6th Street Design School

If you were here with me as a I run through my daily list of favorite blogs, you would know that 6th Street Design School by Kristen Krason is one that I never, ever miss. She is an adorable and hugely talented interior designer here in Utah.  I'm always in love with everything she does. So you can imagine my extreme excitement when I opened her blog this morning and saw this:

Kirsetn Krason Interiors

Remember the Rock Star Ottoman?  This is it!

Kirsten Krason Interiors

 It's been recovered in the most perfect fabric for the room.  Love it.  And of course, I also still love the legs and apron with their chippy layers of paint.  It's not often that I get to see how something looks when it goes home with someone, so I'm so excited to see it in this beautiful room!  You can read the whole post about the rest of the room here.  She did an awesome job!

Award!

A kind of long while ago the very sweet Caroline from cw frosting awarded me with the Kreative Blogger Award!  How flattering is that?!  I sincerely apologize that it has taken me so long to aknowledge this kind award.  With summer here, things have been crazy.

 Thank You Thank You Thank You Caroline!

In order to participate, the rules, I believe, are that I tell 10 things about myself, and bestow the award to 10 deserving blogs, who then do the same.  Scroll down to visit the worthy recipients :)

For my version of 10 Things About Me (which is I'm sure way more boring info than you want to know) I'm going to fess up and tell you about my addictions. Serious addictions.  I have a lot of them.  Its a problem.

1. Pepsi, Pepsi, and more Pepsi. Ah Sweet Nectar. Sad but true: a Pepsi with a good burn is often what gets me through the day.
2.  Flip flops and sandals. While I  can (try to) totally rock a nice boot or heel, I have a super casual life and as a result have developed a major weakness for cute flip flops and/or sandals.  If I didn't live in Utah, I would wear them every single day of the year, and have divided them all into two categories-"dressy" (non-rubber) and "regular" (rubber). Of he several pairs that I've recently purchased, these are my current favorites-Dressy bronze leather (faux, probably) with bronze flowers from Old Navy. 

3.  Sugar.  Need to get a handle on this one.  Anything sweet, especially baked.  Especially chocolate. But really, anything with lots of sugar will do.

4.  My IPhone.  I used to be really, really annoyed that my husband's phone is permanently attached to his hand.  Also, I swore I never wanted a smartphone.  Why on earth would I need the Internet on my phone? For all my super important meetings?  Cut to this past Christmas, when he talked me into one.  Oh boy. LOVE.  Pretty sure that I can never go back.

Am dying over the these personalized IPhone covers from Dani Notes Stationary

5.  Bravo TV.  The Real Housewives.  Any of them.  I know, its trashy.  Its a total waste of time.  I shouldn't.  But that's what makes it soooo good.

6.  The big wide world of design blogging.  As we all know, be careful.  If you get sucked in, you will never be the same again. Large chunks of time will disappear from your day.  Its awesome and inspiring and awesome some more.  So much pretty.  So much talent.

7.  Design magazines.  I'm far from professional, but I could drink up just about anything to do with design.  And  as much as I love blogs, there's just something about being able to hold the magazine in your hand and flip the pages.

8.  Country music.  The good and the cheesy.  I love pretty much any music, but I grew up on country and its still my fav.  I might be partly hick.  Oh well.

Yep, I'm totally down with Alabama:)

9.  Old crappy furniture and paint.  I know that seems like two addictions, but for me they go hand in hand, and have for years.

10.  Going to the movies.  Hands down one of my favorite things to do.  I make it a point to go to a late show with my sister and sis-in-law on a regular basis. Those girls are fun.  My sister has been known to sneak an entire box of eclairs in her purse.  Not that we would eat an entire box. Ha! Guess you'll never know.

So now you know my weaknesses.  Some of them.

And here are the 10 lovely bloggers who are more than award-worthy themselves:

Emily at Lovely Beasts

Lori at Wool Flax and Beeswax

Korrie at Red Hen Home

Sherry at Shanty Girl

Bonnie at The Finde

Natalie at Natty by Design

Jill at Peanut Butter Plaza

Cara and Ann Marie at Twice Lovely

Allison at Vintage Charm and Restoration

A Lived In Home

There are so many incredible blogs out there I wasn't sure how to choose.  My biggest love in this arena is re-creating furniture, so I tried to seek out bloggers I admire who also refinish furniture.  

 Please go check them out-they're pretty amazing!

Thanks again, Caroline!

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Off With My Hinges

There it is. My newly door-less door frame!

Got right to the point that time, didn't I?  I was a little excited.  Now I'll back up a bit.

Remember when I posted this picture just a few posts ago?

I actually really like this area just off my kitchen. But as you can see in the picture, it contains a very lot of doors. The laundry door, the power room door, the garage door and a door in the mudroom right where I am standing to take the picture that closes the whole area off from the rest of the house. For four years we have almost never closed that last mudroom door. Mostly it just swings inward and conveniently bangs into the garage door every single time a person attempts to enter through it. Every. Single. Time. To the point that the door knobs like to catch on each other and occasionally try to rip each other out of their respective doors. So the other day, a light bulb dawned in my brain. We need to take that door away! Yes, it took four years for that bright idea. So after waiting for about two seconds for Tyler to get around to doing it, I just woke up one morning and took that door right off the hinges all by myself. And...I LOVE IT! Why the crap didn't I do this four years ago?

  And as always happens when I have finished furniture for sale patiently waiting under sheets at my house, I can't resist playing around a little.  This is the beautiful vintage dresser I finished last month.  I am drooling over how awesome it looks in the mudroom.  Not to mention the storage!  But alas, it is still for sale in my shop.

I have a before picture of the mudroom with the door and the bench that usually lives there, but blogger insists on loading it sideways!  Why?!?

Now I have some patching and painting to do.  Blah.  But worth it.  And a tip learned through trial and error from a door-remover novice?  If you are permanently removing the door from the frame, just leave the hinges attached to the door and unscrew the whole thing from the frame.  That way you're not removing twice the number of screws.  Unless that's not the correct way to go about it.  Then that's not what I did at all.

Just a silly picture from the playing around.  I love this picture of me and my dad when I was little.  Yes the bow is whatever.  And a tarnished butter dish from Tyler's grandma that I will probably never put butter in.  But it makes a gorgeous little spot in which to put keys and such when coming in and out of the house. 

So what lesson have we learned here?  We have learned that just because the builder put it there, doesn't mean it belongs there.  After about eight minutes with a drill, I have a lot more light and a lot less door in my life.

The Dresser That Goes

A few weeks ago my cute friend Lindsey took one of the Molly Tables home to live in the room shared by her two little girlies.  She mentioned that they were also sharing a dresser that had belonged to her husband as a little boy, and that she'd like to it have refinished to match the table.  Remember how the Molly Tables were all pink and cream and girly curves?  Well, a few days later she dropped off this dresser:

Can you say Total Opposite of pink and cream and girly curves?  And then she said something along the lines of, "Oh, just do whatever you think will make it look good with the table." Hmm.  It took a few days of contemplation.  Here is what I came up with:

 I thought about white with pink drawers, pink with white drawers, white top, pink bottom you name it.  None of it seemed right for this piece. Because the dresser has a completely different shape than the tables, I didn't want to do an exact replica of their paint job. I decided it would be best to keep a simple dresser  simple and do something that would just "go".  Besides, its not really chic for everything to be exactly matchy anyway.  At least I'm pretty sure I've heard that around:)

So I painted the whole thing the same white as the tables, distressed it, stained it with the same Dark Walnut, and coated it in polycrylic.

To bring in the pink and a touch of  girliness I played around with a bunch of appliques and ended up again keeping it pretty simple by adding just one, similar to those on the tables, painted that sweet Ballet Slipper Pink and stained.

  For fun and just a tiny bit of curve I added feet, and painted just the balls of them pink as well.

 

 And of course pink glass knobs, the perfect finishing touch. Larger roses on the top three drawers and smaller round knobs on the rest.

Can you picture them living in a room together?  I hope so.

 Thanks Lindsey!  I hope you love it!

Linking up to Cassie's party :)

And

And

Even More Rug Love

This morning I thought I'd put up the guest post that I did for Cassie at Primitive and Proper.  It's a fun one, with some reminiscing of past projects as well as an awesome new one.  Enjoy!

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Hi Primitive and Proper readers!  I'm super excited and flattered to be here today, thanks to Cassie, whose work I so admire! She's awesome, right?  

To begin, let me just start with a BIG disclaimer: I am in no way a professional designer, nor do I play one on the Internet.  There are so many ladies here in blogland with an amazing talent for creating amazing interiors.  Like, unreal talent. I am not in that league. But I do love furniture and paint.  I've taught myself to refinish furniture through trial and lots of error over the past 10 or so years and that is what I really love to do.  But that's not exactly what I'm posting about today.  Today I thought I'd write a little bit about painting rugs.

Maybe we're just crazy messy, but pretty rugs never last under our table.  I lamented the fact here.  Just, you know, 4 kids=gross mess mushed into the rug.  But I love the look of a rug under a table, plus- maybe its just us again-but I felt like we were scratching up our wood floor.  I know, chair pads.  Seriously, those never stick.  So I took the crafty blogger's best friend, the Fabulous Canvas Drop Cloth, and made a rug that was easy to sweep and easy to mop. Basically painted on my design and coated with poly.  Stick it to the floor with rug tape, and wha-lah.  Easy to walk on, easy to clean, easy on the eyes. 

Then I made this adorable flower rug for my even more adorable sister-in-law.

 In the beginning of this year, my first canvas rug gave up.  So I improved upon the design with more paint and way more poly to make it a little stronger and I think the quality is quite a bit better. 

I think it gives this area just the right amount of color.  You can read about my whole process for this rug here.

 Now enter the real challenge: I have this green shag number in my seldom used, seldom decorated Front Room.  Its in good shape, but I'm tired of the shag and over the dark color.  And I didn't want a shiny, waterproof rug there.  Although, around here anything wipe-able is usually best...  Also, it needed to be a little beefier than a drop cloth.

 I remembered I had the old stretched-out flat weave rug from, ironically enough, under the kitchen table, stashed in the basement.  It's a basic brown indoor/outdoor from Pier One via Big Lots.  I decided it would be my guinea pig.  I didn't want to spend any money on this experiment because I didn't know how it would turn out.  I used the back (pictured) because the weave was flatter than the top.

I coated it with some really old, gloopy paint I had left over that I could never use on anything else.  It sucked it up like a thirsty sailor and asked for more.  So I rolled on one more coat of $10/gallon white paint from Walmart.   With the lighter-weight canvas rugs, after the base coat I've used drapery clips to hang the drop cloth from nails pounded into studs in my basement and use our projector to trace a pattern-'cause I'm no free-hander. I planned to use the same technique to create a subtle zebra print in taupe.  But this was a huge, heavy rug to begin with and after it sucked up all that paint it was a monster.  So scratch hanging it from the studs.  So I decided to go with the crafty blogger's next best friend, Chevron.  I got out my trusty measuring stick and went to town with a pencil.  I measured the rug into thirds and then the added horizontal trace marks every 13 1/2 inches.  Then I used the measuring stick again to trace a diagonal line from each intersecting point.  Does that make sense?  The pencil marks in the picture are faint, but they're there. Go ahead click to make bigger.  Next I painted with the leftover paint from my new kitchen rug.  Didn't want to spend any $, remember?  I added some black to make it a little darker, although you can't see both rugs from the same spot anyway. 

It was a little shiny and rough, so I hand sanded it randomly.  Also, I stand by the fact

that sanding and distressing in all things hides a multitude of sins:)

And here it is!  A long way from perfect, but good enough :) I feel like it really lightens up the room. And makes me hate the ugly sofas just a little less.  As a side note I will say that this rug is a little rough, but not bad.  This area is super low traffic. I wouldn't put in our family room where we relax and spend a lot of time on the floor.  Also as a side note, remember I am no designer.  But imagine an awesome coffee table, badly needed reupholstered/slip covered sofas, lamps, sides tables, the works.  Its coming.

Thank you again so much Cassie!  Its been so fun!

Emily

Powder Your Nose, Just a Snippet

We have a little powder bath just off our kitchen and garage entrance.  It's actually a pass-through to the laundry room and it sees a lot of, um, action. 

Just to give you an idea. 

 Sometime after I painted my new kitchen rug, I got a wild hair and decided that I needed more pattern in my life. Also, I had a lot of left over paint. And why let a perfectly good, only-used-once poster board pattern go to waste?  So I broke it out and went a little wild on a wall of the bathroom.  The same pattern in the same color might be overkill for some people.  Luckily,  not so for me.  It possibly might not even be enough for me.  Take that.

Ta-Da! 

 I kept it kind of reminiscent of wall paper and went floor to ceiling, wall to wall,  even under the mirror and behind the toilet-which was no small feat, let me tell you.  I really like how it accentuates the ceiling height.   I kept it to just one wall because a) I wasn't sure this tiny space could handle it on every wall-maybe if I was  hipper, and b) I'm just a little lazy. Again, I swear the pictures don't do it justice.

 As a side note, the glaring light drives me nuts, but even with the laundry window there is absolutely no natural light here.  This is what I got when I tried to take pics with the lights off:

My  editing skills can't hack that.

Just the same snippet of wall in several angles.  There's no real way to stand back and take a good picture in here, although now I'm realizing I probably could have branched out my photos to show a little more.  Oh well.  Maybe I'll do that again later.   Probably on the same day that I accessorize the rest of it.  Ha.

I may be the only person who will ever really notice or appreciate it, but I don't care. I love it. Its just what this little hallway/pass-through powder needed. It makes me happy every time I change a load of laundry. And that's not just a few times.

Linking up