The Same But Different

I took advantage of the long Labor Day weekend to get to a multi-day project. Our red coffee table clashed with our new red rug and it was hard to find an opportunity to have a few days in a row where we wouldn't miss it in the living room (relatively...).

So out onto the lawn on a tarp, propped up on containers so that I could get to the legs. A quick sand with a medium-fine grit, just to take the shine off.

Then after a quick wipe, it was time for paint! Safety Blue in Rustoleum's High Performance Professional Enamel. I didn't actually buy it for this project - we had some left over from painting the build-in shelves in the nursery.

One coat,

Two coats, three coats:

I followed drying instructions for minimal drying time (you have to spray within an hour or so or wait 48 hours, and no way were we going to make it that long without our table). The top surface was uneven, but no where near as bad as it was when I painted it red. I attribute this to a few things. 1) I was painting over paint and not over whatever was on it the first time. 2) This blue enamel went on much easier, so maybe there is something to this whole "professional" grade stuff. And 3) I cared a whole lot less and didn't dwell on imperfections.

I waited two days and then applied Slate Gray Minwax stain purchased a long time ago for my blue cedar chest. I tried a different technique (also associated with not caring) - I wiped it on and then off the top surface and then dripped it into the crevices of the side edges and legs.

Finally after more waiting, I sprayed the whole things with three thin coats of Minwax Polycrylic spray (one coat, then super-fine sand, then promptly decided that wasn't worth the effort and did coats two and three without sanding). Two more days to cure fully and back it went!

But we weren't idle in the living room while we waited. We took advantage of not having furniture on the rug (or at least not having *much* furniture on the rug) to finally get a rug pad down. First we let it air out in a different room - it stank of chemicals coming out of the packaging. But a day or two later, it was fine and ready to get put under the rug (we had more motivation now that the little one is experimenting with crawling and rolling and banging her head inelegantly against the floor on the way down...)

And so without further ado, here's the new and improved coffee table!

See how the gray is in the details? D actually thought I had painstakingly painted each line, but since stain is so liquidy, I just dripped it in and wiped off the rest.

Honestly I like this even better than the red - better spray paint and better stain technique. Let's hope that's the last time I had to paint this thing, though, because twice is definitely enough.

How to make your room bigger

The red rug in our living room was a discount buy that I have regretted for years. It started shredding at the corners within months of purchasing it. Therefore vacuuming it became particularly challenging (occasionally I would forget to be careful, drag the vacuum to the corner, and suck up a nasty chunk of threads) and small red yarns made it to every room of the house. This, for example, was one of the better corners:

Unfortunately I could not find a rug in a similar color that I liked. I'd been checking all the usual suspect websites for a few seasons, to no avail. And then, this weekend, we wandered into an estate sale...The rug must have been meant to be because it was still waiting for us the following day when we went back to see if they would take less (and, in fact, it already had been marked 50% off, which was exactly what we wanted to pay). And so with a little muscle, we had it rolled, into the car, and then into our house.

One problem:

Yeah, it's a little big.

We knew that already, of course. We knew that our red rug was 5'x8'. And we measured for the 8'x'10 on Saturday and new it fit tightly, if at all. But it was a beautiful Bokhara rug made in Pakistan. The first "Persian" style rug that I ever liked, mostly because it was very simple. And, even better, it was only $300, which was far cheaper than even smaller, less high quality rugs at stores I'd been checking out like Pottery Barn and Crate and Barrel.

So we resorted to the back-up plan. The sitting area of our living room had a little extra space to work with.

In fact, it fit fabulously! Just under the front legs of the sofas - enough to tie the space together (and also to anchor it in place until we get a rug pad). I was worried that such a big rug, especially a patterned rug, would make the room feel small. But in fact, we now essentially have more usable space in the living room because we usually tried to stay on the rug (especially now with the baby requiring a little extra padding while she learns to roll over) and so we now have a few extra square feet to work with, right up to the furniture.

And the teal rug works well in the entry way. Though now the room color scheme is a little too divided, with blue on one half and red on the other (there's a red fan above the fireplace, if you recall). So I have to try to bring more blue elements to the sitting area.

Sadly, I think the best way to do that is to refinish the coffee table, which now clashes with the rug in a slightly different shade of red. Refinishing it the first time was awful, but hopefully the current paint job will act as a base coat to prevent some of the problems that I encountered. Or the project will end with me throwing the table to the curb in a fit of rage and hitting Craigslist for something else. But either way, teal is the name of the game.

Foot rest, dinner table, drink table

We don't drink much coffee but we use our so-called "coffee table" for just about everything else. And we really missed having a table once we sold our old one and hadn't quite finished the new one. I told you last month about how bad my first attempt  at refinishing the table went--the sheen was uneven and splotchy and was rough in some spots and smooth in others (despite a lot of sanding).

I had no idea what to try next and after soliciting everyone for advice, decided to go with applying a regular oil-based primer with a brush to see if that would even out the texture of the spray paint. Time to tape the edges yet again (this makes 3 times). By that time, I was far too frustrated with the project to remember to take step-by-step pictures. After a coat of Sherwin Williams oil-based primer (which I bought 2 years ago for an as-yet-uncompleted project...), the texture was much more even.  We applied a second coat which I think was unnecessary, but between all of it, the table was looking much better..

To give credit where it's due, this idea can from the same friends who gave me the table--they'll figure into the blog more in an upcoming post too! Just like our parents, they are becoming regular, indispensable helpers here.

So two coats of oil-based primer and one night of drying later, I was ready to try again. Immediately it looked like the red was going to go on just as unevenly as the last two attempts. But then I tried something--I started spraying a thicker layer. Not so much that it dripped, but so that it accumulated into an actual coat of paint in one go, rather than the many thin passes I had been doing. It seemed to work. It took more spray paint than I predicted (and entailed a rather frantic run to Home Depot between coats for more), but the texture vanished.

Time for the fast forward: After three rather heavy coats, a couple days of drying, some lightly applied gray stain to match the legs (which, remember, looked fine from day one), some distressing and some polycrylic,  we got our table!!!

You can see how the light shines much more softly and evenly than in our previous attempts. My guess is that the paint-brush primer helped reset our previous failures better and the thicker spray helped even it out. It would seem all my problems can be attributed to my poor spray paint technique on such a large surface (I was fine on the legs and have previously spray painted hardware with no problem). I'm glad I decided to try spray paint, especially on such a used and abused surface like a coffee table. It will be more durable by far than regular latex paint.

But it might be a really long time before I try to do it again.

What's been keeping us busy?

After all the posts about our plans for the guest bedroom and living room, it seemed about time to give an update.

The bedroom, complete with burgundy curtains, lamp shades, and duvet. I think the red looks nice against the gray and purple:

We've been spending most of our time on the living room. First, we settled on curtains for the bay window. Eventually, we'll put up a second bar for the white ones, but for now we have them all strung up on the same rod:

We put a beautiful fan D's grandfather gave us on the mantle. It exactly matches the burnt red accents we've already bought:

What's really been keeping us busy is the wall unit we've been putting together from Ikea cabinets and Elfa shelving. It looks weird without shelves, but we're getting to that part. We're buying wood today to stain, using Minwax English Chestnut.

(I took that photo before we put the fan up...)


I'm spending Columbus Day priming the bathroom in preparation for paint, even though we still don't have a paint color. Someone gave us the good advice to find curtains and rugs first and then match them to a paint color. Unfortunately, we like black and white accents, which still keeps all our options open. D is just going to run to Sherwin Williams sometime this week and come back with a surprise, since I'm much more indecisive on this than he is. In a meantime, keep voting in our poll.

A Do-It-Yourself Living Room

D has diligently been reading Apartment Therapy and come up with some really interesting ways to do our living room. We both love books (remember this?) and wanted them to take front and center in our room. Of course, we also need a place for the TV, various players, and unsightly cables. And we don't have the money for a custom-made wall unit.

After a thorough measuring session, we made a scale blue-print of what we want to end up with, so there will hopefully be no surprises (our scanner isn't plugged in yet, so I'm photographing everything):

Basically, we want to have covered cabinets below the TV and then shelving everywhere else. D read that a great value for 132'' of cabinet is to actually use the wall cabinets from Ikea's Akurum kitchens. We're using the one that looks something like this:

It will be on 8'' legs to rise above our baseboard heating and the doors will have hardware that will hopefully make it look less kitchen-y. Here is the current state of said cabinets:

 

Oh Ikea! Your flat-packed boxes and assembly-required pieces are always such a joy...

For shelving, D found an ingenious system from The Container Store that only requires us to put one line of screws into the wall, instead of in every level of shelving (neither of us wanted to ruin our newly-painted walls).

The Elfa shelving system all hangs from one strip at the top, which can be hidden by a shelf. The vertical strips will be visible, but we plan on sufficiently covering them with books and clutter. Elfa supposedly doesn't need to go into any wall studs, but we are trying to locate a few anyway. 2 full-length and 2 half-length shelves full of books all held up on a tiny strip of screws sounds both miraculous and scary. Instead of using Elfa's cheap-looking veneer shelves (which are over-priced anyway), we're going to buy untreated pine and stain it ourselves.

So with Ikea cabinets on the bottom and Elfa shelving on top, I think we have a plan for one wall. We're even leaving room for a larger TV, in case we ever decide to upgrade.

We are also test-driving curtains and trying to decide between sheer and heavy:

For now, inspired by a design magazine someone gave me, we're going to try several panels of sheers with a thick gray panel on each end, all on one bar. We've tentatively decided that our colors for the room would be brown, teal (check out that rug!) and burnt/brick red. But I couldn't find a single set of curtains that pulled in two of those colors, so rather than have a brown on brown area (curtains and sofa), we're sticking to grays that complement the walls. All those colors together seems to look OK so far, but suggestions, as always, are very appreciated.

Our Guest Bedroom

The furniture currently in our bedroom in our tiny apartment is going to be used in the guest room in our new house. For a few months though, we'll sleep in this so-called guest room while we slowly accumulate the furniture for our new bedroom. The paint colors and decor, then, have to match the reds of our current curtains and bedspreads as well as the stain on our wood furniture. This is the existing decor we're working with:


D and I both like bold colors and I somehow managed to convince him that purple wouldn't necessarily be disastrously feminine. On our families' advice, we're relying on Sherwin Williams paints. We were lucky to catch some sales on Duration, their best paint (I also like that it's low VOC and relatively green). Here are the colors we went with:

The one on the left is called Mythical. The name evokes a little girl's fantasies of unicorns and princesses. Not helping my argument that purple can be genderless. On the right is Samovar Silver. We decided on that one after considering a few different off-whites and grays.

We used the purple on an accent wall and gray for the other walls, with white ceiling and trim. I'm having trouble visualizing if purple is the best complementary color for the burgundies and reds in our curtains and bed spread, but I guess we'll find out soon enough. I'll post before and after pictures of our room once I can get to my camera again (computer's at the apartment, camera's at the house). This weekend we are painting up a storm. The office and the living room are getting a face lift too, and I'll post the details to them later.