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.

It's really hard to type with a cat sitting on both of your wrists, but I'm gonna give it a go.  Nori is a feeling a little lap-deprived since I've been gone for the last 2 days.  It's time for some cat/mom bonding time, even if it involves impairing my wrists for the time being.

Before I left, I read this post on Centsational Girl and was totally inspired.  First of all, I love Emily Henderson's work, and I've always admired her bookshelf styling skills.  She manages to combine just the right amount of quirky statuettes and old books to make me swoon.  Also, I have a lot of time on my hands and love a new project.  Enter: Project Bookcase Re-Style.

We have 3 major bookcases on our main level, and we have a lot of books.  Not like an obscene about of books, but a LOT of books.  Anyway, here's our built-in hallway bookcase before I touched it.


Haha, this is almost embarrassing! This is probably not the best place for a catch-all, but it has turned into our place of stuff-stashing.  Bottom shelf:  lamp shade.  Third shelf:  random white shelf that needs to be hung in the bathroom.  Fourth shelf:  supplies for next crafty project.  Fifth shelf:  angel figurines from my recently deceased grandma that I haven't had the heart to put away yet.  Shelves 6 and 7 don't look that bad, fortunately.

And now for our living room shelves:


Just lots of books.  And a black cat that likes to play jungle hunter by camouflaging herself against my black furry blanket.  (It actually works pretty well for her, she's scared me a number of times that way.)

I started by taking all of the books and arranging them by color on the hall bookshelf:


I've seen a lot of people arranging their books by color instead of by content/title/author.  Like this one on curbly, or these on colourlovers.  I really like the way it turned out, even though I think it works better if you have a cubby bookshelf like the expedit from ikea or something.  (T and I have been dreaming about getting an expedit for ages now...)

Then I went to the thrift store and found some treasures....(the book is for T, he loves old medical books.)


After literally hours of arranging, re-arranging, and re-arranging again, then coming back 2 hours later to re-arrange again, here's what I came up with:


People, I have a lot of white dishes.  Yes, I know that.  It's just that they're so charming and look so good against a black bookcase!  I love the way it turned out.  Midway through the process, I realized that I had a ton of old books stashed at my parents' house in my old room like the silver oil burner, the 3 blue bottles, and some of the books in the left bookcase.  We had to leave T's old textbooks on the bottom 2 shelves because a) they act as an anchor because they're so stinkin' heavy, and b) we have nowhere else to stash them.  So maybe I'm not Emily Henderson, but I think it turned out all right.

Have any ideas on what I should do differently?  I'd love to hear 'em!

Here's the long-awaited next project!


Pretty retro, huh?  Ted and I picked up a pair of these from two different thrift stores when we still lived in Pierre.   We've been holding onto them for over a year now, and our guests and guest room have had to bear their ugly existence for far too long.  I guess I just didn't quite know what I wanted to do to them to make them beautiful...until Tuesday.


Yup, check out that fat drum shade.  This thing is huge.  Anyway, I knew I wanted something more modern and I knew I wanted a white base.  I was thinking something metallic would bring it into the 21st century.  I scoured Mill End for some pretty raw silk and instead ended up with this purplish grey taffeta.  The plans were to use mod podge on the shade since that worked so well on our suitcase project.    Word to the wise:  mod podge will stain your taffeta.  Good thing I tested it first, eh?  Now you know.  Hot glue to the rescue!


Ta-da!  By the way, we have no idea what the wall color is, either.  It changes with the light of day.  Sometimes it looks mushroomy, sometimes green, and now, apparently it looks beige.  Well, whatever.  I love the way this turned out!  And what's even more shocking is how easy it is to recover a lampshade.


Sorry about the grainy picture, apparently I should have T take my blog pictures again.  Photography is so not my thing.  Did I mention that I got the fabric for $2.50/yd?  Awwwww yeah.


We have a guest that is staying in this room for the next month or so and I'm so excited that this year she doesn't have to endure the ugliness that was these lamps.  Hooray!

I am so excited to share with you our latest project.  I saw this awesome chevron bar tutorial on curbly.com  over Christmas break and was dying to try and duplicate it.  I


The makeover was inspired by the show "Mad Men" and T and I thought the bold chevron pattern was perfect for our style.  I even had the perfect spot planned out in our basement.

On Super Bowl Sunday T and I decided to make a quick stop at Goodwill before we went to my parents' party.  I thought it might take us awhile to find a cabinet that would work, but I was wrong!  We walked in the door, saw this beauty and were out again in less than 5 minutes.


It was a no brainer!  This is actually the finished product.  The early stages weren't quite as lovely.  T and I think that somebody converted it from an old TV to the cabinet that it currently is.  You can kind of see the two light circles on the left panel where it looks like there would have been speakers.  There was even a little tag on the inside telling you how to change the vacuum tube!

We made quite a few adjustments ourselves!  First, we pained the top black.  It was an originally an icky brown mock-wood color and it just didn't fit.  We then decided to paint the bottom shelf black to match.  There's actually caning on that shelf but it was a nasty gray color that didn't match the side panels.  Trust me, it's much better in black!  We added the black felt on the inside to give it a bit of class, replaced the knobs on the glass (there were none, originally) and added the little golden medallions.


There are two little random holes in the caning and there were two wooden plugs that went inside them.  I'm guessing that was originally something for the speakers for the tv, but really we have no idea.  In any case, they needed to be covered.  I wanted something vintage, but Hobby Lobby does not carry many vintage-looking medallions.  I found these in the bead aisle and thought they at least matched the gold on the glass doors.  So, after a good scrubbing, some paint, and a little elbow grease, our treasure is complete!

We're still in accessorizing mode, but so far we have picked up a few treasures.  We got these retro coin glasses for $3 total.  They're kind of hard to see, but they have coins from different countries all over them.


We also got this fun little guy:


I had my eye on that baby for awhile before I finally talked T into buying it at Savers earlier this week.  I even left the price tag on it.  It came with the original warranty and directions!  I love it!  The only sad thing is that it's missing the lid.  Oh well.



So, although our bar ended up looking nothing like our inspiration, we love it.  Any thoughts on accessories we should add?

Hi everybody!  I'm back!  Well, at least, I'm going to try this whole blog thing again.

So you saw our new house, and now I'm pleased to say that we're all moved in and I have been working on projects gallore!  But today, I wanted to show you my favorite room of the house, the living room.

Remember this post from a few months ago with my inspiration room?  I absolutely fell in love with this room, and T did too.  I so badly wanted to include the honeysuckle pink chairs, but T said no.  I suppose it would have been a bit too girly for him.



Here's the before that we had to work with.  This picture was taken while we were touring the house for the first time.  (That's the realtor on the left.)  I thought it just seemed dark in there.  And, perhaps a few too many clocks, no?  Maybe they were world travelers that needed a clock for 4 different time zones.  Who knows?


Last time I posted I was trying to talk my mom into the idea of a turquoise room.  Here's what we ended up with:


Ted spent about a half hour trying to convince me that the turquoise would be ok.  I was convinced it was going to be neon and would burn our retinas every time the sun came out.  Not true.  I actually love the brightness!  Notice the fireplace?  It's fake.  Who puts in a faux fireplace in a 1932 house?  Oh well, at least it hold candles quite nicely.  Also, I give you permission to drool over our crown molding.


You'll notice that we ripped up the carpet and had the wood floors refinished.  You can barely see it, but we have a zebra rug!  It's not in the inspiration room, but I couldn't resist.  See the photo hanging on the wall on the right?  It's a T original.  We found the frame at a garage sale for $5 and painted it black.


This is by far my favorite room in our new house.  Want to see more "before" pics?  Click here.  More project updates to come!

Tell me what you think!  Is the turquoise too bright?