Admitting Defeat
A Little Rug on Rug Action
So for about 52 hours, Chad let me believe that I might have won the debate on the “living room in the bedroom” concept last seen here.
The compromise (darn marriage) is that the chairs can stay but the table must go so that mirror feet viewing to occur. Boo.
So now where does that leave us?
Lots of places actually. A lot of weirdness is going on in our bedroom sitting area now. All of which stemmed from finding a $15 mexican rug from the Nearly New Shoppe in Durham.
I thought that its bright colors would match our curtains in a cool, ripped-out-of-Domino kind of way – when in fact the patterns just clash too much. And the rug is W-A-Y bright.
In order to beef up the thinness of the almost blanket like rug, I decided to throw down the guest bedroom rug underneath. You know just to see. They talk about rug layering on Apartment Therapy so how bad could it be?
Well it was not so bueno. Especially after I pulled down our floral curtains to see if they were just making it worse. We did agree on a thrifted ottoman to replace the coffee table though. It will be recovered whenever we decide what the frick is going on with the rest of the room.
And now I really have NO idea what’s going on in there.
Deep sigh.
I think we’ll go back t the old curtains for a bit and rethink the blanket slash rug. But you never know until you try right?
Although I know someone who hopes it stays.
I think she thinks the blanket in the floor is like a big new bed just for her. We couldn’t pry her off the thing.
No Shame In Our Game
If it doesn’t work, live, or look amazing - back to the store it goes. That includes these guys.
Thank goodness for the Lowe’s one year return policy on perennial plants. Strangers actually shook their heads in disbelief and laughed out loud when I came rolling in with my murdered plants. But, I got all sixteen dollars back. Booyah.
Sometimes Simple and Cheap is Okay
I had another crazy idea this weekend. The hubs squashed it. Okay, so it was a mutual squashing. Here’s what I was thinking – we need a console table behind our sofa.
My only reasoning? Because I wanted a place to put two identical lamps, nice and symmetrical, behind the sofa. Giving us balanced light on each side of our arrowhead framings. Simple enough right?
Except our living room is a bit too narrow for such shenanigans.
It’s a little tough to tell by the photo but with the doggie window bench to your far left and the orange Craigslist chair I was leaning over to take this photo, almost all traffic routes through our living room would be a whole foot tighter if I kept my sofa table dreams intact.
After 64,548 hours of staring at the sofa table prototype we rigged up, and a couple of nightmares about unbalanced furniture layouts while I “slept on it” it was time to admit defeat. It’s okay, I’ve been here before I can handle it. Tantrums will be held to a minimum.
But just for fun here was my idea. It might work for you if your living room is not as narrow as ours. First, I snagged two ClosetMaid stackable organizers from Tar-jay for $9.99 each. They were on sale due to all the young people going to college this month and such. They were each 31″ tall and one foot wide. The faux wood finish was very IKEA cheap but simple enough to become an easy table with bonus storage. I was pretty psyched about the whole idea. Baskets were to be involved.
The top was going to be a one foot wide, eight foot long board from Lowes merely attached to the top of the two organizers which would serve as the table legs. Get it?
Could have been great. Darn narrow living room. Oh well, luckily this isn’t the end of the world for any of us. It just would have been nice if it had worked out. Here is where we landed after all the drama.
The secret to this set up? I get to buy a new lamp for the guest bedroom because that’s where I stole the brass one from. Shhh don’t tell the Mr.
You Win Some…
… and someone else wins some. Remember when we entered our little kitchen facelift into This Old House’s Remodel of the Year Contest? Well, we obviously didn’t win but it was fun and we got a lot of great feedback on the cocina as a result.
As a nod to the grand prize winner and all their hard work we thought we’d feature some images of a true Remodel of the Year. They obviously entered the whole house portion of the contest and not the “budget redo” as we did. Notice their mixer isn’t too tall for the countertops now… skillz.
Photos: This Old House
Tone It Down
As mentioned earlier today, we’ve gotten lots of sound advice from readers on our half bathroom. On a side note, we promise this will be one of our last posts on this bathroom for awhile. We get it – enough already right? Just humor us this one last time. This is a nod to you guys.
Some of the feedback has been that our towels and our toilet library were a bit much for the cool beachy room. We’ll admit we suspected this beforehand but thought we play it safe so much that we should just go with our gut. Well our gut is a little too bold and yellow. We’ve found that you all agree with us.
Now, some have gone so far as to say that our bright Ikat patterned towels are a bit too much. Well, honestly, we don’t care. And we mean that in the we value your opinion and are so happy you bother to even read our blog and let us know what you think kinda way. And we’re pickin’ up what your puttin’ down for sure. But the wife loves them and so they stay. If we’re ever showing this house to potential buyers (gasp!) in the future, we can easily throw in some plain white towels to water the whole room down.
A lot of the comments we’ve received about the need to tone it down were well thought out and well, right. So we’ve followed the advice and done just that – except for the Ikat towel thing. Did I mention the wife loves them?
All we did was bring in a bright white hand towel which we bought at Home Goods for $3.99, in place of our too bright yellow towel. Yes, we had to go buy a white towel. That’s how color happy we are around this place. We don’t even own white towels.
We also took away the library, or as one reader put it “whatever that is on your toilet.” Words no one ever wants to hear. So we’ve cooled it down with our simple shell from Heather Garrett Home, purchased here in Durham. We have to admit that we had to fight the urge to bulk it back up with a basket or something. But so far simple is better.
For now we’ve also moved the little pot, which was a lot of fun out and replaced it with a small tube of hand lotion. More practical and less clutter. We likey.
What do you guys think? Was it wise to tone it down a bit? We think so. Any other tips or ideas out there. This is exactly why we post and share these things to get feedback - good and bad! Let ‘er rip.
It’s A Girl!
We say that because we slapped a skirt on that puppy and called it a day. We’re pretty into just hiding our ugly stuff around here lately. Remember our trash can fencing from this weekend?
Yesterday morning we posted about the disappointment that was our little red table turned little red sink vanity. It was worth a shot right? In the end it was going to be a really time-consuming project (as if a few months of procrastination wasn’t bad enough already) that may or may not look like poo at the end of the day. It was getting to be entirely too piecemeal for our liking.
So, as we’ve also already told you guys, we stared down our leaking pipe and discovered a quicker and easier solution in a rubber washer and some carefully spread plumbers putty.
All that was left to do was cover up the ugliness. And by ugliness we mean some major rust and calcium deposits underneath our 1950′s sink.
We know, it’s a little irresponsible of us to just conceal all of this, but the sink is working perfectly now and is just a little worn underneath. Keeping the vintage charm of the original sink fixtures and not tossing one more clunky item into a landfill is worth the shameful rust-hiding.
When searching the web for sink skirt making inspiration we stumbled on a beautiful example and how-to guide from Miss Mustard Seed’s blog via HGTV. It certainly is perfect, as are all of her projects. But we’ll just be the ones to say it – she is an overachiever. As soon as we saw the words “sewing machine” Chad was laughing and I ran in the other direction to scheme up a cheap knock-off.
We used a method similar to our no-sew curtain making. Here are the details:
Step One: Measure your sink both around and from the sink to the floor. Our skirt was made to attach underneath our sink so we measured as far up under the sink as we could and down to the floor. Use a sewing tape for the most accurate measurement.
Step Two: Choose your fabric. We wanted our skirt to be as gender-neutral as possible, read “no flowers.” It was bad enough I was already putting a skirt on something in our house – the pups were just glad it wasn’t them!
Plus whatever fabric we chose had to easily tie into the color scheme of our adjacent kitchen. No clashing allowed.
So we headed to JoAnne’s Fabrics here in Durham and picked up two yards of burlap, marked at $3.99 per yard. When we got to the cash register we discovered it was 40% off. Score!
We think burlap is a nice complement to our wooden kitchen countertops and sisal rug, while giving some contrast to our start white walls (or at least half of our walls) in the bathroom. It says, “I’m girly enough for a skirt, but rough enough to go camping, or ride a horse, or something.”
The other supplies we purchased, also at 40% off, were a roll of burlap toned natural cotton thread and a package of Velcro made for fabric trimmings.
Step Three: Cut your fabric to size. We added two extra inches to the length in order to allow for a hem, and about 18 extra inches to the width to allow us to make little gathers in our skirt and also hem each side.
Step Four: “Sew” your skirt. We hemmed the right, left and bottom edges of the fabric using this method, same one we used on our bedroom curtains, with iron-on hem tape. We used the straight, factory-cut edge for our top and didn’t need to hem it.
Step Five: Attach your Velcro. The Velcro we purchased was made especially for fabric trimmings. This means that it comes with one glued side to stick to your sink and one rough side to sew directly onto your fabric.
We just stitched the rough strip along the top of our skirt by hand – no robot sewing machines. Make sure you sew the Velcro to the front of your skirt, otherwise you could be like us and have to snip it off and re-sew it. D’oh!
Step Six: Skirt ‘yer sink. Just attach the sticky side of the Velcro to the underside of your sink and press firmly. Go slowly so you don’t have to reposition it. The cleaner and drier your sink the better for sticking.
Ours is pretty rusty as we said, and our Velcro still stuck well. It’s good like that. We just pinched back little gathers in our fabric Velcro at the front of the sink to make the slightly pleated effect.
Now we have the perfect hiding place in our tiny storage-less half bath for extra toilet paper or even worse -golf magazines… boys.
What do you guys think? Too girly? Just right? Still mourning the red table like us? Anyone else with a hubs who insists on having golf magazines in the bathroom?
