Unf*cking the Living Room: Step One

This is the first of what will be several posts about fixing up the living room.  I have a LOT of work to do, and I'm starting from the ground up.  I'm excited about it, and I can't wait to see some of the new changes myself. 

The problems we're dealing with in the living room are:

1. Tall, dark furniture looming over the seating arrangement
2. Not a whole lot of natural light
3. Dark furniture in the seating area
4. Not enough seating

Today I want to talk about the first thing, and address the floor plan.  Here is is "before": 

See the line of black bookhelves across the north wall (bottom of plan)?  There's a cabinet adjacent the to west, and across to the south a large, dark tv on a large, dark stand.  Altogether, they make sitting in the room feel like being at the bottom of a big, dark bucket.  Here's the room itself: 

sorry about the text, i was experimenting

From the other side, the room looks like this:

The chair on the left there is crammed up against a bookshelf, and the chair and side table and sofa are so close together you can't walk between them. 

Here's what we did to the bookshelves: 

(experimenting with furniture colors, please ignore)

All the bookshelves slid over and around the corner so that most of them are now on the west wall.  This leaves a lot of open space in the room for the chair and sofa. 

In the room, it looks like this:

Now the bookshelves are a part of the room, instead of towering over it - they feel like a discrete piece of furniture instead of a wall of furniture.  One chair is still at the bottom of a bookshelf, but in this case, it feels like it's part of a library - or so says my roommate, and she likes it. 

The other side of the room is completely open.  Now the chair and sofa are a comfortable distance apart.  The rug isn't large enough for the seating area, but that may be one of the changes coming up. 

New things happening in the room in the next few weeks: 

• A new slipcover for the sofa
• Maaaybe new slipcovers for the chairs
• New curtains on the back door
• New lighting? 
• A couple of new pieces of furniture

I also have some updates for the bedroom in a few weeks.  Stay tuned!

A Chair I Keep Changing

In 2011 I bought an Ikea NOMINELL task chair - normally $140, but I got it from the as-is section (a floor model) for $10. The first thing I did when I got it home was to destroy the back cover and make a copy of it. I did it again in 2015:

2011 Original chair                               2011 back cover                                    2015 back & seat

Over this past weekend, I changed my task chair again: 

This is the same peacock fabric on the back that is in the living room throw pillows, the seat of the KAUSTBY side chair, and the hanging on the fireplace.

I left the seat the original black, but gave it a thorough cleaning.  I'd read somewhere online that you can clean and restore microfiber fabrics with rubbing alcohol and a soft nail brush.  I'd never tried it, so over the weekend I tried it on this cloth seat and a microfiber office chair that belongs to my roommate - and let me tell you, it works GREAT!  This seat, and Sylvan's chair, look practically brand new.

You can't see it, but there's a 17" zipper in one side of the chair back, to make the cover fit tightly.  The bottom of the back cover has a drawstring that's tucked inside the cover once it's tight.

Now the only thing to do to this chair is take a knife to the wheels and dig out nearly 8 years of thread and pet hair that's clogged the wheels so much that they no longer roll!  Grosssss.


More stuff soon!

Peacocks, For Some Reason

The living room is finally *nearly* complete!  I didn't really set out to re-do the entire thing, but that's almost what ended up happening.  So far I've:

• repaired two broken chairs
• new couch from Ikea
• new "coffee table" trunk from an old trunk  I had in storage
• made over an Ikea cart as a rolling side table/art cart
• Recovered a side chair seat
• Added shelves to the tv console for DVD storage
• Stripped, cleaned, and spray painted Sylvan's Tablemate work table (not blogged) 

Over the weekend I use some peacock calico fabric to make 2 new throw pillows and recover a dining chair that I use as a backpack/purse landing pad in the hallway, and a coordinating wall hanging fabric to make a ...wall hanging.  

1                                2                                        3                                        4

1. Wall hanging over the fireplace
2. Hall chair, an Ikea KAUSTBY
3. Throw pillow and Cat of Approval
4. Peacock fabric and teal cotton backing, on a green towel that serves as an ironing board until I get a new one. 

The fabric isn't exactly upholstery quality - it's just a medium weight cotton calico.  So,  I reinforced it with heavy fusible interfacing and backed it with another medium-weight cotton, so it should be fine.  Not bad for like $40 at Fabric.com (including pillow forms and zippers!).  I started out looking for a botanical on a black ground, but I couldn't find one anywhere that I really loved;  meanwhile, this peacock fabric has all the colors I love and want in the room, and gives about the same look as the black botanical I'd had in mind would have. Score!  

I love the way the wall hanging works on the fireplace, and how the peacock pillows kind of bring everything together. The artwork on the fireplace is all pieces painted by me, by Sylvan, and one by her grandmother. 

While I was removing staples from the chair seat, my hand slipped and
I carved a pretty good chunk out of my knuckle on a broken staple. 
Done. For. The. Night. 

What's Next:

IS IT HERE YET?? IS IT HERE YET?? IS IT HERE YET?? 

A Pair of Chairs

Meet my side chairs, which were given to me by a friend a few years ago, and which lost all their feet. They each had two feet in the back, and two extremely crappy little plastic ball casters in the front, which cracked and broke off their stems.  For a while, my cool chairs were on the floor:

This is not a terrible-looking chair;  in fact, I think they're really pretty. They're super comfy, and while there are some cat scratches in a couple of places, the microfiber fabric is in really good shape.

But sitting on the floor? No way. Too hard to get out of, when your butt's below your knees. Plus, it made them look like I got them out of a dumpster.

Here's the underside.  Scrim removed, and wooden support blocks for the feet removed.

Here are the support blocks that I removed.
It wasn't difficult.

I also removed the rear blocks (you can see them in the previous pic), and copied all four blocks onto a scrap of 2x4 I picked up for a dollar at Home Dope's scrap bin.

Here are the new front and rear blocks; along with four flat plates I made to affix to the bottom of the chair.


They're screwed and glued into the frame, the support blocks, and the frame strut in the rear of the chair that each rear block is affixed to.  In other words, these chairs are now freaking SOLID.

Here's the first finished chair. The wooden support plates barely even show; I finished the edges to match the feet (and the TV console, it's the same stain) so where they do show, it looks like it belongs there.

Here's the other chair, with the coffee table chest I put together over the weekend. They're about 3" higher than they were originally, before they ended up on the floor, so they're quite tall.  As a woman of some height, myself (5'10"), I think they're perfect.



















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Rory approves of this chair. 

Next Up: 

Art supplies storage! 

Something I Want Out of Something I Don't Want

I loved my dining room table.  I really did.  Thing is, I never used it as a dining table.  It was too small to seat more than 2-3 people comfortably, and since when do I have dinner parties?  It was mostly a flat surface that accreted random detritus, and it was wasting space.  Meanwhile, I've been wanting a round coffee table for some time.  So I took the dining table apart, cut about a foot and a half out of the pedestal, and reassembled the whole thing: 

Before:

2013

After: 

And then...

I made myself a little time-out corner in the dining room, instead.  A couple of extra tub chairs that didn't fit in the living room, and the [antique?] plant stand/table that a friend gave me a few years ago.  I needed a comfy place to sit and use my asthma nebulizer machine, and now I have one.  Yay!

Ta-da!

SEE I TOLD YOU

One last dining room chair - an Ikea KAUSTBY.  This is the one I use at my computer desk at home.  I'd say I got tired of sitting on an un-cushioned seat, but I pretty much never did.  I got tired of stealing couch pillows to put on the seat, and then having them all butt-shaped after a couple of weeks.

While I was upholstering the dining room chairs (for the actual dining room), I went ahead and did this one, too, with a scrap of heavy drapery fabric I got from a friend in a de-stash:

Tr-drrr. 

The end.

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Dining Room Chairs - Paint Job and Upholstered Seats

The sack cloth upholstery thing has been going on for a while now.  I've always loved the look, but didn't really think much about it because where do you even get sack cloth, anyway? Turns out the answer to that is "from your friend's late grandmother fabric stash that she left behind."  Muchas gracias to said friend for the metric buttload of fabric she sent me home with a few weeks ago.  :)

That stack of fabric included several pieces of both cotton and linen sackcloth, some of which was still printed with lettering and logos - they were landscaping product sacks of some kind, once upon a time.

And so....

Before

Seat removed, frame cleaned, then deglossed with Liquid Sander, and finally painted with a plain black semi-gloss latex paint, with a 1.5" china brush with ragged tips, for that streaky wood-grain look I adore painting with.

The overall effect looks black at a glance, but up close it's a deep, deep espresso-brown and black "stain."

Covering the seats with the cotton sackcloth and eggcrate foam (which I happened to have a bunch of sitting around, left over from old projects).

One chair finished!

I did three of the set of four today.  I actually can't find the rest of my foam!  I know it's around here somewhere.  Soon as I find it I'll get the fourth chair done, lol.

I think when I do find the rest of my foam I'll put a seat cushion on the little Ikea dining room chair that I use at my computer desk, as well.  I'm tired of sitting on a throw pillow to blog.

Before & after comparison.

The dining room table is black, and I keep a rough, white, linen tablecloth on it.  These will coordinate much better.











All of the sackcloths I had were different prints.  So what?  I think it's cute that they're mismatched.  The third one, not pictured, has a simple print of black text;  the fabric for the fourth chair is the same, but the text is different, and placed differently on the cushion.

After