Hus Band out of Town

My husband is out of town for 2 WEEKS! He actually left on Monday and will return next Sunday, methinks. I have realized I'm a truly boring person because (as a co-worker put it) instead of being able to "just party and eat pop tarts and drink boxed wine and run around your house naked like when your parents would leave you alone as a teenager. You gotta do shit." I've given myself a long list of things I want to get accomplished while he's away. And I'm boring because I'm really excited about these plans. They are mostly things that involve destroying the kitchen (or at least the small semblance of order that we currently have) which is easier to tolerate when you are one person who thinks that rice krispy treats make for a great dinner.

Oh that reminds me of a second sub-plan to the for these days alone. I was going to try to avoid going to the grocery store entirely to save up for our Seattle vacation. As I had cup a soup last night, I've already had to abandon this plan. Cup a soup 4 days in to being left alone, means you have hit the bottom of the barrel (or pantry) and need to buy some food.

My plans are to:
paint the dining room
hang dining room curtains
continue with painting the kitchen cabinets, which includes making repairs to the wood veneer, moving the fridge, and emptying large drawers full of stuff
paint exterior metal columns black (someone pointed out the current blue/rust looks is sort of shabby chic, but I think black will be better)
use chalkboard paint on drawers (per previous post)

So far, I've begun the prep work for the kitchen painting.

I cleared the dining room (which is totally not a dining room at this point, but a staging area for kitchen improvements). This picture is very sad, because I consider the dining room cleared for painting, yet clearly it's not. Imagine how awful it looked before?!?

 I also bought zero VOC paint for the dining room. (Test painting spot pictured below).

Super Fab Use for Chalkboard Paint

I was cruising around on Design Sponge and saw the most awesome idea.
My kitchen cabinets have the same "drawers within a cabinet" thing goin on. Below the doors are off for painting, revealing interior drawers.

I'm totally going to use chalkboard paint to paint the drawer fronts to label them. HOT DOG.

Balloon Shades!

I made great progress with the linen balloon shades for my sewing room. Of course I had to clean up my sewing room and vacuum before attempting to put down my cardboard cutting mat and get to work.

These shades were relatively easy to make. I decided not to line the fabric because I wanted it to bunch up really easily and was afraid that a lining would hamper this effect. Although one of the windows faces west and gets a lot of afternoon sun. So I might leave the temporary paper shade up behind it long term to cut down on sun exposure. Although, I'm sure by the time the sunlight has destroyed the shade, I'll be ready for something new. And I used a coupon and Joann's so I got the fabric for under $25 total.
Here is the first shade nearly complete (you can see still see the pins marking the hem). They aren't cute as full as my inspiration picture. But they are close enough and look really pretty. Since they are unlined, you see all of the texture of the linen during the day.

Membership, Flash Sale Websites

I'm totally intrigued by all of the membership, flash sale websites that keep cropping up. At first I only knew of the ones primarily aimed at clothing/accessories: Rue La La, Gilt, the Outnet. But then I stumble across the Foundary and even better, One King's Lane.  And then I saw One King's Lane featured on Million Dollar Decorators and loved it even more. This morning I bought this:

Now here's the deal. We already own this poster and have meant to frame it to hang above our bed (we are so patriotic). But I'll be damned if I can find an affordable 30 x 38 poster frame. I think it's worth $100 (cost with shipping) for the frame alone. And now I don't have to worry about finding a dust and pet hair free zone to frame the thing!
If I'm lucky it will arrive when my husband is out of town (he doesn't read this blog) and I can hide it away for Christmas!

How to Be Really Thrifty

Today I went to Michaels! Woohoo, I love going there. Even though the store is mostly full of crap and if you don't have a coupon you feel like you are totally being ripped off. I needed Antique Gold Rub'n Buff. The curtain rods from our old living room are being repurposed for the dining room. And in the process of turning one long rod into 2 smaller ones, I need to do some repainting. I also need new (or rather more) finials. Irritatingly, the finials sold at Home Depot are about 1/4 inch smaller than the ones I have. So they really won't work. And I didn't want to spend $20 buying new wood finials.

I would probably need to buy 4, if I couldn't find any the same size in Houston and had to order online. So also at Michael's I scored some 2 inch wooden balls, like the one below.

It's the exact same size as the current finial (which I've been carrying around in my purse for 2 weeks). I'm just going to slice off the excess from the current finials and turn them all into balls that just screw into the rod. You don't even see the connection, you just need the ball on the end to prevent the curtain ring from falling off.

I can't wait to go home paint everything flat blat and then use the rub'n buff over top to make it a worn out antique gold!

Oh but guess what I still need to find more stupid wooden rings that are the same size as my current rings.

The Master Bathroom

This post is not chronologically accurate because the master bathroom was one of the first projects we tackled. And when I say we, I mean we hired a contractor to redo the bathroom before we moved in because we needed it done quickly and at that point were comfortable entirely gutting a bathroom by ourselves (although, after this process my husband is confident he can tackle the hall bath with perhaps a bit of help from a plumber).

Here was the inspiration photo. Which we didn't really nail, but hey we've got the marble mosaic floor and subway tile with gray grout.

The original bathroom was HIDEOUS. It was painted cafe o lait and chocolate brown (including the ceiling) and the previous owners had painted over the pink and blue tile and tub with regular latex paint that was peeling.

Before:

Hey what do you know I'm wearing that same shirt again today!

Demo:

 

Rebuilding:

Yeah marble mosaic floor that we got on a mega deal of like $2 a square foot. It's worked out so well because the various shades of gray really hide dirt!

 I really like this Ikea sink.

There are only two missing components. I'd love to have a cabinet like this for towels (upper left of photo)

And we have an antique medical cabinet to get powder coated. Apparently there needs to be some kind of door repair that my husband is working on. This is not our cabinet, but quite similar.

Oh man I bet new glass is going to cost like 50 million dollars. We are also still deciding on a color. At first I thought white, must be white. But we've seen some others at a store in Houston that are brightly colored and now I'm thinking an aqua would be cool.

How to Make Your Own Curtain Rods

As previously mentioned, I hate the bump in my expendable curtain rods that hamper the movement of the drapery rings when opening and closing the curtains. In our old house I had a really nice wooden curtain rod that was actually two smaller rods joined in the middle (with a crazy double ended screw that I need to find more of). The joint was hidden by the middle support. So last night I went to Lowe's to look at their curtain rod selections and again, everything was so expensive and the finials so over the top. I love Sarah Richardson and noticed the used really understated rods in her summer house. Here's a close-up picture of one of the rooms.

And I had a moment of genius inspiration at Lowe's. I bought $2 dowels that are 5/8" wide and wooden drawer pulls to attach to the ends to act as finials.

And a can of bronze spraypaint.

And I started to spray away!

I'm really happy with how it's turning out and I spent about $25 on the whole shebang, versus $25 on only 1 curtain rod (and I need three, 2 that are about 36 inches and one that is 76 inches).
Now I'll just need to buy some mounting hardware (I wasn't happy with my options at Lowe's so I'm going to check elsewhere) and drapery rings. Oh and I need to hem the curtains and, perhaps the biggest barrier, my husband needs to finish framing out the windows. :)
Here's a before picture of what the bay window looked like when we moved in. The panes were cracked and taped together. BLAH.We thought windows going to the ground was a really bad idea and the new windows are raised about 12" off the floor.

Operation Copy Cat Entry

Maybe I've already shared this picture. But I love this entryway from Remodelista.

My husband has some old planks that could be used as a bench top, but those hairpin legs are kind of pricey (over $20 a leg). And I didn't want to sink a bunch of cash into another project (even if it is just attaching legs to a plank). We have so many things to do around the house, I'm more interested in buying furniture that's ready to go.
This weekend we went out to an antique mall that's somewhat far our of town that we hadn't been to in awhile and SCORED an awesome iron bench for $50!

It's perfect and I like that the legs aren't exactly hairpin, since it might look too retro in our 1960s house. The only thing we might do is put a sealer on top to stop any further rusting. Although I love the current level of distress, which probably doesn't come through at all in the photograph. Emmit loves the bench and hey, there's my straw hat from China, cost $1.50!!! I had to wear it nearly the entire way home since it wasn't exactly a check-able item.
Now we just need to powder coat the hooks from Germany and get a cool mirror.

My husband likes these metal framed mirrors from a local antique store, but we think we can do better than $650 each. But I might prefer something like this, if not something like the inspiration photograph.

How to Turn Store Bought Curtains into Custom Curtains, Part I

I find that the most difficult part of making curtains is deciding on a fabric and then forking over huge sums of cash to pay for it. Our living room bay windows will need four panels and each panel will need over 2.5 yards. So a total of about 10.5 yards. And fabric is so expensive. I've been keeping my eye out for the past year for an amazing deal on something that I love. My husband is not a fan of solid linen curtains that are so popular these days.

(Sally Wheat's house via Cote de Texas)
We settled on a suzani print, but dang the fabric is kind of pricey (especially for a somewhat trendy choice). Side note: in our last house in the course of 8 years I made 4 pair of curtains for our living room. I like to change my mind.
So anyways, I wasn't feeling good about shelling out a bunch of money to make something that I might redo in 2 or 3 years. The last pair of curtains I made for the living room (which I still love and plan to hang in the dining room) I bought at Pier 1. Of course I ended up completely remaking them (removing all the hems and lining them). But it was nice to buy curtains, bring the home, hang them and decide what I liked. Here's a picture of when I was deciding between two prints.

And the finished product:

So back to the current house. I saw these curtains online and thought they were really cute (and fully lined) and at $34 a panel, I could buy all four and spend less than I would to buy fabric and lining. And of course save myself the trouble of making curtains (well sort of).

Oooh I hate rod pockets. I think that's the number one give away that something isn't custom. So I just planned to attach rings (not the clips, the curtains slip right off if whenever you move them). But (as many World Market reviewers had noted) the quality control wasn't so great at the factory in Pakistan and so the prints didn't match up. I opened up all my curtains on the floor of World Market to pick 4 that were as close to matching as possible. But still had to do some sewing.

Here are the panels opened up on the floor, to match up the yellow medallions and determine where to turn over the new top hem. Then I removed the stitching:

Pinned and ironed the new hemline. And then restitched by hand for a nice blind hem.

My next step will be to make some pleats. Maybe inverted or fan.

Now I have to figure out hardware. Stupid curtain rods are so expensive. I don't really want to spend over $20 per rod. I already ruled out Ikea's offerings and Home Depot. I think I'll look into metal rod next. Because another pet peeve of mine is the bump in extending rods that make it impossible for curtains rings to slide nicely when opening and closing them.

It's Been a Long Time

Well I was in China for 2 weeks and didn't do much in the way of the house before that. All our time is taken up with trying to prevent all the trees and new plants from dying in the drought that's affecting Houston!
But I'm back and recovered from the jet lag and it actually rained yesterday, so we are back in business. My next project will be roman shades for my sewing room. I bought some really pretty off-white linen at Joann Fabrics (the horror and it's not even upholstery fabric!). I just spent 2034983290 hours trying to find this inspiration picture on another blog. I love, love, love these pleats and how the shades hang!!!!! I'm not going to line the curtains, since I'll be using sheers and the windows don't get direct sun (oh wait one does, but who cares I'm still not going to line them). That way the fabric should be a whole lot drapier.