Guest Bath Before & After (step 2)

Friday's to-do list amuses me, looking back.  I had it all planned out - two days of work for a single day, for starters.  Two hours to paint the guest bath? On whose planet??  Ha.

But I did get the bathroom painted.  The actual work didn't take me much longer than about two hours, but if you add in breaks I took to eat, sit down for a bit after being on a ladder, rest my cramping hands, and let things dry between coats, it took more like six.

There is a teeny tiny spider crawling around on my computer screen as I'm writing this very sentence.  Hee.

After (the first step): 

Fresh, clean slate:

*glow*

Next up: 

• prime & paint the bathroom door, door trim, and baseboards, which are still original (!) and horrifyingly yellowed with age. 
• shower curtain, mats, towels
• more wall paint, in certain spots - more to come on that
• cabinet knobs
• doorknob
• faucet
• light fixture

Before, and before that:

The first step was this $8 thrift store mirror that I re-sized and re-painted specifically for this space, because standard builders' sheet mirrors give me hives.

 2010:  WTF WAS I SMOKING?!

2007:  *yawn*

(Actually, the white cabinets were a vast improvement: when I bought the house in '04, they were f'oak laminate (fake oak).  This bathroom is so small that I constantly felt like the cabinets were pushing into the room.  The white calmed them down.  In 2007 I also took the hanging cabinet off the wall and cut it down to HALF the depth it had been, so that it wasn't hovering above my head when I was sitting down. That was just weird).





More to come!

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Weekend To-Do List

Weekend??  Well, I'm going to be out of town at an SCA event all day tomorrow, so...

Weekend Sunday To-Do List:

• paint the guest bath, and hang a towel rack (should only be about 2 hours)
• clearcoat the feet from the bulk trash table (10 minutes) and put them onto my couc
• remember when I made cutting boards out of an old wooden countertop? The big one's way too big to be easy to use, so I don't - meanwhile, I always wish I had a little bitty one.  I'm going to cut the big one down into smaller boards.   (1 hr?)
• I may or may not stain and paint a little wooden box to keep some small things in.  Depends on how much time I have. 
• shopping!  Backyard & bathroom stuff! 

Let's see if I do ANY of that, or sit on my butt all day playing video games...

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Grunge-Be-Gone: A Gnu Before-N-After

On my last trip to Ikea I found a little office chair in the as-is section for $9.99. Yup. A $140 NOMINELL chair for ten bucks.  SCORE.

Before:

It'd been a floor model.  For a long, long...long...long time, it would seem:

ewww.

EWWW!

But, never fear!  It only took about half an hour to remove the old (grungy, red, microfiber) cover, separate it into its pattern pieces and use them to make a new cover...

the little hooties that go around the posts under the back

After: 

TADA!   New clean chair that coordinates with the color scheme that will be in the room once I finish painting things, and get some real flooring down over that green-painted concrete:

oooh, aaah.

CLEEEEEAAANN!!

Awesome.

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Table Out of Nowhere

Of the things on my to-do list for last weekend, the only thing I got done was the couch cover. But it's done!

Yesterday was bulky trash pickup day in my neighborhood.  Whee!  I was pleased to see my pile thoroughly looted after having only been out for three hours - there was practically nothing left for the trash collectors.

And I scored this coffee table:

Two points each to those of you who looked at this and wondered why the heck I'd be interested in it.
Look at the feet, though:

PERFECT!  These are exactly what I've been looking for...for my couch.  :)

They're undergoing a slight color modification at the moment; another couple of coats of stain and some clearcoat, and then pads on the bottom so they don't scratch my floor, and they'll be ready to go onto the couch.

Yay, couch feet!  The rest of the table is probably going to be turned into a small bookshelf for a friend of mine.  :)


And I swear I'll get that bathroom painted this week. Really, I will.



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Weekend!

Yay, I totally fail at getting stuff done this week! :D  Hee.  Actually, not really.  I've been puttering a bit here and there.  I just don't have anything done that I can post about yet. 

This weekend, I'd like to: 

 Finish the second couch cover - I'm almost there! 

Get the rest of the sides and the doors put on the aquarium stand I've been working on.

Paint the guest bath.  I kind of just...stopped...after I painted the wall behind the mirror and hung the new mirror I refinished....in July. 

Start working on some new costume stuff!















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Fait Accomplit

My vacation was fantastic.  I got SO MUCH DONE!  Which amounts to a lot of sewing, a curtain room divider in the living room, some insane house-cleaning...and not really much else, hehe.  I'd intended to paint the hall bath and deal with the proto-art situation in the living room, but I ended up not having enough time, between the sewing and all the loafing I did.  That's right, folks - I spent over half the week parked in front of the tv.  As it should be!  Hee.

I love the curtain!

And actually, I did manage to haul all my large houseplants out to the backyard for a much-needed bath.  The large Dracaena in the picture above got pretty sunburned, too, unfortunately. It'd been so long since I'd left it outside for more than a minute that I'd forgotten about that.  It's alive, but over half the leaves are scorched beyond belief.  I feel so awful for having done that.  I have no idea what I'll do with it...stick it in a side room until it's repaired as much as it will, and grown enough to prune back the damaged parts without decimating the entire plant.  :'(

I also went to Ikea - hence the new set of LILL curtains in the living room as a room divider.  I also grabbed a little gray MUS to go with the white one I have on my desk at work (hee),  a pack of four curtain rod holders from the as-is section for like 90c, a little Airplane Plant for $2, a SKANKA saucepan (I'm slowly replacing my old, beat-up cookware), and a NOMINELL swiveling office chair from the as-is section for, I kid you not, TEN DOLLARS.  :O  It's in great shape, aside from being a little grungy on the top from all the hands grabbing it while it was a floor model.  It's getting reupholstered as soon as I figure out what fabric I want to put on it.  :o)

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