Work That Bench

In our quest for organization, we knew we would need to do something in our garage.  Between the 2 of us, we have a decent amount of tools that were in need of a home.  We were on the lookout for a workbench, but hadn’t found anything that really struck our fancy.  During a random trip through Lowe’s, we discovered this kit from 2×4 Basics.

The kit included all of the brackets and corner pieces and we would supply the wood and build it ourselves.  The kit was around $65.00 and the wood would have been around $50, so we estimated $120 for the whole work bench.  Not bad…but also not great.

As I was visiting my friend Craig’s List, I found a guy selling his garage workbench/cabinets for a grand total of $50.00.  This is much cheaper than a build it work bench.  I anxiously emailed him to see if it was still available.  As luck would have it, Nathanael was in town with Kimberly, so he could go with Steve to help him load it up and get it back to our house.

Some of the drawers stuck, so Steve took his sander to them and it solves the problem.  While he was at it, he sanded the whole workbench.  I’m going to paint it a glossy deep gray to class it up a bit.  The storage is absolutely perfect!  The drawers are shallow and plentiful, which is perfect for a work bench.  It also has the wide spaces to store larger tool boxes.  The countertop that came on it was in bad shape, so we bought a new piece of particle board and had Lowe’s cut it in half for us…Voila, we had a new countertop.

The peg board already came with our garage, we just adjusted it so it would go all the way up to the ceiling.  Steve is so excited to have his “toys” organized and at his fingertips…and I appreciate that we have all the stuff we need to get our various projects done.  In fact, Steve is in the basement right now working on the latest project…what is it you ask?  Storage shelves for the basement!  Don’t worry, I’ll post all the info and photos once he gets done.

Breakdown of the bench-
$50.00 for the cabinets
$33.00 for the new counter top
$5.00 for a gallon of gray glossy paint from the Lowe’s mis-mixed rack
Grand total- $88.00

For the amount storage and room we have in our garage, we’re sold!  What do you use in your garage?  We’re thinking we might need a few more storage options in there…

(You aren’t crazy, I haven’t actually painted the bench yet…that will also be coming soon).

Future Plans – Time To Do the Laundry

We’ve been talking a lot recently about our overall plan for our house.  We are planning to live here for a good long time and after 2 months in the house, we’re starting to get a clear vision of what we want to do.  One of the rooms I was most excited about has quickly become a pain point for me.  What’s that you ask?  The laundry room.  I was SO excited to have a designated laundry room, but I quickly realize as far as functional goes, our laundry room is NOT it.  It’s awkwardly shaped and set up and I spend more time getting frustrated with that room than it’s really worth.

At first I thought the 2 cabinets would be awesome…turns out, they don’t store what I actually need them to store, the hanging bar is all but worthless to me (we have to hang 90% of our clothes to dry so they stay the appropriate length for us, but we use a drying rack since hangers stretch them out), and you can see the removed door on the left.  It’s impossible to open the door and get past it to the washer and dryer, so while I love having the door to shut out the noise, this one will just not do.

Here is the laundry sink (with a now extinct shelf sitting on it).  The sink is awesome, it’s really deep and very handy.  There is no counter space to set anything (now that we had to remove the shelf in order to open the dryer) so that’s a hindrance to how useful this could be.

Next to the laundry sink, this closet…again, not as useful as I really thought it would be.  We need more organization in here (and again..less doors)

This “gorgeous” linoleum really doesn’t need a comment.  In the background, you can see where the prior owners had the laundry room plumbed for a gas line.  We have an electric dryer and no use for the gas line.

Kirby demonstrating all of the doors in our laundry room.

On a typical day, as I’m trying to do laundry, it looks a little something like this:

Yes…take that in….laundry rack of pants, clothes baskets on the floor of things to be folded, cleaning bucket sitting on the laundry sink and closet door to my right.
**The pictures below are borrowed off the internet…click on them to see their source**
In our brainstorming, this is a room I would really like to get functional.  I want to tear out the closet, yes, you read that right.  Closet = gone and replace it with a mudroom type set up similar to this.

This type of setup would work great for us (I’m not crazy about the color, light fixture, or floor so ignore that part)…we have hooks to hang the dog leashes, biking bags, and current season coats on.  There is storage for shoes and it make the small room open up a bit AND removes a door.

These drying racks are the most genius laundry item I have seen.  We are making these stat so I don’t have to trip over the drying rack in the middle of the floor anymore.

Check out the sliding door on the left in this picture.  We were talking about doing a pocket door between the laundry room and the kitchen, but that involves a lot of ripping out of walls, moving of electrical boxes, etc.  So instead of doing that, we’re going to install a handy sliding door on the outside of the wall.  I’m planning to do it in a fun color to really add some spunk to the laundry room (and white on the kitchen side).  And will remove the block your path door…leaving us with a grand total of 1 door in the laundry room and that is to the garage…much more reasonable.

Someday, we will get a front loading washing machine to really maximize space…then we can build a flat surface over it to fold laundry on.  In the mean time, I want a bunch of shelves over the washer and dryer so I can store the clothes baskets, dog food, and detergent.

We are also planning to redo the laundry room cabinet and countertop to add some additional counter space.  I’m thinking it would be fun to do something laundry esque with it like this:

I love the blue cabinet!  it’s so fun and unexpected.

We also need to do something about our lighting situation.  Right now, we have 2 small lights that are not really illuminating much in the laundry room…but we haven’t really been able to come up with a solution that we both get excited about.  I’m also thinking we’ll probably go white with the paint and then do fun accent colors to keep the room as bright and airy as possible…but that to is subject to change.  We’re also going to rip up the linoleum and add some ceramic tile…this will obviously be the last step of our process

So there you have it, we’re doing some dreaming over here this week.  Whatta ya think?  Do you love your laundry space?  What do you love about it?  What are some must haves I am forgetting?

This, That, & the Other Thing

We’ve been doing a lot of super random things here and there so I figured they probably merited a super random post to commemorate their occurrence.

First up –  We are assessing our living room seating situation in light of our new space.  We are thinking about a sectional for our living room.  We decided to grab some cardboard from the basement to layout a possible sectional configuration.  We settled on this (ground breaking, right?).  I really wanted a chaise, but it will just look weird in our living room, so we nixed that.

Then, we decided to head to Nebraska Furniture Mart and check out their selection.

I’m a big fan of the coloring on this sectional…dark charcoal.  Was it comfortable? No.  Sad.

This one was our favorite of the day…though without the stripey ottoman.

The jury is still out on this one.  Stay tuned for what is going to be a ton of follow-up posts I suspect.

Next up in the random files-  Canvas art
Awhile back, I had heard about a deal on eighteen25 from the Canvas People.  $50 off any canvas.  I decided that was a good incentive for me to pull the trigger and finally order one wedding picture.  Yes, we got married 7 months ago and yes we have AWESOME wedding photos, but no, I have none of them up.  As part of our photography package, we got the copyrights to our pictures so we can order them whenever we want.  I decided to order an 11×14 Canvas of one of my favorite photos of the day.  Want to see what I picked?

Love it!  It doesn’t have a permanent home yet, so it’s sitting above the mantle for now where we can see it every day.  Total cost, with shipping?  $27.24.  Sweet!

To continue our journey of random-

Our front door was lacking a peephole.  I have quickly discovered that solicitors love to come to our neighborhood, that’s an annoying part of home ownership I wasn’t expecting.  I purchased a $4.75 peephole at Lowe’s and sent my resident fixer of things to fix it.

and fresh new peephole.  You may be thinking that it’s close to the window.  Whoops, you are right….guess they will be able to see the top of my head and know if I am home.  Oh well.  Lesson learned on that.

Finally, to cap off today’s tour of random…I have started painting more glassware!

I am testing out a lime green to see how that looks

and a really deep teal blue

I am excited for our new accent colors…not going to lie, it was inspired by this gift bag…

More colors and glassware to come on this, that’s for sure!

So there you have it…a few things that are going on over here this week!

Planning a Price Is Right Shower

I thought we’d take a break from house stuff today and talk about other fun things…like bridal showers!

A few weekends ago, I headed down to St. Louis to celebrate the upcoming marriage of my friend Mandy.  When we first decided on Mandy’s shower date, I was gainfully unemployed, having just moved to Omaha, so I found myself with a lot of free time to be creative.  When Mandy’s maid of honor asked for some suggestions on shower games/theme, I proposed the Price Is Right.  I had heard it played with Baby Showers, but when I did a search, I had a hard time finding a lot of different ideas online.

So, I did what any good unemployed person would do, I set to doing “research” the good ol’ fashioned way, I started watching the Price is Right everyday (and don’t worry, I’m not going to get political and start a debate of who is the better host ::coughBobBarkercough::).  I came up with several games that could easily translate to the shower atmosphere.  All of the games would be played to win prizes for the bride-to-be.

The games I identified are:
Bonus Game (as defined on Wikipedia)
The contestant is asked whether each of four small prizes is priced higher or lower than the incorrect price given. Each prize corresponds to one of four windows on a gameboard, one of which conceals the word “Bonus”. The contestant wins a large bonus prize by correctly pricing the small prize with the window containing “Bonus”.

Check-Out
The contestant is asked to individually price five grocery items. After all five guesses are tallied, the actual prices of the items are revealed. If the contestant’s cumulative total is within $2 of the actual total price of the five grocery items, the contestant wins a bonus prize.

Cliff Hangers
The game board contains a mountain climber. The contestant is asked to individually price three small prizes. If a guess is incorrect, the climber takes one step up the mountain for each dollar of difference between the contestant’s guess and the actual price. Only after the climber stops does the contestant learn the actual price. If the climber takes more than 25 steps, he falls off the mountain and the contestant loses the game. However, if the climber moves 25 steps or less, the contestant wins a bonus prize in addition to the three small prizes.

Coming or Going
The contestant is shown the price of a prize, whose digits may be displayed in either the correct or reverse order. In order to win, the contestant must choose which of the two possibilities is the correct price (e.g., $1,234 or $4,321).

Easy as 1 2 3
The contestant is given blocks marked 1, 2 and 3, which are used to rank three prizes from least expensive to most expensive. The contestant wins the prizes by correctly ranking all three.

Hi Lo
The contestant is shown six grocery items and asked to choose the three she believes are the highest-priced. After the prices of the contestant’s choices are revealed and placed in the Hi row, the lowest-priced of the items in the Hi row is kept and the remaining items’ prices are then revealed and placed in the Lo row. If the contestant has correctly chosen the three highest-priced items, she wins a prize.

Hole in One
The contestant must putt a golf ball into a hole in order to win (in the real game, they win a car. In the shower version, you can clearly make this whatever you want)  The contestant is asked to place six grocery/household items in ascending order of price. The prices are then revealed one at a time, and the contestant will ultimately make their putt from a line closer to the hole for each successive price that is higher than the previous price.   After the prices have been revealed and the line from which the contestant will putt is determined, the contestant receives one chance to putt the ball into the hole. If their first attempt is unsuccessful, the ball is replaced on the same line and the contestant receives a second and final putt.

Most Expensive
This one might shock you, the contestant is shown 3 prizes and has to identify the most expensive in order to win all three.

The options are really endless on the games you could play…and if for some reason you didn’t like ANYTHING already done on the Price Is Right, it’s pretty easy to make up your own as well.

We opted to send out evites, since it wasn’t very formal, with some language to indicate what the attendees should expect.  Here is what I put together:
Mandy is a bride to be!  The bridesmaids invite you to join them in celebrating Mandy’s upcoming wedding with a shower that will have you wanting to “Come On Down!”  The party will get started at 2 p.m., don’t be late, you won’t want to miss Contestants Row!

Please join us at location.  We will be using the community room and there will be plenty of signs posted directing you where to go.
Questions?  Feel free to contact Elizabeth at number.

**Should you wish to bring a gift, Mandy and fiance are registered at Bed, Bath, and Beyond, Target, and Home Depot.  You can find the links available on their wedding website**

Pretty basic, but I think it  got our message across

To start off the shower, we divided everyone into 3 teams (there were about 15 attendees at the shower, not counting the bridesmaids who didn’t play).  They were able to bid on the items from Contestants Row as a group and play the games as a group.  This seemed to serve as a good ice breaker and mix and mingle people who didn’t know each other as well.
 For the shower, we ended up going with the “Hole In One” and Cliffhanger (I had “Hi-Lo” waiting in the wings, but we were a bit short on time so we didn’t end up using it).

Hole In One was SO easy to set up.  I borrowed a putting cup from my friend Mel (well, it’s really Heeyoung’s putting cup… and a putter and ball from Steve.  I hit up Target to find 6 things that had some tricky prices.  I settled on: Scott’s Bath Tissue, Clorox Toilet Bowl cleaner, a Glade scented candle, air freshener,  pack of hangers, and a bottle of nail polish.  The trickiest part was that the Scott’s Bath Tissue was the most expensive (a 4 pack for $3.99!), and the “contestants” fell for my trick.  Pricing it as the second cheapest item of the 6.

Photo credit this one to Elizabeth (not me)

We were still easy on the chosen putter though, since she really wanted to win the prize for Mandy.  For the first round, the prize was the game of Quelf.  It is randomness in a box.

For the second round, one of the other Bridesmaids put together the “Cliffhanger” game.  She made the “mountain climber” out of craft foam and then drew the mountain on the poster board.  “Cliff” was attached with double sided tape, so that he could move as needed to climb up.  They were able to win a bath/relaxation package for Mandy.

Elizabeth did an awesome job on this one!  It looked just like the “real deal” on the Price Is Right.

The last round, we had a “showcase showdown”!  The maid of honor made a “big wheel” to spin…it was a great idea!  She made it out of a circle of craft wood, similar to what you would find in the “wooden crafts” section of Michaels or Hobby Lobby.  She sectioned it up and painted like the “big wheel” on the disk and then had it drilled out in the middle with a dowel it could rotate on.  The top spinners of the big wheel ended up competing in the showcase showdown.

Amanda got prizes in 2 themes—a honeymoon extender package (full of things to remind the couple of their honeymoon to the Bahamas – margarita mix, leis, a patio table, umbrellas for drinks, tropical glasses, etc.) and a “letters” package.  Mandy was proposed to via Boggle, so this show case was PERFECT for the happy could.  She had letters for their names that could be used as bookends or just display, travel boggle, and the word “family” that was matted and framed.  It was really cute…I thought I had pictures of it, but I guess I do not.

The surprising thing is that the one team got close enough on their showcase guess to be within $2.00 winning Mandy BOTH showcases!  I swear we didn’t plan that…

To make it more authentic, we also had downloaded the price is right theme music to build a little excitement.

None of us are “graphically inclined”, so our decorations were really simple – We went with Red, Yellow, and Orange as our fun “price is right” themed colors.  If any of us had been good at photoshop or other such things, we could have had a lot of fun with Price Is Right themed invitations, signage (directing attendees where to go to sign up for contestants row, etc.).

In between the rounds, we ate some snacks and had Mandy open her presents.  This broke up the monotony that sometimes comes with showers as everyone waits for an eternity to finish opening presents.  Everyone seemed to have a great time, and I would call this shower a success!

What do you think?  Tacky?  Awesome?  Do you love game shows as much as I do??

Little Green Globes

Every so often, I get a weird idea and it becomes my obsession until I can see it to fruition (or failure, either one, I just have to give it a go to satisfy my curiosity).   To give you a bit of background, Steve and I were married last fall, and through the process acquired a LOT of glassware (and not fancy china or anything, stuff for centerpieces). Nathanael and my sister brought us the glassware down with our gifted fridge and now it’s sitting in the corner of our basement.  I have gifted some of it to friends and family getting married and now I am left with about 10 boxes of glassware. They are all clear glass and I haven’t really known what to do with them.

On another note, I recently ordered some paint from Valspar. They were giving away free samples, and I really wanted an awesome green. The color in my head and the color that arrived on my door step are 2 different colors.  Luscious Green is not something that would EVER work on our walls.

Last night, I got a wild hair and decided to try my hand at painting some glassware. I had seen this before and just filed it somewhere in my brain…but lo and behold, last night, it came to fruition.

I headed down to the basement to pick my first “victim”. I settled on these:

They are cute and small and I have 7 of them.

The luscious green ready to decorate

So here is the process….dump in a blob of paint, roll the paint around to finely coat the inside, and then finish the top rim over the garbage so not to leak Luscious Green on the floor (which probably happened much to my husband’s dismay, but thank you easily wiped up latex paint).  The last part takes a bit because you have to do it really slow.  The important thing to note is that you can’t touch the paint in any fashion or the marks will show up.  One jar took me probably 5 minutes, so we’re really not talking about a LOT of your life…

Rolling oh so slowly and carefully

I love the opaque glossy finish the paint/glass combo gives these little globes.

In case you wanted the color info to get yourself some Luscious Green paint too!

I haven’t really decided where they will live permanently, but for now, they are hanging out on our mantle place giving our otherwise undecorated house a little bit of springy goodness.  I have SEVERAL more paint samples I will be re-purposing this way and plenty more glassware as well.  If you are new to arts and crafts, don’t worry, this is so easy anyone can do it.  Steve helped and thought it was actually pretty fun!

Cost Breakdown of this project:
7 Globes- Free (they were originally $.25 each)
Paint sample- Free
I love $0.00 projects!

Linked up here:

Introducing…our new fireplace!!

We finally wrapped up this phase of our fireplace makeover.  As a refresher…this is what we started with…
 A lot of brown/dark hues and brass…major light suck at the end of our family room.

I detailed our painting process here and now we finished up the final touches.  These touches involved painting the entire living room washed khaki (sneak peek here) and tackling the bronze accents of the fireplace.  I did a bit of research online before starting the brass painting and I sadly discovered that our fireplace does not come apart in any way shape or form that would let me take the doors outside to paint them.  So, I waited for a nice day, opened up all the windows, sprayed REALLY quick and then we all went outside to let the house air out.
Before I started the spray painting process, I literally had dreams about accidentally spray painting my newly whited fireplace black, so I made a super duper “tent of safety” to keep the black paint contained where it was supposed to be.

A few sprays of Rustoleum’s High Heat glossy black paint and we were in business.  I ended up doing 3 thin coat because the brass didn’t want to go down without a fight and I didn’t want to use primer because I didn’t have any on hand that was high heat.  As a side note…I later discovered that Rustoleum makes a high heat paint that comes in a quart size container and can be applied with a brush.  If you are reading this, thinking of painting your fireplace, and discover yours will also not come apart, I recommend going the brush/painting on method as opposed to the spray paint.  Guess our Lowe’s was running low when I was there otherwise I probably could have saved a bit of trouble, but then, what fun would this be??

Anyway, I crossed my fingers as I peel off the tape and plastic…
WOW!  I love it already….and no black paint on the white, WHEW!
And here is a look with the tarp removed, the bookshelf arranging in progress and the washed khaki over the fireplace.  I am LOVING this…all my doubts and hesitations have been washed away.  Our new fireplace is awesome.

Long term we’re also planning to get a tv that can mount over the fireplace (to make the layout of our room make sense), do something to lighten up the back of the bookshelves, and replace the fake log insert with some awesome fire glass.  All in good time, but for now, our mini-makeover is complete.

One more look (with a sneak peek of what I’m working on tonight)!

I’m linking up with Shabby Chic Cottage today!

Tales Of a Homeowner- #3

Remember how we attacked our vole problem here?  And how we cleared out all of the rocks to add in our new dirt?  And remember how I told you when I was describing our style that we either a) research something to death or b) fly by the seat of our pants?  Well…this is a fly by the seat of our pants story.  If we had followed step A, there would probably BE no story to share.

It started innocently enough, it looked something like this:
 All smiles, cleaning out the flowerbed, just getting our project started…We should really know better…

During the rock removal and dirt leveling process, we decided the best course of action was to pile the rock in our driveway.  We planned to put it back in after we did our dirt work to save both time and money.  Mostly money, rarely does DIY save time, but rock we already own is way cheaper than rock we would have to buy and haul.

Me mid rock pour…again, smiling and enjoying the weather.  We have about half the rock out here.

Once we had all the rock out and laid down the landscaping cloth, we sat on the rock pile for a good week or so (there was rain, it was yucky weather, we generally didn’t want to deal with it) until just after Easter.  Our house guests had gone and we decided that the sunny conditions meant we should go ahead and tackle this project.

We discovered that there was a LOT of dirt in our rock pile…quite a bit more than we had originally bargained for.  On our first attempt at dealing with the rock pile, we thought if we took the hose and nozzle and sprayed the rocks, that the dirt would nicely wash away and we would then be able to load the rocks back into the wheelbarrow, and lay them back in their bed.  This was sure to take a bit of time, we reasoned, but be relatively easy, making our thrifty idea pay off big time while we sat on our front step sipping a lemonade and enjoying our vole free yard.
 As you probably guessed, that attempt fell FLAT…There was too much dirt and it was taking us FOREVER to wash off each shovel full of dirt with the hose.  There was almost literally a ton more dirt than we had bargained for.  We abandoned the project after a few shovels full, and decided to go back to ignoring the rock pile for awhile.

While at work a few days later, Steve learned that a co-worker had a power washer.  He decided to see if we could borrow it and spray off our rocks.  This generally sounded like a bad idea, but we could think of no other options to clean the rocks and, being the stubborn folk we are, we really didn’t want to have gone through all the work of removing them if we were just going to have to do this again in the future (either putting back the dirty rock, or getting the dirty rock taken away and new rock delivered).    Turns out, this WAS a bad idea.  We made a HUGE muddy mess.  It was faster than the hose method, but still really inefficient and MUCH MUCH dirtier.
 Also, while performing this unscientific washing process, we discovered that when they re-roofed our house (a bad storm went through 5ish years ago, so we got a new roof out of the deal, score!) they threw piles of nails into the rock.  Since our neighbors probably already hate us from the amount of mud that’s everywhere, we had to pick all the nails out so we didn’t pop anyone’s tires (including our own!).

Luckily, after about an half hour of this trainwreck process, Steve’s friends from St. Louis happened to stop by to see the house (and let us meeting their baby – who is somehow already 6 mos old!).  This is what they were greeted with when they walked up….Hey, welcome to our new house…check out our mud!  Let us hold your baby!

(Don’t worry, they did wrap Charlotte up in a blanket before handing her to Steve to hold).

Mark, THANKFULLY, suggested that instead of this fail of a method, we put all the rocks in a wheel barrow, wash them and then get them out of the wheel barrow with the shovel.  Figuring it couldn’t possibly get any worse, we decided to give this a try…and by we, I mean my dear husband took a go at this.  It was by far the easiest method we tried, though I am dreading the arrival of our water bill this month.

We still have a little bit left that will need to get distributed into the beds, but overall, we are in MUCH better shape than we were pre-wheelbarrow method.
 So help a girl out…what SHOULD we have done to painlessly wash off our rocks and return them to our landscaping?  Or is there no painless way to do this and should we have just sucked it up and bought new rock?  Don’t make me do post project research…

Missed our other New Homeowner Tales?  Check them out here and here.

Linked up with a Bowl Full of Lemons!

The Khakis Are Officially Washed (the sneak peek)

That’s right, we have finished painting our second coat…it looks SO GOOD!  A large improvement over glossy brown or browney yellow.

I think it goes nicely with our cabinets (though ignore the green tape, we’re still doing touch-ups)

I will post more pictures once we get the whole room back together, but just thought I’d give you a sneak peek!

Missed the paint debacle?  You can catch up here and here.

Half of a Chair Makeover

In our new house, we have a peninsula type thing in our kitchen…which we haven’t had before.  So I knew I needed to start the hunt for some island barstools.  I scoured Craigslist until I finally found what I was looking for, 3 barstools, padded seats, in need of a little make-over loving.  I sent an email, hoping I would be successful, and I heard back almost immediately.  I arranged to leave right away and go get them.  The seller felt really bad about their condition, they were left in the house they had just bought.  She assured me they were structurally sound, just really dirty.  I headed off to pick them up.  This trip reinforced my love of my car, a 2009 Pontiac Vibe.  I folded all my seats down and comfortable fit the 3 barstools in my back seat.  Three cheers for efficient gas mileage AND functionality.

Want to see ‘em?  They are something to behold…

Yeah…I’m not sure what happened to these seats, but they are NOT beautiful.  I headed off to Hancock Fabrics to buy some new upholstery fabric to give these a face life.  I settled on a light gray that had some texture and played well off the wood.  As I sometimes do, I over complicated this project a bit.  The first thing I did was take the seats off the wood frame.

Next, I decided to pull off the staples to remove the old fabric.  (I later learned that instead of REMOVING the fabric in this case, I could have just put it over the old stuff…)  I am fairly comfortable with my decision to remove it since it was so gross.  I wouldn’t want it contaminating my house for years to come.
Pulling out some staples…the front cutters I used for staple pulling the carpet came in GREAT hand here.  As did my leather workgloves…I don’t know how I existed before I owned leather work gloves…

After staple removing all 3 chair pad, Steve helped me lay out the old covers on the new fabric for a template.  I cut them larger than the sample (and I was glad I did, my new fabric didn’t stretch as much as the old ratty chenille did).

Steve’s arm modelling this part of the process…

The last step, staple.  I used a Bostich hand stapler, light duty.  It did an EXCELLENT job on this project.  The secret is to REALLY pull the fabric.  It took both of us to do this step…so unfortunately, there are no pictures, but I don’t have any secrets really, just pull and staple, pull and staple…you get the picture I think.

Finally, I had some white felt left from a failed wedding reception project, so I cut 3 squares of felt to finish off the bottom of the chairs and hide the staples.

We reattached the seats and we were ready to go!

I am loving the new look!!  I decided to leave the wood alone for now, it matches our cabinets perfectly.  It’s a little beat up in spots, so someday I will probably end up painting them, but for now, it’s perfect!  I love the detail on the back, and with the help of some chair pads, they are the perfect height!

So there you have it, our half of a chair makeover.  Budget breakdown?  Of course!
3 Chairs- $30.00
2 yards of upholstery fabric- $16.00
Bostich stapler- $16.00 (and I’ll be able to use it on a ton more projects)
Grand total:  $62.00 for 3 chairs ($20.67 each)

Today (5/9/2011) I am linking up with Decorchick’s Link Party!  Check out all the great projects going on in blog-land!

Classy Cabinets Part 2

After we installed our awesome pull-out pot rack we decided to tackle our trash dilemma.  Our kitchen is a bit baffling becuase there is NO WHERE to have a trash can.  Under the sink isn’t tall enough for anything more than a bathroom sized trash can, and there is no where else not in the middle of the road to store it.  Couple that with the fact that Kirby LOVES to get into the trash, and we knew we needed a good alternative to a “normal” kitchen trash can.

A demonstration of the odd cabinet placement in our kitchen

We headed back to Lowe’s to check out the options and came upon a pull out trash can in the Rev-A-Shelf brand.  We opted for the double trashcan so we can have a place for our recycling too.
Picture borrowed from the Rev-A-Shelf website.  I forgot to get a photo of the box before I tossed it…oops!
We decided on this cabinet next to the dishwasher…not for it’s convenient location, but because it was the only cabinet we had that would fit the trash can.  Similar to our experience with the pot rack, the box says “minimum cabinet width” but what it really means is “ideal cabinet width”.  Steve used the jigsaw this time to remove the shelf and it worked pretty slick.  He had the whole thing mounted in under a half hour.

Our handy trash in use.  The sliders are very stable and glide in and out nicely.
It’s also nice because there is spare room on the side to keep trash bags.  The only bad part about this placement is that we can’t throw things in the trash while we have the dishwasher open.  The trash can pulls out easily enough though, so this is only a minor annoyance rather than a big deal breaker.  Kirby definitely is not capable of opening the cabinet, so it’s also very dog proof.

The trashcan is a little pricey, $75.00 at Lowe’s, but we had a $10 off coupon and we have found most larger trashcans in the store are in that vicinity anyway, and the convenience of this is fantastic.  Overall, I have really love the Rev-A-Shelf brand and I would happily do my whole kitchen in these organizers!