have a seat

won't you? stay awhile. ignore the hyperactive dog; she'll calm down in a minute. sterling, sit. SIT. SIT. nevermind.

a few weeks ago, i bought a pair of chairs for 20 dolla at a flea market. check it:


they were a leeetle scuffied up in the leg region:


but i liked the character, and the carved details were fab:


fun fact: when my aunt saw them the other day, she told me that her mother had the exact same chairs in her dining room! crazy coinkydink, yah?

i wanted to make them into something reminiscent of these french and swedish (respectively) babies:



so. to transform these beasts into beauts, i first took out the slip seats. not gonna lie, i didn't hate the original fabric. but it was old and worn:


and i did, in fact, hate what i found when i removed the fabric:

eeeeeeww. dirty white vinyl. blech. i wrapped the seats back up all quick-like with the fabric i bought a joann's to take them from gross to gorg. eous. ok, enough.

the chairs had previously been painted dark brown. answer me this: who paints wood brown? it's already brown. just stain it darker. anyway, i had a lighter treatment in mind. so i took them out back and went to town with the sandpaper.

here's another shot of the roughed-up gams:


and the carved details:


sideways. please excuse.

each chair then got a lovely coat or three of white paint of the spray variety. (if you intend to do some spray painting of your own, i'd highly recommend purchasing one of those spray paint trigger attachments. you will not regret your investment. neither will your trigger finger. trust.)


two issues: 1) it was too bright-n-shiny-sparkly-crisp white for the look i had in mind. i was lead to believe that it would to turn out creamy off-white, but i had to go all joe wilson on the colored cap of the spray can 2) remember that brown paint? yeah...it bled through the white in some places, giving the paint a pinkish tint. lesson on the importance of primer: learned.

good thing i'd picked up a handy-dandy dark brown paint sampler at the home deep:


this thing was super chouette. it had a built-in brush in the lid like a can of rubber cement. i used the brush to apply the paint to the dinged and distressed areas in small sections, then wiped it off with a paper towel. it stuck to the white more than i'd anticipated, so i then used a wet wipe to remove the majority of the brown, leaving the chairs nicely weathered and antiqued. from this:

to this:


and here we have the final product:



success! next on tap: replace all living room furnishings to go with chairs. hmm....

shiny happy furniture

as previously stated, i dig mirrored furniture. but, as erin pointed out in a comment, i do not dig cleaning mirrors. or much of anything. unless it involves a vacuum. i freaking LOVE to vacuum. which is a good thing, given that my two large dogs shed approximately the weight of a small child every day while i'm at work. alas, the dyson animal hair vac does not do mirrors.

but.

look at this:


monica at craftynest is a crafty genius. old table + silver paint = shiny silver table. the look of mirrored furniture without the irritating cleaning regimen. what did i tell you? crafty. genius.

i'm thinking: take one plain piece of furniture like so


apply some silver paint to the front of the doors. paint everything else white. add some white trim on top of the silver door panels. end up with something like so


now who wants to go thrifting tomorrow?? i need something to dull the pain of the travesty that these


are on backorder until december.

woe is me.

come in...again

remember that time i was going to post the rest of the door makeover tomorrow and then tomorrow i got some sort of stomach bug/food poisoning/swine flu? yeah...

so, after we hung the door, we had to make it close. and stay closed. captain fantastic broke out the chisel again to recess the hardware:


i'm sure he knows the technical name for the pieces of hardware, but he's not here right now. he's busy fetching soup and probiotics from whole foods for his ailing wife. aaawww.

contractor brad kindly informed us of the standard height off the floor at which trim carpenters mount the door-closing-hardware-thingies, and we discovered that the old door's lock set was all cattywhompus. since we'd already rolled up our sleeves and gotten in deep, no sense in halfassing now eh? so we filled in the old holes in the door frame with some super-strong epoxy-type stuff, and, after it dried, i sanded that sucker smooth. in pearls. and big girl shoes.


then, c-fan drilled new holes, using his hand to steady the drill. while i planned the quickest route to the emergency room for finger reattachment surgery.


which produced this result:


which was subsequently painted and adorned with more...hardware. you know the type. the door-closing type.

then.....we took the door down. again.


and secured a quilt to the doorway so that the neighbs couldn't see in our house during the multiple days of sanding and painting and drying that we were anticipating.

meanwhile, the door got a sensible coat of primer. white on the inside and edges, gray on the front. thanks, home depot guy, for advising us, in your infinite wisdom, to use the gray primer. that was an excellent idea. it made the red dark and rich with fewer coats.


notice the patio table has been replaced by actual sawhorses. movin' up, kids! as the primer coat was significantly damaged by suicidal gnats and acorn-grenade-launching squirrels, we then moved the operation into the guyrage.


captain fantastic rocked the roller for the large expanses, whilst i took care of the deets. this is always a good idea. some of us are more observant than others. though the others may call the some "perfectionist" and "obsessive compulsive." sticks and stones, friends.



slap on that hardware, hang that puppy one.more.time and, drumroll please.....voila!



fabulous! and yet...incomplete. behold the rusty, spotty, ugly brass address numbers and mailbox. and the equally rusty, spotty, ugly AND broken porch lights. the brokenness was the result of a light bulb change incident in which the more delicate stone was attacked by a wasp and may or may not have cast things about in fear and cried on the floor for 20 minutes. i digress.


look that that big marley dog. so handsome. manning his post.

captain fantastic mounted a dining chair and removed the offending fixtures, which was infinitely less complicated than expected:


while i removed the offending mailbox and numbers.



what's the cardboard box fer? why, to hold the screws while i spray painted the brass with black hammer-finish paint to match the new light fixtures of course!


aaaaaaaaaand here we are again with an after shot:


except for the awning. the awning has to go. i despise the awning. but no more broken door and no more brass, woohoo! lookin' good. now our front door is less "ew" and more "aaah."

meanwhile, behind the door.....

come on in...

so. theoretically. if one were to get locked out of the house, both front and back doors, and said doors did not have keys (like, for example, if one only locks the metal security door and does not have keys to the wooden doors...but they mysteriously got locked anyway) and instead of calling a locksmith, one decides to kick in the door because "we're planning to replace it anyway." theoretically. one might find oneself in the position in which we found ourselves a few months ago.


what now? roll into the home depot and snatch up a pre-fab aluminum door and wedge it in place? oooooh no. not us. that's far to uncomplicated. howsabout roll into home depot and pick up a giant wooden slab:


and make that sucker into a door from scratch? indeed. when captain fantastic asked his buddy contractor brad for advice, contractor brad said, "my advice? when you go to home depot to buy your second door, call a professional." oh contractor brad, ye of little faith.

after removing the old door and purchasing the new slab, we removed the hardware and hinges from the old door:


then, we measured the length of the old door and cut the new slab down to size, using captain fantastic's fave new toy:


nothing like a project to necessitate new tools. next up was measuring the distance between the hinges on the old door and marking the placement on the new door, which we did both by using the measuring tape and by laying the new door on top of the old door, for extra insurance. measure twice, cut once. or something. below, the captain uses a hammer and chisel to carve out indentations in the door, so that the hinges will sink down and be level with the edge. if that makes sense.


next, i drilled holes for the hinge screws:


do you like our sawhorse? it is our patio table. other backyard landscaping gems include that plastic chair and the old owners' children's swing set. plays nicely off the mustard-yellow 1968 winnebago (not pictured). awesome.

after we screwed the hinges into their recessed homes, it was time to hang up the door. for the first time. the hinges were old and crotchety, so it was a giant pain in the A to get it up there. then we had to take it down and plane the edges of the door to make it fit in the doorway properly. planing is taking what's basically a big razor and shaving wood off, bit by tedious bit, so that the door fits perfectly in the door frame with juuust enough gap to close. we hung, took down, planed, rehung, took down, planed and repeated approximately 15 times. no lie. want to know what it feels like to do that? it feels like this:


(that's a drill. and grumpy captain.) forever and a day later, we had finally achieved a near-perfect fit, woohoo! aaaaand then we took the door down again. to attach this contraption and drill holes for the handle:


and lock set:


like so:

hott.

another rumble with the hinges and ta-da!


aaaand this is how the door stayed for approximately two months.

tomorrow: painting the door, installing the hardware and jazzing up the front porch.

big day!

happy birthday to...ME! the big 2-7, which i feel is a legit adult age. i bet you thought i would be turning 14, or some such age more in line with my girlish looks. two years ago, i worked at a school, and a parent mistook me for a 6th-grader. seriously. i'll probably get carded until i'm 65. eh. moving on, some interesting facts related to my birthday:

1) there are like a bisquillion people whose birthday is today, or tomorrow, or yesterday, or sometime this week. guess what our parents were doing during the christmas/new year's holiday season, hmmmmm??? now that i'm married, i can talk about these things.

2) when i was a child, i was really relieved that i had been born near labor day (woohoo 3 day weekend!) but not on labor day. this was because i reckoned that childbirth labor was more difficult on that day, and i would have felt bad for doing that to my mom. freak. (fyi, i think my mom was in labor for something ridiculous like 36 hours before my lazy a$$ required a c-section anyway...so didn't quite dodge that bullet. sorry. i'm worth it?)

3) for the following one month and one day, i will officially be A COUGAR. rawr.

so, in my honor, please eat something chocolate tonight and not feel bad about it.

keepin' it real

painting the living room is taking for. ev. er. and it is not that big. it is old though, and full of baseboards that needed cleaning and nails that needed removing and holes that needed patching etcetera and so forth and so on ad nauseum. then there have been the little hiccups, including but not limited to:

*my spilling half a gallon of paint on my foot.

*cleaning giant paint smears off the hardwoods after we were mistaken in assuming that said spill had dried overnight on the dropcloth.

*cleaning dozens of painted paw prints off the hardwoods (see "spill," above).

*captain unfantastic's accidentally purchasing a new gallon of valspar low odor paint (low odor my a$$; i'm still mostly dead of toxic fume poisoning) instead of the tried-and-true olympic

*...in a slightly darker interpretation of "table linen"

*...which we realized when we noticed that the two coats of edging i'd previously applied were too light and needed to be edged...again...

there follows, we have been painting for 3 days and are not yet finished. but soon, friends, soon.

get excited, because it's already looking fabulous.

also forthcoming = snazzed-up flea market chairs, as mentioned in a previous post. the ole home-improvement diapraghm was spazzing on that one too, in the form of:

*old stain bleeding through my new coat of paint

*...which i was unable to complete because the can was empty.

*half a dozen old staples in the staple gun, which didn't go in all the way when i recovered the seat

*...and only came halfway out when i tried to remove them

*...and the pliers are m.i.a.

seeeeeeew...once we get these things under control, it'll be game on around here.

i like to think of myself as a blog ambassador for those who are frowned upon by the gods of luck, skill and unlaziness, but love to DREAM BIG nonetheless. indeed.

faux bois

if it resembles a tree branch, i will buy it. case in point, we own all of these items:

(urban outfitters)

(target)

(urban outfitters)

(lenox)

a drawer pull on my desk like this one:
and three hurricanes similar to this in various sizes:

too much? nay. i shall not rest until our house resembles a forest.

michael aram's my boy. i'd add this vase and candle holder to the collection:


and i've been lusting after these for months, though captain fantastic says they're "too modern" for us. boo. must be all the silver+black+drum shade bidniss:

(z gallerie)

i'm also down with un-faux bois. i put some real branches in a vase on our console table, which i'd show you if my living room weren't currently disassembled and strewn about the house while we repaint the walls.

i think this is a pretty cool idea for a side table:

(source unknown...design sponge maybe?)

and i'm pretty sure we'll be undertaking a rustic-coffee-table-diy-initiative at some point in the near future. comme ça:

except smaller. i mean have you seen the living-room-to-dog size ratio in our household? please.

got any fun bois to share, faux or otherwise?