Reupholstering the dining room chairs.

I bought my dining room set at a consignment shop called Rerun.  I intended to reupholster the chairs early on, but here we are six months later . . .

I finally decided on a fabric from Tonic Living and it was a snap to change it out.  I flipped over the chair and removed the screws that hold the seat to the chair frame.  Then I began the process of removing all the staples.  I used a screw driver and a pair of pliers.

Oh hey, there was another layer of fabric under there!

And another.  Ick.

I made sure to not vacuum before I put the fabric face down on the ground.  That way the fabric would get nice and coated with dog hair.

I cut out a piece of fabric and started stapling it to the chair bottom.  I found this staple gun when I bought the house in a kitchen drawer, along with the aforementioned hammer, and a wrench.  I love free tools.

Then I trimmed the excess fabric away and screwed the seat back onto the chair frame.

It looks so much better, yes?

Then I started on the rest of the chairs.  And promptly ran out of staples.  Damn it.

Fun finds on craigslist

Since moving in, I've had my record player on a stool and the LPs in a cardboard box.  It didn't look great.  Also, my parents, who had bequeathed me a sizable portion of their LP collection, were coming to visit and I wanted to show that I appreciated them and used them.  There's nothing better than a dance party with records.

I found these bookcases on craigslist and the guy was also selling a display box. 

 

I cleaned up all the pieces with some Howard Feed-N-Wax wood preserver and bought some metal legs at Ikea for the display box.  I think it's just the right size and height for my record player and LPs.  My only regret is that I didn't buy the second display box he was selling.  I think I could have added legs, fashioned a door for it, and turned it into bar storage.

A pretty rad thing happened when I sold my old pressboard bookcases on craigslist: the buyer told me he grew up on my street and used to play in my house in the 60s!  He asked if the "little house" was still in the backyard.  I told him we had to remove the shed because it was rotting and he told me how much fun he had playing in it as a kid.  He also told me that the family that lived here had two little girls and that they moved to Texas.  It makes me really content to know that people had fun and were happy in this house. 

The dining room, or how I spent my labor day weekend.

My dining room is odd.  When I bought the house the trim was missing from an entire wall where there had clearly been water damage at some point.  I figured I'd have to spend the next year visiting The Rebuilding Center looking for matching trim.  Then there's the half carpet situation.  The wood floor actually extends underneath and beyond where the carpet ends, but only by 8 inches.

I have a theory about this.  My realtor thinks I'm crazy.

In Portland Maps, under the section where they break down the square footage, there's a carport that measures 140 square feet.  I don't have a carport.  I think this section of the dining room used to be the carport. 

It would explain why I have an electrical panel in the dining room. It would explain why there's wood flooring only in half the room. 

Anyhoosy, the dining room was a bit of a mess.  Paint that didn't meet the corners, missing trim, electrical outlets hanging out of the wall.  That first week I was working on the house my electrician friend Josh came and took care of all the safety hazards.  He cleaned up the bad wiring in the attic, anchored the electrical outlets properly, and did a once-over to make sure I didn't go up in smoke.  One day I was home, recovering from dental work, when I noticed some boards high on a shelf in my garage.

The missing trim! It was all there!  Once I got that up I was motivated to paint the trim.

Once the trim was painted I got the bug to paint the whole room.  I had originally wanted to paint the dining room a steel blue and the living room a deep warm orange.  But I sort of liked having the rooftop painting against the green . . . it made parts of the painting pop in a way I didn't think they would on a blue wall.  So I put some paint samples up and found a pale green I liked.

A funny thing happened at the Home Depot.  The color swatch I put on the wall was a Glidden paint sample.  When I went to purchase a full gallon I asked for it to be put in a Behr base. I figured they'd grab the color coding from the Glidden paint and just put it in the Behr base.  Instead they used the color matching computer program.  The resulting paint did NOT match the paint sample I put on the wall.  It had a sick fluorescent tinge to it.

It was the color of toothpaste!  Seriously:

It made me crazy, so crazy I couldn't stand it.  The next day I went and bought more paint samples.  Two days later, Labor Day, I went back to Home Depot and got a new paint color.  It wasn't as gray as I wanted, but I could live with it.  It's very pretty in the morning light.  At night it almost has a metallic sheen.

 

 

Soon I'll reupholster the chairs with a more vibrant pattern in an orange or yellow tone.  Someday I'll have the floors refinished and extended so I can get rid of that crazy zigzag carpet.  For now the paint demons have been quieted, though I'm sure they'll start screaming again soon.  I never though I was compulsive until I bought a house; now I'm pretty sure I could paint trim for a millennium and I don't know if I'd be in heaven or hell.  I'm learning so much about myself, mainly that there's a lot of crazy in here.  Or maybe that's the paint fumes talking.