It's Curtains for the Drapes

Finito!!  I am D-O-N-E with the Crate & Barrel knock-off Bella Porte Citrine drapes in our dining room.

My goal was to get the all of the panels hemmed before I went back to work last Thursday.  I submit this picture as evidence of the state of panel #4 on Thursday.

So close, yet so far away.

No biggie, I finished them Friday morning.  Labor Day weekend = 4 day weekend 'round these parts.  I went the laziest route possible- I used hem tape while the drapes were still hung on the rods.  It actually made it really nice. I found that the rod hanging over our sliding door is just a smidge lower than the rod hanging over the big window, so I was able to adjust the hems by about half an inch to get the just-touching-the-floor look.  Here they are now:

Ta-dahhh!!!

 Yeah, I know you can't really see the hems.  Let's fix that, eh?

That trellis pattern just floats my boat.

 There you are!  Good little hem.  What, extreme close up, you say?

Boom!

 Not bad for hem tape, if I do say so myself.  If you ever wondered what type of seamstress I am, terrible/lazy is your answer.  And for gratuity's sake, one more shot of my much-more-funned-up dining room.

View from the kitchen!

 You can't tell, but I've Spackled and sanded the holes from when our drapery rods were hung lower.  Now I just need to get some paint on those puppies, which I have been putting off because our matching paint is in a 5-gallon bucket and I hate trying to pour paint out of those bad boys.  Oh well, the drapes cover the holes, so I can just admire them and pretend there's nothing that needs to be painted!

Little Fixes

This past week found us finally getting around to fixing a few niggling details in the living and dining rooms.

Piano before, with mirror leaned on top.  (Read more about how the piano came to live with us.)

Don't you dare mess up the finish on that piano, mirror!

Piano after, with mirror hung from the wall.

Yeah, the mirror's a smidge too close to the piano.  But it's a start.

Crystal display hutch before, being crowded by the *awesome!* new drapes.  (Read more about making the Crate & Barrel Bella Porte Citrine knock-off drapes.)

I wish you could tell how cloistered that hutch is.

Crystal display hutch after, having been shifted about three inches away from the corner.

Breathing room!

Another pic with terrible lighting, just for fun.

Drapes before, being a steely blue-gray.

Muted and not-quite-going.

Drapes after, having switched to a fun turquoise velour.  (They seem to have mysteriously disappeared from Ikea's website.)

Turquoise funs it up in here.

You may have also noticed that the area rug we had in that room is missing.  We still love the rug, but once we switched pianos, there were just too many large, dark, brown items in the room.  It's chillin' in our garage right now.  We're thinking since it's an indoor/outdoor rug, it'll be great if we build the covered outdoor living space we've been pondering for next year's project list.

So the next steps will be to patch, sand, and paint the holes from our dining room drapery rods before we raised them about a foot to maximize their impact and match the height of the rod in the living room.  And hem the curtains in the dining room.  If my contract is approved (cross your fingers!), then I will be back to working a contracted schedule on Thursday.  Think I can get that taken care of before then?

Let The Sun Shine In

Project Fun-Things-Up-In-Here got a major shot in the arm.  Well, in the window.  As in new drapes for the dining room!  (You can read about my mission to bring a little fun to our house here and the plans for the drapes here.)

Big kudos to my Mom for helping me with the sewing.  On a 90 degree day.  In her second-floor sewing room with a southern exposure.  And no air-conditioning.  (She loves me.)

Yay for mommies!

First we had to cut the panels to size.  Steve and I had raised our drapery rods to 95",  and we needed to leave some extra for the rod pocket, and then a little more for me to hem them to exact length after they were hung up in the dining room.  We ended up unrolling the fabric on the floor in my parents' foyer because it was the only place we could get 105" of flat surface area.  After we snipped the first panel, we just used that as our cutting guide for the other three panels.

That's a lotta yellow.

The trellis pattern made all of our hemming and cutting really easy because we just followed the patterns.  Lucky for us, the repeats were frequent enough that we were able to create panels that followed the exact same patterns.  Once we drug the panels upstairs, we needed to make sure that we put the rod pockets on the same side for each panel so that the pattern would appear aligned across both windows.  So, I took a picture of the pattern for the "top" of each panel.  Naturally.

This side up.

We noticed later that the edging actually had arrows that we could have used, but since they'd shortly be ironed over for hemming anyway... whatever.

When Mom helps me with sewing projects, it usually means that I do the ironing (the grunt work) and she operates the machine (the scary part).  It works pretty well for us.  It's *definitely* faster than doing it all by yourself.

Here's the first fold for the side of the panel.  Since the fabric was 55" wide and I wanted my panels to be at least 50" wide, I just used the color to guide how deep to make my first crease with the iron.

Follow the yellow brick(?) road.

Then we used the pattern again to iron our second crease.  See what I mean about how helpful the stinking pattern is?  Plus the fabric ironed like a dream- nice and crisp.  We also liked how thick the side hems are.  Mom and I thought it'd look more professional with thicker hems.

Dreamweaver.

From there it was all Mom's job. (And it was my job to get all up in her business to take pictures.)

Nice job, Mom!

After we had hemmed all of the sides, we repeated the process along the top of each panel, leaving about 3" for the rod pocket.  We didn't line these drapery panels because a) I'm lazy, b) did I mention it was 90 degrees that day? and c) Steve and I are the type of people that like privacy sheers but still like light, so lining seemed unnecessary.  We also left the bottom unhemmed so that I can hem them to the exact length I want once they're hung.  Here's two of the panels folded and draped on the bannister in my parents' house.  They are sooo long!  The rod pockets are laying on the floor behind the bannister rail.

Cheery yellow in bulk.

And then my sweet husband hung the panels that night while I was out to dinner with friends.  Love that man!  Unfortunately, my pictures don't do them justice.

Hello, drapes!

I was surprised how little extra fabric drags on the floor.  Like maybe two inches worth.  That'll make hemming them super-easy.  And gotta love Ikea's Lill sheers.  Less than $10 on sheers for that whole room.

Love it!

I am especially happy with how they turned out.  I was a smidge worried that they'd be overwhelmingly yellow, but the charming lattice design makes them fit right in.  Although they surely make a statement.  They totally Funned-Things-Up in our dining room.  Now I just have to get around to hemming the bottoms....  One project begets another, right??

But still, I've pretty much stuck a fork in this project.  How do you like them apples, Crate & Barrel?!

Hello Bella!

What light through yonder window breaks?  It's happy yellow window treatments, obviously!

So our dining room drapes.  A little stodgy.  Not much fun.  You know what *is* fun?  Window treatments from Crate and Barrel.

It's gonna be a bright, bright sunshiney day!

The Bella Porte 96" drapes in Citrine.  And for a paltry $140 per panel, they were mine!!

Kidding, kidding.  We'd need to buy four panels.  $560 on drapes before taxes?  I think not.

But sheesh, I love the look of these drapes.  And I can't help but think they would look so bright and soft and modern and fun(!) without assaulting your eyeballs with color or overpowering the country-chic vibe going on in that dining room.  I wondered if I could find similar fabric; you know, maybe try to make them myself (read: with lots of my mom's help).  I turned to any internet savvy person's best friend: the google.  And what do you know, I found the fabric!

Dwell Studio's Bella Porte in Citrine.

This Bella doesn't constantly bite its lip.

Good news:  I found it!
Bad news: It's designer fabric.  $$$

I considered some other geometric prints in a similar shade of golden mustard yellow, but didn't find anything I liked near as well as this fabric.  So I decided to just stick with the program and try to get the fabric I really loved at the smallest possible cost.  The best deal I found was from Fabric.com, and even then it was listed as $18.98 per yard.  Not exactly budget-friendly, considering I'd need 11ish yards (12ish if I wanted to leave wiggle room for boo-boos or have leftover fabric for pillow covers or the like).  And try as I might, I couldn't find any coupons online.  Just purchasing the fabric would end up being about $230 before tax!  Still cheaper than Crate and Barrel, but not cheap enough to spring for it. 

So in the meantime I signed up for Fabric.com's email list, hoping for an amazing coupon.  I also visited Crate and Barrel to see the drapes in person.  My aim was to make sure I loved them as much in person as I did in my head, and to see what their construction was like- thinking that if I was going to make two sets of these curtain panels, I'd want them to look as Crate & Barrel-ish as possible.  Yeah, I loved them in person.  And yeah, they looked pretty easy to make.  Too easy to pay five hundred sixty ever-loving dollars for, that's for certain.  

After nearly a month of watching for an email coupon, I got the one I was waiting for.

Twenty-five percent off purchases of $150 or more.  That's me, baby!  I went ahead and pulled the trigger.  That coupon knocked almost $60 off my total!  $185 for four 96" curtain panels I can do.  It's still a smidge over $46 per panel, which makes me cringe a little if I think about it too hard, but sometimes when you are totally in love, the money is worth it.

That means that I am saving about $445 (before tax) to make these babies rather than buy them.  Ahhh, that eases my guilt a little.

The fabric arrived yesterday and I love it more in person.  As if that was possible.  I can't wait to start working on these drapes!  Oh wait, there's a paint can with my name on it out in the garage.  I guess I'll wait to start working on the drapes until after I'm done painting trim outside!

Decorating ADD

I feared this day would come.

I am a visual person.  However, I find it difficult to visualize things I haven't seen before.  Hence, Pinterest is my decorating savior.  It's so much less likely that you'll be unhappy with the results if you can see a picture of it beforehand.  And so far, I have been quite happy with how most of the projects around our house are turning out.  We've been in this house for over 10 months and I haven't wanted to change or get rid of any of the improvements we've done so far.

If this seems unremarkable to you, that's good.  Count yourself among the lucky, the normal.

I have long accused my mom of having decorating ADD.  When I was in my late teens, my mom bought a couch.  And after it had been in our home for a day, she decided she didn't like it.  So they got a new couch.  About 15 months later, she changed the couch again.  Late-teens-me just couldn't understand why she needed to keep changing couches.  Late-teens-me wouldn't really care what a couch looked like, so long as it was comfortable.  If you ask her, my mom will swear up and down that it was really only two couches involved in this scenario, not three.  I remember three.  Whatever, it's beside the point.  Since then, I have teased her about having decorating ADD.  And I promised myself that I would never be so fickle.

Famous last words.  Just like countless women before me, I am turning into my mother.

And in offense to late-teens-me, I kind of like it.

A couple of weeks ago I was in the kitchen getting a soda out of the fridge.  I looked out into the living room where Steve was sprawled on the couch with the dogs, laughing at an episode of Burn Notice.  I looked into our dining room where Steve's modeling supplies were spread out on the dining table.  And it occurred to me that even though I love the way both of those room are looking, they feel too... old.  A little too formal and stiff, somehow.   When we are home, yes we are quiet and introverted, but we also make fart jokes.  We will lure the dogs down the hallway and then jump out at them when they least expect it just to watch them startle (Indy loves this game- it's like the canine version of peek-a-boo to him).  We've been having 30 second dance parties since before Liz Lemon made it cool.  We wear things around the house that are totally unacceptable in public.  We deliver terrible one-liners with the sole purpose of trying to gross each other out.  We make up songs and sing them loudly (read: badly).  We work on models and laugh at TV shows and let our dogs up on the couch.

Listen, despite our introverted need to be away from society to recharge our mental and emotional batteries, we are weird, nerdy, crass, vibrant, fun-loving people.  And the main part of our house feels like that nondescript guy from your Tuesday/Thursday ride-share lives there with his nondescript wife.  Our decorating would tell you that we are people who value a calm, cozy, sophisticated space.  But there is nothing in either of those rooms to signal how much FUN we have in this house doing nothing in particular but being in it together.

It was a revelation to me.  Pinterest had helped me identify decor and styles I loved, but it didn't help me bring the character of our relationship to the space.  And that's half the fun of going to other peoples' houses, seeing what their spaces say about the people who live there.  Dang.

Fun and whimsy are a little overdue.  But since both of those rooms are moving on towards "done," I don't want to change out anything major.  And I definitely don't want to spend much money.  Steve is generous towards me about finances, but I don't want him to feel like he needs to cut me off before I impulse-buy a fainting couch (Betty Draper, much?).  So I think the easiest way to up the fun factor without breaking the bank will be with textile sand accents.  Pillows, drapes, some kitsch.  The wheels are already turning....

Changing your mind is fun!!

Dining Room: Move-In to Present

Ah, the dining room.  That place where we're supposed to eat our food.  Anyone else tend to find themselves forever eating at the breakfast bar or on the couch while watching TV, and occasionally dusting the dining room table?  It's kind of embarrassing how little we sit at my beloved craigslist table, since it's what kicked off our entire kitchen cabinet redo.  Oh well, I like it even if I don't use it.

Ooh, shiny.

Upgrading the dining room was a pretty easy transition for us.  We only really made three improvements in here, and one of them is *technically* in the kitchen.  Everything else was just decorating- and most of that with items we already had.

First improvement: paint.  Just like the rest of the main parts of the house, it is painted with Sherwin Williams' Kilim Beige up to the ceiling line.  I like to leave the ceiling unpainted in rooms where the ceiling's vaulted.  It's a visual trick- it makes the ceiling look even higher and the room brighter and more spacious.

Can't see the line, can you Russ?

The second improvement made a world of difference for me.  See the faux-cut crystal and brass oh-so-90s chandelier?  Both him and his little brother who was hanging in our entry got the heave ho.  Well technically not the heave ho.  They got the craigslist treatment.  It took me almost a month but I finally got someone to buy both of them for $50.  I'm still incredulous that someone would pay $50 for them, but to each his own, right?

Let's see how much our Beanie Babies are worth on ebay while we watch Friends.

So we got to switch them out with something a little less offensive.  Since I was still so in loooove with our distressed black bar-height craigslist table, it kind of set the tone for decorating.  My dishes are painted with Tuscan-themed fruits, so it only seemed natural to bring the Tuscan theme from our last house's kitchen to a whole new level.

Enter a 20% off coupon from Lowe's.  Soon enough, our lighting situation had been upgraded.

Gotta love a chandy.

The chain on this baby is still loose and untamed for one key reason- the chandelier isn't centered over our dining room table.  We figured at some point we'd swag it over, but until now we've been lazy. (Just keepin' it real.)

Third improvement: more paint.  In the kitchen, actually.  That breakfast bar comes out into the dining room, and we knew two of our bar-height chairs would be pushed right up against it, so it was super-important when we painted and stained the kitchen cabinets that we do a really good job on the breakfast bar to keep the look seamless.

Double the distressing.

Everything else was easy-peasy.  Not to say that it's "done" (to Steve's chagrin).  But here's where we're at now.

My absolute favorite thing about our dining room (aside from my aforementioned devotion to the craigslist table) is a hutch that Steve's mom made several years back.  It fits perfectly with the country-chic-meets-Tuscany vibe that's happening in there.

Hutch-a-palooza.

The distressed matte black and the ocher bead board make my heart sing.  Aside from our plates on the plate rack, we just keep some of our cute kitchen-y odds and ends on this hutch.  So not only do I love the hutch, but I love the stuff in the hutch.

A Partylite pillar candle holder from one of Steve's aunts, a ceramic bird that I got with my sister-in-law, a bottle of wine that was a Christmas gift, the gorgeous Fitz & Floyd serving platter that belongs to my mother-in-law.

The mandolin that one of Steve's grandpas made in his younger years.

Lemons (faux, but of course) in a pretty beverage dispenser.  I do love me some lemons.

The marble rolling pin that belonged to Steve's other grandfather.

The gorgeous Crate & Barrel wine glasses we got for Christmas, silk artichokes, our inherited set of chopsticks.

Even with cramming that hutch full of kitsch, we still had more things that needed to be stored or displayed.  Enter stage left, my old friend craigslist.  I have long had a small set of crystal (a wedding present from dear friends of the family) and nowhere to display it.  I also had more casseroles and cake pans than kitchen cabinet space.  As usual, I prowled craigslist until something wonderful popped up.  A small natural hutch from Ikea in like new condition for $40.  Yes please.

It's knotty.

And of course, there's always something unfinished, right?  Oh look, random box of stuff on the floor, perhaps?

Ten months after move in?  You bet.

How about a bookshelf that didn't fit anywhere else in the house?  Sure, why not.

Fire trucks on a ladder shelf.  Get it??

Eventually there will be a sideboard on the wall where the bookshelf lives- Steve agreed to make me one for the additional small appliances we've managed to accumulate since moving in here.  I found this guy at Pier 1.  Pretty sure we could make something similar for WAY less than $599.

Too sexy for its price tag.

Pretty much everything else in our dining room, we already owned before moving in.   Aside from the cheapie display cabinet, the curtains were our only real expense.  After a couple of months of having our neighbors stare into our windows while I was indecisive, I settled on 96" drapes from Lowes that we modified to create a header for a more formal look and hemmed to skim the floor (thanks to my mom's patience and sewing machine).

Gratuitous craigslist table action.

So that's where we're at with the dining room right now.  Next stop: get that box unpacked and steam the carpet.  Maybe then we'll eat in the dining room...?