Archive for November, 2009
Reader Redesign: Best Seat In The House
When Angie sent over her simple and inspiring chair makeover we loved the outcome so much we had to share it. Here’s her letter:
I love your style and your blog. I just got into blogs a few months ago and yours is a must read every day! I’m so excited to share my before and after chair makeover. I purchased it at the Ann Arbor ReUse Center for $5.00. After I removed the seat cushion and a ridiculous number of staples, I patched, sanded and primed the chair. I bought some new foam for the seat on sale at Joann’s and painted the chair with some white trim paint I had on hand from other paint jobs in our house. To cover the seat I bought a half yard of this funky fabric from the monaluna mingle collection on Etsy. Thanks for the daily inspiration! -Angie
Here’s the bleak before:
And here’s the brilliant after:
Didn’t Angie do an amazing job? Feel free to drop in on her blog for more details. We love how simple this project really is and how anyone can do it on a serious budget with a fantastic result. Happy chair covering to one and all!
Looking for a little step-by-step chair recovering tutorial? Look no further.
Burning Question: Very Superstitious?
Here’s a Friday-the-13th-tastic question for you to ponder: have you ever made a design choice in your home that might be considered superstitious? Do you keep a certain item in a room because you think it’s good luck? Or do you have a particular decorating habit that you can’t break for fear of the “or else…”?
Sure some of these might fall into the category of Fung Shui or general decorating rituals, but we’d still love to hear what you do around your house to avoid bad luck.
And for major good karma points, go take a look at some cute Virginia puppies who need a happy home over on Hamburger’s House.
Image courtesy of blik.
Another Reader Gets The Glossy Treatment
Our readers have officially scored a hat trick with Better Homes & Garden’s Kitchen + Bath Makeovers magazine. Like Lindsay and Jessica before her, Christina’s affordable kitchen makeover (which we shared as a Reader Redesign back in February) landed in the magazine’s “Do It For Less” section after they saw it here on YHL. Yeah, we’re doing the happy dance right along with them.
Here’s Christina’s and her husband Trevor’s starring page that shows off their dramatic $1,400 kitchen transformation (and no we didn’t forget a zero on that number). Plus it was a total gut job (they even replaced appliances, the floor and the cabinets for that unbelievable price). Congrats Christina and Trevor on the feature! Well played, handy homeowners. And thanks for giving us a shout out! We’re totally blushing.
Note: click the image below to enlarge the article and check out our original post about their kitchen right here.
And on the subject of amazing kitchen makeovers on a seriously enviable budget, what’s the best deal you’ve scored when it comes to your kitchen? Have you snagged a secondhand appliance on craigstlist, negotiated a killer deal on cabinets, or even found hardware on ebay? Do tell. Here’s the story of how we took home a free dishwasher along with a super cheap faucet and sink back in the day. Don’t good deals make you feel like the king of the world? It can’t just be me…
Images courtesy of Kitchen + Bath Makeovers.
Duet To It Freebie Winner!
All of the duets you guys listed in the entries on our latest giveaway from RYOBI were great, but clearly its because you haven’t heard our album yet. That’s right – Sherry & John Sing The Hits will blow your mind (especially our rendition of Beyonce and Jay-Z’s “03 Bonnie & Clyde“). Ok, just kidding. We’ll do our best to keep our singing (and rapping) to ourselves.
That’s not to say we wouldn’t like to bust out into song over this week’s prize from RYOBI. The Duet Power Paint System is practically built for a couple like us. One paint can fueling two power painting tools at the same time sure would make painting a room much faster… leaving plenty of time for crooning.
But this week we’ll have to leave the joyful musical outburts to our winner. We serenaded random.org and it sung back this lucky person’s name: Amy B (a fan of Kid Rock & Sheryl Crow’s “Picture” duet). Congrats! Who’s the lucky person who gets to join you in a future painting project?
As for the rest of us, if not winning this week has left you sobbing on the flor, we’ve got a feeling next Monday’s prize will surely help soften the blow (yes, there’s a clue in there)…
Get more info on our freebies at our Giveaway FAQs page. Images courtesy of RYOBI.
Tackling The Basement: Chapter Four
Well, thanks to the generous and wonderful folks at True Value, we now have a totally dry and completely functional basement to use for storage galore (read about how we prepped and waterproofed the former bug graveyard here and here). And thanks to a little road trip to Ikea this weekend, we came home armed with pretty much every item that we planned to snag in this basic mood board of sorts that we shared last week:
- Expedit shelf (included in the total Expedit Workstation) -$120
- Torsby table (already owned, so it’s free!)
- A woven basket or two – $17 each
- Two Aneboda wardrobes – $100 a pop
- A few white storage boxes – $12 for two
- And a few green storage boxes to keep things interesting – $12 for two
- Expedit desk (included in the Expedit Workstation) accounted for above
And the room is really coming together. Especially thanks to the floor plan we brainstormed ahead of time to see which items would work where (and which ones would provide the most function without breaking the bank):
Of course we still have a lot more projects to take on (creating a new light fixture, rewrapping the water heater, building a screen to hide the ugly rewrapped water heater, dealing with the windows, DIYing a dehumidifier, etc). But here’s what the basement looks like now thanks to the addition of two Ikea Aneboda Wardrobes along with an Expedit Workstation and a few inexpensive accessories (like some faux plants for a bit of greenery and these storage boxes for even more concealed stashing space). Not to mention the Torsby table and a few extra wooden chairs that we already owned. We also brought down our bikes as planned, but have even more in store when it comes to sprucing up that back wall so stay tuned…
Oh and we still have to paint the built-in cabinet below, so don’t mind the dingy look of it now…
Not bad, eh? Just to refresh your memory, the room looked like this about a month ago:
But thanks to around $350 worth of Ikea furniture (the Expedit Workstation even happened to be on sale!) and around $400 worth of prepping supplies (thanks again True Value!) we were able to take the basement from scary cinder block dungeon to a waterproofed room that’s furniture ready.
Oh and we would show you the insides of those wardrobes but we still have a lot of organizing to do (am I a total nerd for feeling a little bit giddy when I say that?). So next on the agenda is going back to True Value to snag lots of awesome sealed plastic storage bins to stack tons of seasonal decor, sporting equipment and other stuff that we’d rather hide behind closed doors. Then it’s on to lighting, art and hiding that wart of a water heater. Fun, fun, fun.
And speaking of house warts, do you guys have any ugly eyesores (fuse boxes? propane tanks? carpet stains? damaged hardwoods? odd trap doors? ugly outlets?) that you’ve successfully camouflaged? Tell us all about it.
Psst- Here’s how we hid our fuse box in the den, our exterior propane tank, and some pretty gross plugs and outlets above our washer and dryer. Fingers crossed we can make that water heater disappear too…
