Before and After

I've been a busy bee around these parts! Let me show you what I've been up to over the past few days!

First, Roger's uncle Steve gave us this bench when we first moved out here last year. He had a bunch of furniture and stuff to get rid of, and we had literally nothing, so we took it and have been stowing it for over a year. It's mostly been used as a surface for holding boxes up until now.

Basically I decided that I would start making our house into a home over break. The problem is that we still don't have a bunch of money to go out and buy furniture. We're doing okay, don't get me wrong, but when you move across the country with nothing but a mattress, it costs a lot of money and takes some time to re-accumulate the amount of stuff you take for granted when you've been somewhere for a while.

Anyway, I decided to reupholster the bench. I was intimidated by the idea at first, but it's really not hard at all. You just need a staple gun, fabric, and something to pry out old staples with. And some time. It takes a while.

I found some nice, slightly funky but classy fabric. To complete the look, I decided to also paint the legs, put on some cutesy trim, and use mismatched buttons for the top. The buttons are what's taking forever. I'm almost done threading them through the fabric and cushioning, but each one takes a few minutes. After I get them all threaded, I'll have to secure the cords underneath to get that nice dimpled look on top, but you can see how it's going to turn out:

So yay for that!

Even better, though, is that I decided to finally do something with the front entry way of our house. Until today, it's just been a coat rack with some boxes that we didn't know what to do with. We still don't really have anywhere to put the boxes, since we don't have any cabinets or shelves to store things in/on, but I hid them somewhere else and went to town on the front room. Here it is in its "before" state:

I guess I should note that we moved that big table and chairs in from outside for Thanksgiving. It's really more of an "outside" table, and we've used it for grilling up until now, but we needed more seating/serving space for guests, so we brought it in and it hasn't made it back outside yet. Anyway, here, look at the after shot:

I haven't decided what to put on the wall above the chairs yet, but it's sure crying out for something. I might be adding more snowflakes to the ceiling as time goes on, but what I really want to do is paint. I have all these really great ideas for painting, but I haven't gotten the go-ahead from our land lady yet. I think she'll be okay with it... I hope so! I'm getting really excited about it, so I hope it works out!

Well, I'm tired, for some reason. I think I'm going to sit in my new sitting area and watch TV on my computer or something.

Happy Holidays to everyone!