A Whole New Dining Room, Sort Of

Welcome back, me.

So, someone, at some time, painted a steel blue accent wall in almost every room of this house.  You saw the one in the bedroom a few months ago.  Here's the one in the dining room:

We'll, um, we'll talk about the burlap-and-ruffles light fixture in a minute.

For now, I wanted to show you this, which took all of an hour to accomplish:

It's nothing special, I just painted the wall white like the rest of the walls in the dining room, kitchen, and living room.  It's boring, but it blends in with the rest of the house, which is what I wanted it to do.

Okay, let's talk about this.  This is a cut-corner rectangle lampshade onto which has been hot-glued burlap and strips of an OFELIA blanket from Ikea (I have the same blanket and recognized it immediately).  It's another hideous artefact of the previous tenant, who left behind other treasures such as ugly, heavy drapes, broken curtain rods, gallons of used paint, and countertop scraps.

I mean...

For some reason - maybe this is an old light fixture thing that I just didn't know about? - I had to un-wire the bulb housing from this light fixture in order to get the shade off the fixture.  So this took a minute longer than I thought it would.  But it was easy - and here's the new shade:

There.  Plain, white, unassuming, boring, blends with everything.  It's also quite a bit brighter, since the bulb isn't having to fight against that burlap to get light out.

So that's the dining room squared away, until we can get a table in there to work at and maybe also eat at.  At the moment I'm working on things in the living room, and I'll have some new bedroom stuff to show you in the next couple of weeks, too.  TTFN.

My Ikea Hyllis Is On IkeaHackers Today!

IkeaHackers is featuring my Hyllis entertainment console makeover today!  You can see the post

HERE.

And since I've actually finished that wall since I sent them the email, here's a shot of it all put together (until I change it again, you know how I am):

The original blog post about how I did it is here.


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I Did A Thing!

Time again for my monthly post!  Ha. Ha.

Anyway, back in March, I replaced my kitchen sink, but I ended up re-attaching the same old, broken garbage disposal that I had, rather than purchase more connections to route the drains, when I'd planned on someday replacing that disposal.

I do a lot of costume work in trade for my friends in the SCA (see costuming blog), and I just recently took on a HUGE commission from a woman who traded me, not only for a BUNCH of cool fabric, but also for - you guessed it! - a brand-new garbage disposal that she'd purchased and then never installed.  Yay!!!

They sure do look nicer than they used to, don't they?  This one's even BLUE.

It goes with my house. Heehee.

Since no project of mine is ever complete without at least one supply run to the hardware store, the new disposal didn't have a power cord.

I have to say, at this point, that I have been drenched in the kindness of strangers this week.  A nice man stopped and helped me replace a flat tire on Monday.  Then Tuesday, at the tire shop, when I couldn't afford the tire repairs and new tire I needed, the manager there gave me a massive discount that he didn't have to give me, so that I could drive away on safe wheels.

Wednesday, my friend gave me this disposal, and when the power cord kit was a dollar and a half more than I had in my wallet, the salesperson at Home Depot gave me his employee discount so I could purchase it.  Wow!!

All done!  Wiring is super-easy.  I kind of love doing it.

And here, ladies and gents, is a clean, new sink, with a clean, new, WORKING garbage disposal.  It's quiet, too - standing right over the sink, I can barely hear the disposal it when it's on.

And this is the unit I removed, sitting in the enormous bin I've had under the sink to catch the leaks for the past, oh, like YEAR.

The gaskets had gone bad (probably just with age), and the motor flooded and stopped working.  The thing had been rusting inside (obviously), and had just been filling up with water and then leaking, over and over, since the motor stopped working, even though I wasn't using that side of the sink if I could help it.

Point of interest:  garbage disposal sludge smells like bong water and vomit.







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So I Made This Wrap-Around Watch

• $6 cheapass watch from Walmart, removed and discarded everything but the face
• Leather thong, beads, wire, closures, and hole punch - already had. 

Tada. 

ERMAHGERD TER SHERT HERCK

You know that thing I never do on this blog?  I'mma do it again.   I can't help it:  I LOVE T-SHIRT HACKS.   I saw this one on Pinterest:

blog entry + how-to from the Pin  HERE 

And had to have it.   But that's not all I had to have.  I had to have a cute, sassy little black dress; but what I actually had was this:

pose and dress re-do also inspired in part by
The Refashionista! 

Now, before I go any further, let me note that my boyfriend took these pictures, and he's a giant.  I'm five-nine, people, and in these pictures I look like a stumpy little log with hardly any legs.  He's six-two, and taking these shots basically from his face-level.  I look silly. Heehee.

Anyway - how boring is this dress?  It makes my tits look saggy, and while it's comfy, it's just not remotely interesting.  There's no cleavage!  There's no shape! At least I took the short sleeves off of it years ago so it doesn't look out-and-out grandma-y.  But still.  It needed something.  It needed a lot of something.


First it needed to be either longer or shorter, and since I can't add length out of thin air:

I cut off about 7-9" and curved up the side to form a sort-of mans'-shirt slit on both sides at the knee.  Ish. 

And from the piece I cut off, I removed the original hemline, to use as a thin tie belt on the finished dress.

It's kinda awesome!  And my head is all weird!  Tall boyfriend!

The overall shape is much better now, the neckline is waaaay lower, which I love, the length is comfy, I love the tie belt, and...

 There's that cute little slit/curve in the side.  Yay!

"But Laura,"  you ask, "What about that braided neckline?"   

I did the braided neckline.  I cannot get a single picture of it to turn out.  Black fabric - whaddaya want, yanno?   But it looks COOL AS HELL.  You'll, um, just have to trust me.

I will note, mostly for myself, for next time, that the way that I cut the slits  in the fabric around the neckline for the "braid" (see the original tutorial here) made it very difficult to accomplish said braid.  I meant to try it on like a sock or something first to get a feel for it, but I got all gung-ho and just went for it.   I did two things, not "wrong", but that I'll change next time:

1.   The slits I cut were smallish (they look to be about 2.5" in the tutorial, and mine were at most an inch and a half), and too far apart in proportion to their length, which meant that the loops resulting from the slits had to stretch really far, which made them thin and tight and hard to work with, and also really small.

2.   I also graduated the size of the cuts  - smaller in the back and shoulders, gradually widening towards the front of the neckline, for a braid that gets bigger around the front and then tapers off again.  But since the slits were so small and the loops so tight, what I got was a braid about 3/4" in the front and barely as wide as a pencil in the back!

Also, with such a tight, small braid, even though it looks really awesome, it drew the fabric of the dress up a LOT.  You can see it above in the pic from the Pin/tutorial - how the braiding pulls and gathers the fabric?  It's a really lovely effect.  Except that it pulled the straps on my dress up so much that they're quite a bit narrower than they started out, and that's the only thing I'm not happy about.  But I can live with it.

(And yes, I tried un-braiding, thinking I'd just adjust the slits.  No dice: the fabric stretched so far and pulled so tight the first time that undoing it and doing it over would have just broken it in places.  I'll just make the slits bigger next time).

And oh yes, there will be a next time.  And if I can manage a decent pic of that braid, I'll post it.

Ta!


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First DIY of the New Year: Going With the Flo'

Hey, check it out:

This was Sunday morning, after about two hours' work, all by myself.  Once Kress got home from work and we worked on it together, we zinged out the rest of the floor in two hours total.

The flooring is done!  But I still have to clean up the baseboards (remove nails, caulk, etc.) and put them back up, so, "after" pics when I'm really done.  :)

In case anyone's wondering, this is Ikea's TUNDRA laminate flooring (this color's not on the website).  I thought it was that easy snap-together "click lock" stuff, but it's not - plain ol' tongue and groove. Whatevs.  The foam underlayment is generic stuff from the hardware store - same price as Ikea's, and Ikea was out of it the day I bought the laminate!

Also, Kress and I signed the concrete underneath the floor.  Little gift for the next owners of the house. :o)

To be continued...


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DIY Shopping, September Edition

Not that there was a previous edition, or ever will be another.  You never know.

Let's! Go! Shopping!

Lowe's

1. 3 packages drywall anchors & screws
2. 1 metal wall-mount shelf rail
3. 3 metal shelf brackets (the kind that hang from said rail)
4. 3 pieces of oak-veneer MDF, 1/4" (unrelated to the shelving parts)

Design*Sponge

Advance Auto Parts
Which is, by the way, my very favorite auto parts store. They're always nice, patient, well-informed and informative - and they don't give me that "Helpless Little Woman" crap that some auto parts places are notorious for with female customers!  Yes, I CAN work on my own car, thank you very much, and I don't need testicles to do it! 

1. air filter
2. gas cap (because mine broke yesterday! WTF?) 

Big. Brass. Ovaries.

Ikea!!!
(Ikea with three exclamation points, because that's how much I love it).

1. 2 packages LILL sheer mesh curtain panels
2. 3 15" SAMLA clear storage boxes
3. linen fabric (AINA), white, yardage to be determined when I see the quality in person

yay!

 Now to DO something with all that stuff! I did put the gas cap on yesterday before I even left the store parking lot.  And I put everything away when I got home instead of dumping it on the dining room table or the garage floor, LOL. 

Got caught up on my sewing last night, and repaired a table that I bought from a friend last week, which I broke the second I got home, LOL.  More on that later in the week. :)





Ok, so I haven't gone to Ikea yet. Thursday! 

 
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Wildebeests: "New" Cutting Boards!

Time out for a little kitchen 'beest in the middle of a busy week (preparing for a Halloween/birthday party this weekend).

Remember this?

yeah, that's my blue coffee mug.

This is the kitchen rack thing I salvaged from my office before we moved.  The metal part of it will eventually end up in my garage;  but it's the wood butcher-block top we're concerned with at the moment:

ewwww

Gross, huh?   Time for:

• a table saw
• a sander
• sanitizer
• mineral oil

yay!

Thaaat's better.  Two beautiful, new, large cutting boards for absolutely free.  Bye-bye, old scratched stained plastic boards!


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The Day I Redecorated the Laundry Room in 5 Hours, or, Why Does My Back Hurt This Much? (and Other Mysteries)

Five and a half hours, to be precise. 6:00 - 11:30pm, last night.  WHOO.  

Before

We'll let this speak for itself.  The color's nice, but...

Oh, Martha!  *faints*  Yeah - I ran out of paint the first time I painted this room (I was using leftovers from the master bathroom, actually).  


However...




After!

 Thaaat's better.  My 5.5 hours was spent: 

• repainting the room with the leftover paint from the bedroom
• removing the shelves and hardware from the walls, and patching holes
• painting to match the walls:  the shelves, the wooden angle brackets ($1 at Home Depot), the horizontal cleats (I already had them in my shop), the wooden drying bar, and the rubber feet-things that hold the bar in place
• mounting all that crap in place so tightly it's going to take a nuclear bomb to get it off the wall again
• filling in screw-holes and painting the finished shelves again to cover filled screw holes and dirty workshop-fingerprints.  Oops. 
• putting up a pretty silver hook (which I also already had) to hold the dusters and the fabric sleeve-sock-thing full of plastic grocery bags
• throwing together some quick artwork from stuff I already had

Botanical prints of purple flowers printed from the Internetz, in $4 clip-frames I've had for a million years.

The purple Umbra "Garbino" trash can - I have like six of these, I love them so much!  I was going to put a blue one in here, but I like  the purple - plus the featherduster is purple, and I just happened to have botanical prints of purple flowers.  Instant accent color, baby! 


The hamper is actually my old kitchen trash can (it's been cleaned, don't worry).  It fits in the room better than the old hamper (we won't go there), and looks a TON nicer. 

And the entire project cost me exactly twelve dollars.  I'm not kidding.  I had the paint already, the 1x2s for the cleats under the shelves, and all the "stuff" for the room - the only thing I bought were the six angle-brackets (a dollar apiece) and a six-pack of paint roller covers (six dollars).  


Of course, I still have to sort through all of this and them put what I'm keeping back on the shelves...

Which, after five and a half hours of work, makes me feel about like this...

(I can't seem to make the automatic-poster thing work, so if several entries show up this morning all at once, I apologize.  I thought I had them all set up to post a day at a time, but I guess not). 



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We Celebrated with Cinnamon Rolls & Puns

I'm embarrassed to say, my kitchen light has been out of commission, more or less, for like a year.   First a couple of the bulbs went out.  I replaced them...well...I replaced one, and dropped the other one.  And lemme tellya, if you've never seen a fluorescent tube explode, it's quite a sight.  At least, it sounded like one - I saw it falling and couldn't catch it, and ran the other way as fast as I could.  Powdered glass and poisonous gasses? No thanks!  It sure was loud, though.  And a year later, I'm still finding glass on top of my cabinets and in my highest shelves.

So I replaced the bulbs again...and a few weeks later, the other pair of bulbs in the fixture went out.  This time it was the ballast, and there was no way I could afford (a) a new one, or (b) an electrician, or (c) a new fixture.

Woe!

It turns out, ballasts are really not that expensive, once I checked.  After some pretty epic procrastination (second only to how long it took me to fix the dryer vent in the laundry room), I bought a ballast this week, and Wednesday night my boyfriend and I unhooked the fixture, took it down, wired in the new ballast, put it up, and VOILA!  Aziz, LIGHT!!!

WAAAAAA!!  *heavenly music* 

Kress wiring in his half of the ballast

I have to say, I love doing electrical work.  It's so easy!  Everything is color-coded!  Pull one out, put the new one in.  Pull the next one out, put the next new one back in.  As long as the breaker's off and you've got a wiring diagram, you're golden.  To which Kress reponds: 

        "But then you have to work on systems that are not color-coded, sometimes." 

        "No, I don't."  

Not that I'm all Little Miss Electrician or anything - I've put up some ceiling fans and moved some light fixtures around, and that's it so far.  This was my first fluorescent fixture.  It wasn't any more complicated than the other fixtures I've done, but it was pretty physically taxing, what with all the reaching and pushing things up against the ceiling with one hand while trying to operate a screwdriver with the other AND trying not to drop stuff on your boyfriend's head at the same time.

Me:  Man, after all that concentration and physical labor, I'm a bit wired.

Kress:  GAH!

Me: Sorry, that's all I could currently come up with

Kress:  I get you, though.  I think I need some meditation after all that work.  Ohm!

Me:  Ooh, good one.  You'd have to be pretty bright to get that one.

Kress:  Wait...watt??

Lol.  :)


Of course, I found out that my kitchen is waaaaay dirtier than I thought it was - I couldn't see in there!  Egad, what a mess.  I guess I know what I'm doing this weekend.  Cleaning binge!!!


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Dining Room Artwork - For Free!

I finally decided on a mirror for that empty wall in the dining room...and since I can't afford to go out and buy the perfect one at the moment, I went ahead and hung artwork there instead, in a frame I already had and wasn't using.  Problem solved!  Hee.

This is the part where I plug someone else's website -  I made this Buddha poster with BlockPosters.com.  The photograph itself is from a free desktop wallpaper that I downloaded and the cropped into the right shape.  I upoloaded the .jpg to BlockPosters, which enlarges an image and slices it up, rendering it into a .pdf file so it can be printed out at home on several sheets of paper and assembled into whatever frame or other display format you wish.  And it's completely free! 

The bar over the poster is a carved wooden tapestry-hanger that I got from Earthbound Trading Company at the outlet mall in San Marcos, TX last year.  I have a pair of them - and while I have hung tapestries from them, I find I really just like the sticks themselves.  I really like this one above the poster:

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Meditation Space Available (Inquire Within)

Good morning!  Happy Monday, too.  Wanna see what I did over the weekend?* 

My heart really, really wants this just outside my  back door - to relax in on a rainy day, or sit and meditate in on cool mornings...

(Picture credit unknown - please comment if you know where this came from)

Mine would have one of these on it:

(The Hangout Place)

And lots of brightly colored lanterns and candles hanging above and all around:

(TripAdvisor.com)

But instead, I have this:

usairnet.com's heat index for Aug. 21st

*sound of brakes screeching* 


Oh, well.

For years I've simply plopped down on whatever expanse of floor in my house was available, sometimes with a pillow or a blanket under me, sometimes not.   These days, though, it hurts me to sit on the floor - so I'd been thinking about building a raised platform to pile cushions on top of.  Something a bit more springy than the hard floor.

Where, though?  Here, maybe, I thought, in this little empty corner of the living room under the windows:

It's out of the way enough, lit - but not heated, thankfully - by the windows all around, with a view of the garden outside and already sheltered by plants.  This picture kept springing to mind...

(photo by Di Lewis, from the book India Style by Alexandra Bonfante-Warren)

That's made of pallets!  Pallets, which are available for free just about anywhere you look - I found a stack of them behind my local grocery store over the weekend, and picked out several nice, relatively new ones from the pile (with permission, of course).  I took two apart and used the slats from both to make a new, sturdier top on one, sanded it, and painted it.  A few pillows, candles, and houseplants later...

YAY!!!

Aside from the pallets, this entire space was made with stuff I already had - candles, plants, the little ceramic cuppa-sand with incense sticks in it...

The little plant here I separated from the big palm-y looking one hanging over the area - a Bird of Paradise.  ...does that make this one a Chick of Paradise?

I really, really wanted to get a little brass Ganesh for this corner - and I found one at World Market over the weekend that I almost bought, but, it'll have to wait until payday.

In the meantime...

THAT didn't take long!  Silly kitty.  This is Rabi  (pronounced "robbie").  I was fully expecting this little corner to turn into a dog bed the second I turned my back, but Rabi and his feline brothers and sisters claimed it almost immediately.  I don't mind sharing. :)


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"New" Living Room: Windows

The "Wood Smoke" grey is blowing me completely away.  I'm just in love with the color - warm, soft, kind of rainy-day.  Sets all my stuff off *perfectly*.   The living room is done, and I'm in the process of doing the kitchen and dining room area right now.

But: photos!  I has them!  Well, some.  Room photos will have to wait until my house is no longer a construction zone, and until I can get that ONE perfect photo that isn't screwed up by the light in the room being all weird (or until I find a really awesome new camera abandoned on my front doorstep or something). 

For Now...

I am completely in love with the way the windows in the back of the room are coming out.  I love my wall o' windows: lots of natural light, plus a great thing to play with for someone with a curtain addiction.  0:)  

This is the window corner before, with the "Matagorda" sand colored paint (yes, it's beige, shut up) and the old window treatments (cream-colored crinkle-voile, which I'd hoped might go with the grey, because I DO love these, but not so much: they just looked dirty against the new wall color.  So I took them down, and one of the cats promptly peed on them while my back was turned. Mmm, catburgers for dinner tonight...).

You can see why light is an issue - when I took this picture, this room was so brightly lit by the windows that you might as well be outside.  But the camera sees big bright squares of light with darkness surrounding, so that's mostly what I get when I try to photograph this room;  the flash washes everything out, and turning lights on in the room only makes everything look yellow-y. 

And here's an "after" shot - again, in full daylight, not that the camera can tell.  Maybe it needs glasses. Poor thing.    

The accessories have stayed the same;  but I've raised the curtain rod up to 8" above the window frame (about 5" above where they were before); the white sheers are a placeholder.  They'll soon be replaced with some in a different fabric, and a couple more layers of color and texture.

Another thing I'm digging here is the way I separated the single large window on the south wall into two tall, narrow windows.  Demo & remo not included:  I wedged a 1x6" board into the window frame between the top and sill, caulked it in place (so it can be removed easily later, should I change my mind), and painted it to match.   This is a bad photo, but a decent shot of the nearly invisible line between the board and the wall above the window. 

The metal mini-blinds (grrr) ride up and down behind the board.  I'm working on making some brown linen curtain panels into roller shades to use instead, which will be hung in a pair to enhance the two-window look.  (One day they'll grow up to be bamboo chick blinds).

I do love me a good illusion!  From the opposite end of the room (not that I have a decent picture), three tall, narrow windows and the glass door makes a MUCH more cohesive architectural statement than two windows of completely random shape/size + door.  <--- I really just said that, didn't I?   Well, it does.

 

Anyway.

This candle lantern arrangement is one of my favorite things in the room. I love them, and I love the way they look hung in a group like this.

The accessories in this window corner hardly changed at all - the lanterns were here before, as were the giant Bird of Paradise plant and the sheer fabric screen. 


(And no, the paint color's not this dark or cement-ish.  That's the light thing again. Sigh). 

One of the changes that did end up happening back here was that I placed three of my mid-sized deity statues in the windows, one statue centered in each window.  I saw the idea online somewhere recently and decided to try it out.  I love the result - and that the statues are heavy enough that the cats can't knock them over and break them, hehe: 

Hidden behind the sheers

The Buddha and Ganesh were raffle prizes that I won at the women's festival I 

go to every year; the Kali & Shiva statue on the right was a gift from a friend. 

But wait! There's more!  For tomorrow.  MWAHAA.  :)


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