Design Fever

I spent the weekend in a shopping and decorating lather. The wooden retro shelf pictured here was bought for a song from from the local Surplus City. What do I consider a song? FIVE dollars in this case. (Take that Decor Direct Girl!) It was the last of its kind in the store and the display sample to boot. I could hardly believe my luck.

Looking at that photo really kicks up my OCD, because it looks a little out of kilter. The crookedness is caused entirely by the way I was holding the camera though, it's actually totally level and currently sitting atop my stereo speaker although I have plans to wall mount it soon. I had to merchandise it (Christopher Lloyd) before I could assign it a permanent space on the wall.

My second find was this groovy retro-style night stand:

I'm using it as a coffee table and I'm thrilled with the way it blends stylistically with The Couch, not to mention the additional storage space the two large deep drawers add to my living room situation. FINALLY a place for my remote controls (they currently number four). Total price? Thirty-five dollars, also at Surplus City.

Having spent most of the weekend in the design mode, you can only imagine my shock to learn a mere hour ago that the premiere episode of Season 3 of HGTV's design star was TONIGHT. But for an extremely luckily-timed perusal of the guide, I wouldn't have seen it at ALL. Fortunately, I caught the show only five minutes in. (Whew.) The whole season looks to have been filmed in, of all places, NashVegas, practically right in my own ding dang back YARD.

HOW, I ask you, oh how did I not know this? I'm slippin', that's for sure. This whole having a job thing is seriously cutting into the online reindeer games. (Not that I'm complaining. I really do love my job.)

Obviously, I will likely not spend as much time recapping the show this summer as I did last. But, still, Season 3 looks at least as promising a Seasons 1 and 2 AND the first challenge looks pretty amazing.

The contestants (nine of them) were given a budget $100,000 and what looks to be a pile of lumber and a some army cots and sleeping bags. Their assignment? Build the design headquarters in which they will be living for the remainder of the competition. Yah. Good one. Mean time, the design star wanna-be's will be sleeping al fresco at the construction site until the structure is complete. Time limit for the challenge? One week. I can't even imagine.

If you missed tonight's episode, you can easily catch up here , meet all the contestants and view their audition videos. My preliminary favorite is Matt Locke, a thirty-eight-year-old from Colorado who blew the judges away with his elaborately engineered design board. But, as we know, there's no telling how the whole thing will end up. Tune in next Sunday on HGTV at 8:00PM CST.

Speaking of design competitions, I'm actually switching from Com-shaft Cable to DirecTV in order to finally be able to experience Season 5 of Project Runway on my very own couch. Although I'm finding it very difficult to find any info on the upcoming season, I do understand that episode one will air sometime in July, so for once, no more waiting around for the DVD's to be issued...woohoo!

I have managed to find some rather strange, even sometimes cryptic videos from a Latin designer who may or may not have been cast in Season 5. I suppose it could be a hoax. You can see the shortest video here.