Monday, February 24, 2014

Trim Transformation - Living Room

You can always tell whenever I get super productive, because I actually am consistent with my blog posts. For the first time in about a month and a half, Eric and I actually had a weekend where we could work on the house. Not that we don't love it when friends are here, or when we're out of town, but it's always nice to just be home. 
Our next big project to tackle is painting all of the trim throughout the house white. At the moment about 70% of the trim is white, 20% is painted brown, and 10% is a wood finish. The mismatched look isn't really doing anything for me, and makes the house look choppy. 
First up, the living room! 
This room has wood trim around the two doors and floor, but not the windows. So we can be grateful for that. First Eric gave everything a light sanding with a sanders block, nothing insane, just enough to help the primer stick. Next we cleaned everything to get rid of any dust, and then taped off the walls. After consulting our go-to painting mistress (thanks Brit!) we decided that priming the wood before painting would give us the best results. 
No turning back now! Lucky for us, our carpet is...well...kinda crappy. It easily came up around the trim so we didn't have to worry about accidentally getting paint on it. 
After a few coats of Simply White by Benjamin Moore, and some touch ups after the tape came off, we were in white trim heaven! 
A wonderful surprise that came from this trim transformation is how much better our entertainment center looks! Before when the dark tones around the fireplace were competing with the lighter wood of the trim it was just "meh". But now with the deep wood being the center of attention the contrast is perfect! 
I laid on the floor and just stared at it with this goofy grin on my face :)

You also may have noticed in one of the pictures above, a little beauty of a chair peeking out from the corner. That my friend, is Beth's incredible orange accent chair! 
Round 1 of our furniture was delivered this weekend! I can't even explain how ecstatic I am about the way this chair turned out. When we picked out our furniture back in January (more on that in THIS POST), we had to use a lot of imagination to envision the pieces with the fabric choices. So even though I loved everything in the store, there was this little part of me that was a itty-bit nervous about the final product. 
As soon as the movers set it on the floor, all of my doubts immediately evaporated. I believe "freaking sweet!" were my exact words...I can get pretty poetic when exited. 
Eric was pretty pumped about his man chair too. Unfortunately these were delivered right before we started painting, so we had to cover them almost as soon as they were set up. 
Eric: "Beth, my chair doesn't really need pillows does it?" 
Beth: "Of course it does silly!" 
Now I just need a little poof to sit in front so I can prop my feet up while reading a book and sipping hot chocolate. 
As of now all of the painting in the living room is complete! We still want to get new carpet, and I'd like to hang some curtains, but this space has come a long way from when it originally looked like this:
This picture was taken just a little over 6 months ago, so I'd say we've made good progress for living here half a year already! 

Anyone else get to cross off a few things from their to-do list this weekend? 
Saturday's weather was absolutely PERFECT! It gave me spring-tinted glasses though, because my "no coat required" thought process lead into Sunday, which brought a bit of a snow flurry and left me shivering and aggravated.
Oh well, we'll get to Spring someday....I hope.

Saturday, February 22, 2014

I Love Lamp!

Brick loves lamp....
and I love lamp! 
Vavoom!!!! 
Hello upgrade! 
Remember this sad little lamp Eric and I found at Valley Thrift about a month ago? 
I went over more of the paint process in THIS POST, but some spray paint, a bit of gold-leaf, and a new lampshade was all this little guy needed to transform from floral and grey, to gold and glam! 
This was my first attempt at gold-leaf, and although the whole process was a bit messy (imagine gold magic dust spread all over my table), it was pretty easy to get the hang of. 
Now this baby sits happily in our living room, and makes me just grin every time I turn it on. 

Nothing is more self-satisfying than creating something yourself. Especially a piece for your own home, it's your space so make it express yourself! 
Give it a try and tell me all about it! 

Thursday, February 20, 2014

The Votes are In!

After a couple weeks of looking at these adorable little fabric swatches pinned to our blinds, we have come to a decision! 
Thank you to everyone who told us which option they liked the best, having a second set of eyes  and a different opinion helps keep things fresh. 
Once again, here were the six fabrics we were considering: 
And the winner is....
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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OPTION NUMBER ONE!!!
Eric and I both agree that this pattern will bring the most color to our space. I love how bright and cheerful it is, and I feel it's something we will love it for a long time. 
It is a bit brighter than we originally thought, compared to the image we saw on the computer, but that is why we ordered a sample and hung it up to see how it would look in our light. I'm blaming the "florescent orange" look on me taking this photo at 8:40pm with absolutely NO natural light #iphonecamera. 
So now hopefully in the near future, our quite bland kitchen windows will go from this:
To something like this! 
Woo pattern and pizazz!!!! 
Now we  just need to order the fabric, and cross the how-in-the-heck-are-we-going-to-hang-these bridge when we get there. 

On a completely non-curtain related note, I want to share these ADORABLE pillows we snatched up at Ohio Thrift while in Columbus last weekend. 
How much fun are these?! There may have been some running involved after I spotted them. For $7 a pop, NO chance was I going to let these bad boys get away. 
I can just imagine them sitting on our porch swing this summer, or on our new outdoor chairs we got for the backyard. 

In furniture related news, Eric's recliner and my accent chair will arrive this weekend and hopefully be delivered Saturday! 

And lastly in YES I'm a complete nerd news , there are brand new episodes of Doctor Who on Hulu! Eeeeeekkkk!!!!!!
Eric doesn't quite understand how great this is....
 Yup...pretty much captures that moment. 
Ha!
Thanks again everyone who shared which curtain fabric they liked the most. Hopefully we can get these bad boys done and hung up before my birthday in March...keep those fingers crossed. 
Have a good one! 

Tuesday, February 11, 2014

Maybe Now We'll Stop Eating In The Living Room...

The chair fairies came last week! 
Friday night before we left for the weekend, Eric and I picked up these six beauties off of a seller from Craigslist. Trying to fit them all into our cars was like a giant Jenga puzzle, but with a little finagling we had success!
I have been stalking like a rat browsing Craigslist for a set of chairs to replace the three IKEA ones I've had since college for a while now. This particular seller had these chairs plus a table for $100, but after asking if they were willing to separate the set, we were able to get them for $80. 
$80 for 6 = just a bit over $13 per chair = MEGA SCORE! 
Aren't those little details great!? They're very sturdy, and a nice comfy size for Mr. Long-legs here. 
My vision is to paint them white (once the weather warms up) and reupholster the cushions. I've fallen in love with the contrast a dark table and floors paired with white chairs has. 
Image source here
Image source here
Image source here
Here is an older picture of our dinning room. Now close your eyes, and envision white chairs...isn't that beautiful?!  
*cue Eric eye roll*
As for the cushion fabric, at the moment I'm leaning towards a shade of red. I already have a few red accents in the room with my "vino" sign and pair of sequin red high-heel wine bottle holders, so I feel like that would be a nice touch. 
It'll be a while until we actually have to worry about choosing a fabric, and I don't know if a pattern or solid would be the best choice. Something that could hide spills and dropped food that's for sure. 
These were just a few I found/had that could be potential contenders. I don't know how well Eric would go for the purple and magenta mix though, ha! 
So now that we finally have chairs that don't feel like they'll come crashing down under us, maybe we'll start actually eating our meals at the table!
A girl can dream :) 

Friday, February 7, 2014

Stuck In The Middle

It's FRIDAY!!!
And since this week was pretty  much all about Jimmy Fallon taking over The Tonight Show (at least in our house it was) what other way to celebrate than by re-watching THIS GEM of a video! 
Steven and Jimmy make everything better, it's a fact. 

Ok, on to the original point of this post. 
Lately I've been stuck. Stuck between about four different projects that I want to share SOOO BAD, but can't really because none of them are complete. I usually like to wait to have the whole "process" shown with astonishing  slightly-impressive before and after photos. I don't know, maybe none of you guys really care about the process, and that is more my OCD of wanting a "tadaa!" moment at the end to blame. Either way, this past week Eric and I have been working on a few things, and even though none of them are completely finished, I still want to share! 

First up is the set of The Little Mermaid Jr. for the Coldwater Middle School musical. We were approached to help design/construct the set a few months ago, and being the Disney princess addict that I am, instantly said "Of course we'll help!!!". 
Six boards of foam-core, a jigsaw, a lot of shop-vac action, some metallic paint, and vuala! we have coral. 
We also worked on these seahorse doors, which where a bit more meticulous than the coral, but overall I think they turned out great! 
We're planning to finish the rest of the set next weekend, I can't wait to see it all set up during the show!  
The performances are March 7th & 8th at 7:00pm, and March 9th at 2:00om in the Coldwater Auditeria. If you're in the area I highly suggest going, there are some seriously talented kids that will be performing. 

The second project I have going on is transforming this lamp from Goodwill...
...to look like this lamp I found on Pinterest. 
I've gotten through most of the painting, and once everything is dry I can move onto the gold-leaf details. I've never used gold-leaf before, but have read enough tutorials and it seems pretty easy. I love the splattered look this particular lamp has, and there is this lampshade at Target that I want to get to accent the gold.
First a few coats of primer, then about three coats of white spray paint with light sanding in between. I didn't take a picture after the white paint (guess I just forgot) but don't worry, you can't see the floral pattern peaking through anymore. 
After the white was dry, I wrapped the middle section with a few Kroger bags so I could paint the bottom and top parts gold. 
If you look closely, there is some weird texture action happening on the base. Honestly, I have no idea what is going on there. That appeared after my first coat of gold paint, and I can't think of why it's happening. I primed and painted that piece without any sort of previous reaction, so why would the gold go nuts on me? 
My only thought is that this actually did happen with the primer and white paint as well, but because they had a flat finish it wasn't noticeable until I hit it with the super shiny gold finish. 
I sanded it down, gave it another coat of gold, and it had the same reaction. What I don't understand is why it's only happening on one side of the base, if it was some strange paint-layering-issue shouldn't it be over the entire piece? 
Any paint experts have some advise? As of now my solution is to just face that side towards the back. 
Genius, I know.  

So that's the low-down on the Wellman house lately. We did get some fabric samples in the mail, so I hung them up with bobby-pins to see how they looked. I'm still waiting on one more sample, and then hopefully we can make a choice. 
Stay tuned for the "We finally finished stuff!" post. 
Anyone else out there in the middle of more than one project? I'd love to hear about them :)