Nightstand Makeover

I got my nightstand from my mother, who had used it for years before she gave it to me, and before that, it was a table in our living room while I was a baby.  This table is easily 30+ years old, and never been touched up.  It's been used and loved and abused nonstop the entire time.

Finally, it was time to fix it.  Both for the purpose of my bedroom makeover -- which is going to be a project long in the making, cuz we're poor folk, and I gotta work with what I got -- and just plain making it look better, I busted out the primer and the paint and went to work.

Here, we have the before... and I didn't realize how dirty it was until I was editing these pictures.  I washed the whole thing before painting with Oxyclean and water.

Once I got it into my craft room/office, I realized that the stains were even worse than I had thought.

 I did like the handle on the front, it would just need a new color once the whole table was repainted.  Fortunately, I had my handy-dandy Oil Rubbed Bronze by Krylon handy to paint it later.  (It seems to be the color of choice among many craft bloggers.)

So I did a coat of primer and two coats of white paint.  The handle got two coats of the ORB as well, and we have the finished product!

I got it in place in my room, and the various decor onto it, and I realized that the lamp definitely needs touching up.  I think I'm going to spray the body with the ORB as well, but I'm not really sure what to do with the shade.  I like the shade, but it'll definitely need to be white.  Perhaps with a red trim, to tie it into the red/white/black theme I have slowly being put together in the room.

While going through the photos in my camera, I did find a few that hinted that my youngest (he's 22 months old) might have gotten his his hands on my camera... perhaps.

I linked up!!

Dining Room Tour

HOUSEography is hosting a House Tour Room-by-Room party. I meant to check in last week with my living room, but I was too lazy to clean I forgot to take pictures.  So this week, I'm joining in with my dining room.  Calling it a tour is kind of amusing, because I live in a double-wide, so it's really more of a glance-in and see it all than a tour, haha.

Here, we have my dining room!  It's still fairly plain, not much to it.  It's a rental, so I can't change a whole lot, so I make do with what I can for now.

You can see into the dining room from the main area of the house.  I believe it was actually designed to be the "breakfast nook", but we turned the original dining room into a work area for my husband, because there's a very light cream carpet installed in there, and I have two small boys who make a lot of mess when they eat.

Here's the view of the dining room from near my front door.  That doorway off to the left in my dining room is the laundry/utility room, and the back door.  I don't really like the white door with the grate that is installed there, so I got one of those curtain rods, similar to a shower curtain rod, and have it held up by a pair of white nails in the doorjamb and hung a sheer curtain in the doorway.

Off to the right is a doorway into my kitchen.  And we have the view from the kitchen to my dining room.

That trunk there by the door, I picked up at Ross for $25.  We store soda and juice and whatnot in there, before we put it in the fridge.  Easy access!

My table is by Better Homes and Gardens, bought it last year from Walmart.  Unfortunately, we've already had one chair break beyond repair, and another two have their rungs coming out on the bottom that my husband needs to fix.  So we have those two older chairs sitting on the side for my sons to sit in in the meantime.

We almost always keep the curtains in the dining room closed during the day, because our house is on the same property as our landlord's business, and it's located right behind our house, and the employees often look in our windows, so for a hint of privacy, I keep the curtains closed until they leave around 3:30.

With the windows open, we have this awe-inspiring view:

 

Pretty amazing, huh?

So there we have it!  I don't know yet what all I'm going to do to fix up the dining room yet, it's really pretty far down on my list of priorities, altogether.

Bird Pillow

I've mentioned previously that I'm redecorating our room, using a red, black, and white theme.  I don't know what it is about those colors, and I know they're really popular these days, but I love how they all look together.  Between my tie pillow that I made and the cherry blossom painting, I've gotten started with the transformation, albeit slowly.

Last night, I experimented with another pillow.  I was inspired both by Janlynn-Sewmore's Wordy Bird pillow and by a pillow I'd seen at Walmart.

I knew I wanted to have a pillow with a bird, matching the color scheme I had chosen, and I loved the branches idea as well, but until I saw the Wordy Bird pillow and read the post, I wasn't really sure how to go about doing that.  I loved the simplicity of the whole project, and remembered that there are many ways to accomplish the same outcome.

I had originally bought some white and black patterned fabric for the main body of the pillow and some fun, flirty white fabric for the bird, branch, and leaves.  But once I adhered the white to the Heat n Bond (AMAZING stuff, by the way!) and cut the shapes out, I realized I didn't really like the design on top of the body of fabric.  I wanted subtle, but it was disappearing into it.  So I decided to go opposite of subtle.  I'd already made one mostly black pillow, but I decided to just go ahead with the second one.

I really wanted a bird on it, and I love the one on my header here on my blog that I took that and drew it out onto some cardstock to use as a template in cutting out the fabric.  I made up a pair of leaves, because I kinda figured the leaves in the header were a bit too complex for me for my very first time using Heat n bond, and wasn't sure how it would turn out, detail-wise.

After I ironed the design onto the pillow, I decided it was still lacking, so, inspired again by Janlynn's pillow, I cut a strip of the same fabric I'd used before to sew along the top and help add to it, and I cut out a flower from the fabric and Heat n Bond left over, and sewed a button into the center.

I'm really pleased with how it turned out!  And it goes nicely with the other pillows I have so far!!  The pillow with ties, as I showed before, and the other pillow is an envelope case I sewed to cover those really ugly pillows I'd bought before.

I really have GOT to come up with a better way to photograph my projects.  Because seriously, unmaking my bed to remove all the pattern from my comforters to show the pillows is kinda messy looking.


I linked!

Redecorating a Wall Hanging

A few years ago, my mother gave me this picture for my wall.  It didn't really match my house, but the flowers were pretty, so I hung it in our bedroom to fill the blank wall.  We've moved a couple of times since then, and I just kind of carried the picture around with me, never really getting around to hanging it again.

Finally, I looked at it one day, and realized that while I loved the flowers themselves, the basic picture had to go.  It was a little worse for the wear, having been somewhat beat up over time.

So in a fit of inspiration, I took it apart, painted the mats -- not as easy as it sounds, surprisingly -- and the frame, and painted a new image for inside the frame.  (My first real time painting something like that.  Fear not, the tulip picture is still safe and rolled up in my craft room closet.)

I focused a lot on the black, red and white theme of the decor that I'm planning for my bedroom, as you can see.  I just used regular acrylic paint.  I'm fairly pleased with how it turned out, particularly for a first-time.  And altogether, it cost me nothing to do, as I already had everything on hand.

A quick recap:

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