Shootin’ Pretty

We have a new member of the famiy! No, nothing that exciting….we got a camera! You see, the one we had been using is something around 7 years old and barely functional. As in, it takes about 30 seconds after you press the button for it to actually take the picture. And the pictures weren’t very good. Yeah, it was time for an upgrade.

Now we are no photography experts. In fact, we are beyond novices. Chris and I are both artistic in lots of other ways, but photography is not a strong suit. Nor do we know the first thing about operating a manual camera (though we were tempted by the digital SLR’s). So, here’s the verdict: we need a camera, it needs to be cheap, and it needs to take half decent pictures without any real help from us.

Enter: the Nikon Coolpix L110

Not only does it meet our basic requirements but it actually allows you to change a few settings manually on it and has 15x superzoom. Sweet. And the best part? It cost a whopping $230 (on sale at Best Buy). Oh, yes.

So, what I’m saying is, expect some more pretty (I hope!) pictures on this site….which means more regular updating. I need accountability people! I have so much to update on that it’s overwhelming.

So I will leave you with a hint of what we spent 15 hours doing last weekend, and entire week prepping before that.

Yes, my heel has been brown since Saturday.

Weekend deals

We had a busy shopping weekend last weekend. We had been planning to build an HD projector for a while to replace our ancient bubble TV in our living room, but when we saw the deals on TVs at Best Buy last week…we couldn’t pass up the deal on this tv.  So we wound up buying a 50″  Panasonic plasma TV for $699- can’t beat that! Now some of you tech-nerds may wonder why we bought a plasma instead of an lcd tv…and I have to say that plasma tv’s are very underestimated! The biggest issue with them in the past was the “burn-in” that could happen on the screen if you let it sit on the same picture for too long. Well, that is no longer an issue with the new ones. Plus, our TV has a built in screen saver that turns on when it’s been paused for a few minutes to stop any chance of that happening- score! The other issue is that it consumes more power, but with the amount that we watch tv (hint: not very often), that shouldn’t be a problem. On the up-side, plasmas have much richer color, handle on-screen motion much better (hooray, football!), don’t change color with different viewing angles, cost a lot less -especially for the larger models, and don’t run a risk of the pixels burning out (this happens a lot with LCDs and it makes the screen go black, apparently right after they go out of warranty too!). We also saved ourselves $300 by going with the 720p model instead of the 1080p. The only way to actually get the 1080p resolution out of your 1080p tv is if you have 1) blu-ray or 2)cable with HD channels. Since we have neither, and have no plans to get either, there was no reason to spend the extra money.

Since we got a new tv, we needed a tv stand. I was determined not to buy one of the basic cheapo glass tv stands (which really aren’t that cheap to buy); I wanted a real piece of furniture. Unfortunately, those run in the hundreds. But once again, Craigslist had my back. After persistently repeating the “tv stand” search, I ran into a new post for this bad boy, brand new, for only $135. Yes, please! We ran over to the seller’s house- luckily, only a block away- after work on Friday and picked it up. It looks even better than I imagined!

I also scored some awesome deals at Target. I got this birch candle for $3 on clearance, which I’ve been gawking at for quite a while at the $10 price tag.

I got 3 of these 11×14 frames for an art project that was inspired by these pieces at ZGallerie (more to come on that later)

I got this pinecone tree- something like this for $3 on clearance…it was missing the top pinecone, but all I had to do was grab an extra pinecone from my Christmas decor, hot glue it to the top, and wha-la! good as new!

I also found this glass pillar candleholder on clearance for $8. It is open at the top, so you can fill it with whatever you want. Love it!

Then at Goodwill I found these white canisters and glass canister for a couple bucks each…useful in the kitchen and on the future shelving in our master bath!

And for the grand finale…we scored this marble tile on sale at Lowe’s for $1.49/sq ft. Nope, nothing wrong with it. Yes, it is the same that YHL is using. Yes, that makes a grand total of $45 for our new MARBLE bathroom flooring. Yes, I wish I had a third yes. And yes I don’t! (Better off Ted? Anyone?)

So, we are pretty shopped out right now, but we still have a lot to get for our bathroom reno, which is officially starting this weekend (around watching the playoffs on our brand new TV of course). Anyone else score any good deals recently?