Dining Room Makeover!

When we bought our house the owner asked us if we wanted the dining set. He didn't need it anymore and none of his kids or grandkids wanted it. We agreed because the chairs to our set were falling apart, literally. We've twice now had a chair collapse under someone.

This is what the chairs to our new-to-us set look like.

Darling, right? Butterflies on blue. It's retro, vintage, whatever you want to call it, which I normally love. The house's vintage vibe is a big part of what sold me on it. However, this little bit of vintage charm isn't exactly my taste.

And we've got rolls and rolls of the material downstairs. A couple weeks ago we noticed that a few of the chairs were getting rips in the material and we'd already known that the material was N-A-S-T-Y. The kids spill and drop their food on the chairs every day. They are gross. I'm constantly having to wash off every part of the chairs after they eat.

I decided now was the time to recover the cushions. I was given two gift cards to a local craft store for Christmas and decided to use one of them to buy the needed materials.

So now, two of my chairs look like this.

Here's a close up of the material.
I also bought some plastic to cover the material so it will actually stay nice.

I've been trying to get one chair done a night, but I'm thinking I'd like it all done before New Years. It's been interesting trying to learn how to recover a chair. All those lovely ehow.com video people make it look so easy. I hate them.

Anyway, I love my new chairs. With the neutral color and the dark wood, they will work in whatever kind of dining room we choose for our next house when we move away from Cleveland, as far away as possible. J/K. Kind of.

House Pictures: Before and After

Here are a few before and after pictures of the house. Some of the pictures are from before we moved in because we forgot to take pictures of it empty. Now we still have a lot of work to do, even in these rooms that we've worked on. In the dining room for instance, we are going to recover the chairs; in the living room there's stuff everywhere sitting in places other than where they will end up; in Jeremy and Emma's room there's still some work to do there with touching up paint and whatnot.

Jeremy and Emma's room before (complete with previous owner's stuff).



During the process of getting the laminate off the floor.


Laminate off, now on to wood sanding, polishing, and polyurethane.


And the (nearly) end result. We still need to put dressers in and clothes, books, etc. We're leaving the funky light because it isn't nearly as bad as the rest of them.


Dinning room before.


Process of getting wallpaper off.


Painted, carpet removed, wood sanded, stained, and polyurethaned.

Nasty curtains down, ones that match wall colors up.
Living room. You can see where we left the carpet, Nathan and our friend Ryan did that.



Living room before.

Living room front windows and walls after.



Our room which we haven't done much with other than take down those pink drapes and that pink light. Without them the nasty pink haze is gone.

The Retro House Updated

I know it's been about a week since I blogged, but hey, I warned you that it would be a while, right? Things have been crazy here with trying to get the house in order and out of its 1950s shell. For example:

Here's me trying to get the linoleum off the floor in Jeremy and Emma's room.

Jeremy's been sleeping on his mattress in the living room or on our bed (it just has depended on where we've been working while they're asleep). Emma's been sleeping in the portable crib. Megan is the lucky one who has a bed and who's room isn't really covered in boxes.

We've also been taking down wallpaper. Lots of it. Here's the living room wallpaper coming down and you can kinda get a peek at a dining room wall in its new bareness. We almost finished painting last night. As we were off to bed Nathan noticed two or three little spots near the ceiling that need touch ups, so we should be done with this sometime this morning.
And here's me mowing our yard. This is my very first time EVER mowing a yard. We decided against the traditional mower that uses gas since it's so expensive, stinky, and loud and opted for the old school push mower. It was actually a lot of fun and did a good job cutting the grass. I had my doubts, but it worked well.
We've also been hard at play.

I loved this shot of the tricycle next to Nathan's bike. But here you see we've done sidewalk chalk, something we weren't allowed to do at the apartment complex.
Water gun fights while waiting for the Memorial Day Parade to begin.

This one's for you, Leanne! There were two bagpipe bands in the parade and this one was really good (in my I-know-nothing-about-pipe-bands opinion).
And Dad, this one's for you. There were a bunch of these little "Korvettes" (sorry if the "" are unnecessary, I don't know if that's the real name or not). These guys were really cool. They drove around really fast and did all kinds of formation work.


I've also started working on the front yard, pulling out weeds and the wild plants that were growing around the trees in front and planting new ones. I've been working on the front yard for three days and I'm nowhere near done with the area around just one of the trees. Some of our good friends gave us a flat of flowers after they bought too many and that sparked my drive to get it done. So at our tri-weekly trip to Home Depot we bought a few more flats and now I'm hard at work on another project.

So in addition to those things we've been trying to put away everything, get the basement in a condition ready for the kids to take over (it's going to be a play room for them), ripping up carpet in the dining room to reveal beautiful hardwood floors that need only a little bit of help to make them ready, and I'm still babysitting among all this mess and craziness. Fun times!

We love being in a house, we are extremely grateful to have it, to have our own space, and have a chance to make it our own. Even if it means things aren't being put away immediately.

Home Sweet Retro Home

Goin' on a house-hunt (goin' on a house-hunt)

I'm not afraid (well, maybe a little)

Got a real good friend (it is my husband)

By my side (by my side)

Oh, Oh (Oh, oh)

What do we see? (What do we see?)

Oh look! It's hideous tile! (hideous tile!)

Oh look! It's a ceiling falling down! (ceiling falling down!)

Oh look! It's twenty city violations! (20 violations!)

Do we got to go through it? (Got to go through it?) (Make motions with hand like you are holding your nose to avoid smelling mold)

Ok, that's enough of that.

So we went house-hunting this weekend. The first house I could have said no as soon as we turned down the street. I'm pretty picky about where we live, but even Nathan agreed that the area wasn't good. When we went into the house we realized it didn't have a dinning room. Or even a breakfast nook. There was no place to eat at all. So we joked that I'd have to buy a desk off an elementary school and put it next to the kitchen window and serve dinner one person at a time.
Other than those two things, the house wasn't bad.

The next 2 houses and the very last house we saw were all bank owned. The first wasn't too bad, but I'm pretty sure I smelled something funny. And the kitchen wasn't any bigger than what we've got now. And if you've seen what we've got now, you know it isn't much. The next house was really bad. It was completely deceiving. The outside looked wonderful. They've completely redone the outside. Too bad they forgot to do the house's ROOF. The ceiling was falling down in every room. We went maybe 2 feet in and had to go back out. Nathan thinks the problem might have actually started from the upstairs bath and they just never got it fixed and then the problem got worse and worse until all the ceilings started coming down. To be honest, I don't remember a thing from the last house because I was still so enamored with the one just before it.

The next to last house was awesome. The man that owns it is 90 years old and I don't think he's changed a thing in the house (except new fridge, hot water tank, stuff like that) since it was built in 1950. He is a widower and I'm certain he's left everything how it was when his wife passed. He's also really clean. There was no dust anywhere. Not even on the hot water tank.

Nathan has been really good about this. He likes the house because it has nice carpet and the roof isn't falling in. I like it because it's funky. He hates the funky.

Here's my I Love It!/He Hates It! List:

-The dining room. Not such a big deal, but all we have to do it take down some wallpaper and paint (Nathan is insistent here). I get to pick the colors, so that's ok.

-Extra room off the dining room that I'm making into a sewing/craft/writing room.

-The kitchen (and I can't believe I'm putting it at a positive) has turquoise and black tile counter tops. I've always hated tile counter tops, but these along with the rest of the very retro kitchen, well. . .it's just so dang cute! Pink walls with turquoise and black tile counters? What could be better? I guess Nathan knows what is better because he's going to put in new counter tops.

-The master bedroom has dual closets and the room is HUGE! He has no qualms with this, but he hates the light fixture in the room and I think it's one of the coolest things I've ever seen. The rest of the coolest things I've ever seen are also in this house and things he hates. Other way awesome light fixtures are in the small bedroom (where Megan will be) and in the half-bath).

-The second bedroom is also very large. Unfortunately it has linoleum which Nathan also plans on changing to carpet. I guess I agree with that one.

-The third bedroom is very girly, perfect for Megan. Pink with amazingly cute, perfect, girly wallpaper and built-in book shelves and tons of storage in the closet.

-The bathroom. Oh where to start? Nathan hates it. I love it. Description won't do it justice, so when we get the house (I hope I hope I hope) then I'll be taking lots of pictures of everything.

-Partially finished basement. I can just send the kids down there to play and not have to worry about what a huge mess they are making. And they can make almost as much noise as they want. There's also a wet bar in it, which of course we don't care about since we don't drink, but it's cool if we want to entertain down there ever. Which I don't really see us doing since we are basically giving that part of the house to the kids so I can have some space.

-Two Words: Deep Freeze.

-The house is in a really nice area where some houses are going for over 200,000 but our price isn't anywhere near that (thankfully or we'd never have even seen the house).

So I guess that's it until we get the house and can take pictures of it's loveliness. It's really funny because I almost nixed the house before we even saw it. I'd seen a couple pictures on the Realtor website and couldn't get over the curtains in the living room. I know I shouldn't have based the house off a picture of curtains, but I almost did. SO GLAD I DIDN'T!!