Runaway October

I have a con­fes­sion. I can be quite a slob.

The evi­dence: Exhibit A — My craft room, The SMOR (sewing machine oper­a­tions room), about 24 hours ago.

When we bought this house, we knew one of the rooms would be used for hob­bies. Unfor­tu­nately, we had been using the din­ing room table pre­vi­ously so we had no fur­ni­ture to set up in there. About the time we moved, I was given a very nice cut­ting table and sewing machine desk. They came from a fam­ily friend who had passed away. Sadly, she was a heavy smoker and smoked in her hobby room. The tables just ooze nicotine.

My father in law con­vinced me that I shouldn’t try to paint them, as they’re cov­ered in melamine. While I’m fairly cer­tain I would be able to repaint them, new fur­ni­ture would be eas­i­est. Of course I decided this after try­ing to clean one of the tables with bleach (Bleck!) and ruin­ing a per­fectly good skirt.

So I struck a deal with my hus­band. If I clean the craft room, could we build new fur­ni­ture for the room? He agreed, poor sap.

So this is where it stands cur­rently. Not “clean” per se, but every­thing has been gone through and sorted and I found all kinds of stuff I had for­got­ten about! Score. My M.O. was to grab what I needed, take it down stairs to craft, bag/box up what­ever was left and toss it in the SMOR when I was done. Bad bad. I had at least 15 empty boxes when I was done, and dou­ble that amount of bags to recycle

(I still need to vac­uum, obviously.)

This is the table I want we’ll be mak­ing, free plans cour­tesy of Knock Off Wood. It’ll go well with the IKEA Expe­dit book­case that’s in there currently.

I know that if I had a vehi­cle right now, me and the boys would be ter­ror­iz­ing Home Depot and Lowe’s. I’ll keep you posted on our progress. I’m super excited to make my own craft fur­ni­ture, and for so much less than Pot­tery Barn too!

Not too long ago we bought two sets of the Svala table and chairs from IKEA for our “play­room”. I was kinda bummed they came unfin­ished but then got excited that I could do what­ever I wanted with them. I mean, who doesn’t dream of this per­fectly coör­di­nated play­room that looks like it came straight out of a Pot­tery Barn or Montes­sori guidebook?

Svala from Ikea

The kids had dif­fer­ent ideas, as usual. Within a few days they had scrib­bled all over the top with crayons and who-knows-what. Even the table legs had been col­ored on. I’m totally psy­ched with the cre­ativ­ity com­ing from these two lit­tle boys. Psy­ched. Too bad they didn’t con­sult me first because their art­work totally didn’t go with my Pot­tery Barn color schemes.

Daisy Dreams lam­i­nated cotton

I recently came across a tuto­r­ial for an oil­cloth table cover from Twig & This­tle, that I thought was a great idea for the boys’ work­space. I had some oil­cloth that I picked up from my favoritest fab­ric coop but it was very girly.

Then it occured to me that I had a yard of chalk­cloth in my stash. That would be per­fect! It’s fairly water resis­tant for spills and such, and I could whip out the chalks when the kids were bored. Score!

Kathleen’s tuto­r­ial included adorable lit­tle scal­lops around the edge, which I thought would be okay if done in a nice manly color, like black

chalk­cloth. But man, chalk­cloth is hard to work with. I didn’t have quite enough to cover both tables sep­a­rately so I did one cover for both tables pushed together.

I ended up just hav­ing straight edges with a lit­tle bit of dec­o­ra­tive stitch­ing.  I think it turned out pretty good and the kids have throughly tested it. Heck I even ended up eat­ing on it last night because we had a HUGE crowd to feed last night.

Chalk­cloth Table Topper

Pretty Col­ors

This is seri­ous business…

(Declan was still napping)

So if you’re in need of some­thing sim­i­lar head on over to Twig & This­tle for the exact instruc­tions. Or you can check out Oil­cloth Addict for a no sew cus­tom chalk­cloth table top­per, also.

Okay… so it isn’t much, but hey. Before it was just a blank wall.

Garage Entry

The coat hooks are from Ikea that I spray painted red yes­ter­day. The lit­tle Sim­plify sign I picked up at Hobby Lobby and was near my gar­den tub in the old house. And the orga­nizer cab­i­net is from Pot­tery Barn that we received as a wed­ding present not long before we moved so this is the first time it’s been hung. I’m always hes­i­tant to make these cute lit­tle group­ings because I have so few dec­o­ra­tive accents that I don’t want to use them all up at once. But this worked out nicely.

Not bad for 30 min­utes work, eh? (And I think it’s all pretty much level too!)