My Mother's Dinning Room

I have been holding off on showing pictures of the redo from my mother's dinning room and kitchen for some time now because I am waiting for pictures of the kitchen. (Ahem, are you reading this, sister??)
But I can wait no longer, so I will show you the dinning room today. I call it the dinning room, but its really just an extension of the kitchen with a table in it. We also have a formal dinning room, but that is used more as a sewing room.
I painted the dinning room many, many years ago for my mom, after removing the old wall paper. I really don't know exactly when this happened, but it was before  Prom of my senior year of high school. I found a highly amusing picture of myself on Prom night in the dinning area, with the wall behind me painted.

The dinning room and I, freshly painted circa 2004

My mother loved the color I had picked out for the kitchen (and I had bought about twice as much as we needed) that we used it in the dinning area as well. I think this was actually a good idea anyway, as they are essentially one room with a bar separating them.

The before color is a decade-old color called Parchment. I don't know what brand it is if you're interested in making your dinning room look circa 2001, but it is probably Glidden.  Considering the crazy 70's era wallpaper that was there before, this is a huge improvement.

The dinning area, my brother and grandmother, circa 1998
(Brother is now 14!)

The "parchment" paint really lightened up and cleaned up the room. We were in the process of a deep clean at the time of this picture, which explains the covered table.

And After: Again, this color is Silverleaf by Valspar.

I think the color kind of reads blue in these pictures, but its definitely more grey in person.

The black candle holders are new, as are the mirror tiles. My mom had really, really old candle sconce and mirror set on the wall that just needed to go. 

Another thing we need to work on is the curtains. I couldn't find the Young House Love style white breezy curtains I wanted in my quick trip home (strange, right?) and didn't find any other suitable alternatives in stores, so I left the curtains as is. 

I would love to see something with a subtle pattern and perhaps bamboo instead of those plastic blinds, 

or maybe just roman shades, as I don't think those blinds ever get pulled down.

Perhaps someday soon I will have pictures of the kitchen!

A Christmas Present

While I was home for Christmas, my intent was to tackle one big project--the kitchen. I really wanted to paint the kitchen cabinets, the walls and perhaps the countertop. Well, it didn'tgo exactly as planned. First, we decided 7 days wouldn't be enough time to properly sand and prime and paint all the cabinets (theres quite a few...), and I was unsuccessful in convincing my mother that painting the floor and/or counter top was a good idea. So what did I do?

Well, I DID paint the kitchen. You're going to have to wait to see pictures of that. We primed and painted the walls, and also gave the ceiling a fresh coat of white paint. But since that didn't really take up my whole week or all of the paint we had, I started looking around for other things to paint. One room that hadn't been updated in a while was the entryway/mud room.

This room was papered shortly after we moved into the house by my mother. She chose a trendy hunter green almost solid paper. It was looking dated, and also my mom runs an in-home daycare center, and the kids had done a little peeling in some spots.

 

My little helper
There were TWO layers of wallpaper.
The green and a lovely 70's style flower pattern

So I got to work with my friend the wallpaper steamer and one of my mom's daycare kids one afternoon and stripped all that wall paper! If you have to remove wallpaper and you don't own a steamer, I seriously recommend it. Once the water heats up, you apply it to the paper, and it works miracles so the paper just easily falls off. I have used vinegar and hotwater in a spray bottle, and also fabric softener and hot water. Both of these things work OK if the wallpaper is just going to come off easily anyway. But I really don't like how the water gets cold quickly, and then the paper you've scraped off is soggy and cold. Gross.

So yes, this little ~$50 steamer is DEFINITELY worth it.

Buy it here

Here are some in progress pics. After removing all the wallpaper, we washed the walls to make sure any left over pieces of wallpaper were removed. We let the wall dry a little, and then spackled some holes and let it dry overnight. 

Daisy helped

So what color did we use? Well, I had originally picked out a color from Lowes in Michigan by Valspar called Silverware (spoiler: this is the same color that I used in the kitchen and dinning area. Mom liked it), but the Lowes at home(Vermont) had different color chips and didn't have "Silverware." 

Instead I found a really close match called "Silver Leaf."

It's really hard to take pictures of this tiny tiny area. These were the best I could do.

Further considerations: painting the trim white? Sanding and refinishing the door? The door is original and the previous owners of the house went to great lengths to strip the many layers of paint to get it back to the natural wood, so my mother is unwilling (at least at this point.. I haven't pushed much) to paint it white. But she has agreed that we could sand and re-stain it the next time I visit home (probably in the summer).

Overall my mom was really happy with my Christmas present for her!

Before:

After:

 



 

Look What Santa Brought Me!

Two things that will be seriously helpful for my blogging. 

First, a new sewing machine. It is the Brother cs6000i, and I'm in love. 

Picture from here

It it a serious upgrade in terms of features from my late-60's Singer Fashionmate. Don't get me wrong, the Fashionmate is a workhorse and served me well, but this new one purrs like a kitten and makes sewing so fast. Threading it is very easy, there are 60 different stitches, and you don't even have to  use a foot pedal to sew. This is awesome for me, as someone with knee/hip issues. I actually got this new toy a week before Christmas (fast shipping!!) so I got to use it to make some of my Christmas gifts.

Here she is in real life!

The second toy is a new camera. 

Photo from here

It's not a DSLR-- I looked at them but ultimately decided I wasn't ready for that sort of investment, both in money and in learning. Instead I got the Canon PowerShot SD1300 IS, which is 12.1MP. This is a pretty significant improvement over my previous camera- an Olympus FE-120 that's nearly 5 years old and only 6.0 megapixels. One of the most obvious improvements is the speed of taking pictures-- the Canon takes the picture nearly as soon as you press the button, while the old one had a 2-3 second delay. Big difference for any sort of action shot.

Yes, I used my old camera to take a picture of my new camera,
because I'm silly like that

Another new toy...very exciting is this bad boy:

Image from here

That's right! A palm sander. This guy should make redoing furniture that much easier. I already have a few projects in mind where this will come in VERY handy. I think my dad was very amused that I asked for a sander for Christmas. I'm sure not many24 year old women have these on top of their wish list!

I'm excited to start out 2011 with some new toys that can only make my projects better. I hope you'll hang around to see what I do.

Because I couldn't resist...

I went to Target a couple days ago and saw the plastic bulbs in the $1 sections, and I couldn't resist buying some.I've seen so many ways people have used them this year, I decided to go for my own interpretation.

I wanted to use clear tacks so they weren't visible, but I didn't have any. All I had were these large color tacks, so I decided to just go with it and make that part of the decoration. This area at the top of the stairs has been puzzling me since I moved in so I'm appreciating the decor there for now.

Where Have I Been? and Christmas Details

Well, the honest answer to the question "Where have I been?" is I've been at work. I presented at a conference this week in Colorado, and my boss is presented in NYC at the same time, which means I was quite busy getting both presentations ready to go.
Further, while in Colorado (Snowmass Village, near Aspen), I suffered from some fairly serious altitude sickness. For those of you that don't know, when you go to somewhere that has a high elevation, the amount of oxygen in the air decreases, meaning your body has to compensate. Most people handle this with little inconvenience, but I was one of the lucky few who had a really hard time. I got to take TWO separate ambulance rides to the hospital, on two different days. The first day was relatively mild, I was short of breath and vomitting, so I got some fluid and an oxygen machine to use while sleeping. The second day was much more scary, I was still slightly short of breath, but had a horrible headache, was vomiting much more violently (sorry if this is TMI) and was generally confused and not sure what was going on. That day I was given a bunch of different medicines to take-- 2 steroids, an anti-nausea medicine, and some pain medicine.

Why didn't I leave early? Well, I tried. But as luck would have it, all the flights out of Aspen on Saturday morning had been cancelled because of the weather, so all the afternoon flights were overbooked. There was no way I could have gotten out of Aspen/Snowmass Village on Saturday. So I had to wait until my normally scheduled departure on Sunday, and hope for the best. I stayed hooked to the oxygen machine (the granny machine, as I was calling it) every minute I could--this was not a portable one. It had to be plugged into the wall to work. And I spent most of the day resting in bed and wishing I could be at the conference and/or in the hot tub.
Needless to say, I am not anxious to hurry back to that kind of altitude. I have seen various numbers for the altitude of Snowmass Villiage, but the consensus is something between 8000 feet and 9000 feet.

And now, back to normal posts: Here's part of what I've done to spruce my apartment up for Christmas:

The beginning of December meant some subtle changes in the decor around my apartment. My Christmas decorations aren't as elaborate as some that I see on blogs, but what I do makes me happy. One of the first things I did was change the filler for the big vase on the counter in my kitchen. Earlier this summer I got a whole bunch of lemons at the Salvation Army for very, very little, and they had lived in the vase until now.

I replaced the lemons with some purple ornaments I got a couple years ago.

I also replaced what was one the glittery pink pumpkins on my dinning table with a more seasonally appropriate centerpiece:

Ellie made a rare appearance in a picture to give us her opinion, and it doesn't look to good.

The silver beads are of the same type that I used for my tree--which can also function as a centerpiece.

And finally, I pulled out the Pièce de résistance-- the pink Christmas tree.

Yes, you probably notice that the armoire isn't around--I'll have to explain that in a later post (I am so behind!)

I also put up some multicolored lights around the sliding door in the living room, and some snowflake ornaments on the windows.

Edited to add: I took some better pictures of the pink tree and the other trees I made. 

 

Christmas presents

Since the holiday season is officially "on", I've started thinking about what I will be gifting to my family this year. I have at least 8 people to consider for gifts, with others that will get smaller gifts. And this includes a range of people--from my grandmother to my 13 year old brother. In years past, I have often purchased things from the school I was at, but now that I'm no longer a student, thats not an option (plus I'm over it anyway.)
My family tends to gift eachother very practical things- my mother runs a daycare and goes through a lot of kitchen linens, so my gifts for her almost always include dishtowels and potholders (which might sound lame but she always appreciates them), my stepdad is a contractor and often works outside even in the winter, so lined carhart pants and laying pieces are key for him, as well as good tough work gloves.

Regardless, this year I don't want to do my "normal" Christmas thing. Last year I made candles and gave them to all my female family members, and this year, I want to take it a step further, and make ALL of my gifts. And apparently I'm not the only one! Over at (never home) maker, Ashley writes about how she would like to attempt a homemade Christmas (and also how shes otherwise decluttering her holidays) in this post titled Season's Greetings& Farewell to Stuff.

Along a similar vein, many people are suggesting that people wrap their gifts this season in reusable shopping bags. Sarah Richardson (of Sarah's House on HGTV) recommends this, and I see lots of great ideas at Sew, Mama, Sew! for how to make reuseable bags into pretty packages. I am planning to make use of these ideas--to start, I will make a bag like this

 to hold each gift. I made this bag using a pattern also from Sew, Mama, Sew!, which is super easy. You can find that pattern here: Classic Tote Tutorial

Then I will pretty them up even more, but using some of the ideas they blogged about yesterday. You can find the whole post here, but here is a picture that sums it up:

From Sew, Mama, Sew!

Since some of my family members actually occasionally read my blog, I can't go into real details yet about some presents. But I can tell you that I've so far used beads, yarn, ribbon, wire, fabric, and towels. Also I have already done a post about how while I'm home for Christmas, I will be seriously re-working my mom's kitchen (with only a little help from her). 

The trickiest part will be making something for my 13 year old, soon to be 14, brother. His top request is a video game, and while I am proficient in programming I am not a video game programmer!! (But wouldn't that be awesome?) If you have any ideas about what I could make for a 13/14 year old boy who likes camping, hunting and history, please, let me know!!

So what about you? Will you make some or all of your gifts this year?