The Twins are DONE!!!

EEEEEE!!! They're done!!! Are you as excited as we are??? I hope so!!

Of course I'm talking about the chairs for the living room! They're amazing! I actually gave the upholster Sandy a hug. :) She did such a good job. She had a fight with them when she put the nail heads in. There are a few spots that I need to go back and touch up, i just haven't had time. Plus you wouldn't be able to see it unless you had your face super close to them. Oh and I guess I should mention how long it took her...3 days! We dropped them off on Sunday and she called me Wednesday telling me they were done! We couldn't get up there until Friday, so don't worry I haven't been holding out on you all!! Ok, I'll stop talking about them and show them to you!!

Here's a before..



And NOW!!





We LOVE them!! Here's what the living room was before..



And the room after...now don't judge the awfulness of the picture. I'm tired and was feeling lazy! We're making a coffee table, so once that's done I'll have Tim take a pretty picture of the room!!



Notice Winston..? That's his favorite toy, ever!! I love that dog!

What's next you ask?? Well the coffee table aaaaaannnndddd the basement!! Woo-Hoo!

jo

The Great Wall of Fleenor

(yeah, that title is courtesy of Tim...)

First...an update on the chairs!!

Thanks to my good friend Jenni..I found an upholster who is doing my chairs for...wait for it...$50 a chair!! Now compared to some of the other places I called..this is a steal. (One person wanted $180 a chair, hahahahahaha!!) Tim and I drove them up north on Sunday and met Sandy. She's awesome. She teased me a lot for what I thought I could do. I should get them sometime this week!! eeeee!! If you or anyone is in need of some upholstery, contact her! thegoodjunkshop@yahoo.com and her name is Sandy. Just one tip..if you do what Tim and I did, keep the fabric that you took off. She needs that to make a pattern out of it, so don't throw the scrapes away. Or she said she's had someone take her the chair, she rips it all off, you go back and get it so you can paint it, and then take it back for her to finish.

Ok now onto the latest thing we've finished. I'm awful and only have a before picture from when we first moved in, In the living room, all of our walls are either tall and completely empty or full of windows. So we had to decide how we were going to fill those tall, completely empty walls. We thought out a few different ideas and decided on 2 different things for the 2 walls. The one wall that goes up our stairs is getting a special little treatment that you'll have to wait for! The other wall upstairs got a shelf face lift. We really thought this through. On one of our many trips to Lowe's we checked out their shelving choices and wrote down the measurements of the 3 different sizes we liked. When we got home, Tim took a picture or the wall and loaded that picture onto photo shop and sized down the measurements of the shelves so we could visually see what they'd look like. We decided on 2 large, 2 medium, and 3 small. We went back and got them and then we put those bad boys up. I'm not going to lie, these have been up since February, I just haven't finished filling the shelves.





Pretty much everything on these shelves are from thrift stores. And anything that is an animal or a nick-knack, we sprayed painted. We didn't really have an idea of what we wanted up there, whenever we saw something we liked, we got it. (Sometimes not knowing if it'd work anywhere!) After we painted the whole area and put up the curtains, I decided I wanted to bring in some other colors other than gray, yellow, and tealish-blueish. We went with orange and that granny smith apple green that I am now officially obsessed with. Tim might have to take the spray paint can away from me. :)

One thing we knew we wanted was a big, marquee "F". We had a hard time with that...let's be honest, we are still having a hard time with that. They are not cheap and we can't find one that fits everything we want. We might make one some day but for now we are happy with the foam board "F" Tim made last minute.



I'm happy with it...for now. I'm sure I'll see something at a thrift store that would look better up there. Who knows how many times the things up there will change! Oh and that lamp will be changing very soon! Hopefully you'll be hearing from me by the end of the week with the finished chairs!!

jo

Chair Blues..

I'm kind of sad..and when I say kind of, I mean I'm really really sad. Since I've had some days off, we decided to get to work on the new chairs for the living room. I found these amazing Victorian armchairs on craigslist for $100. Now I would of barter with the lady but...I was scared for our lives. I was happy Tim was with me...The lady met us in the hallway of a creepy apartment complex and told us to be quiet because there was a sleeping baby. (Riiiight) Once inside there were a handful of medieval swords and knives all over the wall in this house..At this point you'd think we'd leave. Nope! I had to have these chairs!! She showed them to us, I said yes before she could even finish telling us about them, gave her her money and peaced out!! Now I'm sure this lady was super nice and just liked collecting medieval things but it was creepy!!



Worth it right?!?

At first, I was going to have a professional take care of the twins but one of my sister-in-laws helped me figure out how to get the back of the chair off. They were a pain in my butt...lots of bad things came out of my mouth. :) I'll leave it at that. With lots of muscle help from Tim we got all that awful fabric off and we sanded them...mainly by hand. There are a lot of intrigue areas on these chairs. It took a lot longer than I wanted!!



We decided we were going to spray paint these to avoid dripping. That was one problem we had with our dining room chairs. We put on a coat of primer and noticed that the paint wasn't sticking to those intricate little areas!! BAH! I had Tim do a coat of spray paint just to make sure it was a bust, and it was. Still no sticking. We ended up buying a quart of nice white paint and did 4 light coats.



SO PRETTY!!

Now on to why I'm sad...I had everything we needed..fabric, cording, and nail head trim. Tim and I covered the seat cushions with muslin (I didn't feel like taking off that fabric) and I got the fun, bright, new fabric out and found out that we don't have the right tools. We tried the staple gun we used for our dining chairs but the staples weren't holding the fabric. We even got out the loud compressor hoping the extra umph would do the trick..no such luck!! So now I'm back to square one. I wanted so badly for these chairs to be done! I'll be calling around for a decent upholsterer and hopefully soon I'll have the final product! If you know of anyone who won't charge me an arm and a leg..please pass along their info!!

jo

I need your help!

So yes I still suck at this whole blog thing..I promise I'm going to try to do better! Our problem is we start something and then before it's finished we have to do something else, so things aren't getting finished. And I can't blog about unfinished things!! I've been off for a few days so things have been getting done...meaning you're going to get a butt load of blog updates! woo-hoo!!

Anyway, Tim and I can't agree on something..so I thought I'd ask for some help! At the end of our hallway Tim painted a mirror we got from a thrift store ($2!!) orange and put it up and surprised me. I love it!! But I think there needs to be something else down there with it. I was thinking a book shelf. Now we would have to build it because I don't think there's a book shelf out there that matches our exact measurements. I was thinking something along these lines..



(i found this picture searching in google, not sure where it's from)

I even love the color on back. I love it so much I decided to bring in it the living room, I bought spray paint that matches and went to town on some candle stick holders and some other little nick knacks. I measured out what I thought would look good and what wouldn't be awkward when walking out of our room but my wonderful husband still isn't sold on it. I think it'd look so good down there! So I thought I'd ask you guys what you think...here's the hallway..



What do you guys think...Let me know!!!!

jo

Dining Room Chairs...FINALLY!!!

First of all...who has 2 thumbs and sucks at updating her blog?? *THIS GIRL!!* Man it's been awhile. A lot of things have been going on over here and has kind of put a hold on somethings. But we are back!! We finished our chairs, yay!! And we've put some stuff on the walls! But first the chairs!

It's sort of annoying how long these 6 chairs took us. Tim started this project before Christmas...yea you read that right, Christmas!! He sanded the table and 4 chairs that came with the table and the other 2 chairs we got for our captain chairs (they only set us back $20). We wanted the table to have more of a rustic, farm look. So all he did was sand it and did a light coat of stain. You can see nicks and some parts are a little darker than other parts, but that's what we wanted! We love it! It's been upstairs since Christmas...so now here's the story on those chairs.

When we bought the table it came with 4 ladder back chairs. I thought that we could paint them and add fabric to them and be done with it. Well..first they were bigger than the chairs we got for the Captains chairs, and second I kind of hated them. They weren't exactly what I was wanting. Before we even put an offer on a house I found this picture online and decided we had to do this!



Sadly we can't have the buffet but we still went through with our plan. Tim already had 3 out of the 4 chairs sanded when I finally told him I didn't care for them. :) He told me if I could find some chairs for super cheap and within a certain time limit, I could get them. So I hunted on craigslist constantly for 2 weeks until I found these gems for $15. Well when Tim picked them up, he only had a 20, so actually they were $20. But still..that's awesome!!



We sanded these and had to do 3 coats on all the chairs. I recovered all the seats and a seat from a chair I got for my desk that was $15 at a flea mart. (the chair on the right is 1 of the Captains Chairs and the other one is my desk chair!)



So without further ado...here they are!!







We are very happy with the finish product!!

As a side note..Tim is a full time photographer!! Woo Hoo!!!

jo

The Little Things!

First off...props to Tim for making our blog look amazing! I love it, don't you? Thanks Tim!

Second, I thought while you're patiently waiting for our chairs to get finished, I'd share some things from in the house.

When we bought the house we had a million different ideas of what we wanted to do here and there, and that's when we decided were going to do a room at a time. That way we could put all our focus on that room and not feel overwhelmed. Obviously we tackled the biggest and most seen area of the house. Sadly, it's a big area and is kind of overwhelming, ha! But I think we're doing a good job so far! The one thing we promised each other is that we'd do everything...and I mean everything...on a budget. Now we never really sat down and said this is how much we are spending, it's just an understanding. Actually that's one of the reasons we decided to do this blog. I love watching HGTV and I really like "Sarah's House." She completely guts a house and then walks you through all she does. Only problem is, she has an endless amount of money. Yea if I had $150,000 to redo a room I'd get a lot of things she does. But realistically there's just no way we could do half the things she does! Now I'm not an idiot, I know only a few people read this but I think if one person saw that we did a room, and saved a ton of money, then maybe they'd try to do it themselves.

So I'm going to show you the things we've bought and how much we bought it for...that way you can see that you don't have to spend a lot to have the things you like!



This bad boy we found on craigslist. Craigslist is our best friend. We look at it numerous times during the day and send each other things we've found. We got him for $10. Yup $10. Now it doesn't work and if we wanted to spend the money to make it work we could, but we just don't want to. Instead, Tim put 2 old computer speakers back behind and we have a cord that connects to our phones. We can plug it in whenever we want music. Not bad for 10 bucks!! That little fan cost us $40...oh wait we got 2 for $40!! One big one that you'll see someday in our room :)



This beaut is from an antique store and only cost us $50. We really wanted this other table but just couldn't bring ourselves to pay over $200 for it...then we ran into this. It's dirty but that gives it character. (I added some more when we painted..whoops) Antique stores are a lot like craigslist...you can barter. We talked them down and that's how we ended with $50. Amazing!



And then there's this little gem. Just look at her. She's glorious. We didn't become obsessed with card catalog's until we started reading dreambookdesign.com. They have one that makes us drool!! (Go look at it!!) Sadly KC doesn't have a big supply of these and when we came across this on craigslist we acted fast! It was originally on there for $200...no thanks! I patiently watched it go down, and down until it got to where i could write and barter her. Yea we got it for $75!! Holy steal batman!! She was going to go in the entry way but was just too small :( She's downstairs now, where we can take in her beauty every night.

There will be more where that came from! And hopefully soon some dining room chairs!

jo

Kitchen light DIY

When we moved in, all the lights were thankfully livable. Since our house was a foreclosure, a company came in and painted everything inside and out, laid new carpet, and painted all the light fixtures. They looked a lot better but they don't match! We have had an amazing white chandelier from my brother and sister-in-laws wedding, that has been with us for a while. We love it! It went up I think the second night we were here. We are still trying to find lights for in the kitchen and the entry way. And the fan in the living room might get a white face lift...not 100% sure if you can paint a ceiling fan. Guess we will find out!

We have a light above our sink that was ok...but I found this lovely idea on esty.com and decided we had to do it!!



I wasn't really sure how it was going to get done, but that's were Tim comes in. He took apart our old light and tried to figure out what we could do.



After throwing out a few different ideas, we came up with this...He took off the glass surrounding the bulb, and then twisted off the part that the glass attached to. We found some hanging light things that dangle (good description!) and thankfully they fit in the previous light. We painted the light white and found 3 mason jars that match. Tim cut out circles in the lids so the dangling light fit perfectly through.



He shoved the dangle lights through, did all the wiring and voila! Here's the beauty! We love it! I can't wait to change out the rest of the lights so they all match!



Next on our to-do list are chairs...lots of chairs. 6 dining room chairs and 2 new chairs for the living room! Hopefully they'll be done soon!!

jo