The Reveal

It's been two weeks since I introduced those babies to you (read about it in this post here). We were in sore need of more seating in our living room which until then had only been featuring a three-seater couch. After adding a tufted back, squeaky-yellow but oh so comfortable litte arm chair we knew we were on the right track but unfortunately it was nigh impossible to find anything that matched or team up harmonically with said yellow armchair. Now what?

That's when those two chairs walked ...err, were carried into our life thanks to our lovely neighbor.
 Two -matching- chairs with surprisingly modern, clean lines.
Score!
For free!
Mega Score!

Only the green and worn burlap-y kind of upholstery fabric just wouldn't do, and since I had spied similarly shaped chairs upholstered in velvet and our living room could use some bling, that's what I ordered - 6 yards of silver-grey velvet.
A DIY blog isn't a real DIY blog unless you have spray painted something (check!) and upholstered an old chair ...
In hindsight I should have ordered a heavier, upholstery weight fabric, and time will tell how well this lighter velvet will hold up to the daily abuse of a house full of boys and animals but so far, so good.

There are some really good and detailed tutorials out there on how to upholster a piece of  furniture so this won't be yet another one. In the end it's a rather straightforward process:

1. take fabric off
2. remove all old staples, tacks, etc.
3. use old fabric/foam as patterns for new fabric
4. put new fabric back on in reverse order

 Take pictures as you go for reference in case you hit a point when you aren't quite sure how things go back together, and things will be golden. No, really.

Removing the old fabric took seemingly forever, well, at least for chair No.1, since I was taking pictures of the process to document the construction and because I was being extra careful to preserve the rather brittle fabric to use as pattern for the new fabric.
It was also a rather messy process, especially when I revealed a layer of foam (?) that had disintegrated into fine orange dust. The stuff was -everywhere-! and I sneezed orange for hours afterward. Yuck!

Once all the old stuff was removed, it was clean slate time! I'd originally hoped to preserve the foam/batting but after revealing the orange powdered mess underneath, I started fresh and bought new foam and batting. It felt good to put the new materials on the nice, solid frame work (the second chair had a few minor wobbly leg issues that I fixed with four strategically placed screws. easy-peasy!)

Here's the back of chair one coming back together: a layer of foam, a layer of batting doubled up, and then the fabric.

 For the tufting of the back, I needed buttons and since I was on a roll I decided to reuse the old buttons. I cut small circles from the new fabric, sewed a quick running stitch along the perimeter and so, created a little round pouch into which I slipped the old button. All done!

 

Looking good! The tufting on the first chair turned out much nicer than the one on the second one, much to my dismay. Spacing the buttons evenly wasn't quite as easy as I expected it to be, and since the fully fasten the fabric of the back -after- the tufting, the tufting got pulled out of position a bit more than I expected. It's not bad -bad-, and there is only one button that is ...ahem, somewhat out of line, but side by side you see the tufting isn't exactly spaced the same way. It's good enough though. I can live with it.

 Another in-between step was creating piping since that was the design detail that defined the chairs so beautifully (It was either that or nail head trim). For that, I simply cut a long strip of fabric per chair (I used the selvage edge of the fabric; all 6 yards of it) and folded rope into it.

 Here is a close-up detail shot of me attaching the first round of piping to the back of the chair.

Next up the seat, foam, batting, and fabric, then the skirt around the lower edge, and finally, the back. While it took me about 6 afternoons to take apart and rebuild the first chair, I managed to whip chair No. 2 in shape in only 3 afternoons (between work, homework, Cub Scouts, and household chores).

Then, we moved them into the living room, and, gosh, are they lovely!

They are just the right height and width and perfect shape for our not-too-large livingroom, and the color and sheen of the fabric works great with our dark-grey 'restoration hardware' look we have going on in this part of our house.

And, man, they are comfortable.
Ms Inkybinky falls into a regular coma every time she sits on one.
No kidding.

Mo' paint

While the final coat of paint is drying on the pocket doors on the living room side and ony the re-attaching of the hardware stands between me and completely finished pocket doors (on -both- sides, no less!), I put the waiting time to good use and moved on to my next target: the arch way.

When we bought the Little Old House, it was a duplex, its original floorplan chopped up into two apartments (one upstairs and one downstairs). The downstair's living room had been closed off from the former vestibule which had been turned into a teeny-weeny bedroom. Re-opening and restoring the original floorplan of our Little Old House was one of the first things we did, and the transformation was really mindblowing (read about it here, here and here)

Again, I'd finished it on the vestibule side a while ago, but hadn't gotten around to it on the living room side of things. Thanks to my master list of "all things to do" and some newly revived get'er done spirit, I'm now gettin'er done!


At this point I'm at two coats of crisp, bright white with one more coat to go for a nice even and cean finish. After that there are just the original house door (in its not-original location) and a replacement window that need painting. This, however, will have to wait. At least for a bit.

We want to move the door back to its historically correct position and replace the ugly 80s aluminum window with a proper wooden sash window. Since that affects the exterior of our house it requires the approval of the Historic Preservation Committee so there's some paperwork we'll have to tackle, and since it's a slightly larger project we've already touched base with our contractor team who helped us bring the Little Old House back to life last year.

So stay tuned while we're saving up money for this and many more projects!

Meet George!

I'm obviously a child of the 70s because I looooove shag! After secretely ordering a shag rug for our livingroom about which I haven't written at all and knowing the husband would like it, the last thing missing to absolute shaggy happiness on our livingroom couch was a shaggy pillow.

You know, texture and all that jazz.

That's when I stumbled across this fuzzy darling here at Target. Laaaaaaaaa!

Perfect!

Dear husband looked at it when we brought my shopping loot in and asked "what I wanted to do with it".
The only correct answer in this case?
"Hug it and pet it and call it George."

Here, George (aka "The Yak") is hanging out with his buddies on the livingroom couch

And you know what?

EVERYBODY loves George!

That's strike 2 for shag(gy stuff). Ha!

Anybody else with a hankering for shag?

Babysteps

Remember when I mentioned earlier that we're still kind of in the rough construction phase of things rather than the decorating stage? Well, that's still mostly true except for when it comes to lighting where function and decorating just simply go hand in hand.

In order to pass the safety inspection and get the electricity turned back on at the Duckling, all of our lights had to have basic covers (no exposed lightbulbs and/or wires) so our electrician went ahead and got simple cheap glass globe fixtures.

[source]

Function - check. Design - Yeaaah, not so much. At least the bulbs were covered, we passed inspection and life (and lights) went on.

Inspired by a blog trend of adding lamp shades to regular ceiling fixtures, I took off the glass globe and popped on the shade of a smaller lamp I had kicking around shortly after moving in.

[Step 1]

Ever seen a more forlornly looking lamp?
No?
Me neither.
It did, however, look better than the glass globe, even if the scale was entirely off.

[Step 2]

After a quick run to the store about a week and $15 later, things started to look up. Just when we thought that we were done tweaking lights we realized we sorely missed on little feature.

A ceiling fan!

We used to have them in every room over at Silver St and enjoyed how much cooler our place felt thanks to a little air movement during those sweltering Florida spring, summer and fall days, even if the ac wasn't running. Many seem to consider ceiling fans a design faux-pas but here in Florida, they're really more of a bare necessity - well, at least to us. So sue us - we did install a ceiling fan and then plopped the shade on top.

[Sharp shot there]

Much much better. Everybody breathe a collective sigh of relief :o)

[Middle of a blogpost picture]

Show me ... The hole in the wall!

You would think that after scraping, patching, priming and painting foot after foot of trim I'd be more than just sick and tired of trim.

How is that a certain piece of trim gets me all giddy with excitement? Let me show you!

[All chunky goodness!]

8 (!) pieces put together create the trim you see in this close up. No, it's not primed or painted yet but since it's brandnew I won't have to scrape and patch it. Thank God for small blessings. And it's oh so pretty!

Look!

Ta-da! Yes, ladies and gentlemen, this is the arch way to our living room aka "the hole in the wall". Now it's an Arch Way with a beautifully chunky presence just the way it's supposed to be.

[Before/ in-progress]

Much much better, don't you agree?

The fireplace that isn't

I know it's hard to believe but we're revving it up before our move. We're now fighting on two fronts: at our apartment we're up to our ears in packing chaos, boxes stacked to the ceilings and furniture half broken down, and at the Duckling all kinds of projects are hurriedly being brought to more or less completion. No worries - there's still plenty of work left and I'll keep on posting but at the end of this week we will finally move in! That's right! We will finally fill the Ugly Duckling with life! Since the upstairs bedrooms are pretty much done we decided to tackle the living quarters downstairs as much as possible. Our contractor team has a few spots of drywall to finish still so we kept to the walls that were a go. Another thing we attacked was the fireplace that isn't.

[Before: A load of red brick]

Our livingroom is dominated by what was once a sturdy, possibly craftman-style brick fireplace. Today it's just a massive, red brick wall because a previous owner had the great idea to weatherstrip with (more) brick. So.not.cool. It's good we don't know what kind of mantle we're missing or we'd be in tears. Anyways, while Florida weather doesn't necessarily make a working fireplace a must-have it's a cool ...err, hot feature to have. Since I'm personally a bit iffy about making a fire in a wood house or setting gas on fire in a wood house I searched the 'net for a possible alternative. More on that later! For now we went ahead and turned the brick eyesore into the hot spot of the living room.

[In-progress: Little man helping paint]

Paint to the rescue! The fireplace brick was already painted a solid layer brick red and so we didn't feel bad about repainting it. There's just no good way to remove layers of paint from old brick without damaging it - you can read up on sandblasting (baaaad....), chemicals and other means of removing paint but we didn't think it'd be worth it. I simply grabbed a bucket of flat white paint and forged ahead while husband tackled the walls (that will get its own post - promised).

[Almost done!]

What a difference! In a spur of the moment decision I painted the top row black which helped visually 'shrink' the fireplace and balance it against the overall size and height of the room. Originally we were musing about adding a wooden mantel but now we aren't sure. It looks sharp as it is! Don't you love how it just pops against its new backdrop of a warm charcoal grey? We definitely do!

And if you think that we've strayed a bit from the original design board, wait until you see the dining room ;o)