Dining Room Table & Chairs- Before

When we were looking at houses in North Carolina and trying to decide if this was the house that we wanted, one of the factors we kept thinking about was our furniture. This house is about 200 sq ft smaller than our house in Nashville which isn't a huge difference, but the layout makes the rooms a lot smaller. We knew that a lot of our furniture wouldn't fit. 

Someone gave us a good piece of advice and said, "Don't buy a house based on your furniture. The investment of furniture doesn't compare to the investment of a house." True story. But we had only had our furniture (that we bought brand new) for 5 years so it felt a little painful to get rid of.  

Obviously we ended up buying this house, so we had to figure out what we were going to do. 

The was our old dining room table & chairs in Nashville. 

The chairs (that were a gift) are from Pottery Barn. 

We found this table at Rooms to Go. We loved it but it is honkin. 

Clearly these weren't going to fit in our dining area in our new house:

We put them on Craig's List and they sold quickly. I was happier to part with them when I found out the wife had been looking for months and made her husband drive down from Kentucky to get them, AND they were huge UK fans. 

Once we moved here, it was time to look for a new set. I knew that we didn't want to buy something brand new again. Good thing refinishing old furniture is "in."

We looked at Shelton's- a huge furniture warehouse in downtown Raleigh. It's the same place where we found our TV Stand. 

Amidst a jungle of furniture, we found this set..... 

We knew we had to see past the finish & upholstery to try to find the right shape & size, knowing that we were going to refinish everything ourselves. This set was the perfect size for our little dining area so we took it.  

This upholstery was something for sure. 

One we got everything home I realized how much I loved these chairs. 

I love the details on the spindles. 

It came with 6 chairs but only 4 fit well at the table.  

While it fits well in the space, clearly there was lots of work to be done. 

And lots of work I did with a lot of help from other people.  

I turned to Pinterest for inspiration on what I was going to do. 

For the table, I knew that I wanted to stain the top and pain the bottom like these:

Source: Brittany Makes

Source: Design Stash

This picture convinced me that I really did want to stain the chairs- as daunting as that sounded (and believe me daunting it was). 

Source: Houzz

For the color, I wanted to use green chalk paint. 

I really liked this color:

Source: Simply Seleta

Source: Copper Roof Interiors

I wanted to use Annie Sloan and had originally thought that using a lighter version of Antibes Green would give me what I want but from everything I found on Pinterest, it goes on much brighter than I wanted. 

The Annie Sloan seller here has pieces that she has painted in different colors, and I was really surprised when I asked what color something that looked like this was:

Source: Oliver and Rust

It was Chateau grey without any Old White added. 

The paint chips for Cateau Grey look like this:

 I was really surprised at how green it went on. 

So I went with that and it was exactly what I was looking for. 

So that's the "before" and I will share the "after" soon with the daunting process that it took to get there.  I'm excited to share more of our home with you! 

Our "New" Retro TV Stand

 When we moved to North Carolina, we had to sell a lot of our furniture because the layout of our house is so different here and the rooms are smaller. We didn't want to buy brand new furniture again, and because refinishing old furniture is "in" we decided to go that route. We found a really cool place in downtown Raleigh called Shelton's where we found a few different pieces of furniture that just needed some TLC. 

In Nashville, we had our TV mounted over our mantle. Our living room here is definitely not big enough to do that again, and I thought I wanted to find a cool old sideboard. 

But when I saw this:

I knew it would be perfect. It was pretty retro as it was, so as soon as I took it home I got to work on it. 

The top was a bit scratched up, so I filled and smoothed those out. 

Then I got to work priming.

Then it was time to paint. I chose Benjamin Moore "Gentlemen's Gray."

I painted the inside light blue to give it a little contrast and make it easier to see inside. 

Once I put everything back together, we put it in place (yes this was before Christmas last year..oops)....

And TA-DA! 

I love it. It is perfect for our living room! 

Guest Bed Makeover

I started this post a year and a half ago, when I actually started this project. Now that we're moving in a week, I thought it would be the appropriate time to share :) 

This is the bed that our landlord provided for the extra room in our apartment here. 

Lovely, huh? Blue pleather headboard and gold balls. Clearly we weren't having that. My original plan was to paint the balls black, take the blue headboard off, recover it, and then put it back on. But the screws were so rusted & stripped that taking the blue pleather off was impossible. 

So instead, we took the bar & balls off, and just recovered the whole thing, metal frame included. 

Thanks to Hannah's sweet staple gun skills, it worked really well

I saw this fabric at a bedding store, and absolutely loved it. Any fabric in a bedding store here is really, really tacky, so it really caught my eye. 

I had a euro & 2 standard shams made. I love them so much, that I am taking them back to America with me. 

The bedding is from Ikea (of course). 

I made the bed skirt myself with grey fabric I bought at the fabric market. Since the bed is against the wall, I only made 2 sides, and stapled them to the ply-wood bed slats. 

And that is how we transformed our guest bed from this: 

To this: 

Joyfully Transformed,

My New "Mantle"

So you can guess that in our completely concrete built apartment building over here, there are no chimneys and fireplaces, and therefore no mantles for decorating.

Our house in America has this woooonnndddeerrrrffuuullll real fireplace {that I would LOVE to warm my feet by right now}....

and a very nice mantle with which to decorate for Christmas.....

or baby showers that just happen to be right before Christmas. 

So all my wanderings in the blog world leaving me wishing I had a mantle to decorate here too. 

Clearly that's not gonna happen {like most things} through normal, conventional means SO I decided that a big shelf would work. I searched all over the EA-ian "ebay" {the greatest things ever for foreigners living here... found easy mac and cherry coke on there last week...} and found one that I really liked. I ordered it, and a week later it arrived on a motorcycle {that's how most things are delivered here}. 

My studly, brawny husband borrowed our friend's drill and installed it for me. 

Drilling into our concrete walls makes installing anything on the walls a little tricky, so I was very thankful at his eager willingness to serve his oh so appreciative wife in this way.

So maybe some shelves in America have this installation feature, but I've only seen it here with shelves from IKEA (so maybe Ikea shelves in America are the same... dunno). Anyway, it really is rather brilliant for shelf installation. I remember Adam trying to install our shelves in our living room in America with 4 hangers on the back that you have to line up perfectly..... which is next to impossible. The frustration level was through the roof.

But not with this one. You first install this bracket that has these 2 metal rods that stick out....

and you just slip the shelf right on. How easy is that?

Then just screw these 2 screws into the rods through the bottom of the shelf. Easy peasy. 

And now I have a new makeshift "mantle"!

..... just waiting to be decorated. 

I started last weekend with lots of homemade fall decor that I will share asap! 

Isn't the little piece of furniture underneath it fun? I really like it. 

Joyfully Decorating,

I've got big crafting plans.....

I have big plans. Lots of big plans.

Our guest room has this really cool cabinet in it, that served many purposes last year... such as:

1. Shoving all of the random things that previous dwellers left behind that I didn't know what else to do with into

2. Putting all of the "this smells musty & i don't want to deal with it" stuff into

3. My make shift crafting cabinet. 

I brought a TON of fun crafting things back from America with me that includes (but isn't limited to)..... a cutting mat, rotary slicer, jewelry making stuff, sculpy, felt, wreath form, embroidery hoops, scrapbooking supplies (and my wedding scrapbook to finish almost 5 years later), and needlepoint/embroidery supplies just to name a few. 

So with all of this fun stuff, I had to make room. I decided that this cabinet was now going to be clean, organized, and used solely for the purpose of all things creative. 

So to begin, i put all of the stuff that I brought with me on the guest bed. Then I started pulling everything out of the cabinet. Pretty soon the bed was full. 

I got my house helper to help me in this endeavor and she just kept saying,"ZEN ME DUO LE!" "IT'S SO MUCH STUFF!" and I kept trying to tell her that I didn't buy it all and that the girls who lived here before me left it {including 3 sets of at least 5 meters of really nice fabric....} As hard as I tried to justify the madness, I could just hear her thinking, "Excessive Foreigner." true.  

But seriously, out of control. How did that little cabinet contain SO much stuff?  

seemingly insurmountable. 

Once we got all the stuff out, we went to town cleaning it....

and then lined it with some lovely stripe and polka dot contact paper. 

The possibilities. 

I took a break that day and shut the door, pretending that it wasn't there.... OR that I would open the door and it would all magically be all organized/sorted through/discarded.... 

and what do you know.... TADA....

No actually, I spent like 5 hours the next day organizing/sorting/getting rid of stuff. 

I sorted through all of my fabric and folded it. 

used some milk boxes {yes boxes} to organize & store gift wrap stuff and paper. If I had American resources, I would chose some kind of fantastic organizing device found at the Container Store. But you gotta do what you gotta do. Milk boxes it is. 

So here's the newly organized bottom cabinet....

and then I used some of these wonderful Ikea zipper organizers to sort the little stuff.... frames, scrapbooking stuff, etc. On the bottom shelf we have my sewing machine, cutting mat, scrapbook, and some other tall things.

One drawer has sewing stuff....

....and other small stuff in the other. 

and here it is all assembled, cleaned, lined, organized and ready to supply my every crafting need. 

I've already made a super cute apron & table runner that I can't wait to share! 

Soon. Seriously..... 

And you'd think I wasn't back in EA with my lack of posting anything about it.... but I promise I'll get back to fun little snipits from life here asap. 

Joyfully ORGANIZED,

Linking Up Over At:
{Organizing Made Fun}