Sneak peek!

My handy man made me something!!



Three guesses what this is! :)

This has been on my "honey, pleeeeease?" list for a while, so I'm stoked that they are coming to be. We're still putting on the finishing touches, and I have lots of refolding to do, but I couldn't wait to share. I'll be back with more pics once the entire system is in place. Can't wait!

That's a nice seat, ma'am

This fall I was on a quest for new chairs for our dining table. They needed to be small, lightweight...and not $100+ per chair. I search high and low and finally stumbled upon some great chairs at the local flea market. Thanks to my mad negotiating skill (or more likely, the fact that it was 1 hour before the close of the market for the month), I scored these chairs for about $8 each:



I got them home, cleaned off the dirt, and decided they needed a little TLC. The finish was less than perfect, the seats an icky blue vinyl.

The before:


But I had become convinced that I had scored some awesome vintage chairs and needed to clean them up right. Strip the varnish, sand down the stain, restain and refinish.

I tried several different methods to get these chairs shaped up. I exposed myself to no less than 3 different toxic strippers, effectively shortening my life by at least 2 months. I sanded until my hand went numb. Then I got out the power sander and sanded some more. Choice words were said and I still was no closer to completion.

Then more choice words were said when I was sitting in a local bar with my honey and realized my tuckas was parked on the EXACT SAME chair I had been working on refinishing!


Yes, my priceless antiques were actually old restaurant chairs. Ha!

The good news? Now I had no guilt about whipping out the spray paint. I had those chairs painted in no time, sans choice words. Add some new fabric to the seats and you have my new and improved chairs for Le Cafe du Moi.

The after:



Just in time to be filled with bottoms for holiday dinners!

Unfinished project #63

UFO sightings are numerous right now. Don't bother looking for the other 62 unfinished objects - they aren't finished yet!

This UFO sighting comes to us via some kids spray painting road signs in the desert. Maybe the fumes got to them, but they claim to have seen white spray paint transform an ugly desk:

Before - cubicle grey, a real downer


After - oooh, it's clean! and white!


Additional sightings unlikely as my desk will never be this clean again...

Bamboo-zled

You know what is a great feeling? It's the feeling that you get after you've been working on a home improvement project, with your house in disarray and your daily schedule in shambles, and everything is dirty and out of place, and it drags on three times longer than you thought it would, and you are wondering if it was a good idea in the first place and then....ahhh, completion! And it's wonderful and life is good.

That's where I am right now.

We took on the task of replacing the carpeting in the upstairs bonus area. This has been on our to-do list for a while due to an unfortunate incident involving unsupervised cat introductions and a smelly boy cat. You can never get that smell out...ewww. Not wanting to invite more cat mischief, as well as avoiding the foot-meets-pin scenarios which are all too common with sewing on carpet, we went with bamboo. Sounded easy at the start, but turned out to be a wee bit trickier.

Before:


Icky carpet, uninspiring color...oh, and clutter (my bad!)

It's a small space, so it should be a snap, right?


Boxes of flooring................. Bye, bye carpet


Painted! ...........................................Boards going in...

Fast forward a whole week and a half, which includes two more trips to Lowes for supplies. Apparently old houses don't have level floors (go figure) and we had to do some impromptu leveling of the subfloor in order to have un-wavy bamboo!

Oh, and the whole time there was an air compressor sitting in living room at the bottom of the stairs so we could run the nailer. Previously mentioned boy cat LOVED that noise (but fortunately controlled his bladder!).

And so (drumroll, please)....


Beautiful!

Still working on the organization of the rest of the room, but here's some up close pictures of the beautiful floor for ya:


Yummy. Definitely worth the time, hassle, banged fingers, choice words, and overall dysfunction. I'm feeling inspired.... :)

Vote for me!

The contest is up and running. See my entry here.

Hopefully your socks are way across the room! :)

Humdrum hutch goes bookish

Finally finished!
$30 Hutch via Craiglist plus a gallon of paint and a old hardback book have transformed this less than stylish hutch into a stylish piece of furniture. Check it out!Before: Ewww, not cool. Useful but ugly!
After: Much better!
Up close and personal: The back of the shelves are papered with pages from and old book for a neat effect.

I entered this in Blueprint magazine (so sad it's out of print!) and Apartment Therapy's January Jumpstart contest. Hopefully the judges will be as fond of it as I am.