Spray Paint! Fabric! Cup Hooks! Oh My!

You ever have one of those days where your eight year old comes home from a sleep over party at 9:30am and announces that she stayed up until 2am? And hearing that information, just the act of that knowledge passing through your ears and into your brain makes you want to get back into bed and hide because you know the ugly which will emerge from said child?

Me too! As a matter of fact, that exact scenario played out this morning. At first I sucked my thumb and whimpered. Then I came up with a solution.

TV all day long! Brilliant!

Can I just take this moment to make a plea to the parents of my kid's friends and beg them to never have sleepovers? Or just don't tell Lily. She has been a weepy mess all day and that was with eight hours of television to distract her from a full onslaught of exhausted tyranny.

Once I had the children plugged into the TV and I had stopped crying I decided to try to get a few things done that have been on my list for a while.

I garbage picked this chair a few weeks ago. It was just sitting out on the curb like a damsel in distress awaiting rescue.

Good lines. Ugly seat. Great potential.

Thank god for spray paint. Here it is getting ready for its beauty treatment.

I chose this fabric for the chair seat. I used my staple gun to attach it.

Three tools I cannot live without: glue gun, staple gun and drill.

It took two cans of high gloss spray paint.

Not bad huh? The whole project cost about $15. The moral of the story? Don't be too proud to pick through your neighbors trash.

While the paint was drying on the chair I decided that it was high time to hang up a chandelier.

I found this old chandelier while out junking about five years ago. It gets moved around the house quite a bit, but my vision has been to hang it on the porch. I considered putting electric candles in it and doing it all proper, but it seemed hard. And expensive. So I improvised with fairy lights. First I wrapped white fairy lights all around the chandelier. Then through the magic of a sturdy cup hook, an S hook and some cheap white chain I made some lighting magic!

It's so satisfying to get these projects done. Neither took very long to do, but felt like much bigger projects than they really were.

The most satisfying part of my day? Getting Lily into bed at 7:30.

Shades on the cheap!

When Rebecca's room was still a purpley blue color I splurged on some fancy Pottery Barn Kids room darkening roman shades.

They were so sweet with a lavender toile pattern.



Once I painted her room pink the shades were All Wrong. They had to go.

I bought some inexpensive white ones to hang up instead and they have worked out great.

At first I thought I would sell the Pottery Barn shades on Craigslist because they had been pretty expensive, but then I had an idea.

I went to Joanne Fabric in search of an inexpensive fabric that I could cover them with to use in my room which has needed shades for the last seven years.



Here's the fabric I chose. It was 6.99 a yard. The entire project used about seven yards of fabric.

First I laid the fabric out on the table and heated up the glue gun.

Then I laid the shade on the fabric and trimmed the excess fabric from the side and bottom.

Then the fun began!

I started gluing the edges of the fabric to the back of the shade.

Usually when I get one of these cockamamie ideas I think to myself, "Piece o' cake!".

Then I start doing the project and get my ass handed back to me on a platter.

Sometime I'll tell you about the time I had the bright idea to put in a brick patio. But I digress...

Luckily, this project was just as easy as I imagined it!

Look!




I only had one problem.

I had two of the expensive room darkening shades, but I have three windows. I solved that problem by going back to the discount store and buying a plain burgundy shade for 9.99 and used the same technique.

I am a girl genius- with burnt fingers from the glue gun...