Strikes my fancy

This is our main bathroom from our home's listing 4 years ago.  First two things I did was take out the rugs and the curtains.  Painted the walls grey and lived with it for awhile.  But I never did like the vanity - too big for the space (length & depth) Then we updated to  this curtain  as my 4 year old is this bathroom's main user.  During the 3 additional year, the yellow tile started cracking around the edges.  One day while shopping at our local Habitat Store, we picked up a sink that was a cute small sink.  What I didn't know then, was how hard it would be to find a vanity for said sink!   Then one day, on my local Facebook page, someone was giving away this desk.  I thought I'd give it a try and see if I could make it a vanity.  Y'all, I picked this up in June and finished it in March.  There were many moments throughout the process, when I almost gave up and just bought one. After being gifte...

One of the funniest thing about the listing for our home was that it said something about the backyard being ready for a cocktail party.  I don't know what you envision when you think of a cocktail party, but I can tell you that no lady in heels wanted to be in our backyard...or our back deck.  I loved the size of our deck the first time I saw it...and hated the red - probably because of the brick. I'll be honest - moving in with an almost 1 year old and so many "immediate" redo needs....we didn't take care of our deck.  We aren't convinced it was built to too high of a quality standard either, but we didn't love the wood like we should have.  So fast forward to this year and it was something I both wanted and needed to work on.  We replaced a few boards and needed to stain all of them.  I should say that our long term goal for this space is to make it screened in.  The mosquitoes around here are no joke!  We love our creek and our "it rained...

 I got this neat piece from my mama with a plan already in my head to make this a bit of a bar in our new home.  The apartment we live in has yellowish walls - so you can only imagine how yellow this piece really looked against the wall!   After creating a paint booth of sorts and filling our place with fumes :-)  We ended up with this piece and I LOVE the color!

As soon as I saw this piece I knew I wanted to show it some love!   Some repair work, custom paint and new handles bring this a new life!   This one moved pretty slow and other than wanting it out of the house as I was moving - I kinda was ok with that :-)  This turned out so cute!

This is as good as it gets for a before picture - THREE different covers for this chair!  I loved the color & character of this chair and simply gave it a new cover.  Oh how I wished my new house had a porch!   It hurt a little when the purchaser told me they were going to paint and recover it :-(  To each their own - off to a new home in a nursery for a new baby boy! (ok, maybe the color & material weren't the best for a boy's nursery :-))

This was a simple makeover - I even used the same knobs!  But it was fun to bring a new life to a piece.

 This was a fun makeover.  I bought this cute bedside table/dresser at a yard sale when I first moved to ATL.  It was green...that always catches my eye!  At the time the color matched my bedroom, but the knobs were a bit wild.  You can see the round knob I used at the bottom of this photo.   And then I moved & got a new bedroom set and green just wasn't cutting it anymore.  So in came a soft yellow!  Such a cute all-purpose piece!

So recently our church merged with another church - one that used to be a church of 2,500 people in Southeast Atlanta...the church is over 120 years old!  I had no idea there were so many rooms in the building...and there was stuff in all of them (desks, pianos, pulpits, extra pews and chairs are the most popular...I have NEVER seen that many pulpits in one place!).  I happened to come in one evening when they were cleaning out rooms....and I turned into my mother :-)  I left with 6 pieces to restore/redo and 5 are done and sold (less than a work week later!)  Here are the few I did first.  

This is another lovely little piece that started with a frantic e-mail to my partner-with-a-truck.   This did have a door when I got it (see it on the left?), but I quickly took it off.  Well, quickly after my furniture guru adviser thought it was a good idea :-)   Starting building the shelves and shore up the supports.   Shelves done & outside painted!   Trying out drawer knobs....   Finished product!  You can't see this too well, but the inside is painted gray.  It's funny how each of these photos (from my phone) make it look like a different color blue.  For me this was adventurous for a piece I wasn't keeping, but after some Facebook feedback - I took a bit of a plunge...and it worked!  Who knows, maybe the next piece will be a more daring color!

On a blustery day in Fall 2013 - one of my neighborhood neighbors posted that they were cleaning out their basement and everything on the curb was FREE!  So I called my trusty partner-with-a-truck over to investigate.  I got pictures of car seats and a cool chair that I had no room for and two piece of furniture (one was the one I sent him for!).....both were waiting on my porch when I got home.  When I first saw this piece I thought I could work my magic and make a changing table with drawers for one of my employees that was expecting (this week actually!), but when it got to my house I realized it was chest high...and probably not the safest changing table for baby ;-) So I e-mailed my sister who always has good furniture ideas and said something like "should I try to save it or should I just put it back out on the curb?!"  "SAVE IT!"  she replied. So I started stripping.....  and found this pretty green color undernea...

This is one of the few pieces that has moved with me to every apartment I've lived in.  Actually, now that I think about it this is THE only piece of furniture that has moved to every apartment/house I've lived in (except the first two).  Wow - I must like this piece ;-) Our love story began when I was in college and wanted to "build" some furniture.  This was back in the day when Lowe's sold build-your-own furniture (do they still do that?).  I picked up two pieces and put them together and stained them.  This piece came with wooden knobs and at some point in my NY moves one broke.  I replaced all the knobs with the metal ones in the picture.  I knew I wanted to do something different with the piece.  It was stained cherry and I couldn't decide between going darker or painting it.  So for THREE YEARS  I lived with this piece and the fact that the stain didn't go cover the whole piece (look closely under the knobs, you'll see it....) ...

I have been looking for a desk to make a vanity for quite some time.  I was scouring Craigslist and came across this beauty.  I got to see a different part of Atlanta when going to pick this guy up!  The drawers stuck and someone decided to try out chalk paint...  I love the color green and thought I could live with this for awhile, but I was wrong.  So I took some gray paint I already had (you'll see that featured in another post) and made it darker by adding some black paint that I already had.  Sanded down the desk to take off the chalkiness and applied - 1 COAT!  I was so excited it only took one coat ;-) Here's the piece now...without the cool handheld vanity mirror I recently got from one of my favorite antique dealers (hint: my sister!) I'm in love....and I think this will be a piece I move with me and use in different ways in different houses - we shall see!

If you need any proof that my sisters and I think alike - even while miles away - just keep reading.  I was gifted this beautiful rocking chair - because the giver had seen some of the work I've done and thought I could do a "marvelous" job with it.      Now, I'll admit right now that sister #3 pays much better attention to detail to me & I was intimidated by this chair!  Great bones, but it needed some lovin.   Luckily the wood and frame were in pretty good shape and I could focus on simply reupholstering it.  That's when I call my resident This Old House expert....sister #3.  She pointed me to products and a great site for material.  And then she answered every.single.frantic.text I sent while working on this chair.  But my first question was "what fabric?!"  I switched between what I knew would be "historically accurate" (= leather) and wanting to do a bold, modern fabric (since when did I become a bold, m...