The Greatest Ikea Hack of All Time (For Me, Anyway)

How do you take a cheap Ikea organizer unit and turn it into a huge, expensive, pain in the butt?  Like this:

Okay, wait.  First, let me show you my inspiration and supplies:

This is a photo I found on Pinterest that made me gasp and clutch my pearls.  I slowly craned my neck around behind me like the girl in the Exorcist and glared at my MOPPE art table organizer unit.  My roommate dropped her pen and asked, "What is wrong with you??"


That apothecary cabinet.  The first thought I had as soon as I let go of those pearls was, I could MAKE THAT.








Here are the two Ikea MOPPEs I fixed up for my art table back in August. 

I adore it.  But what if I had another one...that was HUGE...and could hold all the little household bits and pieces?  I remember thinking, while staining these things, "A whole bunch of these could be kinda cool."









Here's the Ikea MOPPE by itself, as it comes from the store - unstained and fully assembled.

Very potential.  Such ideas.  Wow.











I spent about a week planning and sketching, and making supply lists.  When I was ready, I walked through Ikea pushing this thing around:

I swear there were PLENTY more left on the shelf. 

The first thing I did was set about staining 9 boxes and 54 drawers:

This is only about a third of them. 

As soon as  the boxes were stained and dry, I started assembling the unit: I set out three boxes on my bottom board, dowelled and glued them all together, and then set in the remaining six boxes the same way.  

All the clamps I own. 

Before adding the top board, I glued in six 1/4" square sticks behind the boxes.  I know the boxes are glued in securely; but just on the off chance that repeated use of the drawers knocks them loose (it won't), these sticks might add a little extra security against the boxes being pushed out of place (won't need it).  There's so much open space behind them; I really wish I could have made this thing double-sided. Right now it's going to be used against a wall, but one day it might make a nifty room divider or something.  Maybe I can go back and add more boxes in the future.  For now, when this is done, the back will be covered by a sheet of Luan.

Surprisingly not front-heavy. 

While I was waiting for all the glue to dry, I stained a billion more drawers.  I also cut out papers for the drawer bottoms (thanks, Past Me, for making templates in August that I could use later!), and labels to go into the labels holders waiting to go onto this piece.

Fiskars paper cutter FTW. 

As much as I want to show you a picture of a finished project - it's not done yet!  I can't WAIT to see this thing finished!  I'm hoping it will be by the end of the week.  I'll post updates along the way.



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@_@

You know that moment when you've been working on something big, and you suddenly stop and it finally sinks in that this is real... it's a real thing that's about to happen.  Yeah. That. 

We have a house! A duplex, actually.  Smaller than we're used to, but it's a great place, and the house we've been in for the past year and a half was really far too big for us.  Bulk day is on Monday, so we've been packing like crazy and purging furniture and small items ruthlessly.  Our motto right now is, "That's one less thing to move!"  It feels insane right now. I know everybody goes through this when they move, but it feels insane. I guess you know what I mean.  :)

After the 1st, I'll have pics of the new place for you, and likely a bunch of "hey, look how cute my shit that you've seen 10,000 times looks in this new room" shots, until I get actual projects going.  One of my favorite things in life is unpacking boxes and decorating a new space. 

I'm greatly looking forward to no longer being a live-in handywoman.  It was kinda fun, and interesting, until I broke my foot last year; since then I've just felt like the house was constantly pressing on me, looming over me to get things done and get caught up, and I'm tired of feeling that way.  That whole work-before-play thing has it's place, but it's all too easy to guilt yourself into doing nothing but work and forgetting to do the things that make you happy.  This new place needs nothing but decorating, and I'm SO excited to really get to know the new space without any attached responsibility.   

So, until the 1st, I doubt I'll have anything to post, but rest assured I'll be pretty much continuously covered in dust and tape and cardboard shavings. 

See y'all on the flip-side.

"Don't forget to pack me, Mama!" 

Fail.

This past week, I've been focusing my attention on knocking out some little things that I've had looming on my to-do list for a long time.  Simple, quick, easy, small projects - like swapping out cabinet knobs, spray-painting some doorknobs, cleaning up the weird clutter that keeps accumulating on my fireplace hearth for some reason, getting some "landing strip" areas of the house re-organized and cleaned up;  stuff like that.  The desk lamp that I posted about the other day was one of them, too.

I also tried a few ideas that I've had that didn't work out.  I thought I'd share them with you, because some of them are funny:

This lady painted some chairs with Rit dye!  I can do that!

KaraPaslayDesigns.blogspot.com

I tried it on the big green wing chair that I brought home a couple of weeks ago.  I didn't have Rit dye, but I had a ton of India Ink lying around from my calligraphy studies.  I've actually used it on fabric before, so I knew that it would stay put, not run or fade, nor rub off on my clothes when I sat in the chair.  I decided to try it in a tiny area on the back of the seat cushion where it wouldn't show, and I'm really glad I did.

Apparently the stain-treating chemicals in the chair are really good at their job.  The ink didn't soak in, it just dried on the surface of the chair, into this gross, crusty mess that blackened my fingers the second I touched it to see how it was coming.  FAIL.

*

Several months ago, Kress' mom left us some of those plug-in air fresheners with the oil bottle that you pop in, that fill up the house with this nasty, cloying, putridly-sweet, disgusting fucking smell that gives me migraines and makes me sick to my stomach.  She loves them, and it was sweet of her to buy them for us, but, um, EW NO.   I saw this on Pinterest:

Essentially, you take the air freshener apart and refill the bulb with your own blend of essential oils.  Not one to waste anything, I tried it.  And I really should have tried it with gloves on, by the way, because after scrubbing my hands with soap, dish soap, vinegar, orange cleaner, and finally BLEACH, the residual smell on my hands is STILL making me sick as I sit here typing this.  *barf*

Needless to say, it didn't work.  Maybe it works with some other types of air fresheners,  but on the kind that I had, the wicks broke while I wast trying to get them back into the bulbs, so the whole thing was just a waste of time, effort, and expensive essential oils.  FAIL.

*

Here's another one from Pinterest, although I originally got the idea from a friend who did this and had great luck with it:

That's right, bubble wrap window insulation.  My bedroom gets HOT in the Summers, y'all, and not in that fun way.  The idea here is that the air in the bubble wrap insulates the windows and keeps some of the heat from coming through, without blocking light.  It's not terribly attractive, but behind curtains?  No big deal.  The cool part is (wa waaaa get it) that it works - I've seen it in action, and I know it works.

I, however, didn't have any bubble wrap, and that crap's expensive.  What I did have was leftover foam underlayment from back when I put new flooring into the craft room and guest room.   It's light and clear, and should do the same job, right?  I never got to find out, unfortunately:  when I went to put it up on my bedroom windows I realized something I'd forgotten.  There are big, red manufacturer's logos stamped all over the damned things.  The foam itself wouldn't have shown behind the white sheers in the bedroom, but the logo sure would have.  FAIL.

*

Tomorrow's another day, though, and I have lots more small things to catch up on. For the moment, I'm going to go saw my hands off now, because the bleach (or the devil air freshener oils!) is making my hands peel and burn.

In the meantime, everyone have a safe, happy Memorial Day...and remember to stop and say "thank you."

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Weekend Plans: Garage/Workshop Cleanup!

I'm hoping to spend some of the weekend cleaning up my garage, which is a task that's been looming for several weeks now.  Every time I go out there to get something or put something away, I want to run back into the house without looking at anything.  Ugh.

This is my garage.  If you only look at the "furniture"  (shelving, work tables, etc.), it looks pretty spacious and organized; but, all the black fluffy stuff I drew on the picture represents JUNK all over the floor.  Yeah.  It's that dirty in there.   And most of it is old furniture, discarded projects, bits and pieces that I could throw out or sell on Craigslist that I never get around to doing. 

Like this thing, which started life as the skeleton of an aquarium cabinet I started to build four years ago but I never got around to finishing - I just piled stuff on top of it and inside of it.  Oops. 

And the kitchen rack thing I scavenged from work the other week, which is still disassembled and piled on the floor, instead of put together and being useful.  (But at least I did something with the top).


This is what I want the garage to look like:

See the awesomness?

It could look like this, if it wore Old Spice if I'd clean up, throw things out, sell some other things, prime and paint that little rolling cart and make a tool chest out of it (if I ever find the key or a way to pry the top drawer open), and re-organized some stuff in the garage into a more logical and useful arrangement.


I have some shopping to get done tomorrow afternoon, and then a Halloween party to go to, and a wedding to go to on Sunday.   So I may not get anything done over the weekend besides that.  But I'm hoping I have the get-up-and-go to clean up the garage tomorrow morning.  As messy as it is, it's only about two hours' work if I get started early.

Wish me luck.   And stay tuned for the inevitable "I didn't do anything this weekend but take a nap" post, LOL.  :B

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Tuesday!

Man, work has been CRAZY today!  And the hurricane is CRAZY!  And I'm CRAZY because I've had way! too! much! caffeine! today! omg! 

Not much time for a big post, but I did manage to pick up a couple of side tables over the weekend, from a friend who was getting rid of some extraneous stuff:

This side table, which is Ikea's FORNBRO (no longer available as such) - this will get a new coat of paint (I'm not sure what color yet), and is already serving as a second side table next to my couch in the living room. 

And...

This beautiful little ...table? Display stand?  I'm going with "stand," since it's about 30" high, and too tall for an end or side table.    It's a gorgeous little piece - right now it's on my East living room wall between the entertainment center and the computer desk, under a HUGE "Janet Craig" Dracaena (also given to me by this friend with the tables over the weekend, along with another large tree and some clippings - yay, plants!)  I'm not sure what to put on top of it just yet, but I think my little red doumbek will look nice displayed on the lower shelf. The finish needs some cleaning up, and a loose joint along the bottom shelf needs to be repaired, but it's mostly in great shape.  And I loooooove it. :)

More stuff to work on, yay! 

This week, though, I'm picking away at my craft room.  I spent much of the weekend cleaning it up and spiffing up some of the furniture, and hanging a clock and a corkboard and a window treatment.  More on that later this week!

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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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Wildebeests: Kitchen Potrack

...and now that the kitchen light works, I can take pictures of the finished potrack, and the furthering of my kitchen designs.

When last we met the kitchen, I had a cramped pantry, a wasted space between it and the refrigerator, and a trash can that moonlighted as a dog buffet:

Which is hard to see in this picture - easier to look at the plans I drew up for using the space better:

The "before" is the teeny tiny little sketch in the top right of this picture - and you can see the after.  The pot rack was built in stages over the last month, as time and tools would allow, and went from this...

To this:

Granted, something needs to be done about The Magnet Situation here (there are over 300 words on the front doors alone).

I've screwed some small cup-hooks onto the side to hang a dishtowel on (after I took the photo, whoops).  I may also repaint it at some point - I couldn't decide what color to paint it, so I went with gray to match the walls.  I wanted it to be fun, but I just couldn't decide.  Now I don't have to, for a while, anyway.

Meanwhile, two shelves full of pots and strainers in the pantry have been cleared, and the pantry re-organized into something that makes sense, and is very handy to use!

Next stop:  Laundry Room!


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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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Meet My Master Bathroom

The master bathroom is probably the only room in my entire house that hasn't been re-done a thousand times in the past six years.  I love it just the way it is.  It was also the first space in my house to be made over, when I first moved in, because I can live with just about anything left un-done, except for a soft, relaxing bathing space.

Enjoy!

Nearly floor-to-ceiling curtains over the shower (Ikea's LILL mosquito-net/mesh panels) to diffuse light from the window in the shower, but not block it.

Mostly monochromatic, with coke-bottle-blue glass accessories, blue matting on the artwork in the room, and blue candles (well, they used to be blue, they've faded to a really weird purple-gray.  I need new ones).   

You can see in this shot that the trim molding and doors are painted the same as the walls:  I did that to keep white trim from "chopping" up the room, visually; and also to help the space feel more calm and floaty.  The bedroom outside is painted in almost the same color; the curtains over the double-doors that divide the two rooms are the same ones as the ones that hang from the canopy railing on the bed.  (My closet, on the other side of the door in the picture above, is also painted to match).



Frames, candle holders, and cabinetry are all the same tone of dark brown-stained wood.   In fact, I stained the cabinets myself.  Here's a shot in better light (from a couple of years ago - different plant and curtain)...

And here's what they looked like before/during the transformation:

Yes, I actually sanded down the wood and re-stained the cabinets - indoors - instead of just doing a faux-bois "stain" paint treatment on them.  This project is part of the reason I started doing that, actually - I think I'm STILL vacuuming up dust from this project, and that was five years ago!


One day I plan to replace the large, frameless mirror over the vanity with a pair of tall, narrow, framed mirrors with a small shelf underneath each one to hold small items (makeup brushes, etc.).  Here's a picture I drew on a couple of years ago when I was trying to decide if I wanted two mirrors, or a wide one higher on the wall...

...but I'm definitely sold on two mirrors.  I even know which ones I want, and all the why and how.  I'm just waiting for that bag of money to show up on my doorstep, lol.  What I don't know is what to do with the light fixture above the mirror (visible in the first picture) - I hate it, but I have no clue what I want.  I'm hoping that I'll know the right one when I see it, but nothing's jumped out at me yet. 

And the inspiration for the room?  Was twofold - I'd had a brighter, pale-aqua bathroom in the apartment I lived in before I moved into my house, with lots of beachy things - shells, grasses in a vase, grass baskets - but I wanted to darken the look, make it more rainy-day and less cheerful.  And then I fell in love with Candance Olsen, and this bathroom from her show:

Candace Olsen

This is WAY too shiny and modern for me; but I looooooved the color and the restful, spa-like feeling.  And the double mirrors with shelves!

I said I'm happy with the master bathroom as is - and that's true, but that doesn't mean it couldn't be more beautiful - there's no such thing as enough.   As I said, I'm planning a mirror thing and a light fixture thing.  I'm also constantly on the hunt for the *perfect* rug to go on the floor in here;  and I'm planning on doing something fantastic with a couple more (small) houseplants in the window above the shower.  Updates as soon as I'm done.  :)


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♪ A Few of My Favorite Things ♪♫

Okay, so two of my favorite things:  PAINT and LUMBER! 

Having sold that antique vanity earlier this week, I found myself in possession of a small amount of cash.  I decided not to get fabric for the couch - I could only have gotten about half of it, and I'd rather buy it all at once so that I don't have to worry about going back and it not being there any longer.  That would suck.

Instead, I got materials for two projects:  new paint for the common areas of the house (half price, baby!) and lumber for the kitchen pot rack project I keep talking about but not really talking about.

New Living Room, Party of 1 

Here's a shot of the current wall and ceiling colors in the living room :

 

The ceiling looks really dark in this pic; but the wall color is pretty much spot-on.  I call it "Matagorda" - I mixed it myself to match some sand I collected the last time I was on the beach in Matagorda, TX (which was waaaay too long ago!)  I like it, but an entire houseful is getting to be a bit...beige. 

Here's the paint I brought home earlier this week - and the actual color of the ceiling. 

"Wood Smoke", by Glidden.  The paint I brought home was another brand, I forget which (American somethingorother? *shrug*). 

The color is darker, and grayer - not by much, but just enough that it'll change the entire character of the room.  I really can't wait to get started.


The entire common area of the house is painted all the same color, ceilings and walls: the entry hall, dining room, kitchen, and living room.  Since all four areas are open to each other, I went with one big color scheme when I painted the Matagorda, and I've really loved how harmonious and smooth the effect is.

The "crown molding" that you see in the first picture?  Is totally just white paint on the ceiling and the top of the walls.  And it's not fooling anybody - it's not meant to.  It serves the same purposes:  it's a visual divider between blocks of color, it calls attention to walls shapes and angles, and it creates the illusion of a higher ceiling.  Someday it'll turn into real crown molding, when it grows up; but today is not that day.  For the time being, it pleases me.  I'm actually thinking about expanding it - only by 3" on the ceiling, but extending it down the wall a good 8" or so, as though it were a dropped ceiling, and doing a stencil or trompe l'oeil border across the bottom to make it look even more like molding.  I honestly haven't decided yet. 

Which is one reason I'm not starting with the painting tonight, like I want to.  The other reason is that I'm going to just blow my kitchen UP if I don't do something about the storage in there...



My Queendom For Some *$%#2@ Storage

So, tonight I'm building this:

In the teeny-tiny inset in the top, you can see a hint of the situation now:  there's a trash can wedged between the fridge and the wall of The World's Most Annoying Pantry.  The trash is crammed in there in an attempt to keep my puppy out of it (which doesn't work);  the pantry would be great if it weren't crammed with WAY too much junk. 

Enter the pot rack - which actually is basically one of those over-the-toilet shelving units that you see in bathrooms.  Trash can underneath (with a lid that I'm hoping will prove to be puppy-proof), pots and pans and bakeware - and maybe the coffee/tea stuff, too - on the upper shelves.  And two empty shelves inside the pantry, yay! I don't know whether I'm more excited about building stuff, or about re-organizing the pantry afterward. 

The only problem is that I haven't decided yet whether to:

• stain the rack to match the kitchen cabinets, or
• paint it gray "Wood Smoke" to match the new walls, or
• paint it white to match the trim and the fridge.

Staining the rack to match the cabinets would balance them out across the room.  But it would also be a big, heavy block of darkness on that side of the room - I moved the fridge the other day when I got the new trash can, and I'm loving how huge just that small change makes the kitchen look.  It has me wondering about cluttering up that space again with a big obvious piece of furniture.  So maybe the white. 

What do you think?

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We've Been Dancing With Mr. Brownstone

Obviously, I do NOT have a brownstone, or a cute but cramped little Victorian row house, it being suburban central Texas up in here.  What I DO have, though, is a long, narrow common area:

Arranging furniture in this football field of a room has always been a challenge.  And not just because it's long and narrow;  another big factor in furniture placement is that the north and south walls of the room are made up of windows and doors, which means the seating area placement has always either been centered on the west or east wall (it doesn't help that my cable outlet is on the east wall. When I laid my laminate flooring in 2005, I ran a cable around the room underneath the baseboards so that I could use the west wall, too, if I wanted, which is what I prefer to do).

I've always hated how unbalanced the room has been - no matter which side of the room the seating area is on, it makes the whole space look lopsided and cramped. Granted, a lot of the cramped-ness comes from the fact that I have too much large furniture, and too many little pieces filling in empty space around them.

At the moment, what's been pissing me off recently is the fact that the couch is floating out in the middle of the room all by itself.

But, browsing through casaCARA's brownstone reno posts this week reminded me that there are plenty of  options for decorating a room of this shape (brownstones and row houses, ofc, being long, skinny, 2-storey homes, most often with windows and doors at either end, sometimes with a bay at one or both ends, with bedrooms (or apartments) above the main living space) ...which I knew, but you know how sometimes your brain just refuses to work with information you already have until something shiny pops up to catch its attention. :)

So I'm thinking of doing something like this, instead: 

Most of the smaller pieces are gone, as well as the large bookcases that were on the west wall (by the fireplace) - they were eight feet tall (!) and 24" deep from the wall, and were just towering over the entire space (again: I knew this, I just hadn't figured out what to do with them).  I moved them out of the room last night (into the bedroom, where they're *perfect*) and replaced them with the long, low bookshelf that had previously been under the bar at the north end of the room (bottom).  Just this small change opens up the room, and will allow me to move everything else around:

• The main seating area pulls off the east wall, out into the center of the room.  This is something I've tried before, but not since I got my new couch (my old sofa was eight feet long, and overstuffed - it dominated even this 16x24' room no matter which way I turned it!)
• Centering the seating area leaves lots of negative space around each piece and between the back of the sofa and the windows in the rear (south) of the room, and allows for traffic to flow around either side of the seating area, instead of skirting around behind it the way it's been.   (And I'd really love to stick a chair into the end of the seating arrangement, opposite the television - preferably this one)
• This leaves the TV/entertainment center alone on the east wall, and a bit too far away from the sofa for my tastes; but I plan on replacing the long, heavy unit with a small dresser made into a TV/electronics stand, with the electronic components in the space where the top drawer used to be.  I love those.  I also plan to pull it out from the wall a bit, and back it with the turquoise fabric screen that I showed you last week, for a large splash of color and a bit more space around the unit.  
• The long, low bookshelf being on the west wall also opens up the space under the bar at the north end of the room, which I'm hoping will encourage a colony of wild bar stools to take up residence on their own.  *looks around hopefully*  Having that space under the bar unoccupied also actually adds to the length of the room, visually - which I find I like very much, although if you'd asked me before, I'd have said, "No! I will MAKE this room be square if it KILLS me!"  Uh-huh. Sure.
• The next step is to flip the couch and the weird little transforming settee thing ( this thing from World Market):  the heavier (visually) couch will anchor the windows a bit, and the colors will set off the sheer, breezy curtains (er...once I get it slipcovered, hehe). 
• The settee thing itself, though cute at first sight, has proven to be a major pain in the ass - literally:  it's totally uncomfortable, even with the 8" thick cushion I made for it to replace the flat, egg-crate cushion it came with.  It's also a weird shape that fits nowhere; and the frame, when completely open, is pretty much a big padded seesaw which regularly dumps me and my friends out onto the floor when we sit on it the wrong way!  So I'm going to spend the weekend removing the back and move-able arms, and creating a new cushion for the seat, so that it becomes a large ottoman/lounger thing that will divide the room visually without taking up too much visual space and blocking the view of the seating area, and also provide extra seating for the cats parties.  

Like I needed more projects, right?  Heh.   Moving the gigantic bookcases was the biggest job in the room, though, and that's done (although I broke some of the trim molding on my floor in the process, damn it). The rest is all pushing furniture around and juggling knick-knacks and houseplants.

And eventually I'll finish painting.

And eventually I'll re-cover the couch. 


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