Library inspired hutch

Thanks to Wren taking a 2 hour nap yesterday afternoon I was able to tick off quite a few projects! One of them being this $30 Goodwill dresser. As soon as I saw that it was made of solid wood and was a really good size I knew that it had a lot of potential for our family room. I love books and since having an actual library in the house just isn't gonna happen in the near future I thought it would be fun to make this "library inspired".

Recently somebody asked me what my workshop looked like (I think it was you Kelsey). My "workshop" is really where ever my fancy should like and yesterday I set up a paint studio on our lawn (very little clean up!) since it was so nice and sunny. The color I chose was a mismatched light, warm gray I found that really felt Martha Stewart-ish.

I had to splurge to get the hardware I knew would be perfect, 5 library card pulls and 2 knobs actually cost nearly twice as much as the dresser itself!

The organization that labelled pulls offer is perfect for a well-loved and busy room like a family room.

Ain't no shame in our frame

Since I just told you about it last week and showed you yesterday, obviously you remember the cool picture I picked up for $19 (no tax!) at Goodwill. Even though the painting is actually really neat, and probably 30 or 40 years old I actually grabbed it because of the frame. Not only is there tons of potential with the really ornate details, but the dimensions alone were amazing! This lovely treasure measures 5 feet long and 3 feet high, which was perfect for an idea I had floating around for a while.


The hallway to the powder room and laundry room is really long and fairly narrow so I didn't want a collection of frames or pictures, and I definitely knew it was too long to have a large painting because you cannot stand back to really view the wall. I decided that I would do a family photo collage (aka a glorified bulletin board).

Throw together a little paint, a piece of quarter inch plywood, and a sheet of cork and TA DA! you have yourself a photo collage that makes for an interesting stroll to the bathroom for our guests.

I just thought I would throw in this shot for a good laugh because I know that's what I did when I first saw that ugly light fixture (PSA: smoked glass is not appropriate for anywhere, let alone a dark hallway!). Thankfully it is due to be removed this week and replaced with pot lighting.

this is definitely an optical illusion, because it is actually hung in the center of the wall:

Where have those 2 crazy kids been?

You may have been asking yourself this question lately (or probably not). But rest assured we have not been sitting on our laurels! We have been in the midst of an all out project frenzy (with some good food and a Canada Day fireworks display in the middle somewhere...). Wren spent some quality time with her Grandparents yesterday so that we would have the luxury of getting a whole stack of work done (Thanks mom & dad!).

We entered the final frontier of our hardwood installation, leaving only the kitchen and stairs to be done. I am pretty sure we set a record time on the guest room, starting at 2 pm, and finishing at 6:30!

Here it is in all of it's subfloor glory, since we ripped the carpet out in our pre-Wren days you can imagine how annoying it has been to looking at this room.

Exactly 4.5 hours later we realised that either we completely misjudged the size of this room or we are unbelievably efficient with our wood. Looks like Sean has a work out later tonight by hauling it all back into the garage.

Since that only took up less than a day, what else have we been doing? That is where all of this comes in:

1 old oil painting (I bought it stictly for the frame):

2 more frames for the powder room, and this funky antique metal 3.

This crazy, scratched up old dresser that has more faux knobs than I ever imagined could fit on a piece of furniture

and this coffee table and yet another dresser that I thought had a very romantic shape to it.

Poor Sean is wondering how our 2 car garage has now become my "to do" warehouse. At least he is pretty understanding as I discovered a couple weeks ago when I found him hanging out in there on a velvet wingback chair smoking a cigar (which he does about once a month) and playing dart. Turns out he has decided that with all that furniture in there it is actually a pretty good hangout!

Even though we worked our butt's off on the hardwood we just couldn't miss a good fireworks show so we strolled downtown to my Sister's place at 10pm to get a good view at a park close by. All in all, a pretty successful day!