michelle got me this amazing chair for my birthday back in april:

i’ve been wanting one — one that i could refinish/reupholster obvs — since we moved into our house in december. i really did scour the internet and antique places for months, and michelle finally sourced this one at captain’s treasures on queen. (for which i have a new-found love. check out that tagline — “he’s the got best booty around!” how could you not love this guy?!)

so flip it over, and here are the innards:

honestly, this is all i have achieved so far. i took off the fabric, removed the springs, sanded and painted the frame, and have been stuck. really, really stuck. it’s not for want of trying.

i start searching the internet for what to do next, and it just becomes overwhelming. it starts fine, reading a page or two, and i feel emboldened! i can DO this! then i click on another link. and another. and maybe a few more. who knew there were so many families of burlap?! tiny nails?! batting?? springs?! piping? wah! too many windows open! SYSTEM FAILURE! SHUTDOWN!

so here it sits, awaiting my love and care, with springs in its lap:

anyone have any tips on what to do next? have you done this before? i’m seriously wanting to tackle this myself, but feel at a bit of a loss with the information overload that’s out there. the only related task i can bring myself to do lately is anguish over the gorgeous uphostery fabric options over at tonic living!

so, here’s the thing. i just can’t walk by furniture that’s been kicked to the curb. no matter how beat up, ugly, heavy — i will be taking it home.  so, much to michelle’s concern about my “hoarder potential,” i lugged this home on monday, and i have the bruises on my shoulders to prove it.

some people would see an extra-heavy piece of garbage. all i can see is a neglected, underdog piece of furniture who just needs someone to root for it. so i got to sanding.

it needed a lot of sanding help! spilled nail polish, who knows what else what happening here. popped off the back, took off the doors. painted the body and back separately, then reassembled that part. here we are after one coat of paint — the outside is pure white, the inside is Behr’s “silver moon.”

this next part was kind of annoying, and was done while i drank my coffee this morning, with dumpling closely supervising.

more paint paint paint, then i added the hardwares into the mix! i bought these yesterday in a rush on my way to boxing, and i am SO PLEASED with this decision. i was going to go for a brushed nickel something, but in my haste, my brain just went **SHINY THINGS** and i left the store with two of these instead. you can see where i still had to clean up the bits of paint on the glass:

one last coat of paint and touchups:

and done! as promised in the title, from trash to flash, people!

COST

cabinet: free

paint: leftover paint + two cans spraypaint ($13)

hardware: $16

= $29

i seriously enjoy this kind of little project to work away on. it’s like i don’t even notice that the hours have whittled away as a tape, sand, paint, paint, paint. it feels meditative to me. we don’t even have room for this really, so i’m just going to sell it! or put it back out on the curb for good karma. i’m not sure yet!

as mentioned above, i was at the newsgirls boxing gym yesterday — wanted to point it out, just so you know i’m still making progress on my 30 before Thirty list! Number 6, to be exact. Aiming to get in the ring before Xmas, which is both awesome and terrifying. i’ve been sparring a bit lately, but have some serious work to do if i don’t want to get pulverized in there :/

finally finally finally! mirror and cabinet success!

mirror and cabinet mounted! michelle and i are now closely acquainted with toggle anchors and molly bolts. i now feel like we could hang a-n-y-t-h-i-n-g!!

i don’t know why, but i have a definite trust problem with anchors. they’re so little! the mirror is so heavy and big! i do not understand the science that makes them work, but i love it! the mirror is mounted so simply:

both the mirror and the cabinet survived the night, so my confidence in these anchors is growing.  i love the cabinet — a place my toothbrush can finally call home. it’s like a real bathroom!

we’ve come a long way — remember this?

were we ever so young? this is back when our toilet also doubled as a rocking chair.

a few finishing touches — baseboard, a transition piece, heating vent — and we are nearly finished. and i love the floor as much as ever, and am so happy we got carried away with ourselves that day at The Tile Store, even if it did mean some extra work.

you know you’re really into your reno when: you share a midnight triumph beer, sitting on the bathroom floor with your girlfriend <3

the cheese box i bought this weekend for $10:

i get that not everyone is turned on by the idea of PASTEURIZED LOAF CHEESE. but i am! and i think it’s weird little things like this that keep one’s home from looking too much like an ikea display room. you know? also, cheese is basically my main food group.

cleaned it out, then decided between zebra or flower liner…

mounted it to the back of my closet door, using a couple of screws and a drill. easy so far.

then i dug out this treasure, which was a project unto itself, having been plucked from the side of the road and lovingly refinished:

so all tucked away, my closet/pop-up-vanity looks like this:

and ta-da! pop-up vanity! it’s just the right height for hair & makeups.

you gotta make the most of the space you have. i’ve been fantasizing about a vanity for a while, but it’s just not practical or even physically possible in this room, but this is such a compact way to indulge my desire to sit and fuss in the mornings!

final closet tasks: figure our prettier lighting, make covered hangers.

i need to be better at taking “before” pictures, otherwise you’re never going to believe that i actually do anything.

remember when i got that $8 frame at aberfoyle’s antique market? it was yellowed, dirty, and someone had fake-drawn “crackling” lines all over it in pencil, in an effort to create some diy aging look. it was bad.

but this is good! since we moved, i saved my set of keys from our old place, the first place michelle & i lived together, and was waiting for a frame like this to do something special with them.

so, take twenty minutes, a coat of spraypaint, cover the backing in white linen fabric, find the centre, hot glue the keys onto the fabric = DONE. cute romance art for $8 and some stuff around the house!

there’s a little ledge to the right, at the top of our stairs, that we’re going to slowly populate with arts, photos, anything else. so this is the first of that effort — i’m so happy with how it turned out!!

as part of #12 on the 30 Before Thirty, michelle planned a date for this weekend. i was expecting “let’s go for dinner” or “here’s tickets to that thing you like.” i should have taken into account that michelle is naturally an overachiever and all kinds of thoughtful and awesome.

SO,  it started friday, and basically just concluded. from friday until now, we were:

1. at a blue jays game!!! drinking beer! one of my fave toronto dates!

2. at the reenactment of the battle of 1812 in fort erie, drinking lemonade, vineyards, and wine tastings, and meandering around niagara-on-the-lake, and niagra falls, and dinner at the Stone Road Grille (a meal that will forever be filed away in my food-porn brain fantasies)

3. at the most honeymoon-y hotel in all of niagara falls. yes, that is a red, heart-shaped hot tub. flanked in mirrors.

4. and today, we spent the day at the Aberfoyle Antique Market!!

wait, did i mention we even had dogsitting for the weekend? spending 48 hours without any dumpling drool stains on our clothes went a long way in bringing the sexy back.

sooo ya. “date night.” the bar is high. i’m already scheming for next month…!

but, now that i’ve suffiently waxed romantic here, i mostly want to pump up how amazing and fun the Aberfoyle Antique Market was — so many treasures, not too far from toronto, GO THERE!

we got there reasonably early, a bit after 9, and some vendors were still setting up. if you are into refinishing furniture, fun antique treasures, obsessed with finding oddities and unique one-of-a-kind things for your home and loooOOoove to haggle, you must get yourself to this market!

if not for the treasures, for the poutine. with a side of pickles!

you know it’s a good weekend when you average a poutine per day. or that’s my measure anyways.

michelle and i wandered through all the stalls for literally hours, and still hadn’t even seen everything. there were so many treasures, all across the price board. i made off with a few treasures (a mini fur stole, antique wooden picture frame, and an adorable old cheesebox i’m going to repurpose), all for under $50!

i don’t haggle, but i do hum and haw an awful lot before deciding to buy something, which vendors seem to take as haggling. however, without fail, i did not pay full price for anything — as i stood there, brow furrowed, trying to decide whether or not i needed yet another ornate picture frame, the vendor bustles over — “it’s $10, and $10 is a great price. it’s a great frame. look at it! i mean, but, you know, i guess i could do $8 , but $8 is the lowest i could ever go. yes, $8 is the lowest.” indecision pays, people!

from antique pinup nudie art, to bureaus, to chairs, to books, to picture frames, to kitsch, to to shabby farmhouse — it is totally worth the hour & a half-ish drive from toronto to check it out. you can seriously spend your whole sunday here, and it’s a really fun thing to poke through all the treats, chat with the vendors, score something you didn’t even know you wanted, and it’s even more fun to do it with a cute girl on your arm.

Ok, so now I have 100% earned crossing off the first of my 30 Before Thirty list – the closet is completely organized and beautified!

I realize now I should have taken a photo when all of my business/clothes/crafts/small animals were crammed in, literally, from top to bottom. Taking something out was sort of like playing Jenga, and I tended to lose. But remember this scary picture?

Anyways, I give you The Closet! There are things in here that I have been lugging around for years (like the breadbox, which now houses my yarn and projects) and I’m so glad that I was always stubborn enough to hold onto them, even though they had no purpose or function at times.

Also, I am more of a clothes-folder, so my hanging stuff is pretty minimal.

This project required:

Painting: trim, walls, door, mirror, shelves

Building: the bottom shelf. Sounds hard, but literally, cut two lengths of 2×2, cut mdf shelf to fit, level, line rails up, screw them in (to studs!), sit shelf on top! easy peasy.

Wallpapering: the inside – but this is low-commitment wallpaper, put up with carpet tape! I know it sounds half-assed, and I guess it sort of is, but it looks perfect, feels perfect, and suits my decorating commitment levels.

Being ruthless: with my hoards of clothes and craft supplies, now donated

All of this was done with tools/stuff we just had around, save for the $4.02 I spent on the scrap wood for the bottom shelf.

So, TOTAL COST: $4.02 + some elbow grease

things i still want to do to the closet:

1. i have an amazing little sitting bench, that when i’m on it, it’s the perfect height to do my makeup at that mirror. SO, next up: find a cute little basket to mount to the door, to house my MAC collection. DIY fake vanity-in-a-closet!

2. make fancy clothes hangers for all the clothes, not just for the fancy fur in the back there. there must be a diy for pretty cloth-covered hangers on the internets somewhere!

inspired by nicole over at making it lovely, i am going to write — and complete! — a list of 30 things i want to do before my 30th birthday, which is april 5th, 2011. this gives me exactly 8 months from today.

now, seeing as how a hefty sum of these are going to be house related, because i nearly finished one of them today, and largely because i love putting things on lists that you have already completed and can start with at least one thing crossed off, today seemed like a fine time to share it with you.

1. organize and beautify closet (see below for preview!)
2. make good blog entries for 30 days straight
3. wear red lipstick once a week for one month
4. reupholster my birthday chair
5. learn how to drive standard
6. grab my mouthguard, get in the ring, and box a fight!!!
7. bake bread from scratch
8. buy the perfect alarm clock
9. visit the AGO
10. have dinner at colborne lane
11. leave PhD school for a year/get a job!
12. have a surprise romance date with michelle once a month, alternating who gets to plan it
13. refinish the front porch bench
14. have a lobster dinner/kitchen party in toronto
15. visit home — aka annapolis valley, nova scotia
16. find a strapless bra that actually works
17. finish knitting dumpling’s sweater
18. build a transition piece for the kitchen floor
19. write and mail six cards to six old friends
20. make a dog-related art that’s not (too) cheesy
21. revamp my prom dress
22. make and bottle wine with michelle
23. build shelves above our bed to display little arts and memories
24. host a theme party
25. grow hair into a full-on ponytail (i think i have enough months?)
26. make a curried clam chowder
27. paint the front porch
28. find perfect day-to-day earrings
29. go to montreal for a weekend
30. build a mini-victorian-style dog house

and i’ve crossed off the first one — it’s actually at about 95%, for which reason, i am just giving you a sneak preview now. tomorrow, i’ll post pics of the full project. it involved wallpapering, shelf-building, painting, donating a lot of clothes, organizing… but now, my sad, dreary, dinge-coloured closet is now one of my favorite little nooks in the house!

can you blame me? the one in my room is the scariest closet ever.

*shudder*

it just didn’t feel right to bring a hemnes daybed into that world without organizing my closet first. and by organize, i mean make really nice and special. i really like taking the sort of mundane house spaces and making them nice little treats to look at every day.

this was the start of it yesterday:

soon to be organized, pared down, and amazing, i’m sure.

so far, i have painted the trim, inside of the closet, the shelf, and the ceiling Bright White, wallpapered the inside (more on this tomorrow), and have the beginnings of a new shelf i’m building for the bottom. i love owning and using tools! it’s basically just big-ass jumbo crafts, which i am totally into.

i used the rest of the wallpaper we used on the stairs. it’s so nice and bright, it makes the space look really snappy.

for the record: i’m not someone who was ever really in the closet. i more just “turned gay.” i’ve heard that oprah would probably love to talk to me about this.

some weekends, you just have to STEP AWAY FROM THE WET SAW.

we went to algonquin, and are now trying to devise a home-reno project that will allow for hammocks in the backyard. hm.

and to send us off, michelle and i had not one, but TWO retail dreams become a reality on friday.

1. because our bathroom has a bulkhead on the right wall, we are very limited in our mirror choices (aka, they must be dainty). michelle has been lusting after this mirror from Restoration Hardware:

it’s literally The Only Mirror we’ve found that could fit. but the $400 with tax price tag was really depressing. how AMAZING was it that it 1) went on major sale after months of wistfully google-imaging it every week, and 2) we went to buy it, and 3) they messed up and *didn’t* have it, but because i was so patient, gave us even MORE of a discount and got it sent right to our house. bathroom bling!!

2. i’ve been wanting an ikea hemnes daybed since basically the day we moved in. i’ve scoured the vast plains of craiglist forever. a few come up, i miss them, i weep, i move on. i almost score one, i map it, it comes up on bedbugregistry.com, i get scared, i don’t get it, i move on. they’re about $700 to buy new, including a mattress. just not in the (credit) cards for this grad student. though i am a big fan of balancing PFI (pay for it) splurges with DIY, i just couldn’t do it.

but THEN, michelle puts a feed of “hemnes daybed” on one of her internet thingys. she sees one posted and emails right away — first! and we get it! for $300! with a *brand new* mattress! what! this is the sort of thing that is like major craiglist WIN. it was so exciting. i even put it together before we left on friday, and i’m so in love.

i’ll post some pics of my room upstairs soon. it has seriously come along since that day i finally gave up on the “antique leather” and went for bright white!