The dumpster at my school is a magical place

I have no idea why this is, but the folks at my school tend to throw away a LOT of furniture.  I see chairs, bulletin boards, tables, and other classroom supplies tossed in the dumpster ALL the time.  It feels so sad to me, because a lot of these things that are tossed in the trash are actually just fine, they're just in need of some love and creativity.  So, one day when I was walking home I spotted this chair in the dumpster that looked SO COOL.  Definitely old and outdated, but the basic structure of it seemed perfect.  I texted Jon a picture, and he agreed that it was awesome.  When he wheeled it in our house, it felt like he had brought home flowers...ha!  You can see our engagement chairs in this pic too...I think I have a love language ; )

Isn't it cool?  Totally beat up, but SO worth rescuing.  There was absolutely nothing wrong with the wheels or frame, just the foam and upholstery.

We still have foam left over from when Jon reupholstered our navy chairs, so I knew I could use that to fix the arm in a minute.

First, I took apart the whole entire chair to clean it and remove the old upholstery.

I spray painted the chair frame an enamel gray that we had left over from another project, which made it feel fresh and clean and new.  Then, a couple of nights later, I went to Joann's to look for fabric.  Oh my word, the CHOICES.

I LOVE the print on the right.  It's navy on burlap...how awesome is that?!  I was about to buy the whole bolt : )  But then I thought that burlap might look pretty but not actually be that comfortable to sit on.  I'm still trying to think of reasons why we need this fabric!  The fabric on the left was a second runner up, but it was pretty expensive per yard even with a coupon.  Bummer.  I brought it to the cutting counter and wandered around the store one last time to see if there were any better options.  I stumbled upon a hidden little aisle that had thick cotton fabric for half of the price of the blue moroccan print (with a 40% off sale on top of that)...and in a cute ikat print instead.  Here is the chair in process...

Pretty fun, huh?  The spray paint we already had, and the chair was free from a dumpster, so I only paid $5.99 for the fabric.  I still need to finish the seat, but you can pretty much get an idea of what it will look like : ) It's so funny how experimenting with reupholstering furniture makes you look at things differently...you see the potential in things in a new way.  Just for comparison, look at how far this chair came!

Oh!  And all I did to fix the arm was hot glue on a patch of foam and cover it with fabric.  It only took about a minute!

So, the moral of the story is, go dumpster.  Seriously.  You can find some GEMS : )

We have permission to paint!

You guys.  We got permission to paint!  You might have seen in a few pictures of our house, but when we moved in the walls in the dining room and living room looked like this.

YIKES.  And we were told by our property manager that our landlords loved it, and there would be absolutely no painting.  Eeek!  So, our temporary solution was to cover as much wall space as we could with drop cloth curtains.  (Which, by the way, is a crazy affordable way to get beautiful, full, weighty curtains, already cut to size.)  I think it helped, temporarily, and having curtains hung so high and wide made our windows look much larger than they actually are.

So anyways, the other day, something AMAZING happened.  Jon got into a conversation with our landlord (who happens to live next door, and who we have been becoming friends with), and invited him in to show him the pallet wood bookshelf.  Jon casually led the conversation to painting the walls, and our landlord actually said YES!  It was cute, he said something like, "Well, seeing what you've done with the place, I know you won't paint it a deep purple or something like that...so, sure!  You can paint."

We made it our date on Friday to track down cans of oops paint at Home Depot and Walmart.  Look at our samples!

This is right by our front door.  We ended up finding a pre-made color at Walmart called "Country White," which was really pretty as-is.  I had my heart set on a grey color though, so rather than getting that mixed, we just got one of those 50 cent bottles of craft acrylic paint in black to mix in with our white.  (That's the grey patch above the white).  Google told us that it's ok to mix acrylic paint and latex paint, because they are both water soluble.  I actually really liked how it turned out, too.  So, if you want a very very inexpensive way to get just the right paint color, there you go : )

We decided though that it would be best to go with the white, both to honor our landlords (we wanted to be very very neutral), and we loved how fresh and clean it looked.

On Saturday night, we started with our dining room!

Oh, mercy.  Those walls!

Only two of the walls were actually sponge painted (huh?) so we had to use a couple of coats on those walls.  Everything else was SO fast!

And here is the blurry late-night phone shot of the finished room : )  SUCH a difference!  Here she is all put back together, in better light.

I wanted to hug the walls : )  It's the little things.  Also, I need to tell you about the elements in this room, because it's such a sweet picture of redeemed things making a space beautiful.

Curtains: Drop cloths (9x6) from Home Depot
Chandelier: Southern Thrift in Nashville (this was in the living room of the home I lived in with Katie in Nashville!  And it may have been spray painted in our basement...)
Chairs: Goodwill outlet (spray painted)
Table: Goodwill outlet (It's a Henredon table!  We found it for just $20.  We were pretty excited.)
Bench: A gift from Dad when he was moving out of his office in San Diego (and originally from a consignment store in San Diego).
Flowers: From our landlords : )

I think we maybe spent $60 on this room?  If even that!  Point being, making rooms feel special and beautiful to you has absolutely no correlation with a large budget.  We have had SO much fun making the things in here ours by redeeming broken things!

A tale of an Ikea dresser

When we first moved into our house, we decided together that we would rather take our time and slowly accumulate quality pieces of furniture we truly loved, instead of filling our house with a bunch of stuff for the sake of filling empty space.  For the most part, we were pretty resistant to buying anything new (unless it is upholstered or a mattress, then absolutely), because we loved restoring old furniture so much.  So, we bought our mattress and couch from Ikea, but decided to wait for everything else.

We looked around for dressers, but found that they were waaaaaaay too big for our little bedroom.  Then, I saw this, and fell in love.  Isn't that so cool!?  It's an Ikea Rast dresser, that someone brilliant turned into knock-off campaign furniture.  At the time, we hadn't gotten our campaign dresser, so I was in love with this idea : )  Our need for storage felt urgent enough that we decided to make a temporary exception to our "let's wait and find it at goodwill or a garage sale" rule.  When we brought home our rast dressers, Jon put them together on either side of our bed.

It was the perfect solution for us in our room to give us storage and not use up a whole ton of space.  These little bitty dressers are prefect as night stands!  They sat like this for a few weeks, and meanwhile we found the campaign dressers and decided not to try that same look here.  Instead, we decided to paint these dressers solid navy, and give the knobs a little upgrade.

Here's how I started.  First, I started taking apart the dresser that Jon had worked so hard to build (assembling Ikea furniture is no joke!)

Then I pulled out all of the drawers.

And started painting!  We chose a glossy navy, and a trick I found is that it is MUCH easier to paint multiple thin layers than to try and get the paint to look good with a thick layer.

I was a little nervous when I started because the navy was coming out more like a little kid's room and less the dark sophisticated vibe, but it darkened considerably as it dried.

After the paint dried, we added on the pretty new brushed nickel knobs (they were a value pack at Home Depot.)

Isn't that a crazy change?!  We love how the glossy paint makes it look like a much fancier piece of furniture than it actually is : )

Here is the difference in our room now.

Not too bad for Ikea dressers, huh? : )  The curtains are 9x6 drop cloths that are also from Home Depot, and hung on rods from Target.  We received a bed frame as a wedding gift, and that is on it's way...our room is actually pretty close to being done!

My husband is amazing

You guys.  We spent all weekend working on our guest room.  All of the other rooms in our house have a pretty put-together feeling, even if there are projects here and there that would feel fun to do.  But here is how our guest room was looking:

Not that bad, but it's the room in our house that had become a dumping ground for everything we didn't know what to do with.  Marriage and living with Jon has changed my style more than I expected.  I'm actually really into having a restricted color pallet in our home.  Before marriage, I would cram all kinds of pattern and color into one space, which is what this room feels like.  Individually the elements are cute, but this is a LOT going on.  The turquoise, the piles of books, and the art thrown onto the walls all feel hectic (really, we didn't know where to put that art, so I tacked them up on the wall so they wouldn't get damaged sitting on the floor).  So.  The biggest thing to happen in the room was the project you see in the bottom left of that photo - a bookshelf!

First, Jon tracked down a bunch of pallets.  This was a HUGE process.  When he had enough wood to start building, he made a base that looked like this:

Taking apart pallets is a slow, painful process, because the wood is so thin.  It doesn't take much at all for the wood to break into unusable pieces.  So, after a LOT more pulling apart pallets, the bookshelf grew to this:

Then this!

Then, Jon added backing to each of the shelves.  One thing that he really worked hard on, and I think made a HUGE difference in the quality of the shelf when building with pallet wood, was to really take time and layer the wood so there is lots of support.  That is why he planned in so many shelf dividers and you see two layers of pallet wood on each side.  Leave it to my smart engineer husband to figure out how to make a solid bookshelf out of pallet wood : )  Here's what it looked like with the back on it:

Isn't he cute? : )

And oh my word.  This thing was HEAVY!

How cool does that look?!  My favorite part is the backing of the shelf on the left where the boards are diagonal.  Jon did that to use up some of the wide smaller pieces that were broken.

Then, our books got to go from these crazy piles...

To this!

The coolest pallet wood bookshelf in the world.  This room is still a work in progress (the pink spongey walls need to go...those pictures want to become a little gallery wall...we need a bed frame for the day bed...you know) but for now, our books have a very, very cool home, all made out of free wood that Jon rescued.  I'll post a full tour of the room when we find some good oops paint to cover up those pink walls!

Proportion is everything

Today Jon and I went to an estate sale, which, for the record, are the BEST place to find second-hand items to restore (besides the Goodwill bins, of course).  This estate sale that we found today was a happy one, because a cute old couple was selling things just to downsize.  It also meant that they just wanted to get rid of their stuff, and would really take any offer.  Oh my word.  Jon found some treasures, like camping gear, fishing gear, and a foul weather suit (brand new!) and I found THIS:

The coolest mirror in the world.  The mirror isn't in it (it was whole, just not in the frame when I took this picture), but I was so excited about how BIG this thing is!  I don't know if you can tell in the picture, but it is at least 4ft x 3ft.  Mirrors are surprisingly expensive when bought new - one this size at Lowe's or Home Depot would be around $80 on the low end.  So right along with well-crafted wood furniture, mirrors are always a perfect thing to keep an eye open for at thrift stores or garage sales.  I only had a few dollars in my pocket, but I figured it would never hurt to ask if the woman running the sale would take $4 for the mirror.  SHE SAID YES!

So.  It was time to give our mirror a little update and a new home.  First I sanded it and wiped it down to get ready for black paint:

Now, for giving it a home.  A huge mirror is perfect in ANY room in a house, but my first thought was our entryway with the campaign dresser.  Here is what our entryway looked like before:

Cute and cheery, but that tiny mirror was getting lost on the huge wall, and it wasn't much of an entrance focal point.  So, here is the after with our new glossy black mirror:

Ha, that thing is HUGE.  We still need to figure out a way to get it hung up on the wall, but for now our little entryway has a huge statement piece for all of $4.  How cool is that?!

For those times you live in a rental...

We LOVE the little house we are renting.  LOVE it : )  But there are some quirky things about it, what with being a cottage from the 1920's.  The sponge paint, crazy kitchen floor (I'll have to show you later), and wood EVERYWHERE.  This is totally a personal preference thing, but I tend to only like wood in very, very dark stains, and mostly only on floors.  Anywhere else and it starts to feel too dark and heavy to me.  If I could pick, all wood except the floors would be painted a pretty, fresh, clean, bright white.  So, you can imagine what I would love to do with our front door and all of that wood trim:

Sadly, our landlords won't let us paint (even those sponge paint walls!), so this brings me to my latest theory on quirky houses: You can live with ANYTHING as long as it is bright, sparkling, and perfectly CLEAN.  Scrubbed, shined, polished...whatever it takes to make something not-so-cute at least sparkling and immaculate.  SO.  This little door was my project today.

First, I attacked it with a few round of Murphy's Oil Soap for Wood, and here's how it turned out:

And here is how my cleaning rag turned out:

Ewwwwwwwwwwww.

I don't know if you can even tell a difference between the before and after picture, but in person you can tell that the door is just fresh, clean wood now - no more dust or dirt caked on there.  What I love about the Murphy's Oil Soap too is that it scrubs things clean AND nourishes the wood with oil, which makes the color of the wood a little less dull.

Next, I tackled the hardware.  Here is what it looked like before:

Poor little guy.

I unscrewed the hardware from the door and made it a cleaning paste with vinegar, salt, and flour, just like I did for the hardware on our campaign dresser.  (Sidenote: There's a preview of our kitchen floor!  Can you see it?)

I spread this paste onto the brass hardware and let it sit in the cereal bowl for about an hour.  There must be something REALLY abrasive about the vinegar and salt together, with the flour making it stay put, because after I scrubbed the paste off in the sink...

The hardware was completely transformed into this!

Isn't that so much better?  It's the little things.  If you can't paint it, at least you can go from this:

To this!