Archives of Our Lives

Hello, and welcome to another rousing round of Saturday Steals!

To participate, simply:

1) Steal a steal.

2) Write a post about it on your blog, mentioning that you’re participating in Saturday Steals (you can steal the above image if you so desire), and

3. Add the link to said post to the list at the bottom of THIS post.

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My steal this week came to me in the nick (nic? nik?) of time.

As you know, I’ve been working (slowly but also surely) away in my office trying to spruce the place up a bit.

I am also trying to do this on a very limited (i.e. practically nonexistent) budget. I used paint and primer leftover from two projects ago for the walls. I’m using curtain rods from the as-is section of the already-cheap Ikea. I’m using a desk that I bought from a salvage yard. I’m selling anything not absolutely NECESSARY for the functionality of my office in order to fund whatever purchases I do need to make (see ya later old desk, old keyboard, old office chair, old soul).

It occurred to me, however, that I probably ought to spring for a quart of paint in order to update some of my already-owned items. My filing cabinet, for example: it was a hand-me-down from Poor Kyle’s parents, which was great. I’d already spray painted it black (from the original mushroomy-colour it was when we got it) and it looked good. But with this new office, I wanted to go with a little lighter, more cheerful look.

I wanted that filing cabinet to be the colour of blue cotton candy.

So on a whim after class the other day, I swung into a local hardware store to look at paint chips. Aghast at the price tag for one tiny vessel of latex paint ($17.99—three dollars more than I paid for the central piece of furniture in my office), I resolved not to purchase any paint…just to browse colours.

I picked up a chip I thought might work. It was light blue, almost robin’s egg blue. It looked perfect.

My task complete, I meandered my way down the spray paint aisle just for kicks. Nothing cheap there, either. At length I began my trek back to the front of the store, not finding any smokin’ steals for me.

Then, in a flash, it hit me: MISTINTS!

The mistinted paint aisle is the island of misfit toys of a hardware store. The screw-ups, the freaks, the unmatchables. The mistints. No poverty-stricken aspiring designer should ever leave a hardware store without checking the misfit aisle first.

I whipped around, determined, and headed straight back to the paint section. There, on a lowly cart in the middle of an aisle (it really did look island-ish), was a stack of paint cans that nobody else wanted.

And look what I found!

One (1) quart of paint in a lovely shade of grey (for which I have no use in mind, but I know I’ll need it for something soon), and one (1) quart of paint in COTTON CANDY BLUE!

Below is an image of the paint chip I originally chose next to the paint colour I got from mistint island:

It doesn’t even look close in this picture, but I promise they’re really similar.

It may have a tiny tint of green more than I was hoping, but guess what?

AT $3.00 each (the cans even said five dollars and they rang up at three!), WHO THE HECK CARES?

I got two quarts of perfect-for-my-office paint for six dollars TOTAL, when the regular price of one can would’ve been EIGHTEEN! That’s a $30 savings.

And that is a steal.

(Images of the finished product to come soon.)

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And you? (This link list will be open from now till Sunday at 11:59 p.m.)