The Tiniest Entryway Ever

I wrote a post almost at the beginning of my blogging about a little piece of IKEA furniture I repurposed for my entryway. It has served me and my husband well over the last few years, mostly because it gave us a way to sit and store at the same time in our tiny entryway.

Over time, I've noticed how much it gets in the way of getting in and out of the house. The whole landing inside our actual condo measures only 3.5' x 3.5', so anytime more than one person wants to enter, someone has to step totally behind the door or is forced to walk on the super narrow portion of my winding staircase. Sorry to all you visitors who have thought that you were going to tumble to your deaths.

So, I finally decided to do a little redecorating. Let me tell you that it's not easy to find furniture that will fit in that area. I went through dozens of side tables that both did or didn't fit the measurements of the hallway. Plus, I like to have stuff that is unique, but that doesn't cost a fortune. I at least have found some non-obvious retail sites in the last several months that kind of fit the bill. 

Check out the before...

...and the after...

I can't bear to get rid of the trunk yet, so it has found a home on the back landing of our condo.

Here are a few resources for those that are looking for decorating options that aren't the typical retail options.

• Ballard Designs
• Home Decorators Collection (yes, this is a Home Depot company, but it's still a pretty decent resource)
• Jonathan Adler for accessories - he has a very specific look, but I love it.
• Global Views is a wholesaler that we used when we were working with a decorator. One great thing about working with a decorator is the insane amount of money that you can save off of retail. Oddly, hiring a decorator can pay for itself just based on the furniture discount if you are planning on making a few major purchases.

New Life - Repurposing Old (Ikea!) Furniture - REDUX!

Hang on. Repurposing old Ikea furniture again? Didn't we just go through this? It doesn't seem so long ago that I dreamed up this whole scheme to start this blog and repaint and old Ikea chest to make it new again. But now we're back in the same place.


See, we finally decided to redecorate our office. No more baby-boy-themed paint scheme with a mishmash of cheap furniture. Now we have a real desk, a cool paint color, fancy chairs, actual non-ugly light fixtures and table. New! That's all fine and dandy, but where are we going to put all those books we had accumulated over the years? There was no room left in our office for all our books. Our one tall and one short Billy bookcase from Ikea were still serving a very real purpose but didn't fit the space anymore. So, one bookcase got shuttled off to the attic, and one earned a place in our guest bedroom as a functional decorative piece.

Oh, but Billy, you're kind of boring, and your natural finish doesn't match the room I'm putting you in. So let's hit those paint cans again. I have to be honest: even though the room is very clearly a homemade Holly Hobby piece, I'm totally in love with it. It's the only room in the house where I picked all the furniture, color, and decor myself, and I think of it as MY room. MY work in progress. The room is a deep grape color (crazy, I know) with black and white accents modern and baroque accents, so I wanted to keep with the theme and paint the bookshelf white with black accents. 



To be as thrifty and environmentally friendly as possible, I used the same paint I had purchased from the last Ikea refinishing project two years ago. So, I dug out the old paint I used last time to paint my furniture and scraped off the icky solid layer of paint that kept the rest of it relatively fresh. After sanding and cleaning, I painted the craptastic chipboard veneer and even that terribly flimsy chipboard backing that slides into the grooves on the back of the shelves. You know, the one that actually you could pop out just by giving it a gentle nudge? 

In my thriftiness, I didn't really calculate how much paint I would need. It was barely enough - I didn't even paint the underside of one of the shelves. (Yes, friends, if you come visit, I officially give you permission to inspect the shelf and mock me.)

Keeping with the modern baroque theme I'd already started going with in the room, I chose a stencil from Michael's that mimicked the pattern on the bedspread in the room:

I toyed with the idea of taking the design across the sides, top, and even the back of the shelf. However, I planned to put decorative items on top of the refinished pieces, so it didn't make sense to take all that time stenciling the top. Also, since I'm bad at editing my book collection, I figured that no one would ever see the back of the shelf. So, I just took the stencil up the side in black stencil paint.

Why is it off center, you ask? Well, in my brain, it made sense that it would be slightly closer to the front of the bookshelf so you can see it, and I thought it would look fine since there is a little divot on the back of the shelf to prevent it from tipping forward. Like I said, it made sense in my brain. Don't judge me too harshly


After finishing the stenciling, the paint took f-o-r-e-v-e-r to dry. The stencil paint I purchased had a dense, dry, powdery texture, which gave the stencil a nice antique-y look. However, the high-gloss paint that I used as the base probably extended the drying time by a lot. On the paint, it tells you to let it set for 24 hours. After 3 days, it was still rubbing off with a touch of the finger. I thought I was going to have to scrap the whole thing - and let me tell you how excited I would have been about that - but luckily, it finally set after almost an entire week.


Add a few vintage books, some adorable little foo dogs from west elm, and voila! A new decorative bookshelf is born. Okay, it's not that impressive, but at least it looks different from how it started and it matches the room. That's all I ask for.

Materials used in this project: 

• Old Billy bookshelf from Ikea
• Gloss oil paint
• Stencil from Michael's
• Stencil brush
• Masking tape
• A place where the bookcase can dry for days on end since you can't move the stupid thing for fear of smudging the stencil.

Cover Up!

As it may be becoming clear, I am sometimes reluctant to spend money on furniture. Especially if I'm not convinced that I like something, I tend to look for the cheapest solution. Sometimes, I'm stuck in a state of limbo since I assume I'll upgrade in the future; I just don't want to upgrade right now.

This week, it's yet another piece of IKEA furniture that I'm trying to cover up. This time, it's really a cover up. Literally.

I have a television in my bedroom that I would love to get rid of. It's insanely heavy (Sony likes to make 'em solid) and kind of unsightly compared to sleek new LCDs and plasmas. The only problem? It still works great, it's bulky, and it needs something to sit on. Enter the IKEA side table as TV stand:

Blech. Double blech to all the crap that is on the shelves underneath the TV. Crappy DVD player, essential but ugly DVR, old N64 for MarioKart entertainment, and sewing basket for all my stupid odds and ends. Messy, no?

Since all the other wooden furniture in the bedroom is black, I thought covering it up in black fabric might be a good way to make it blend a little better. (Yes, the image above already has the fabric covering on it. The TV was too heavy just to move for the picture.)

I measured the table and bought a length of black duck cloth that covered the entire circumference of the unit plus a little extra for the top. From past experience, I made myself a little diagram to ensure that I didn't screw up the measurements too much:

Then, I marked the cloth with a dressmaker's pencil and cut the cloth along the lines I had marked using a good sharp pair of sewing scissors.


Now comes the hard part for those of us who weren't raised to make clothes for ourselves. I hemmed the bottom and side edges of the cloth with a 3/4" hem by finishing the edge with a zigzag stitch and then hemming a straight stitch hem. Then, I sewed the top cover piece to the side covering leaving one end open. A key move here was basting the fabric. The four images below all show the top fabric basted to the side fabric.

Lastly, I sewed on snaps to fasten the front flap to the overhang I left. I am bad with snaps. See my key lessons below for more on that topic.

The end result doesn't look fantastic, but it looks better than having all my crap exposed:


Plus, there was a huge bonus feature! I built in the snaps because I assumed that I would have to unsnap the cover every time I wanted to use the satellite box/DVR. It turns out that the duck cloth is a loose enough weave that I don't need to unfasten the fabric to use the equipment. Woo!

A few lessons learned on this particular project:

• Always give yourself a little extra room when working with fabric. It tends to scoot around on you.
• Basting fabric (pinning two pieces together where you want to sew them) prior to committing needle to fabric is critical. If I hadn't done that, I would have had one very uneven cover since I would have run out of fabric before everything was covered.
• Snaps are easy to screw up, even though they look simple. Make sure you match up what goes where before you start sewing, because there are a multitude of ways to screw up the orientation. I didn't do this and literally had to resew snaps 6 times. (Quite a feat considering I only had 4 snaps to sew.)
• Account for the fact that there will be gaps in the fabric unless you plan to cover them up somehow. That's why all shirts are designed with overlap where fabrics connect. I don't why, but I assumed that if every fabric seam was straight, there wouldn't be any wood peeking through. Oops.
  

Materials used for this project:

• Tape Measure
• Black duck cloth: 2 yards
• Dressmaker's pencil
  
• Sewing Scissors (sharp ones)
• Sewing Machine
• Black Thread
• Needle
• Snaps

New Life - Repurposing Old (IKEA!) Furniture

One of the first projects that arose from my new creative spring was to solve a practical problem.

My condo in Chicago is on the 3rd floor with a landing on the 2nd floor. I love having this second floor area because it gives a little rest stop on the way up the stairs and a place to take off my shoes. (Being Asian, I don't wear shoes inside the house.) However, for 3 years, this created a crazy mess of shoes on my landing, and there was nowhere to sit. Disaster.

So, I decided to clean up my act. I stored my shoes in a separate location upstairs. Great! Check!

Now, all I had to do was find a bench that would fit the landing area. You've all gone furniture shopping, right? I browsed a LOT of different online stores, and they were all too big, not the right color, or just downright expensive.

Then I discovered that the solution was right in front of me. I had an old chest from IKEA that I used as my first coffee table right after college that was sitting unused in my office. It turned out to be the perfect size to fit in that area. It didn't really match the area since it's just a plain IKEA maple-colored finish, and honestly, I found it pretty ugly, but it certainly was more appealing than paying $300 for a new bench that still didn't really match.


Then, I thought that maybe since I wasn't paying squat for the item itself, I could just repaint it to suit my color scheme. I happened to have the paints from when I moved in three years ago (a Tiffany blue door with white walls), so I figured I could get my local paint provider to mix some new paint in order to refinish the furniture. But I still had to choose a design.

I combed websites for ideas, but everything I came upon seemed too complicated for a first-time furniture painter (Martha Stewart) or just not quite right for that area (floral stencils). But as I was looking through an old Martha Stewart Living that boasted 75 "Pretty and Practical Decorating Ideas," I came across this image from a woman's home in NYC.

I loved the pattern in what appears to be some sort of fireplace grate replacement. So I decided to replicate that design on my bench.

First, I went and bought the paint. Two quarts of Benjamin Moore Satin Impervo Alkyd Low Lustre Enamel set me back $50. (The guy at the store told me that oil-based was the only way to go for high-traffic areas.) I bought some 3M masking tape knowing that masking off the grid would be easiest way to recreate the look. They had two types of tape - normal blue painter's tape and painter's tape for delicate surfaces. Despite the fact that it was only available in the 1" width (I had wanted 0.75" for a smaller, more delicate grid), I went with the delicate surfaces tape since it was less likely to pucker and allow paint to seep under it.

Next, a prototype of the pattern. If you look closely at the image, the block pattern is a square that repeats. I created a half-scale version of the pattern in order to make sure I could recreate it and so the measurements would be easier when I masked the actual furniture. Each square would be 13" wide, which allowed for 3 repeats of the pattern on the top of the bench, and 2 plus a little extra on the front.


Finally, I started working with the actual furniture. I lightly sanded the furniture to give the paint something to stick to. This was messy - I recommend doing this outside or in a garage or somewhere that's very easy to clean. The dust was really fine and looked kind of like baby powder.

I painted the chest with three coats of paint. I didn't use any primer, which is probably why it took three coats to cover the wood color. For anyone who doesn't paint a lot, a quart goes a REALLY long way, so there was plenty to spare. I didn't sand between coats, which didn't seem to make a difference. I used cheap brushes and didn't clean them with thinner or mineral spirits between coats. That was probably a mistake. Every time I started a new coat, the old, dried paint from the brush would flake off in tiny pieces and screwed up the smooth surface of the paint. Oops. There were two important lessons in here for me:

1. Don't start with the side that is most visible.
2. Things will never be perfect when you do them the first time. Especially if you're impatient. But usually, it turns out okay anyway.
   

Next, I masked off the pattern onto the bench. This was harder than it looked. I screwed it up a few times because I calculated the number of inches incorrectly when I put three of the squares together. It only took one coat of the blue because the white served as a nice base. Plus, I daubed it on pretty thickly. The "don't start with the visible side" lesson also applies here. I forgot to really push down on the tape to seal it the first time.

8 hours later, I peeled off the masking tape to reveal the painted pattern.

Lastly, I used a tiny 8 ounce can of Minwax clear gloss polyurethane to protect the paint job since it's in a high-traffic area. Plus, since a bunch of stuff I own has metal in it, I think this will help with any of those stupid gray marks that always seem to appear when metal and paint come within half an inch of each other. I applied two coats. Now it's super shiny.

Here's the final result in its new home:



So, maybe the size wasn't perfect. It's a little deeper than I anticipated, meaning that my front door won't open all the way. (Good thing that the carpet prevents it from doing that anyway.) It also makes for a pretty narrow area to get up the stairs - you are forced to use the skinny inner part of the spiral staircase. (Good thing there's a banister right there.) But now I have a place to sit and even a little shoe storage space right at my front door.

Stuff used for this project:

• Old IKEA chest/coffee table
  
• Sandpaper
  
• 1 quart Benjamin Moore Satin Impervo Alkyd Low Lustre Enamel paint for the base color
• 1 quart Benjamin Moore Satin Impervo Alkyd Low Lustre Enamel paint for the highlight color (use less if you can - some brands sell sample sizes of paint)
• 3 paint brushes (or fewer if you're willing to clean them off)
  
• Masking Tape
• Something to protect your floors/walls when you're painting (newspapers, paper grocery bags, whatever)
• Ruler (for the details)
• Tape measure (for the big picture)
• Pencil (for marking off distances on the paint - it erases off)
• Minwax semi-gloss polyurethane (8 oz)

-pinkpop