It’s time for another garage update ! And, yes, I think I’m just going to stick to calling it the garage. I’ve tried a few other things, but they just don’t stick. So, garage it is! Remember how last week we chatted about the painted concrete floor (that I’m NOT in love with), and our beautiful rugs (that I AM in love with)?

Well, once we got the floor painted and the rugs in, it was time to fill the room up with some furniture. We started off with the Kivik sofa from Ikea.

(Note: I have not yet learned how to take photos in this dark room, and the lighting isn’t finished yet, so bear with me as we finish up the lighting and I figure out how to take good photos in here!)

I know a lot of people complain about Ikea furniture, especially on home decor blogs, but I’m just gonna go ahead and say I love it anyways. This couch is beautiful, insanely comfortable, and CHEAP. Can’t beat it. We opted to go with their plain ol’ beige cover – there were several more textured options that we liked a lot better, but they were also much pricier. The cover that we got was on sale for almost 50% off, which means that we saved an insane amount of money and ended up spending less than $900 on this entire (GIANT) couch.

And doesn’t it look good?!

We were originally going to get the loveseat/chaise combination (it’s slightly smaller than this one), but in the end, the sofa/chaise combination was less than $100 more, and we liked it a lot more. Plus, more room to stretch out!

I like the beige color in the room, and the fabric is insanely soft. We’ll probably eventually upgrade to one of their nicer, textured options – just because we like them better, but for now this is great.

Next it was time to add in a coffee table. I’ve been drooling over the wood carved coffee table from West Elm ever since they released it, so it was a no-brainer for us to choose it.

I love that it’s nice and small so it gives us some extra floor space, and we desperately need some more textures and pattern in this room, so it layers right in.

We’ll eventually probably bring down the chair that’s currently in our reading room, but we didn’t want to leave that room completely empty (and I actually use it as it is now!) so that will wait until we eventually turn that room into a nursery. For now, I think we’ve got more than enough seating!

As you can see, we also replaced the old lights with a much cuter option, though it hangs crooked. Annoying! We haven’t figured out exactly how we’re going to fix it yet, but we’ll come up with something. I love the shadows it makes on the ceiling, though!

And, finally, we added a giant projector and dresser to hold all of the components (as some of you who follow me on Instagram may have already seen).

I can give more details on the whole setup and how it works later if anyone is interested, but for now let’s just look. This is actually the dresser that used to be in our bedroom as Corey’s dresser, but we’ve never planned on it being in there long-term, and we think it works nicely in here. We still have a few finishing touches to do on it (as you can see), but once it’s all put together, we won’t have to see any of the annoying components and it’ll hold some of our movies and video games as well. Love!

So, that’s where we’re at right now with the garage. It’s still a mess and needs lots of work, but it’s starting to come together, and we’ve definitely been using it a lot! Next up we need to chat about the curtains we’re adding to hide the water heater and water softener, then we have a few more furniture pieces to talk about, and hopefully we’ll get around to accessorizing and adding in the finishing touches sometime over the next few weeks.

But, since we haven’t gotten to any of that yet, here’s a last look at what it’s looking like as of right now:

I know, it’s a hot mess, but it’ll get there eventually!

What projects have you been working on lately?

 

 

 

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Remember when I showed you guys this super cute vanity we scored on Craigslist? And how it finally (!) filled up that empty space in our bedroom?

Well, I hate it.

Seriously. I’ve considered burning it multiple times.

I even had a nightmare about it the other night.

But, let me explain. I was seriously in love with this guy when we bought it, and I couldn’t wait to get it painted and back in the room. Corey and I waffled back and forth for weeks about what we wanted to do with it,and we finally ended up settling on black. It’s a neutral color (which was important, since our wall color is so bold) but it’s a little more fun and bold than a plain white or gray. We don’t have any black in the room yet, and I’m a strong believer that every room should have a bit of black in it…so black it was.

But, there was a problem.

As you can see, the vanity was still just plain wood and hadn’t been painted. There was a very thin coat of poly on it, but nothing else. I decided to forgo sanding it (a step I skip any chance I can get), and go straight to priming and painting. Only, when I painted it the top looked terrible. Apparently it was a thicker coat of poly than I thought, because it completely messed up the texture of the paint and looked completely ridiculous.

So, I had Corey sand it down for me so I could repaint it.

And when I did? The paint cracked.

SERIOUSLY.

This has only ever happened to me once, and I knew what I did wrong that time (put a top coat on before the paint had dried fully). But this time? There was nothing on the vanity, it had been sanded and cleaned, and there was absolutely no reason for it to crack.

This was the first time I considered burning it.

But I forged ahead, Corey sanded it down again, and I gave it another shot.

It looked much better the second time around – I thought we had finally found victory! Until…the next day when Corey (who was genuinely trying to be helpful) sprayed another coat on the top.

For those of you who don’t know, if you wait more than an hour-ish after painting with spray paint, you should wait at least 48 hours before painting again…or it will crack

And crack it did.

(This would be the second time I wanted to burn it.)

I sanded it down (yet again) and tried one last time.

It didn’t crack this time, but there are still some spots on the top with a really weird texture. I have no idea why. I’ve just given up.

But, if you don’t look at the top too closely, it still looks cute!

I love the black in the room, and I am SO happy with how it looks in this space. I just try really hard to ignore the weird parts on the top…because I don’t know how to fix ‘em and I’m just mad about it. And when I’m mad at things, I ignore them. It doesn’t make the problem go away, but it sure does make me feel better.

I added some fun fabric to the stool (which gave us ZERO problems, by the way) and decided that the vanity itself needed a little bit more fun – so I grabbed a test pot of coral paint from Lowe’s and painted the inside of the vanity for a fun surprise. It’s not something most people will see, but I know it’s there and it makes me smile.

And, with the addition of some super cute flower pulls (that I’ve been lusting after for months but Corey hasn’t let me use them yet because they’re “too girly”), I think I’m hating this vanity a little bit less now.

Maybe once I live with it a little longer I’ll even come to like it.

Maybe.

Have you had any projects give you a really hard time lately?

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When Corey and I originally moved into this house over a year and a half ago (!), I honestly thought we would never use the little breakfast nook in the kitchen.

I mean, honestly. We’d lived in nothing but tiny apartments that didn’t even technically have dining rooms, so it felt downright luxurious to not only have the most giant dining room in the history of the world (our dining room table is 104 inches long!) but to also have a breakfast nook larger than any other dining area we’d ever had.

If I’m being honest, it seemed a bit overkill.

BUT!

After living here for over a year and a half (!), I have grown to adore our little breakfast nook. We use it all the time. Corey eats breakfast here daily, and we sit down to a big breakfast here every single Saturday morning.

And guess what? We use the dining room too!

I still feel a little silly saying that we actually need two separate dining spaces, but, um, we do now.

It’s so nice to have this little area in the kitchen to plop down for a quick breakfast or lunch (or just do get some work done), but to also have the giant dining table for when we have guests or want to sit down and have a nice dinner at home together.

So, in summary, we love the breakfast nook. And, really, it’s the only area in the kitchen that actually feels kind of “complete”. We think the furniture in this little area is perfect, and it’s really come together nicely over the last few months.

But, can we talk about those chairs?

Ugh. I love them so much it’s almost embarrassing, but that fabric? HOT MESS. I actually like the color, but it’s gross, dirty, and completely falling apart.

Cute, right?

We’ve been meaning to recover them for forever, but I have had complete design paralysis when it comes to actually choosing a fabric. Should I go floral? Graphic? Pop of color? Neutral?

I DON’T KNOW!

After months (and months and months) of indecision, I finally decided it was time to just make a damn decision and go for it. After all, it’s not like it’s particularly difficult to recover them if I hate the fabric I choose.

So, last week  I finally ordered some fabric.

I went with a scallop pattern in navy. It’s more color than a black or gray fabric would have been (and this area definitely needs color) but it’s neutral enough that we can still layer in colorful accessories without worrying about clashing. And, it ties in nicely with the navy chairs in the dining room, which is a win-win for me.

So finally, after owning these babies for more than 6 months, I recovered them this weekend. I’m always tempted to gloss over the steps to recovering chairs, but it’s something I’ve gotten asked about a lot in the past so I’ll go over it again – I promise it’s ridiculously simple.

STEP 1:

Remove the seat part of the chair.

STEP 2:

Remove the old fabric. Curse at the  chair many times while you do this. Remember that this is by far the most difficult part of this process.

It helps if you watch some Vampire Diaries while you do it. Ian Somerhalder makes everything better.

(Ew, Corey’s computer screen is dirty.)

STEP 3:

Cut your fabric to the right size for the chair – leave a few inches on all sides. Lay out the new fabric (iron it first, please!) and plop the seat on top of it.

STEP 4:

Enlist your handsome husband (or wonderful wife, or fantastic friend) to help, because this is a two-person job. I mean, you can do it alone if you want. It’s just easier with someone else.

STEP 5:

Pull the fabric tight on one side. Staple.

STEP 6:

Keep going. Cut off the extra fabric when you’re done. I know that’s not particularly descriptive, but this is one of those things you’ve just gotta learn as you go. It’s like wrapping a present…and just remember that if you mess up, it takes just a few seconds to remove the staple and try it again!

STEP 7:

Put the chair back together and marvel at the amazing job you did.

LOVE.

This might sound dramatic, but I feel like this transforms this entire little nook. The navy goes so well with that dark wood and the gold legs that it makes me a little weak in the knees. And having some pattern over there makes the whole area feel so much more put together and complete.

…now if only we could do something about that terrible floor and wall texture/color.

Oh well, baby steps!

Have you done any small projects that make a huge impact lately?

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After the craziness of Creating With the Stars, I’m taking this week off for a quick breather! I’ll be posting the tutorials for two of our projects in the competition (since they were originally posted elsewhere), and there’ll be a special post on Friday for those of you who are new in these parts! Enjoy! 

Is it awkward for me to admit that I knew I would be knocking off this dresser before I even got into this competition? I’ve been in love with it for a while now, and I remember a week or so before I even found out I was in the competition I stumbled on it again and my husband Corey and I decided right then and there that if we got in and if there was a knockoff round, we’d be doing this guy.

(The inspiration – via West Elm)

Luckily, we did, and there was, so here we are!

Like I said, this dresser has been on my mind for a while because it’s just so beautiful, but if you know me at all you know I’m not the type to spend $900 on a piece of furniture. It’s just not gonna happen. So, Corey and I set out to re-create this dresser as affordably as possible, all while putting our own little spin on it.

What we used: 

An antique dresser

Scrap 1×4 wood – we used maybe one board total

White paint

Gray paint

Gorilla glue (or any wood glue you like)

3/4″ dowel rods (for drawer pulls)

1/2″ dowel rod (for drawer pulls)

We started off with this beautiful antique dresser that we found at a local flea market. We loved the clean lines, the tall frame, and (of course!) those casters. Drool. Our style is a pretty good mix of modern and more traditional/vintage furniture, so we liked that this would lead to a slightly less sleek and modern look than the original, which fits right in with the rest of our house. It was basically perfect.

The first step for us was figuring out a way to inset the drawers a bit so that when we added the wood tiles they wouldn’t stick out. We wanted the entire front of the dresser to be flush (the West Elm one has the drawers slightly inset, but we thought a flush look would be a bit more fitting for our dresser). Our original plan was to just move the drawer slides back a few inches in the dresser, which would hopefully make the drawers sit the way we wanted them, but thankfully it was an even easier fix than that with this particular dresser – there were little metal pieces on the inside of the drawers that stopped them from going all the way in. All we had to do was pull those out and make some new stoppers with some little dowel rods and we were good to go.

Next up was cutting all of our wood tiles. Let me warn you – this project isn’t for the faint of heart…it took forever! But, I think the end result is totally worth it, so I won’t complain.

For the tiles we took a few 1×4 boards that we had already laying around and cut them down to 1/4″ thick tiles. It was the quickest way we could think of to do it, and it also meant that the end-grain of the wood would be showing, which added some fun texture. It was a pretty quick job to cut the tiles – we just used a chop saw with a piece of wood clamped to it to make sure all of the tiles were the same size. Our stack quickly grew, and soon enough we had a giant pile of wood tiles.

When they were all cut, we gave them a quick whitewash. I wanted a bit of variety within the tiles, so we did a whitewash on some of them and a graywash on others. It was a subtle difference, but it makes the end product look a bit more random and varied, which I like.

Once our tiles were all dried and ready to go, it was time to attach them to the drawers. We didn’t want to nail them in because then we’d have a billion different nail holes to fill, so we just used some wood glue. We glued ‘em on in a subway pattern and then clamped a board to the drawer while it dried to ensure they all stuck. As the tiles got wet with the glue, some of them started to bow, so clamping it down also kept that to a minimum. We let it all dry together for about 12 hours (just to be sure!) then removed the clamps, sanded down the edges, and that was all there was to it!

The last step was creating the drawer pulls – we knew we wanted ones similar to the inspiration piece, but we also knew that actually finding and buying those pulls would be challenging (not to mention expensive!) so, we decided to make our own! Corey bought a 3/4″ dowel, drilled two holes in the back, and inserted a small, 1/2″ dowel piece . We then spray painted the whole thing with some oil-rubbed bronze spray paint, and screwed ‘em in!

Once we put it all together, it looked a little something like this:

And that, my friends, is how we created our own version of West Elm’s wood-tiled dresser – and under $200, to boot!

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GUESS WHAT? It’s the first day of voting for the FINAL ROUND of Creating With the Stars (sorry for all of the caps, but this is a Big Deal, people!). The projects are, as usual, amazing and the competition is seriously stiff. Go check it out and vote for your favorite – I’d love it if you’d use your psychic powers to try and pick ours…I sure would like to win this thing! 

So, there’s this corner (well, really it’s just an area – not an actual corner) of our master bedroom that has been woefully neglected since the day we moved in.

You’ve only seen it once or twice because I avoid photographing it as much as possible (though I’m sure you can’t possibly guess why). I’m not even exaggerating when I tell you that we plopped down that little table there on the day we moved in because we didn’t have a better place for it, shoved a box underneath (that happens to be filled with my N64…because I’m still 12, apparently) and haven’t touched it since. Like, the box is still unpacked, over a year and a half later. We hung the television shortly after moving in, but it was hung entirely too high, and the cords were all over the place.

Basically, it was not a good look.

But we’re making progress.

Corey’s parents got a new television and so we got their old one, which is significantly larger than the one we had here before. Since we were already having to re-hang everything, Corey took some time to hang it lower (thank goodness), and he also hid the cords and components for me. It’s basically the exact same system we have in our dresser downstairs (that’s a seriously vintage post right there, but it’ll get you the info you need!), except that instead of hiding the components in the drawers of a dresser we hid them in the linen closet in our master bathroom (which happens to be right behind that wall), and it makes things look oh so much better.

(Please ignore the random splotches of darker colored paint. There were a few parts on the wall that needed a touch-up and we used the sample tin of our paint, thinking it was exactly the same…apparently it was not. Still need to fix that. Awkward.)

Look! No cords!

We also recently snagged this gorgeous vanity from Craigslist – I’ve been wanting a vanity for forever but up until now I hadn’t seen anything I really liked. This one is the perfect size for this space. We needed something narrow because it’s right next to the door entering our room, and this fits the bill perfectly.

Obviously, we haven’t done anything to it yet. We’ve been a little bit busy with this whole competition thing. But, we’ve been tossing around a few ideas for what we can do with it, and we’re excited to transform it into something a little more modern and fun.

Oh, and just if you’re curious, this is what happens in my house if you try to take a photo of anything, ever.

Yet another Hadley photobomb. Let’s try that again.

(And yes, if you’re curious, she is as tall as that vanity. It is not just the perspective.)

(And, um, as a reminder…she’s not quite even 10 months old yet.)

(Good grief.)

Of course, I’m so used to doing my makeup in the bathroom, it’s going to be a major adjustment for me to change things up and get ready in here. I’m a creature of habit, so disrupting my morning routine is going to be a challenge – but I’m so excited to use this thing that I may have no problem jumping right in and using it instead. It’ll sure be nice to be able to sit down while I’m doing my makeup…can you say lazy?! 

I promise to keep you updated on where we land with this guy – we’re hoping to tackle it pretty soon.

Since we haven’t decided anything for sure, I’d love to hear your thoughts – what color do you think we should paint it? Anyone else have a vanity where you get ready in the mornings?

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