Color Blocked Deco

I know you must be on the edge of your seat with anticipation- What did Karen spend her last $3 on at Brimfield??  Fear not, I'm here to put you at ease! Piled under other several other items, I discovered the most adorable wood and metal deco tray.  The handle caught my eye and once I moved the junk piles from it, I realized that it was in amazing condition.  I would've paid more than $3 for it if necessary- that's how much I love it.

At first I just cleaned it up with a little wood conditioner (which worked miracles!) and fine steel wool on the metal, but I wanted to kick it up a bit.

While adorable on it's own, it needed a pop of color.  After racking my brain for what pattern this little guy wanted- herringbone?  diamonds?  free-handed feathers?- I kept coming back to color blocking.  Why resist the urge?

It's the perfect size to hang out next to my computer and corral the everyday necessities.

My sexy mac is in the shop, so I'm borrowing Hubby's extra lappy currently, hence the less-sexy black box.  Hopefully only another day or so.

Considering I used paint, wood conditioner, and steel wool that I already had, the only cost here was the $3 tray!  And what a pretty $3 tray it is!

I'm so happy that I could keep the integrity of the piece and give it a quick update.  My favorite type of DIY!

So, what do you think?

Musical Chairs (again)

Remember when I said that the dining room was done?

I lied.  Well, not lied, just reevaluated.

Turns out that Hubby wasn't the biggest fan of the wide array of chair styles I had collected for this look.  He liked the more traditional one on the left, but that was about it.  I can convince him into a lot of things design-wise (like a 2-tone kitchen), but apparently my powers were weak with the chairs.

Good thing that I had replacement chairs just hanging around the house... right?  Now that I'm attempting to purge my basement furniture hoard collection, I brought up the entire old chair collection and started to play around.  I made a valiant last attempt to plead my case for keeping the above 4, but Hubby strongly voted for 4 more traditional styles.

Since it's his house too, and I don't hate these chairs by any means (I did buy them after all.... AND they may have actually been the original 4 chosen chairs way back), it looks like I have some more chairs to refinish! (AND maybe one of these days I'll figure out how to photograph the dining room without it looking dark and washed out at the same time.  maybe.)

Only one chair remains from the refinished 4 above, one was refinished for our previous dining room iteration, one is primed but was never painted, and one hasn't been touched at all yet.  They look like kind of a mess today, but once I unify them with paint and fabric like I've done before, they'll all be one big happy family.

There hasn't been a day nice enough to finish them yet (paint spraying is reserved for outside only), so until then, the chairs in my dining room may or may not be actually sittable.

Now all that's left to decide is color.  Do I stick with the yellow/green that actually grew on me?  Do I go for a mid-tone gray?  Or should I be crazy and go for a different green?  I know which way I'm leaning today, but that could change by the time I get to painting.  What do you think?

Office Glitz

IKEA's pretty devious if you ask me.  Every time I end up there to buy a flip house kitchen or such, I end up spending money on my own house as well. After drooling over this lamp for 6 months,

my resistance wore down.

It fit's perfectly in my office.  Not too big, not too small, and just enough glitz.  Check out that cord and gold accents!  Well done, IKEA!  (it's also available in silver, but the white just called to me)

I also purchased drawer inserts for my office's expedit cubbies.  I've tried to keep flip reciepts and paperwork organized with just open shelving, but it hasn't been pretty (read: looks like a bomb went off).  Once I got 4 sets of drawers home and assembled one set, I noticed an issue...

As you may know, IKEA's expedit line has now been replaced with Kallax.  Same product, but a little sleeker.  And, apparently, slightly whiter.

Not kosher.  It wasn't close enough to be the same and not different enough to be different, if you know what I mean.  The way I saw it, I had 2 options.  Go back to IKEA and pick up the drawers in the wood tone...

... and IKEA's 35 minutes away and at this point was a weekend.  I don't do IKEA on weekends...... I like myself too much to do that to me....  so where does that leave me?

Paint them, naturally.

I went with a light gray- just gray enough to add a bit of contrast to the white and get away from the clashing white tones.

Some fancier brass pulls are in these drawers future, but until then, I also sprayed the knobs gold.  Can you tell how excited I am for the weather finally to be nice enough to start painting outside again?

Once I get the office organized once again and tweak a few more small things, I'll give you a full office update.  Until then, I'm totally excited to have a little bit more style in this tiny room.

Well, I'm off to meet the contractor at Grover!  Happy Monday!!