Home Dec

Re-Making the Desk: The Big Reveal

21 Comments / Home Dec, Home Decorating, Personal Post / By

Before I do the big reveal, I thought I would show you Anne’s room, so that you will see how perfectly her desk/dresser fits in with the decor.

For starters, she dressed herself – and was quite proud of her outfit!  Now you can see the butterflies going up the wall and all of her homemade cuddly quilts piled high on the bed. What is missing is her butterfly quilt, it lives downstairs. The butterflies are important…

More quilt decor – her wall hanging in blue, pink, gray and white was designed by me and the wall hanging that has been turned into a window covering was hand embroidered by a dear family friend. It has been protected with blackout fabric on the back and hung with looped ribbon. I wanted to make sure it was protected from sun damage.

And now…the what you’ve all been waiting for, the big reveal!

Now, as I mentioned earlier, Lowe’s sold me the wrong kind of paint and I made lemonade out of lemons. Here’s what happened. I told the guy at the paint counter that I wanted a glossy/shiny finish, and I intended to use a stencil to paint butterflies on after I was done as a nice detailing. He said no problem, they sold tester cans for $3.00. Well all of that is true, except that the Satin paint that comes in the tester cans will NOT stick to the latex enamel glossy finish!  So I decided to go with butterfly decals instead, and to take it one step further, I really almost want to thank the guy, because you know what, when Anne is 15 butterflies might not be so hip anymore and instead of having to repaint the whole desk, all I will have to do is take the decals off!

Here’s is another view of more butterflies:

Do you also remember yesterday when I mentioned I got primer and 2 different kind of paint? Well here’s why:

I turned the desk part of the dresser into a chalkboard!  For now it will be a fun place to color and when she is older it will be a fun place to leave her secret messages.

I am so happy with how it turned out and the best part is that the dresser in our guest room has been emptied of her clothes and can now actually be used by guests! Oh yeah, and she loves it too!

I think my next home dec project will be refinishing the chair my parents bought for me to go with this desk umpteen million years ago 🙂

Re-Making the Desk: Part 1

5 Comments / Home Dec, Home Decorating / By

Happy Monday everyone! I know, you are all thinking, “It is Monday, what’s happy about it?!?”  Well, as I have said countless times, every day is a holiday when you live in Toddler Land. There are no Mondays or Saturdays, there are just days.  Shoot most of the time I only know what day it is because we have an appointment. Thank goodness for my Blackberry or I would be very lost!

This weekend Anne and I put the finishing touches on her desk/dresser and got it moved up into her room! I am so excited to share it with you, but that will have to wait until tomorrow. First I want to show you how we got to the finished product!

Here is the dresser in all it’s ugly glory! Now someone pointed out to me that it wasn’t ugly, and really it wasn’t, it just wasn’t what I wanted for Anne’s room. The stain was a bit too dark for my tastes.

Step one in the make-over process was to clean out the dresser. I had to be careful with this step and think it through. It was mostly filled with yearbooks from the Mister and me. There were also several photo albums, I wanted to be sure everything was stored in a way that nothing would get ruined. I decided to put the albums on the bottom shelf of my cookbook bookcase (say that 10 times fast!) and the yearbooks went into a tote.  Now I decided to think ahead about how heavy everything was going to be and the fact that I am not the strongest lady ever and came up with an ingenious moving idea!

I grabbed a super old ratty towel and put the tote on top before I started filling it up. Then I could just drag it across the room to the garage. It spared my floor from scratches and my back from aching!

Next up, I had to remove all the child safety locks – time to break out the hair dryer! And of course, Anne just had to help mommy 🙂

Here’s the desk all clean and ready to be moved on the towel, just like the heavy tote above.

Here’s the dresser with all the hardware removed and ready for painting! Now, I have to admit, that aside from taking all the hardware off and getting a drop cloth, I really had no idea what to do next, I was fairly certain I would need to sand everything, but luckily I was informed that it was not necessary!

So I headed to my friendly neighborhood Lowe’s and told them my plans for the dresser. I even brought one of the drawers with me in case they wanted to see it! They set me up with a drop cloth, primer, 2 different types of paint (I’ll show you why there are 2 tomorrow), paint brushes, and a roller. Then Anne picked out the new hardware she wanted for the drawers. Now I will say that they sold me the wrong kind of paint for what I had planned at the end, but I decided to make lemonade from lemons and I am even happier with the end result. I’ll tell you more about that tomorrow!

We got the dresser all primed and I, um…got really into my work…

I had to do 3 coats of the latex glossy white that I picked out for the dresser, so I did one coat a day last week before it got to hot. It was the first thing we did every morning before breakfast even. Here’s Anne getting in on the action!

My real proud moment in all of this was figuring out how I was going to paint the desk part of the dresser. I removed it because I did it in 2 different colors (you’ll see why tomorrow). I remembered that when we built our fence last year my dad and I bought 2 sawhorses and I busted one out.

This saved me a lot of headaches and probably spilled paint too!

Come back tomorrow and I will take you on a tour of Anne’s room and show you the finished dresser in all it’s glory!

And now in other news, did you see that Sondra from Contemporary Cloth is having a huge sale AND giveaway? You can even win one of my BitterSweet Bundles! Go here to check it out! Also, don’t forget to enter the giveaway I am hosting for Fat Quarter Shop!

Make it a great day!

 

Don’t Faint – I’m Swooning Again!

15 Comments / Home Dec, Swoon / By

Do you remember back in January, February, March and April I posted Swoon blocks? Haven’t seen any from me in awhile, have you? Well, I am Swooning again, please don’t faint or anything. I finally tracked down all the fabric I needed and then I stopped sewing blocks. There are lots of reasons why: deployment, sick toddler, sick mommy, company, and tons of other projects.  Excuses excuses! Back to the Swooning already!  In the last 2 days I have made 2 new blocks!  I guess they would be my May and June Blocks. I’m hoping in the next several days I can get done my July and August blocks, then I would be back on track for 1 block per month. We’ll see – I don’t want to set myself up for failure, right now I just want to celebrate actually getting some swooning done!

Now you might be saying to yourself, “WOOHOO! 2/3 of the way done, only 3 blocks to go!” Well…let’s not jump the gun, I decided to go King Size remember? So I actually have 10 more blocks to go!  This is the never ending quilt project!  (And as a side note, can I just tell you how hard it was to get this picture, the blocks are so ginormous I practically needed a wide angle lens! I have no idea where I will lay them out from now on for pictures because I certainly do not have enough floor space in my sewing room!)

Now in totally non-quilting related news…I have decided to take on a Home Dec projects of sorts. This is really not my thing, but it is something I am really excited about. I am going to re-do my circa 1980s desk/dresser for Anne’s bedroom! Here is a really hideous before picture – it currently lives in my butler’s pantry downstairs just off my kitchen.

The white things are from our child safety lock days (don’t need them now – see picture below for explanation). The pictures on top are our family portraits from Anne’s First Birthday, the extra adults are my wonderful parents!

The drawers are all jamb packed with year books and photo albums. They are so heavy I can barely open them so I don’t worry about Anne getting into them, plus we are darn near out of the open ever drawer and cabinet stage – thank heavens!!!

So today I will be working on emptying the drawers and storing the books and photo albums. Anne will probably happily help me out with this chore and we are also going blueberry picking again!  Should be a fun day!  What’s on your agenda?

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