I am feeling so fresh and renewed lately. It sounds so superficial but sometimes a change of pace, or in my case space, can put that extra little umphf in my step.
It has a lot to do with re-calibrating my design compass. Sorry if you are confused, I think Sean is still whirling from some of the recent changes too. So let me explain. I have always LOVED white interiors. Love, love, love them. My favorite design book of all time is called Living With White by my design-hero: Atlanta Bartlett. And while I have ALWAYS loved time-worn and well loved items as well, my original vision for my home was a balance of the two (which Atlanta does exquisitely). When we bought this house it was a big house for two 24 year olds with little furniture and lots of expensive renos to do. Meaning furniture was not in the budget.
As many of you know, that is how WhiteBerry Reinvented came to be. The only way I could get this house feeling like a home was thrifting, garage sale-ing and dumpster diving for furniture I could refinish on the CHEAP! 6 months later I was doing it as a full-time job. While I always stayed true to my vision of white, our house became a constantly evolving 'show room' of pieces, coming and going as they sold and I finished new ones. Obviously I managed, and found myself enjoying the whole process (if you are a design junkie it is addicting to constantly reinvent your spaces). But as WhiteBerry wound down over the past year as I ventured on to bigger and more time consuming projects (aka Lexington and now ParkView) I took a look around and realized that while I loved every item individually my vision for a fresh, yet warm, lived- in interior was not my reality.
I know more and more moms are venturing into the painted furniture business, and if you have then you know that right now distressed furniture is HUGE. Whenever I finished new pieces the first ones to sell were always the most distressed. So before I knew it I was distressing things left and right! Which is a good thing for some people, but for me I need a little bit of that new-sparkle. Some crisp, straight lines to play off my still-insanely-loved old items. And now that we don't live in a 'showroom' I am getting back to it.
This is my homecoming. To embrace the idea of designing a room and *gasp* then live with it! So slowly, bit by bit Sean and I are tweaking a few things. Not starting from scratch, just shifting a few things in the direction we always envisioned our home to be.
So we started with our dining room/living room. I have rambled about it endlessly here. How I have never been content in here, hence the constant work in progress.
Just because we are finally making our space our own, it doesn't mean we can break the bank, so you know I hit the thrift store when I went looking for a new table.
I found this tacky, dated table for $45 (of course my original before shot disappeared mysteriously from my camera). It had good lines, but most importantly it has really awesome chrome legs. So I unscrewed them from the table top to save myself a ton of taping during the painting process. Thanks for the support during this project mr. garbage can!
The table was not special or all that great, in fact it is what I call a 'particle board special' with plastic veneer. The lesson here is you don't always need to buy solid wood furniture to paint, so long as the veneer is in good shape and you use a paint that adheres to plastic. For this table I just used a can of krylon spray paint.
30 minutes and $8 of spray paint later this is what the outcome was. I left it in the
Garaga
to 'cure' for a few days then we hauled her in and used a little stainless steel polish on the legs.
And Voila, I finally have that little bit of sparkle I've been craving.
I played around with bringing the wing backs around the table but in the end I feel like I simplicity won out.
As things stand.
The one splurge we have made in our tweaking is the Stockholm rug from Ikea.
There are 2 sizes they make but the largest size is almost ALWAYS out of stock. It is massive people, you don't get this much rug for under $500 very often!
It is just the perfect punch of fun for us. We are negotiating what we want to do for a coffee table still because we've always known the trunk was both too high and not substantial enough for our big room but loved it enough to look past those flaws. So who knows what will happen there...
But for now we enjoying the luxury of feeling like we are actually creating the home we insanely adore.
And if you read this whole post, thanks for listening, and more importantly thanks for not laughing (at least to my face) that we've changed the dining room... again.
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