, yep that's the ground you can see through that hole. Gorgeous wide pine on the right, non specific pale hardwood on the left.

We would probably have left these mismatched boards except that we are extending the lounge out a further metre and would have then had three floorboard changes in the one room and new pine is a very pale yellow colour that would stand out in a dramatic and potentially very ugly way. We also don't want to stain as we love that original honey colour that you only find in very old timber floors. So the only thing to do was to find some new old floorboards to match. And of course Betsy has a very unusual width board of 138 mm when most old boards were 150mm. We were super excited to find quite a large stash at our favourite demo yard.

They don't look much now but sanded up they should be beautiful. I so love the idea that we have rescued the floors from some old girl who had been taken apart piece by piece. Can you see how each board fits together and locks the tongue into the groove? Beautiful. Now we just need to scratch up this much again and we should have enough to complete the room.

We have our eyes on some recycled windows as well and a very keen builder who could start in a few months so time to finalize our house plans. In the meantime I am now nursing another sick child. This one was off colour earlier in the week and spent alot of time in this spot.

And now miss Liongirl is battling some high fevers and no one is getting much sleep. At least we finally had some sun today so I could take some decent photos of my recent opshop treasures. Back soon with the booty.