Free Craft Table

Free! Free!! I hear the word free and I go running towards whatever it is! My company had the most glorious furniture giveaway yesterday! It was amazing! They have this warehouse full of old office furniture from old offices that have either been shut down or updated. I guess they were running out of room so they invited all their agents out to sift through it and take whatever we wanted. For. Free!!

Hardly anyone took advantage of this! Our company has hundreds and hundreds of agents in the triangle and I saw maybe 20 people there. More for me!!

I worked really hard to restrain myself and only bring home items that I knew we had a place for right now. And it was all office furniture so it wasn't like I was scoring couches and side chairs...it was more utilitarian. I ended up with two filing cabinets, three bulletin boards, two mail cubbies, and two adorable end tables. I'll show you more of my scores later but for now, look what I created with the mail cubbies!

It's a craft table for my craft room! A stand up, fabric cutting, gift wrapping, puzzle holding craft table! And it was all FREE!

So, remember when I found my office desk and we bought if off a friend? Well, they had an extra table top from the desk that they re-did and gave it to us for free. Then I went to this office giveaway yesterday and found these two mail cubbies that I was immediately drawn to. I think they will be the perfect fabric storage solution!! Right???

So we hauled them upstairs and set the top of the desk on top of them and Whabam!! Work surface!!

It's far from finished. The table top doesn't fit perfectly and right now it's just balancing on top so we need to secure it in place. Also, one of the mail cubbies is about an inch shorter then the other so we need to build the shorter one up. It also needs two stools because it's a bit taller then I realized it would be.  And you know I'm going to paint it a fun color because this is the crafty/get creative room and office brown is not going to cut it.  Plus it looks gigantic in the space so we're going to have to do some reorganization.

I'm just really excited though! It's going to be perfect and I totally have a vision for what I want it to look like. I'm juggling so many projects right now...I don't know how Derrick lives with me sometimes!

Dining Room Fabric

We found fabric for our dining room chairs! Derrick braved the fabric store with me in Wake Forest. A sweet client of mine gave me a gift card to the fabric store and I was waiting for a good project to use it on. It was still more expensive then I thought it would be....upholstery fabric is not cheap! But it's good quality and will hopefully last forever!!

Here's what we started with! The fabric was in good condition and the seats were really well done but I wanted something with a bit more personality.

I knew I wanted something in the blue family. I thought something red or yellow wouldn't look good with the wood of the chair. I also wanted something that felt a little formal. Nothing crazy...we're not super fancy people, but it is a dining room and the table and chairs are pretty traditional so I didn't want to go super casual.

 We landed on this! This is a pretty true representation of the color. Kind of a tealy-blue. It's a nice heavy-weight fabric and I like the texture in it too!

Derrick asked me on the way to the fabric store when I was going to reupholster them. Immediately....duh! I'm a busy body. Unless I'm feeling lazy, or hungry, or the weather is perfect for doing nothing......  OK, OK...I'm a doer if the conditions are just right and on Saturday the conditions were just right!

Before we headed home we had to sneak in some Ellie time because we're actively working on our favorite aunt/favorite uncle status. This is her Rosie the Riveter look.

The NCSU game started at 3:30 and recovering all six chairs took the first half of the game. It's not typically that fast because I usually try to remove the old fabric. In this case the staples were so tight and there were so many of them we decided to just remove the black backing (to re-use) and reupholster directly over the old fabric. It didn't smell and the new fabric was nice and thick so you can't tell at all.

Look at all those staples. That's about 6 blisters waiting to happen.

Here they are all finished! My electric stapler was also crucial in this project for making this go by super fast. And the pattern repeated enough that I didn't have to worry about centering anything...just making sure it was straight.

Now he can say WE upholstered the chairs. Nice move Derrick.

Here's the final product!! I think they look great! When you look at the whole room it's a pretty subtle change but I think a rug and the hutch will make a huge difference and it's nice to add a little pattern and color to the space.

Slowly but surely! 

Creeped out to the MAX

Holy smokes! Last night Derrick and I were watching "The Game". It's a movie from the '90s that Derrick had seen before but the only thing he remembered about it was he liked it. If you haven't seen it, it's really good BUT it's creepy and about other people controlling your life so you can imagine how completely creeped out I was when, right at the peak of the movie, the power went out!

After regaining our flight impulse we scampered around the house gathering the only candles we had which included our unity candle from our wedding ceremony. Our house smelled like a Yankee Candle shop.

You should watch "The Game". It's good and suspenseful but at the end you don't feel like it was scary at all so you have no trouble sleeping. The perfect combo.

Desk Reveal

The desk is done!! I hope....

A fly landed in the middle of my third coat of paint yesterday and you can see the roller mark where I had to pick the fly off and re-roll that area. A fly may have ruined it for everybody!! Or at least may mean that I have to re-paint the top. I am hoping that the light in the office will not draw attention to the flaw and that it will disappear once I load my desk up with office type things.

Anyways, enough of the fly. The desk is in the office and ready for use! You ready for this before and after?

Sorry for the terrible after. I couldn't put the legs on until it was inside and I didn't have room for a really far panned out picture.

Anyways, here's how it all went down.

Step 1: Have a garage or borrow one. Or steal one. Garages are amazing! I love having a garage so much! The apartment was not the ideal crafting space. It typically meant the living room was a minefield of scissors, staple guns, hot glue, and wet paint. Since the project was a bit smelly it was so awesome to be able to spread everything out for miles and let things dry over night. Here's what it looked like for the past week, Crosby included. She stood or lied right there whenever I was out there and made sure those neighborhood kids didn't come bother me. JK...I like the neighbor kids...they are hilarious.

Step 2: Primer

I used oil based primer and paint because I read that it dried harder than latex paint making it more durable. I thought this was a good feature for the desk.  That being said, oil based paint is a bear to work with! It doesn't wash out and cleaning your brushes is a pain. Here it is after one coat of primer.

Step 3: Paint

And here's coat one of paint. I used a foam roller as much as I could and then a small paint brush for the nooks and crannies. Everywhere I used the paint brush I went back over with a foam roller as much as possible to get an even look. I primed and painted coat one on the first day and then let each coat of paint dry for a full night before applying the next coat. It took 3 coats to completely cover and lose the streakiness.

Step 4: Decorate your driveway

More accurately, have your dog get distracted by the pesky CPI security lady, step in your pan of paint, and proceed to leave footprint on your driveway. True story. Later I found her sucking on her foot so I ended up cutting all the hair off her foot for fear she would be poisoned to death.

Step 5: Spray paint

I disassembled the drawer pulls as much as possible and spray painted them a champagne gold color. It's a difficult color to find and not in many hardware stores. Try a craft store like Michael's. I also sprayed the bottom of the feet but I had to give them a coat of white first. They have screws sticking out the bottom of them so I had to get creative with my drying methods. If you don't have an old rocking chair, you could try cutting some holes in some thick cardboard.  PS: This rocking chair is getting scraped down and re-done and then probably sold because we don't have room for it. Any takers?

Then you're done! Great job! You only lost 1 week of garage use and 1 layer of skin to scrub the paint off! Get a really strong, handsome man to help you move it into your office and make sure he gives you lots of compliments and tells you it was totally worth blowing off a week of prospecting for :)

Lets ooooo and ahhhh at it again, shall we?

And now the office looks like this!

Such an improvement, eh?!

Stinky Pantry

So my desk is coming along amazingly!! I'm hoping to have it completed tomorrow but it might be Friday. This is one of those projects that I am super happy with and really proud of. I can't wait for it to be moved into the office!

With the desk almost complete I've been thinking about my next project and I've settled on the pantry. I want to paint it a fun color inside but the bigger issue is the smell! Our sellers were clean people. When we looked at the house it was very clean and organized and when we moved in all the bathrooms were clean, the carpets were vacuumed It was really great. But....the pantry stinks! It's a weird smell and I can't figure out what it is. It's kind of sweet but it's not good. So I think I'm going to pull everything out to the pantry, killz the heck out of it, and then paint it a fun color! Hopefully the Killz will stifle the smell because right now I cringe every time I open it!

About to get studious!

We found a desk!!! And it was cheap. And it's awesome!

So, my realtor friend Amy and I had lunch yesterday and she told me about these three desks she had found on Craigslist and brought home for her husband who needed a desk.  He needed one desk, she brought home three. Talk about service!

If you could see our office right now you would know our desperation for office furniture because right now we have two cheap book cases and that is it. The rest is still all in boxes because if I unpacked it there would be no place for it to go but the floor.

She sent me a picture of the ones she had leftover and said it was ours for $50 so we skipped out on work patiently waited until our work was done and then high tailed it over there! Isn't is beautiful?? It's a bit dinged up and needs a little TLC but Young House Love   , you know, the bloggers I want to be best friends with, did a desk makeover IDENTICAL to this one! Check it out here.  It was fate. And don't judge me but I'm probably going to copy everything about young house love's desk! I had already told Derrick a while ago I wanted a white desk and I love the gold touches they did. I may play around with a stencil to make it more fun too so we'll just see where it takes us!

If it turns out awful we'll just put it in the backyard as a doghouse for Crosby. Win Win!

We have a table!

Our dining room is looking a little bit fancier these days! When we moved we had one table so it went to the dining room as a place holder. And it looked comically small and not nearly nice enough for the room.

Well, Derrick's mom gave us her dining room table! She told us it wasn't right for her space and she knew we would need one so she offered it to us and we loaded it up and brought it home this weekend. We still have 2 more chairs and a hutch to get to complete the set but doesn't the table look so good in here? Eventually there will be curtains, a rug, some art, and a hutch....and maybe a different wall color, but the table made a huge difference!

Crosby has taken to doing her morning yoga in this room because it just feels so much better now.

The plan was to take the old table up to the puzzle room to use as a craft table but before we took it upstairs we wanted to see how it looked in the kitchen. We thought it was going to look much to big but it's actually not bad. I think it will still end up upstairs but for now we're living with it for a while before we make that move.

In other news, our shower door is broken. It doesn't close and it's very strange...it's as if the magnets just stopped working. I've played around with it and can't figure it out so we may need to bring in reinforcements. Home ownership is fun :)  Seriously :)