Coffee Table Revamp

Matt and I haven't had a coffee table since he first lived with Jess back in Ypsi. We originally had our eye on a pretty cool table from Ikea, but we were reluctant to buy it because, well, we are kinda cheap sometimes, and it just seemed like a lot of money every time we looked at it.

One day this past Spring we went out thrift store shopping for a new little dining table for our new little apartment. We wanted an older wood table, and we were willing to do the revamp to get a good solid piece.

Our first stop was the Ann Arbor Recycle ReUse Center. We didn't have any luck finding a table we liked, but we spotted a coffee table that spoke to us. We snatched it up, and started working on it as soon as we got home (we were just a little excited...).

Here's the before:

As you can see, someone let this table become a kiddie play/craft table. It was covered in kids paint and chalk. The picture from underneath shows a little better what the color the table originally was.

Here's some of Matt hard at work sanding it down. It had been redone at some point before. When Matt was sanding the top it was so thin on the edges he had to be careful not to go down through it.

Now for the fun part...the AFTER photos! All we did to finish it was pick out a stain color we liked, and I stained it in the garage for a couple of days. Then I put on a layer of polyurethane to protect it a little, and we were done!

Here's the basics of how the costs for this project broke down:

$20 Coffee table (ReUse Center)

$9 Stain for coffee table (Home Depot Gift Card)
$10 Polyurethane (Home Depot Gift Card)

In total, this great wood coffee table only cost us about $40. And - it was fun to work on!

New life, new old stuff

It's been almost 1 month since I graduated with my Master's degree. I am still looking for a full time job, and I am working part time for the office that I did my internship with. Job searching has been hit or miss, because I am in a really specialized field, and I don't have much leeway in terms of location. There have been 2 or 3 postings that really excited me, and the rest have been things I could take or leave. I actually had two interviews for one position, but was ultimately not chosen. They had 80 applicants and only interviewed 5, so that's kind of cool, but, it would have been a really great opportunity.

While this ongoing job search is always lingering in the back of my mind, I have been looking for distractions. Matt and I are moving to a new apartment very soon, and I cannot wait to set it up and decorate it.

We will be downsizing significantly, as we are moving from a 4-bedroom house with a garage and basement, to a 2-bedroom apartment. We have been working on getting rid of things by: selling, donating, recycling, giving away, and throwing things away. There's always more we could do, but we have made some pretty good progress.

This past weekend we found ourselves talking about getting a smaller dining room table. We aren't sure yet how much room we will have, but we know it will be less than we are used to. Our table we used in this house is on loan from the Tinseys, and it's great, but we don't need it for the two of us for day to day use.

We talked about finding a small table with wings, and we decided to start thrift store shopping. Ann Arbor has SOO many thrift stores!

On our first stop we went to the Ann Arbor Recycling ReUse Center. There were no dining room tables that matched our needs, but something caught my eye. Sitting on top of another table was a coffee table, obviously a little mistreated over the years by children who liked to paint. It was so unique that I just kept coming back to it. We bought it, and we started sanding it almost as soon as we got home.

The next day we went out to buy stain for said coffee table, and we decided to stop at the Habitat for Humanity ReStore. Let me tell you - this store made me never want to buy something for a house at a retail store again - at least until considering thrift options. They had everything there! Including, a table that was just what we were looking for.

Needless to say, we snatched it up, and we have been hard at work refinishing them both. I will be writing a separate post with before and after pics, and a cost break-down. Stay tuned!

Oh, and our next purchase will be some chairs for our table. We are currently using some straight backs that I don't think anyone who has been over here likes. In addition to the ReUse Center and ReStore, we might go to the Salvation Army and the Ann Arbor PTO Thrift Shop!

I am the kind of person who...

A discussion in one of my Health Behavior and Health Education classes recently got me thinking. Not that my classes don't always get me thinking, but this one really stuck with me.

We were in my Sticky Health Communications class, and we were talking about why New Years resolutions don't work.

There were a number of ideas thrown around by students, and there isn't really one right answer. But the professor, Dr. Brian Zikmund-Fisher, posed this as an explanation:

If you don't convince yourself that you're the kind of person that does something, you won't stick with it.

I have kept this idea with me for over a week now, and I have spent a little more time considering it than I should probably admit. I first tried to think about it in terms of my own behaviors, and previous attempts or successes in behavior change.

It wasn't hard to see how this idea applied to some things in my own life, like making the transition to not eating meat, the trials of committing to diet and exercise, something as simple as actually flossing every night.

So then I started looking for it to pop up as a theme in TV. Tuesday night it popped up right on The Biggest Loser. Not too surprising that this would be the first place I see it.

Some of the things I think this can be most easily applied to are:

• resisting food temptations, ex. "I am the kind of person who can walk away from the cookies in the break room at work, and know it's not worth it to indulge on low quality cookies"
• adding small amounts of exercise to your day, ex. "I am the kind of person that parks a little farther from the store to add some extra walking in to my day"

These are relatively simple behaviors, but unless you have convinced yourself that they are a part of you, it is sooo easy to say "well I just can't resist."

This by no means make this system flawless. You can end up off track. In my opinion though, every time you get off track and realize you need to work on it harder next time, you make yourself stronger in your convictions. You also learn what you should feel bad about, and what is really just a one-time indulgence that you know doesn't need to lead to other indulgences.

This all comes at a time when I realize I have gotten horribly off track for just over a week, after losing 12 pounds. Time to recommit, and get back on track, stronger than ever.

If anyone out there reads this and has a reflection of something in their life that took changing self-concept to change behavior, I would love to hear about it.

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Additional note: In my field we talk a lot about self-efficacy as a key predictor of behavior change. Self-efficacy is the belief in oneself to be able to perform a specific behavior, in a specific situation. I don't see the concept discussed above as being the same. I think this is much more self-concept/personal identity based.