A New House Equals New Projects

We recently had to move since our rental was being sold.  I will be working on a the china cabinet redo post soon.  We are setting up the dining room in the new house almost exactly the same as it was in the old house.  Our new house isn't as large as the old one but I am kind of liking the smaller space.  In this house the dining room and living room are mainly combined so I will be continuing the black and white theme in the living area as well.  I have also picked up two more project pieces to work on once all the unpacking is done.  I will be redoing a secretary and a grandfather clock in the coming month.  Stay tuned for more!

Dining Room Makeover: A Table Gets New Life

After completing the chair revamp it was time to move onto the table itself.  Just a quick remainder of what the table before looked like:

Table Before

I put the Mr. to work sanding down the table while I sanded the china cabinet (which will be covered in a next post).  We also had to do a minor repair to the top where there was a small gash.  To fix the gash we used Elmer's Wood Filler which can be found at just about any hardware store or big box store.  The sanding process took two days since it was just way too hot outside to say out for long periods of time.  The next day we started the painting process.  I used the same brand of paint in white for the table base and legs (Glidden High Endurance Paint Plus Primer in Eggshell/Satin).  For the table top I just used the same Mouse Ears paint that was used on the chairs.  We used paint brushes on the legs and table base and a roller on the table top.  We pulled the table apart to set the leaf inside without closing it up so we could ensure that the colors and coverage all matched up.  There are two drawers on the table that had these wood knobs.  I replaced those with a 2 pack of "crystal" knobs that I found at Walmart for $6.  

Table During

It took about 3 coats just like the chairs.  After the table dried we used the same Minwax Wipe On Poly to protect the table top.  After that finally dried which was in record time thanks to the heat we moved the table back inside the house.  Once back inside we put the chairs around the table and it looked great.  It turned out very similar to the inspiration photo which is exactly what I wanted. 

 

 

 

Dining Set After

Inspiration Photo

 

 

 

 

 

Dining Room Makeover: Chair Revamp

Today I’m going to post about the chairs.  The seats of the chairs where in horrible shape which didn’t really matter to me since I was planning on changing the fabric on them anyway.  I just noticed that the backgrounds on my pics look horrible.  I am a messy worker so please excuse the mess in the background. 

Chairs Before

I started searching the net for some fabric to recover the chairs with.  I found a few online but the prices where a bit higher than I was looking to pay.  On a trip to my local Walmart I ventured into the fabric section and actually found a fabric that I liked.  It was also a decorator fabric so it was thicker than an normal apparel fabric so it was just right for the chair project.  

Fabric For The Chairs

I had never reupholstered chairs before so my first step was to head over to Youtube and watch a few videos on the process.  Once I was sure on how to proceed it was time to get started.  Of course removing the staples from the seats was MUCH harder than it appeared in the video.  Each seat had a TON of staples.  I finally got the seats stripped down to the bases.

Seat Base

On the videos that I watched they used batting on the seat cushions to make them cushier.  The cushions on these chairs was beyond saving so I headed to Joann Fabric and found some high density foam squares.  (Joann has coupons available on the app and website so keep that in mind.)   I didn’t take pictures of the next part of the process.  To get the foam cut down to the correct size I just took the seat bases and sat them on the foam.  I then used a black marker to trace the outline of the seat bases.  I used a utility knife to cut out the foam to the correct size.  I then took my fabric scissors and cut out the correct amount of fabric need for each seat.  I did about 2 inches more than the seat bases to give me plenty of fabric to work with.  We then set the foam and fabric aside to work on the chairs themselves. We jumped around in the process a bit so at this point I went outside and started sanding down the chairs.  I used a 150 grit sand paper.  We tried several brands and I found that the SandBlaster brand was my favorite which can be found HERE.  It took awhile to get them sanded down properly. 

Sanded Chairs

Once the chairs were sanded we wiped them down to ensure that they were free of dirt and any sawdust.  I had over ¾ of a gallon of black paint left over from my vanity redo so I didn’t have to buy any paint to complete the black portions of this project.  The black I used was Glidden High Endurance Plus in Eggshell/Satin. This paint also has a primer in it.  The color is called Mouse Ears. It was purchased at Walmart for approximately $25 a gallon.  I got like 6 projects out of this paint so it lasts.  It took 3 coats to achieve the coverage that I wanted on the chairs

Chairs After 3 Coats Of Paint

While waiting on the chairs to completely dry the Mr. and I went back inside and worked on upholstering the chair seats.  After placing the fabric squares I cut out on the floor.  I then placed the foam in the center of the fabric followed by the seat bases.  The Mr. was in charge of welding the staple gun   Our first attempt didn’t turn out so great.  Once we figured out what we did wrong (didn’t pull the fabric tight enough) we decided to set that one aside and come back to take the staples out and redo it later.  The next 3 seats where much easier to do since we figured out what worked for us.  The corners were the trickiest part and as one video said just play with them until you like the look then staple.  That’s exactly what we did.  After fixing the seat from our first attempt we had all the seats ready to go. 

 

At this point the Mr. then applied 2 coats of Minwax Wipe On Poly in Satin.  It took about 24 hours for the poly to completely dry.  After they were dry we screwed the seats back down to the chairs and had complete chairs once again. 

Complete Chairs Once Again

 

Now for a before and after side by side

 

Coming up next time:  The table gets a new look!

 

A Dining Room In Despair

Since my husband got out of the military in 2012 I haven’t really felt up to getting my house in order.  My husband would joke that as soon as we hung curtains it would be time to move again.  After spending so much time getting our previous home perfectly decorated I got discouraged that seemly as soon as I was finished we had to move.  A couple of months ago I took a look around the house and felt like something had to be done.  When we moved into our current house I told my husband that I thought our dining room set at the time would not fit in the room.  That table was very wide even without the leaf.  It did end up fitting but it was a tight fit.  Thanks to a mishap with some nail polish remover courtesy of big sister I was going to have to refinish that table as a summer project.  However, I decided to just sell that one since it didn’t fit very well into the dining room.  I listed the table for sale on the local sale group and it sold pretty quickly.  I looked around a few furniture stores to decided what kind of table I wanted but being budget conscious I decided to look at the local sale page to see if anything caught my eye.  There was one set but it was totally the wrong color and had a very small amount of damage on the top.  I looked around online for some inspiration and found an idea that I loved.  I then took a second look at the dining set that I had found on the sale page and decided that it could work well for my plans.  I negotiated with the seller to get the price down to exactly what I sold my previous set for so that meant no further expense on the furniture itself.   This dining room makeover ended up taking several weeks to complete.  I am going to post several posts on the dining room redo since it would be way too long to put everything into one post.  Today I will giving an overview of the project as well as sharing my inspiration photo.

I forgot to take a picture of the dining room before we cleared it out but I do have a picture of the previous dining set.  As you can see the table is very large and it left next to nothing in walking space in the room.  There wasn’t really anything else done to the room previously except curtains where hung.

Previous Dining Set

The table that I found on the sale page only came with 4 chairs while the previous one had 6 so we are probably going to eventually build a padded bench to go along one side to make up for the lack of two chairs.  I did find a couple of fabulous white chairs at a local furniture store but they were a bit pricey for me.  Here is the "new" table.  

"New" Dining Set

I found this photo while searching for two tone dining sets.  I knew I wanted to do two tone but wasn’t quite sure exactly what.  I found this photo HERE.

Inspiration Photo

  I decided to paint the table top black and the base and legs of the table white like the inspiration.  I am totally in love with the black and white trend which also carries over to my shoe and handbag collection since I can’t seem to resist purchasing black and white items.  I also already had several items that would coordinated well with the color scheme.  Once we had decided on a direction for the room we finally got to work.  Due to our schedules and life in general it took about a month for everything to be done.  We had no real rhyme or reason to our process so I am going to break the makeover down into specific posts to make it easier to follow.  In my next post I will discuss the revamp of the chairs.  Thanks for stopping by!

Introducing Me!

Hello everyone! 

For those that follow my other blog True Confessions Of A Shoe Addict thanks for stopping by and checking out  my new blog on home decorating and DIY.  Welcome to new readers also!  I'm Jessica and I am a stay at homeschooling mom to two daughters who I will refer to as big sister (who's about to be 13 next month..yikes!) and little sister who will be 7 in a few months.  We also have two pets a mini Dachshund named Jake and a guinea pig named Rosalie.  The Mr. is a former is a former sailor for the USN who is now a civilian contractor for the USN.  After the Mr. got out of the Navy in 2012 we moved a few times before we moved into our current place.  We have been here for about 5 months now and I'm sad to say we still have quite a bit of stuff in boxes.  I lost my mother unexpected last June and am just now feeling up to dealing with decorating the house.  Our current house is a bit of a contradiction.  The front part of the house was built around 1935 and still has many of the original elements There is also an addition built on the back that's only a few years old and is nice and modern.  I'm also having a bit of a decorating crisis since I like both modern and traditional elements so I'm trying to learn to combine those to achieve the look I'm going for.  I'm also trying to overcome the need for everything to be matchy and start using different prints and textures.  I'm also looking to achieve the look I want on a budget.  I've finally had it with all the boxes and clutter so I've decided to just tackle one room at a time.  I'm currently working on the dining room and I am hoping to have that room finished by Monday so it will be my first "real" post for this blog.  Thanks for checking my blog and look for my to come!


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