Days and Nights of the Round Table...

When I sold my house, my rickety redwood patio table went straight to the dumpster instead of the moving truck. But now we had a large deck and no table.
We settled on looking for a round glass table that could seat 4-6 and started searching on CL for patio furniture in November (go figure).

We found a listing on CL for a patio set that someone wanted out of their storage unit, stat! Incredibly, they were only asking $50 for the dining table, a smaller side table and 4 cushioned chairs. Everything was in great condition, but the table had an attached lazy-susan in the middle, which I didn't really care for. And, we had no use for the 4 chairs which were bulky and looked like they came off the bridge of the USS Enterprise. Besides, I had already purchased 6 nice, trim chairs earlier in the summer just after the 4th of July when they were marked down 50%.  We loaded everything up and figured we would make it all work somehow.

Table after we removed the center lazy susan

Well, we paired the 4 unwanted chairs with my husband's old square glass patio table and sold that set at a garage sale for $50, so our table was basically free. We were able to remove the lazy-susan, which now left the white frosted glass top to be dealt with.
My first attempt of spray painting the underside of the table with black outdoor furniture paint didn't turn out well, so next I painted the top of the table with an outdoor rated hammered metal textured paint by Rustoleum. This was some pretty crazy paint and a little tricky to work with (save some brain cells and try not to breathe while painting with this!) but it gave me an interesting matte textured look once it was completed.

What I learned from this project:

1. There are a number of interesting paints with different textures that I had no idea existed. Go to the hardware store and check out what's out there!
2. Shop off season: we likely got a great deal on this table since it was November and not a lot of people were in the market for a patio set close to Thanksgiving.

Irons and Woods...

I already owned a coffee table but it proved to be too small for our new living room so we started shopping around for a replacement. While shopping in a home store one Saturday, dreaming of just pulling up stakes and living on their second floor, we saw a coffee table and matching étagère with a metal base and wood plank top that was perfect. Perfect, except for the price. Each piece was $700 and even at that price the bookshelf was still too small for our living room.

One day my husband found a listing on Craigslist by someone who was selling some reclaimed white cedar planks. They were weathered and dirty, but in sound condition. We bought five 10 foot planks that were almost 2" thick and about 9" wide for a total of $85. Then he made detailed drawings of the two pieces that we saw in the home store and took them to a welder his brother had used previously. The welder charged us $600 total to fabricate a 4' x 2.5' iron table base and a 7' tall bookshelf frame. He did an awesome job!

   Once the frames were completed, my husband         trimmed and sanded the boards so that the planks  would fit snugly. He polyurethaned the boards with
   a matte finish which really warmed up the wood and brought out the grain. Since the frames were raw iron, I spray painted them matte black to give them a more finished look. So, for half the price of the furniture store items we were able to get two custom pieces that exactly fit our living room.

  

Now that our new coffee table was in place, I posted my old coffee table on Craigslist and sold it for $75.

P.S. We also found the multi-colored area rug that's under the table on Craigslist for $50.

What I learned from this project:

1. There are craftsmen out there to help you realize your projects if you can't do everything yourself.

2. When to just step back and let my husband do his thing - he managed this project all the way.

3. Now he wants to learn how to weld.

Lighting the way...

Do NOT buy lamps that
look like this, please.

Sometimes you get lucky enough that your Craigslist find is just perfect the way it is - no alterations needed. That's what happened with a pair of lamps I found for my guestroom. There are lamps aplenty posted on CL, but many are ginger jar 80's bad.

Be patient and don't expect to find the perfect item right away. On a Sunday during my search,  I traded emails back and forth with the seller. He was selling an entire living room of furniture for a house he had staged.  I was happy to buy a pair of lamps at his asking price of $25 each. They had all the characteristics I was looking for - tall, contemporary style, and white drum shades.
The espresso color worked, so I didn't even need to paint the bases. What? I don't get to paint?? Crap.
So, what did I do? I set them on their nightstands, plugged them in...and I was done. Sometimes it's as easy as that.

What I learned from this project:

1. Nothing.

2. Ok, actually, I learned I get a little disappointed when I don't need to alter a Craigslist find.

3. BUT WAIT...

After a year or so, I got the itch to give the room a little color jolt. I replaced the comforter and hung a photograph of some tulips over the bed and then thought it would be fun to repeat a bit of the coral-y pink from the photo in the lamp bases...so, I painted them (with a free sample courtesy of Valspar from Lowe's, btw). I also repainted a small dresser that was in another room and use it as a bedside table, but I'll save that for another post.

What I learned from this project:
1. The pink color paint required 3 coats to give me a nice smooth finish, since paints with red tones usually have less pigment and provide less coverage.
2. This pop of color really livens up the room.
3. I needed to alter my Craigslist find after all!



Deluxe redux...

Just outside our bedroom was an odd little alcove at the top of the stairs. It was about 3 feet wide and we didn't know what to do with that space at first. Put a plant there? A chair that no one would ever use? A kegerator?

Mid Century Mad Men

When my girlfriend saw it she suggested we use the space for our CD player. It would be out of sight, but still accessible. I loved that idea and started casting about for something to set it on. I didn't have to look far, since I already had a Craigslist acquisition that wasn't really working in a different room of the house. Mid century modern is a hot look right now,  but there are a lot of pieces on CL that can be had for a song. Earlier, I had been looking for a couple of small storage pieces for my dining room and found a CL listing for two small mid century dressers that were going for $10 each, an incredible deal! 

When we went to pick them up, the guy was so happy to be rid of them he actually gave them to us for free! But, in reality, they never truly fit the space in the dining room. We sold the taller piece after a couple of months, but the shorter dresser was a perfect fit for the space outside the bedroom. Also, its 3 drawers were ideal for storing CD's. The wood finish was a little beat up, but with some high gloss apple green paint slathered on it - this mid century dresser now sported a 21st century look.

What I learned from this project...
1. It pays to look around your house and see if something you already have will work better somewhere else.
2. Pay no attention to the guy at the paint counter when he says "We don't get many people who pick this color."

Even a classic needs a little help sometimes...

I planned to furnish the guestroom of our new house with a bed my husband already had and some bedside tables that I had. But there was a long empty wall that needed something. I liked the idea of a long desk, but not so deep that it would crowd the foot of the bed.  I decided to look for a sleek style to contrast with the more traditional iron bed.

I've always loved the iconic Parsons table. My parents had a white Parsons coffee table in their living room and I remember thinking they were so daring and hip when they bought it in the early 70's. And with that bunch of acrylic grapes, that were all the rage then, set at a jaunty angle atop the table...well, there was no doubt of their total decorating groovy-ness.

groovy grapes

I started searching CL for desks and tables but I was also hunting for Parsons, parson, parson's... you never know how people will post their treasures. I found a console table with the perfect dimensions at a nearby estate sale that was an odd faux tortoise shell laminate in fair condition (it had a bit of water damage on top), but it was 4" shorter than desk height. I debated about it because of the height, but in the end I felt it was workable and I talked them down from $50 to $40 (because of the water damage).

My husband wondered how it would work as a desk since it was too short. "Honey," I said, "that's where YOU come in." I am lucky enough to be married to a very handy and clever guy, so I gave him the challenge to make the table taller. He rose to the challenge and added the extra 4" to the bottom of the legs with stock pieces from Home Depot. After he was finished I couldn't even tell where the old legs ended and the extension pieces started. I sanded the table (which also smoothed out the rippling from the water damage), primed it, then painted it with bright white semi gloss latex paint, just like mom and dad's.

With a few accessories scored at a discount store, some other items I already had, and a repainted and recovered chair that I had previously rescued from the alley, I was all set with my new guest room desk.

What I learned from this project:

1. Mixing styles of furniture can look really cool as long as you stick to just a couple of styles.
2. My parents had a pretty groovy house when I was a kid.
3. I'll never underestimate my husband's talent for turning my less than perfect purchases into exactly what I need.

Side bored...

You know how sometimes you start a small project and then it snowballs into something much larger? You change a light bulb and before you know it, you're buying sheetrock and picking out tile. Well...I needed an office space, so the nook off the kitchen was about to be repurposed. But before we could do that, we had to first find a replacement for the large buffet that was in that room (it wouldn't fit anywhere else in the house, but it provided much needed storage space).  We did have room in our dining room for a smaller sideboard, so the hunt was on to find one on Craigslist.

After a week or two of scouring CL for buffets, credenzas and sideboards (and every crazy spelling variation) we found a good possibility in a blonde modern-ish sideboard in perfect condition. The seller was asking $150, I offered $75, he countered with $100, so I bought it and we loaded it into the Subaru. This piece was STUPID HEAVY, let me tell you, so I was pretty glad it didn't need to be lugged up any stairs once we got it home.

Here's a "before" pic with 2 of the doors already removed.

The blonde color didn't work for us and the "wood" was actually a laminate so it was going to need a makeover. My inspiration was a piece I had seen in a  furniture catalogue that was a combination of black wood and copper (below).

Since the laminate doors couldn't be stained, we had new doors made by a guy who worked at our local woodworker's store. It was a little more than we wanted to spend ($100 for all 4 doors) but they would be solid wood, he would finish the edges, and he would drill the large round interior holes to match the existing hinges already attached to the sideboard frame. 

We painted the body of the buffet black, then my husband sealed it with an oil based polyurethane (after my initial mistake of using water based poly). The oil based gave us a nicer, smooth finish. Then we stained the new doors, poly'd them, hung them back up, bought 4 pulls at Home Depot and voila! A new buffet for our dining room.

The project was fairly time consuming between all the sanding, priming, painting, and trying to keep the cats from jumping on it while it was still drying, but for about $250 we got a great looking, one of a kind piece that would have cost us hundreds more if we had bought it new (the cost of my inspiration piece was $1499). Oh, and my old buffet...sold it in 2 days for $300 on Craigslist.

What I learned from this project:
1. Water based polyurethane dries too fast for some projects, so use oil based.
2. My husband did a great job fixing the mistakes I made.
3. Our cats love to jump on every piece of furniture we own.

Asian cabin chunky deco...

We had a sofa.
But we didn't have any end tables.
And we didn't have any lamps for the end tables...that we still didn't have.
My husband got to work on CL and found some perfectly serviceable matching end tables, but they were a country-ish-knotty-pine-like style.
Um... but, they were only $20 each.
Suddenly, knotty pine didn't seem so bad. A little black paint and a couple of ceramic replacement drawer pulls from Anthropologie, and we had ourselves some end tables. Nothing fancy, but the size and height are perfect and the black plays nicely with other details in our living room.

     The lamps were a Craigslist find, as well, at only $20 each. They had an interesting kind of Asian deco look, so why wouldn't I want to mix it all up to create "Asian cabin chunky deco". The battered lamp shades reeked of cigarette smoke so badly I had to find a dumpster to trash them on my way home from purchasing them! I painted the lamp bases with some burnt orange paint (which I already had) to cover the original bronze-y finish and bought new shades at LampsPlus, which cost twice as much as the lamps did!

What I learned from this project:

1.  Good quality lamp shades are not cheap, but look great so are worth the price.

2. I had to seal the table tops with polyurethane later since stuff kept sticking to the table tops and pulling up the paint.

3. Our cats think the tables are their personal diving boards.