New Creative Project

I have been holding onto this amazing old chair, lovingly referred to in our home as Pandora's Chair. No one actually can sit in the chair because our very old cat Pandora is always there and on the rare occasion that she get up to use her litter box or grab a mouth full of Iams, she is sure to leave behind enough fur to ruin anyone's pair of black pants. So, really, this chair has become a fancy cat bed that sits in our living room and gets uglier and more disgusting by the day. What a waste and a shame because the chair is actually quite beautiful, though not entirely my style!

Here's the vision! I am going to strip this chair down:

I'll strip and bleach the wood and have a fuchsia stain made up! I have seen a lot of pink stain and I've seen a lot of purple stain and if I mix them... I just know it will be happily magical! I'll re-stain and refinish the wood and then reupholster the chair using this material that I found at DIY Upholstery Supply!

Simple, right!

Since I'm not knowledgeable about upholstery in the least, understandably I do not have the tools necessary to do the job. Instead, I found a hammer and these pliers and screw driver to be priceless in the painstaking task of staple removal.

I didn't actually rip any of the fabric. Instead, I took out every staple and kept the fabric in as good a shape as possible so that I can use it as a pattern and reuse some of the hardware.

During the process of removing the upholstery, I couldn't even keep Pandora off of the chair!

I took a lot of pictures of every step of the process so that I can repiece the chair more easily . Anything that didn't seem obvious to me was snapped. Like this:

and this

And in the end, the chair looks like this:

Tomorrow I strip the wood and then I'll spend the next few days conditioning it! Then I'll stain and finally reupholster! This is such a fun project, but I am wondering how I'll keep Pandora off of the chair when I am done?

Bookcase

One of the best things about being unemployed retired and having two kids in school is that I finally have time to do a few of the things that I haven't had the energy for in years.

I've been interested in re-purposing furniture for awhile and have a so many projects lined up. The research that I've gathered makes me feel like I've actually dug a 17,000 sq ft house into the side of a mountain and built it with just my hands, some 2x4's from free-cycle and pack of Trident. In the words of my very wise friend S, I have practically gone to the University of youtube and have my degree in furniture arts. I mean, I seriously have a stack of banged up furniture in my garage just waiting to be leopard printed or reupholstered or stained pink! It is my ambitious hope that I'll soon be turning piles of wood into furniture.

One piece of furniture that I have acquired is an old, mostly plastic, faux wood book case. There's not much that could be done with it, but I really wanted a fun bookcase for my cookbooks in the kitchen. My husbands Aunt L really set the wheels in my creative machine in motion when she posted this cake stand on my Facebook wall.

I was moved create a henna inspired cookbookcase for my kitchen!

Here's how it happened!

Before:

Primed:

First coat, inside.

Painted:

Detail:

Detail:

Almost done:

And Done:

This has totally made my crazy, cute old kitchen seem so homey. I am just going to keep on taking pictures of it.

The Garden State

We are heading to NJ to empty our storage unit this morning!

Tonight, WE WILL HAVE FURNITURE!!!! Hooray.

We've been living without furniture for three weeks now.

I feel like crackin' open a box of sangria and gettin' my celebrate on.

On a side note, I seriously wish that everyone I know had a blog. I don't care how well I know someone... if they have a blog I'd read it.

Up and Off the Floor

With hesitance, we've started putting new furniture in our house.

This is our new kitchen table. It's no match for the beautiful dining room set that my parents gave me for my birthday a few years back, but it's fine. It will do. I'm happy to have it so that we can give up the card table and folding chairs that have been functioning as our couch, homework and dinner tables.

Also, our bed frames came. Like I said, it will be awhile before we buy head and foot boards for them... but at the very least they are off the ground. In this picture the beds are totally stripped. Why? Because I wash our bedding EVERY SINGLE DAY. I spend so much time doing laundry that it's practically a full time job. I actually ruined Kaitlyn's comforter and need to buy her a new one today. I over washed it and it began falling apart. I wash each sheet, pillowcase, blanket and comforter and then dry them all for two 80 minute dryer cycles every day. Notice the little white bowl around the leg. Each of our beds has 4 of them. They are full of poison and once the bedbug crawls into it... they'll never crawl out. Mwah hahahahhahhaha...

So, on Saturday we'll be getting some furniture out of storage. I know that what is in the storage facility will work for us in some respect. We will make it.

The company who is disposing of our old furniture and our old belongings would like to do it on Friday night, but Jay's been getting some resistance from the condo association. You'd think that they'd want every contaminated piece of furniture out of there as soon as possible, but instead they're complaining about where they can park the truck? Bizarre.