Being Unoriginal

I too have hopped onto the Ikea Rast hack bandwagon. Its just so hard not to give in to blogger peer pressure. That and a $30 pricetag for a dresser/nightstand. Which, get this, was only $10 each for me! Here's the whole shebang. Ikea Seattle was doing interviews in local homes to take pictures and ask us questions like what's your favorite style chair (everyone else had told them Henriksdal and I was all Tobias), what kind of room layouts would you like to see displayed, blah blah. It was actually really fun. J made his famous snickerdoodles which the Ikea gals were so thankful for (I guess other people don't feed their guests) and after just half an hour they were on their way to the next home. My biggest thing was patios. A lot of apartments if not most in Seattle are outfitted with balconies so rooms featuring that layout would be great. Anyway for allowing us to be a part of Ikea Seattle, they gave us $50 in an Ikea gift card! After debating what to get (a gazillion plants to murder with my black thumb) I thought it would be a worthy investment to get matching nightstands with more drawer space. A year ago I bought the Ikea Nordli for its slim profile. One wall had a window and the opposite wall had a desk and dresser so we opted for one nightstand, like so.

It worked out for a while but when our friend moved out of our extra room, we decided to convert his old room into an office/guest room. So, while J was at work and I should've been studying, I moved our desk and dresser into the guest room, which opened up an entire wall of space. I measured and voila, two Rast dressers would fit perfectly, leaving just enough room to the master bath door. One Ikea trip and two vodka lemonades later... 

Please don't mind the unfinished bottom edge of that large abstract art. It was clearly a diy... Anyway, I was debating between a bin pull or a more modern tab pull. Because the width of the dresser, putting two bin pulls per drawer was too busy, not to mention way too expensive for my bedroom budget. In the end I went with the Blankett handles from Ikea. 

Each pack was $9.99 and I needed just three packs. They don't look like much in the box but I decided to spray mine oil-rubbed bronze for a more industrial look. The end result? 

They repeat that simple edge on our new duvet. My first adult non-Ikea bedding! Getting all growns-up here, folks. It's actually a linen cotton blend so its super light weight but still keeps in all the warmth. 

Sorry for the crap photos. A camera is on my wishlist! Toodles.

Gallery Wall Is Up!

After two years of living here, I have made a LOT of holes in the walls. After patching some up and not wanting to do that again, here's what I've learned.

Be patient. Instead of rushing to hammer in a nail to put up that new frame, play around with everything first. Lay it all down on a large table or on the floor, like so.

Those large canvases are a diy, one inspired by the West Elm version. I wanted to make them cohesive, so they all use black, gray, white, and gold. I'm constantly adding more art as I find it/create it. 

Also, 3M tape! Their velcro strips hold up to seven pounds each for the medium size so no more holes! 

Look What I Found!

Apologies for the weeks of nothingness on the blog! Nothing's really happened on the home front except... Ikea came to my house! They came for a little interview and to take a look at my home. It was a team of three wonderful gals dressed in those not so wonderful yellow Ikea shirts. We ate J's famous snickerdoodles and went over some questions, took some pictures, had an amazing time, blah blah. They probably say it to everyone, but they said our home was the BEST! I'll take it.

Other than that, the real meaning of this post is to go over my lucky garage sale finds. I forgot to take a picture of the items as they were on the street, but this is one of them:

They were two for $20! The seller's grandma lived in Japan in the 40's and 50's. Everything is solid wood, although the finish on them was bad, the metal was tarnished, and some hardware (those decorative circles) was missing. I wanted to modernize it a bit so I took off the handles (there are tiny knobs on the circle plates in the middle) and the decorative circles and painted it charcoal. All those metal details were hammered in so I had to painstakingly paint around every edge. Each one took about 90 minutes. Below is when the paint was still drying. 

Good ole' after. 

Total cost for this project was $20 but if you don't have paint and a brush, those would cost you about $15. Have you found any bargains lately? 

DIY: Succulent Babies and Fake Mushrooms

I have had one succulent plant from last summer that sprouted three babies that started to hang over the pot on our patio, so I trimmed them off. I just made sure to keep the stems long on the succulent babies cause the stems will be what gets planted under the dirt. I originally wanted to put them in these speckled planters (the white round ones) from West Elm but I didn't have $89 to spend on a pot that was going to get filled with dirt.

So I just used an old thrifted fruit bowl I spruced up a few years ago by painting the rim a metallic golden bronze. It's almost the same mixture of paint I used on the top of the fake mushrooms I made a while back also. Here's what you'll need for those:

• wire 
• oven-bake clay and an oven, unless you are Daenerys Targaryen and have fire breathing dragon babies
• craft paint and a brush

Cut your wire to the length desired for your mushrooms. I did lengths between two and three inches. Make the stem of your mushrooms by creating rolls of clay (wiener style) around the wire. The point of the wire is to give this stem structure and to help it stand up in the ground. I left a little wire at the bottoms to stick further into the dirt later. Now created tiny saucers out of clay and attach them to your stems. Bake in the oven as stated on your specific clay product. When cool, paint! Wit and Whistle has a way better tutorial with full on pictures if needed which is where I first saw it ever. 

Now that you have trimmed succulent babies and fake mushrooms, fill your spruced up trash to treasure bowl with some rocks at the bottom for drainage, then dirt, then plants and mushrooms.

Here is the finished product which was completely free thanks to using what I already had. 

Clearly these are iPhone pics... since... you can see the reflection... 

Homemade Cat Toy

If you follow me on Instagram you may have seen the cat toy I made for Ellie a few weeks ago using some string and a 60 cents dowel. On my last trip to Michael's to pick up some more craft paint, I figured why not and grabbed another dowel to make a toy for a friends cat. Here's what you'll need:

 A dowel, string, and a drill and 3/16 drill bit. Measure about an inch down from the top of the dowel and drill a straight hole through the middle. Then, measure three feet of each string and thread through the hole. If you have trouble, tape the edges of the string to get it through the hole.

If you want,  you can paint the dowel too. I did navy blue, spring pasture, wedding cake white, and ballet slipper pink to create random width stripes. Tie the strings into a knot at the top, braid a few strings together, and knot all the bottoms of the strings to prevent fraying.

I'm a Gold Digger

Update: Be sure to check out the before and after pictures of the bedroom in the house tour here.

Okay so I'm not really a gold digger, but it's a better title than "I painted dresser knobs this weekend." Anyway, let's go back to the beginning. I was seriously lacking storage for my clothes and because almost everything in this apartment has masculine lines, I wanted to find a dresser to add that smidge of feminine touch. It needed to be simple, clean lines, but with curved legs. And antique. Dovetail drawers preferably, with character because we all know this apartment has too much Ikea already. Then, I found it. It was an hour away which wouldn't have been so bad had this not been winter (I know, I JUST painted the knobs even though I've had this half a year) and where we were going, there was snow. The seller even  had coyotes in her backyard/frontyard/sideyard. Just all around. But we trekked it up there in our sedan, got stuck in their newly landscaped grass lawn which was covered in snow so I don't know why they landscaped in the dead of winter, and somehow shoved placed the dresser in the trunk. I should have taken a picture but just know there were legs sticking out and lots of rope all over. This is the first picture of my beauty: 

In all honesty, I could have just gotten an Ikea dresser and added pretty hardware and legs but I wanted something different, old, mixed so here she was. I live in an apartment with carpet everywhere and have no sander so I sanded this thing by hand. First with 80 grit, then 150. I primed it all with my favorite primer, Zinsser Bulls Eye. 

Some of my favorite perks about Bulls Eye:

• water based makes for easy cleanup
• mold and mildew resistant, inhibits rust 
• blocks ALL stains, I mean ALL
• I've used it on glass, metal, ceramic, laminate, wood and this stuff STICKS. It sticks real good. :)

Then I just painted it with Behr in a custom, slightly modified color - "caviar" in matte. I did two coats to be extra safe, then sealed with polyurethane. Now, here's the gold digging part. I love gold. I used to hate it as a kid and now I can't get enough. It goes so well with dark colors like black, greys, navy blues which are also what I love and it adds a nice girly touch to my dresser too. So, I used some of this magic stuff:

The above is what it looked like halfway through my Rub N' Buff, with the bottom drawer and wheels still left and you can really tell the difference. 

I think I might redo them in an antique gold though, cause the gold leaf just looks super yellow sometimes. So far the only gold incorporated are the knobs on this dresser, the titles on the spines of some books, art, and my gold wood grain pillow.