new purchase--karlstad

guess what's on its way?

recovering old ottomans

in my efforts to rid the living room of brown, i decided to take on my first "upholstery" project. you see, i have two brown hassocks that i have had for..over five years. i don't even remember where we got them, but they were purchased for my (fifth!?) bedroom redo when i lived with my parents. 

let's just say their pseudo-microfiber fabric had seen better days.

i went to hobby lobby in search of some fabric that would blend with my soon-to-be calm grey/blue living room and couldn't find anything. but i had an idea, and went to a crafty aisle. 

i snagged 4 t-shirts for about $10 total (with coupons) and went home to try it out. 

and guess what? grey's totally their color and i correctly guessed that they wore an XL!

so, after some excited cutting, tucking, stapling and hammering, i had two beautiful, clean ottomans to go in my future anti-brown-couch living room.

eh?

interior doors: update

yowza, it's been awhile. last time, i was in the midst of taking off all of my doorknobs, as you could see from my sneak-peek "what-am-i-looking-at" instagram photo:

10 doors. 20 knobs. 80 pieces. sheesh! well, let me tell you, i am quite the doorknob expert now. i never really knew the mechanics of how they actually worked. but they're easy peasy.

i sanded each piece (with 400 grit paper so they didn't scratch), lined them up on some cardboard boxes (latches and all), sprayed them with rust-oleum universal metallic paint & primer in satin nickel, and let them dry.

sadly this step lasted for over a week because i didn't have the energy to put them all back on. oops. so, we temporarily had some very un-private bathrooms.

but! while the doorknobs were off and out of the way, i ran to home depot (my new lowes--because it's closer) and grabbed some off the shelf white paint. 

disclaimer: cheap paint is not a "good deal". i

 had to make a second trip to return my $17 crap and ended up going with $30+ Behr.

just FYI, we painted our interior doors (for the most part) when we moved in 3 years ago, and they were naaassty.

 

look at the difference in whites. ugh! but look how pretty they are now:

(sorry for the weird photo--the lighting in our rooms is less than great, and i wanted you to be able to see the sparkly nickel color)

so, that's my $35 interior door update. not bad considering new knobs would have cost at least $100.