Dining Room Table Makeover, Part I: From Orange to Oooooooh

We are spending some of my maternity leave at home in Ireland (I had a baby! She's adorable! I'm so tired all the time!) and the house that we're renting here is a monster compared to the weeny one or one-and-a-quarter-bed flats we're used to in London.

We mostly huddled in one corner of the kitchen when we moved in, like agoraphobic bunnies freshly sprung from a cage, but now we've spread out and are slowly colonising the whole place and drying our underwear on the radiators, and slowly it's starting to feel a bit more like home. I'm taking advantage of the fact that we have a separate dining room (!!!) to makeover this new-to-us mega-orange pine farmhouse dining table that I picked up on DoneDeal for €70.

Fun fact: I also bought my dream Jenny Packham wedding dress on DoneDeal! True story.

Anyway, this beast of a table was obviously in need of a hefty dose of TLC but I reckoned it had good bones - just look at those sexy AF turned legs! - and to be perfectly honest I was in desperate need of A Not-Baby-Related Project.

The first item on the agenda was to sort out that varnished orange tone, and that was where I made my first mistake. I should have used a chemical stripper like the trusty Nitromoors I usually turn to for any paint removing work, but with a babóg in the house I decided against using anything fume-y and got sander-happy instead. I think I still have carpenter's lung as a result.

To add insult to respiratory injury, I managed to dig a couple of divots into the table lid in my power-tooled enthusiasm to get shot of some particularly pernicious orange patches, but when my sanding frenzy was done I showed the affected areas some love with a handheld sanding block and they were barely noticeable.

Having eventually achieved this paler tone to the wood and cooing over it like it was an especially cute new Pomeranian puppy, I initially thought that the next step would simply be to lacquer it to protect from stains and water damage and the like. However. A quick Google informed me that due to the peculiarities of pine, it will apparently always tend to orange. So over time that hard won lighter finish would invariably revert to the colour of my fake tan circa 2003. As the bambino would say, WAAAAAH.

One Google later and I had the solution: this video, complete with almost unbearable background buzz, from a crew called Finney's Wood Finishes. I mixed up a semi-translucent stain using white wood dye, acrylic lacquer, and some water as instructed, and buffed it into the wood using a soft cloth. Ok, ok: using a pair of decommissioned knickers. (What the hell else can you repurpose old knickers for? Seriously. And they are perfect for jobs like these.)

The idea is that this whitewash will act like a long-term real life Instagram filter (Hudson, maybe?) counteracting those pesky orange tones as they start to reappear.

The next step in the table's rehabilitation will be to paint the apron and legs grey and then wax/lacquer the whole thing, all of which I hope to get done in the course of the long Easter weekend. After turning my nose up at Annie Sloan chalk paint like a total elitist DIY snob for the last several years, having extraordinarily limited time to dedicate to furniture do-overs means that I suddenly find a paint that needs no major prep work very appealing indeed. 

I've got a shiny tin of Paris Grey all ready to go - teething permitting...

Somethings for the weekend

Just some little things I like that I thought you might like too. Happy Friday!

ONE // Our coasters have served us well, but they're looking more than a little battleworn after 7 years of service and these UK designed and made laser cut felt numbers by Donna Wilson (£14) are the front runners to replace them. I love that they look like doilies.

TWO // This actual gold and actual diamond bunny ring from Katie Hillier (£395) would represent a significant step up from my usual high street costume jewellery, but still. SO. CUTE. *Adds to Lotto list*

THREE // These brass sea urchins from US store Furbish are giving me The Wants and would look great mounted on the wall in our hallway. But since they're no longer available (and, er, I wouldn't spend a hundred quid plus shipping on them anyway) I'm brainstorming ways to DIY something similar.

Somebody pass me a paperclip, an elastic band, and a dodgy-looking bomber jacket STAT so I can get my MacGyver on!

FOUR // Last autumn I spent a small fortune on a faux leather sleeveless dress from Oasis, which was completely stupid because (a) I couldn't really afford it, (b) it didn't fit me properly, and (c) I had to spend all winter trying to find layers that would work under or over it so that I wouldn't freeze.

While I'm still a big fan of the leather look, this season I'll be sticking with more versatile separates on my bottom half that should be easier to integrate into my existing wardrobe. I've seen Penneys' / Primark's PU skirt (£8) in person and it looks plain awesome rather than plastic-y (which is probably why there were none left in my size the day I spotted it.)

FIVE // You might not know this about me, but I love stationary. I also love highlighters and products that look kind of like animals, so needless to say these adorable Paperchase bear highlighters (only £3!) are right up my street.

What's on your lust list at the moment?

MonDIY: Kate Spade-alike dot jewellery dish

A lot of the American lifestyle bloggers I follow enthuse about pretty little dishes and trays like they're the Second Coming of Christ. Apparently they're only wonderful for corralling your home office supplies/perfumes/jewellery/hair ties/bobby pins, and while the overuse of "corral" in these situations makes me want to punch someone I have to admit that these dish and tray evangelists might be on to something.

There's no doubt that piling your crap into neat bundles does instantly make a place look tidier. And it's quicker than actually putting the stuff away, and it makes things easier to find the next time you need them if you're like me and would forget where you left your elbow if it wasn't attached.

Win win win!

I thought I'd try my hand at DIYing a dish for hairclips and the like, inspired by this gold confetti dot sprinkled Kate Spade Ticker Tape plate.

It turned out so well that I decided to share the process in case anyone else has ephemera that's in dire need of corralling.

You will need:
- small white dish (I upcycled a soap dish the last tenant left behind)
- hole reinforcement stickers (these were surplus from a previous nail project)
- metallic gold nail polish (this is an old H&M duo) 

(Please note that the end result will not be food safe.)

Stick the hole reinforcers onto the dish in your desired pattern. I followed the distribution of the gold Kate Spade dots as closely as I could.

Apply two thin coats of nail polish to the inner circles of the hole reinforcers, leaving 15 minutes between coats. (I'd recommend brushing one coat on in horizontal strokes and one in vertical strokes to help disguise brush strokes.) To minimise pooling and help ensure a crisp, flat outline, begin and end each brush stroke on the sticker rather than the dish.

Let the final coat of polish dry for 15 minutes.

Begin to get excited that your new dish is going to look all kinds of awesome.

Carefully remove the hole reinforcement stickers with tweezers. (This is a classic case of do as I say, not as I do, because I couldn't find my old tweezers and used my nails like a twit.)

Add a gold rim freehand to the edge of the dish if desired - any wonky bits can easily be corrected with a bit of nail polish remover and a cotton ear bud.

If you want to create overlapping dots, repeat with a second round of stickers but remember to lessen their tackiness first by pressing them to your fingertip a few times. You don't want them lifting that first layer of gold paint when you take them off.

The end result:

Nice, right?

Dress up your zero quid new dish with some jewellery or whatnot (because it's clearly too lovely to use for boring old brown hairclips) and enjoy!

{top image via Sears, all others by me}

Small garden solutions: Milk carton to watering can in under five minutes

Since we only have one planter, a small flower bed, and three hanging baskets to keep watered, I didn't really want to have to get a watering can. (Read: I forgot to buy a watering can when we got the hanging baskets and am not arsed to traipse to Homebase for one. Also, I really don't want to have to lug a watering can home on the bus.)

Last night I wondered if I could repurpose an empty milk carton as a makeshift watering can, and since my planter was looking a bit dry this morning I decided to test my theory.

I punched some holes in the lid of the carton using a safety pin, filled it up with collected rainwater, put the lid back on, and took it for a spin.

BOOM: one DIYed upcycled milk carton watering can.

Have a great weekend!

Pimp my gaff

This weekend, I shall mostly be trying to obscure the contents of our glass-fronted kitchen presses.   

Being able to see all our cups and cereal boxes even when the doors of the presses are closed really isn't my idea of a good time. I have bought me a roll of hot pink opaque window film (from these very nice peeps) and I am NOT afraid to use it. 

If my home improvements humour holds out, I also intend to do this to the back of our front door.

{photo credit: Lisa Barrett}

And it shall look amazeballs.

Jam jars + doilies + tea lights = AMAZEBALLS outdoor lighting idea

{image source: Crafts By Amanda}

Sticking tea light in jam jars is a dead easy way to get some al fresco lighting on, but I've always felt it to be a bit of a bachelor pad/utilitarian looking solution. And then I saw these prettified doily-embellished versions and had an honest-to-goodness "now why didn't I think of that!" moment, complete with mucho forehead slapping.

This is one of the nicest little DIY projects I've seen in a while, and I fully intend to follow Amanda's instructions and make several myself. Just as soon as I've amassed enough jars to do so on a grand(ish) scale - I currently have a grand total of one, which wouldn't exactly look spectacular.

I only wish that I'd come across this "how to" while I was waiting on Camden to send me recycling bins, when I had about six weeks' worth of recycling piled up and a veritable army of glass jars that would have been perfect for the job.

In other news: must really try and get Himself to polish off the last of that honey and jam this weekend. The jars they're in are taking up valuable cupboard space.

Ehem.

Night night.

Oh man, I so need to go to bed. Two & A Half Men repeats are the height of the good telly, and the house is getting cold so rapidly that the heat from my laptop is no longer sufficient to keep me toasty.

Oh, and I'm knackered.

But tomorrow I'll hopefully be putting up a made-by-my-own-fair-hands blind on the kitchen window as part of the drive to get the house in some kind of order this week. Himself's birthday is on the 22^nd and I've set it up in my head as a deadline of sorts. It'll be a roll-up blind constructed from the offcuts of the panel blinds in the dining room and things like dowelling and battens and made by following these instructions.

Mostly I'm mentioning this here because it's been a work in progress pretty much since we got the dining room blinds, which was neither today nor yesterday, and maybe a mention on le blog will spur me on to complete it.

Yeh. Maybe.

Domestic bliss.

One of the best - and worst - things about being at home for large tracts of the day is that I keep noticing things around the house that need to be done.

This is good because there's a chance the gaff will start to feel a bit more like home. We've now been living here for over three years but have yet to hang a picture. People who don't know us ask us how we're settling in when they visit, assuming that we've just unpacked.

It's bad because every time I turn around I see something else to put on the ever-lengthening to do list. And decorating is something that Himself and myself do not see eye to eye on, so it's leading to rows.

While I don't particularly enjoy painting - ooooh yay, can I do the cutting in?!?! - it's not like it's difficult. Same goes for sweeping and hoovering and making the bed and loading and unloading the washing machine - Himself doesn't see this as a two-step job and prefers to leave damp clothes to moulder and stink in the drum - and drying clothes and putting them in the hot press or ironing them or folding them and putting them away.

Himself would like to get in a housekeeper in for these things. And get someone in to do the painting/decorating.

There are two of us, and a dog. In a two-bedroom fun-size house.

It sounds stupidly extravagant, I think. And smacks of being the lazy way out. However, I am told, it would free us up to do other things. Fun things.

Like what?

Spending entire weekends watching Malcolm in the Middle marathons on Sky1?

Office update.

Well, the IKEA Fintorp table legs have been painted. It took five (yes, really - I counted every frickin' one) coats of satin white paint atop a metal primer to take them from this:


... to this:

Whiter in real life than they look here.

I had intended to spray paint these bad boys for the ultimate finish, but it wasn't until after I tried to apply my first coat of Rustoleum All-In-One Universal in the garden that I realised outdoor projects + Irish November weather is not a winning combination. Man, I wish we'd a garage. Ultimately, I primed the legs with International's Multi Surface Primer (good for ferrous and non-ferrous metals and heaps of other stuff) and topped them off with five coats of satin finish Dulux Easycare Satinwood for Wood & Metal, which was the only metal paint I could find in Homebase that was water soluble.

Luckily, I quite enjoy bitesize painting projects - as long as they involve a just-rinse-out-yer-brush-in-the-sink paint - so apart from being time consuming this wasn't too much of a pain in the arse of a job, and only the very eagle of eye would spot any of the few, very fine brushstrokes.

Love Harris' Finesse brushes.

(Oh, and realise how odd it is for me to actually know the name of and publicly declare my love for a paintbrush.)

Anyways, I think that I am going to have a pretty awesome desk when these boyos get hooked up to my white satin finish desk top over the weekend.

My project to take a worn-out bedside locker and transform it into a hot pink mini filing cabinet is going a little less swimmingly. It started out looking something like this:

... and has since been sanded and primed in preparation for its fuchia facelift:

Today, after I'd gathered together the necessities like a Stanley knife and a mini wallpaper roller and a tub of Mod Podge Hard Coat for decoupaging onto furniture, I finally got around to measuring up the wrapping paper I'd intended to use for this project. This is a not too great photo of it:

Needless to say, I don't have nearly enough of it - about a third of the amount I'd need. And since it was bought in January to wrap my birthday present, I'm not holding out too much hope of Himself remembering where it was procured, let alone being able to get some more of it.

Flip's sake...

My First IKEA Pimp!

The pupster went in for a much needed grooming yesterday and is now all fragrant and silky smooth and very cuddly. He always seems to know how lovely he feels after a wash, clip 'n' brush and is cashing in his cuteness chips for lots of extra rubs.

I decided this morning to pimp his bed in honour of his newfound cleanliness. And because I needed a small, manageable project - a break from trying to decide on paint and carpet for upstairs and painting the kitchen cabinets was in order.

This is the "before" shot of his nighttime throne from IKEA:


Looks fairly Prince Of Darkness, I think. Anyway, the colour scheme of the kitchen means that the bed stuck out like a sore thumb in its original state: the kitchen is all light and airy, creams and ivorys and duck-egg blues.

While I don't have an "after" yet, I can tell you that those black legs and armrest supports today received their first coat of ivory paint. And to replace the covers, I've ordered some Michele D'Amore for Marcus Brothers fabric that I discovered on Etsy but was sold out - typical - so I had to roam the interweb looking for another stockist. Eventually I found and ordered it from Fabric For Quilts & More, the online store of a shop in West Virginia ("Take me home, country roads...") run by a really sweet lady called Barbara. It's so nice that I ordered a bit more than I strictly need for the reupholstry job with a view to using it in some other less Boris-y project:


I'm sure you can just imagine how excited the dog is about all this...

Adventures in Woodwork: Part 1

I recently designed/envisaged/dreamed up some integrated, pull-out shelving for my wardrobe on which my shoes could live out a happy [and neat] existence. I wanted flat shelves that could be pulled right out on rollers or something so that I could see everything, including those poor shoes that seem damned to spend all eternity stuck right at the back of the wardrobe and never get to see the light of day. When I told Himself about my vision, he had whipped out a tape measure and begun to size up the available space before you could say "So I was going to ask Dad if he would make them for me." Having only briefly perused Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus before casting it briskly aside and declaring that it was a load of absolute sh*te, I then made the fatal error of Questioning His Abilities.

Oh, the indignance that followed! Did I not know that Himself had done woodwork? [It was later revealed that "doing woodwork" in this instance consisted of a year long flirtation with same in his first year of secondary school. And since Himself no longer gets to tick the "18-25" box on forms, that was a bloody while ago.] I said oh really, I didn't know that, etc etc and made some vaguely conciliatory noises.

Several lifetimes in B&Q and a sh*tload of timber, lats, full extension brackets and sawdust later, I now have a very impressive bespoke† shoe storage solution without a Dad in sight.

Needless to say, now that Himself has proven to be rather a handy chap [and not just in a grope-y way] he is ab-sol-ute-ly f*cked. I have alcoves that are just crying out for some floating shelving across their width, an understairs cubby hole seeking a loving door or similar partition, and plans for a headboard-less platform bed. Oh, it'll be a long time before he gets to settle down in front of Questions & Answers in peace again. Mwwwwaaaaah hah hah hah haaaah...

† The favourite word of Grand Designs' Kevin McCloud, don't cha know [and mine du jour.]