Starting Out Savvy » Decorating

Repurposing a Shelf

Jamie Lee — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 03:08:21 +0000

The area near our TV needed help. My brother, David, gave us a great media stand but because we don’t own enough electronics to fill it, it just served as a shelf to collect clutter. Here is what things looked like before:

Do you see how we had picture frames, board games collecting dust, and the partially chewed box on DVDs collecting dust? We decided to take a shelf made of fiberboard and repurpose it as our media shelf. Since the shelf is much smaller we don’t have as much surface area to set things. Of course I forgot to take a before picture but here’s a shot of the shelf after a couple coats of primer.

(It had that awful fake wood look before we primed it.)

This painting project really taught me a thing or two about the strategy behind painting. Our most valuable lessons are as follows:

Don’t do a bad job priming something because those drips of primer don’t just magically go away.
Think about the surface areas before you start painting. If you will have to move the paintbrush over an area in order to reach something then don’t paint that passing ground first. I painted the surfaces that were parallel to the ground first, but if I had to do it over again, then I would start with the inside surfaces of the boards that stand vertically. My method ended up in a really gooey first coat, because as I painted the sides I would drip paint on the area that I had already painted, which forced me to go over it repeatedly.
I would move the piece of furniture to a new part of the drop cloth before continuing to do the second coat. Both when we primed the shelf and when we painted it, we dripped little bits of paint that dried and formed a bond between the shelf and the drop cloth. When we eventually went to move it inside we damaged the paint on the edges.
If you do have paint chips attached to the bottom because of the mistake mentioned above, use a razor blade to shave them off the wood. At first I tried pulling at them and it resulted in tearing some of the paint that was on the shelf.

Oh, learning experiences!

Here is how it ended up. What do you think?

(Yes, we’re dorks and still own a Super Nintendo.)

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Mirror, Mirror on the Wall…

Jamie Lee — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 03:02:48 +0000

I mentioned before that when I moved in with Peter he had absolutely nothing hanging on the walls. The biggest decision we had to make when decorating the living room was what we should put over the couch. The fact that this wall had been bare for so long pressured us into analyzing what we hung. Would it be a print? Who would it be by? Since we’re both “into art” we felt like we couldn’t hang anything unless it was perfect.

The pressure encouraged us to think outside the box, so instead of art we hung a mirror. I could be philosophical about this decision and say that we hung the mirror to capture living art but, in reality, we opted for the mirror because it added space and light to the room. Plus, we found it on sale at T.J. Maxx for only $60 (originally over $300). I like the darkness of the wood because when I look at it and then turn and see our black TV, I don’t think either one looks out of place.

Isn’t it a beautiful mirror? The lighting from our new shelf bounces around in the mirror to give the room life.

Look at how the room is coming together.

Can you believe that just a few short weeks ago it looked like this?

The White Chair Compromise

Jamie Lee — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 04:16:35 +0000

By now it’s no secret that we would love to own a cream colored couch but our two black Pomeranians shed too much for that to be a pretty reality. I know that owning a light colored couch is not practical. In fact, I once sublet an apartment with a white couch. It was one of those fabulous little daybed couches and it was beautiful. After only a few months of living with the couch it looked dingy and coffee stained. Why is it that in magazines people are always cuddling up on couches with coffee or red wine when it never works in real life?

Nevertheless the idea of having one in our home makes me swoon. After listing every reason why it was a bad idea, Peter and I decided to buy the next best thing–a white chair. The chair forces us to use five sheets of lint remover every time we welcome a guest into our home but it’s gorgeous. We opted a simple Tullsta from IKEA with a white chair cover. The shape of the chair makes it feel like it’s hugging you every time you sit down. It may be a pain to keep clean and a pain to keep the dogs off of but for us it was the perfect compromise.

Have you ever bought something completely impractical just because it was beautiful?

(Imagine it with a chair cover that hides its tan legs.)

Let’s Start with Curtains

Jamie Lee — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 03:27:23 +0000

Last night Peter posted about his hate/hate relationship with our couch. What he didn’t mention was that when Peter and I first met this condo was eerily empty. Imagine yesterday’s photo with no TV and no coffee table to collect clutter. This was the way I was first introduced to it. One would think that having studied art for 14 years that the boy would hang SOMETHING on the walls, but no, it was completely empty. I moved in with one semester left of college. I didn’t know how long I would be here because I didn’t know where I would end up getting a job and so I didn’t want to “waste time” decorating. We hung a few things here and there until finally I realized that no matter how short a period of time I spent living here, I needed it to feel home-ier.

We decided to start with the living room because since we don’t have an entry way this is the first room that guests see when they walk into our home. For a long time we focused our frustration on the biggest (and pretty much only) item in the room–our couch. I yearned for one of those beautiful cream couches that would grace the covers of fabulous design magazines like Domino. Finally, with not enough money in my bank account for a new couch (and two black dogs who would’ve covered the couch with their fur) I let my focus leave the couch and decided to start somewhere. We opted for curtains.

A short trip to both Ikea and Target only set us back about $40 and suddenly we had curtains and curtain rods for the room. We opted for the type of curtain that you can hem with an iron. It was super easy and it was the first step to making our house a home.

Here is the condo post curtains. What do you think?

Living with the Couch

Peter — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 03:13:33 +0000

We began redecorating with considerations of what we needed to remove from the house. Foremost on the list was a chocolate brown couch (c. 1982) that has a wide rib corduroy type texture. Imagine the worst pants you have ever seen. Then, imagine those pants as a couch and you get the basic idea of what we had before us. I have a hate-hate relationship with this sofa from long before I met my lovely fiancé. It was a gift (read: cast-off) from my grandparents and traveled with me from Chicago to Austin in a U-Haul which repeatedly broke down between point A and B. The truck finally died outside Oklahoma City, requiring my father and me to transfer the sofa from one truck to another, along with the rest of my worldly possessions.
The couch weighs as much as a Buick. It comes from those halcyon, pre-Ikea days when furniture was made from steel and little else, like a Detroit muscle car. Lifting this sofa a handful of times gave me pain I have not felt before or since. It almost crippled my father, who has an already delicate frame caused by drunkenly carrying a boat motor through the woods in the Canadian wilderness (but that’s another story). The couch has gone from two separate apartments to the condo, where it now rests in the sitting room. Having long since lost the casters that served as feet, it rests on a couple of two-by-fours like a broken down car.

Given this history, I was only too ready to sell this monstrosity or delight in tearing it apart and tossing the pieces in the dumpster. But the only couches we really liked were from places with price tags better suited to Sotheby’s than bourgeois home stores. We did, however, possess sufficient funds for an alternative project. Gradually, we added to or modified the contents of the room in a way that embraced this once hated piece of furniture and made it the veritable centerpiece of our plan for revamping our space. This embrace of a repulsive object allowed us to expand our imaginations and craft sensibilities into creating something that steered away from the overdone, catalog photo living area and into something that was collectively fashioned, rather than purchased readymade. At least, that is what we have decided to tell ourselves, but our additions have certainly helped. More importantly, it is surprising to realize the sheer joy in creating by hand certain additions to a space that one could buy.

Here is the entire room, including the couch, before we started the decorating process. Stop by tomorrow for more on the living room decorating.

Have you ever had a piece of furniture that you had to decorate around? If so, tell us about it.