No seriously, don't try this.  It was a royal pain.  It haunted me in my dreams.

Waaaaaaay back in June, I went to a garage sale and the lady tried to give me chairs.  No seriously, she had like 15 chairs at this sale and she offered me at least 3 of them.  For free.  They were ugly.  Really ugly.  I painted and recovered one of them that was sort of a dining chair and sold it at our garage sale.  And then this guy sat in my basement for over a month because I was too chicken to tackle it.


Dun-dun DUN!  The evil yellow 70's chair that nearly did me in.


Check out the gnarly nailhead trim.  There was a time when I thought that I might just let it live in my my music room.  The yellow kind of matches.  And then I decided that July 12th was the day.  That's right, it took us 14 days of blood sweat and tears to turn it to this:


Ta-da!  It's kind of like our baby.  We fought so hard to get this baby into the 21st century, oy.  I scraped my hands pulling staples, made my knees raw from kneeling on the carpet, and nearly bruised my hand from the stupid staple gun.  Yeah, I'm kind of a wimp.  It's ok.


Imagine trumpets sounding and bells ringing as we finally put the last staple in.  Anyway, the fabric is kind of a cross between velvet and chenille and I got it for cheap cheap at Mill End Textiles.  Nevermind that I bought 4 yards and used like, 2.  ;)  I bought the piping fabric and piping there too.  This was, btw, my first time doing piping too.

I had help.  On that fateful day, July 12th, I found this awesome website/tutorial that was very helpful and encouraging and made everything look so easy.  If you're doing some easy chairs, check out this link.  I think I'll go the easy route next time.  ;)  Oh, and Ted helped too.  Actually he helped quite a lot.  A LOT lot.

The button, however, was my own addition.  I found a button-making kit at Michael's on sale for $1.50. It was exactly the right size and I didn't need a fancy button-covering contraption to make it.  I love it!  I think the button totally brings an element of class to the chair.  I had to drill holes in the back of the chair to make it happen.  Yeah.  Just more blood, sweat, and tears.


Notice that we chose NOT to put the nailhead trim back in.  Instead we used piping around the arms.  In retrospect, I totally should have just bought more nailhead trim.  It would have made life much easier, but I like the way this turned out.


Oh, and super bonus?  Nori loves the black fuzzy fabric.  She can play jungle hunter camouflage cat 24/7.  She's already claimed the chair as her own.

We had a great barbecue last night for the fourth.  Some of our neighbors came and we also had some old friends from Pierre join us.


Good friends, good food, what more could a girl ask for?  Well, maybe a new flower bed?  Voila!


I love these new day lilies that are grape colored!  I knew when I saw them that they were exactly what I wanted: a splash of color but a hardy plant.  And of course a few hostas to fill everything out.  This took us a LOT longer than the flower bed we did in the front yard, but T was so patient and worked so hard to help me put everything in.  I love my hubby.

So yes, a girl could ask for a new flower bed.  How about an old dresser turned credenza?  Say no more:


Here's the before photo:


All our DVDs, video games, controllers etc, used to go in the black boxes.  Now they fit perfectly in the new credenza.  We even drilled holes in the back of the new drawers and the back of the dresser so all the cords would hang out the back instead of our components cluttering up the top of the credenza.


Yay!

I revamped the blog!  Hooray!  I am not a tech savvy person, and I have no clue when it comes to html.  This is when I say thank you Jesus for google.  This morning I showed T the new "Projects" tab and he looks at me and says, "I feel like we've done a lot more projects than that."  Translated:  "I know you've forced me to help you with way more projects than that."  I thought about it and realized, (other than the severe lack of blogging in the last oh...6 months) we have done a lot more projects than that.  Mostly, we've redone chairs.  So, let me share with you.

You've already seen a chair story.  This was our first foray into upholstery.  Here's a pic of the chair in it's new home:


Now this next one isn't actually a chair, but it sits next to the chair and the same upholstery rules apply, so I figured I'd include it.  This is our reading nook in our office.  The ottoman was $10 at an estate sale and we recovered it in some snazzy red fabric.



(I had intended on the red matching the chair a little better, but oh well....haha!)

This pair of chairs lives in our dining room.  They're our extra dining chairs when we have more than 4 people at the table.  They're pretty retro and we got them at a thrift store for $5 each.  We decided not to re-paint them even though they're a little chipped and nicked up because we have a lot of wood in the dining room.



Now to the breakfast nook.  These chairs were my very first purchase on craigslist.


Here's our gossip bench that we recovered after we rescued it from a flea market.  It's houndstooth fabric.


This one I did just for fun and sold it at our garage sale.  I got it for free from another garage sale, painted it black, and T and I recovered the cushion in composer fabric:




And last but not least, my little desk chair from my music room.  This one had a caned seat that was completely ripped out, so T and I made a seat from scratch.


I cannot tell you enough how utterly easy it is to recover chairs, people!  All you do is rip the old staples out on the bottom and then stretch and re-staple your new fabric where the old one is.  We've replace a few pieces of foam, but that's relatively easy too.  We cut it with a bread knife to fit the seat.  ;)  Cause we're sophisticated like that.

Stay tuned for when I attempt to recover a real chair instead of just a seat cushion.

For $12, it's not a bad deal!  I told him to grab it and we could sell it on our garage sale for more than $12.

T and I are currently in Sioux Falls for the weekend.  Hooray for Easter!  We enjoyed the most moving of Good Friday services with my family last night.  I was in tears by the end.  It was the last song that pushed me over.  A good family friend sang a duet with our music director.  She used to sing duets just like this with her husband who just recently passed away.  It was a first time she sang a duet with anyone else besides him and all I could think about was how strong she was to keep praising the Lord in these difficult circumstances.  By the end it was all I could do to stay in my seat and not go comfort her, because by the end, she was streaming tears too.  Praise the Lord we'll see her husband in heaven someday!

I'm sick of people not being able to leave comments on here.  Stupid template.  Grrrr.

Will you do me a favor?  If you try to leave a comment and are unable to, will you send me an e-mail?  Just a note to say, "hey, this new template doesn't work either" would suffice!  emsensei{at}gmail{dot}com.  Julia from Hooked On Houses stopped by and couldn't leave a comment.  (I about threw up when I saw she e-mailed me instead!)  I'm such a dork...to be e-mailed by Julia!  My hero!

Okay, it's voting time.  I went thrifting today and brought home some treasures and found two awesome pieces that need rescuing:

an awesome dresser:

T woke me up before he left this morning by saying, "hon, if I was you I wouldn't go outside today."  I took his advice and I got no further than my garage...with the door shut, naturally.  It got down to at least -4, but I'm sure it was actually much colder.

I was thinking about how to best utilize my indoor day, and decided upon a leisurely breakfast followed by a chat with one of my former Vietnamese students.  When I told her how much snow we currently have, she told me she thought she'd die if she experienced it.  Haha, poor thing has never seen snow!  Ah, for a tropical climate today!  Almost made me want to go back to Hanoi.  Almost.

On to the topic of my post:  living fabulously indoors.  Living in South Dakota, it's pretty unpleasant from oh, December through March.  It's pretty easy to get cabin fever, and mine hit early this year.

Here's idea number 1:  rearrange a room in your house.  Last night I got the idea to rearrange our living room.  Here's a before picture:


It was a pretty great open layout, but with the coffee table in the middle it was hard to play the wii.  Just not a whole lot of space.  The couch did create a nice entryway space, though.  (That's our front door at the far left edge of the picture.)  You can also see the corner of our table at the far right edge.
After:  We found a nice niche for the entertainment center and even had room to bring in my favorite purple chair from the bedroom!  It may not seem like there's a ton of extra room, but it does in real life.  At least I won't have to move the huge heavy coffee table when I want to play the new wii fit!  The coffee table is now between the couch and the wall.  The only thing I don't like about it is that now the living room is pretty cut off from the dining area.  I suppose it defines the spaces more though...or something.

Anyway, we had fun doing it.  Well, I had fun directing T around.  He really likes the new arrangement, and I think it will grow on me.  Maybe I should post pics of the rest of our apartment so those of you who will never make it out to SD can see it!

So, step 2 of living fabulously indoors:  make yourself a tasty tropical drink!

While T was on the phone with his brother I scanned through my fav cookbook:  Better Homes and Gardens!  We made mocha smoothies.  It had banana in it, which I didn't think I'd like, but actually it worked really well and gave it more of a smoothie texture.  Haha, I just noticed that we match.  Ridiculous.  This was of course after our new dessert, pumpkin pie with frosting.  I found a pumpkin pie that a student had given me before break (don't worry, it was properly refrigerated!) but we didn't have ice cream or whipped cream, so I softened some frosting and used it for topping. Perfectly delicious!

Tomorrow should be pretty frigid too, look for more ideas of living fabulously indoors!  And, while you're at it, let me know if you like the "before" living room or the "after" better!

Ciao!