Saturday, September 29, 2012

New Chairs

The living room chairs were delivered Thursday and I put one together last night and the other this morning.  I decided to wait over night to make sure before I took the time to assemble the second one.

I've decided I love them! And I got check off approval by my assistant house decorators.

Before:
 

I'm not sure where Snuffers got the dog toy from...

After:



From HERE

We also finished the upholstery on the dining room chairs.  I absolutely love how they turned out. 
 
Cost breakdown for chairs:
Chairs - $41 from Craigslist
Paint & Primer - already had leftover from refinishing the buffet
Fabric - $12 from Fabric.com
Total per chair: $13.25
 
I realized the last picture of the gallery wall really wasn't that good.  The light was on in the dining room (ghetto 1990's brass fixture) and it was creating shapes all over the picture.  Here is a replacement picture.
 
And here are some lovely picture of 2 of the children. Kaya is impossible to take pictures of! She is so scared of cameras. I may have tempted her to get up on her hind legs with a Kong toy filled with peanut butter. But only maybe.
 

 
   
You can see the haze in Kaya's eyes.  The vet said she is slowly going blind.  Poor little adorable (old) girl.

 
 

 


Wednesday, September 26, 2012

New Camera?

Yes, I do mean a new one.  About a week ago Scott brought home a camera that a friend of his at work was upgrading from.  I loved it, but realized it wasn't the right camera for me.  It was about 6 years old and while it had everything I needed, it had been dropped and I worried about it's longevity.

Fast forward a few days, we discovered there is a camera store by our house going out of business.  We decided that if they had the camera I wanted, we'd buy it.  If not, we'd return the one I had been using and wait until another date to buy my "dream" camera.  I'm telling you, it had to be fate.  We walk into the store and they only have 1.  They had two cameras that were body only of the model I wanted, but I decided I liked the kit lens the bundle came with.

We didn't buy it right that moment because I wanted to actually think about the decision.  I didn't expect the camera to be there, so I was caught slightly off guard.  I also wanted to make sure their price was in fact fantastic.

Turns out, it was.  But even better, the prices dropped the next morning.  I went running up there on my lunch and purchased this bad boy.  I absolutely LOVE him.  Love, love, LOVE.  It is even BETTER than the XSI I was using.  And what's even better is we got a slamming deal on him!

Canon Rebel T3i

And just for some random fun, Baker has been home almost 2 weeks.  This is his new favorite hobby.


Cute, right?  Only not so much.  He drips ALL over the floor.

Monday, September 24, 2012

Gallery Wall

Most of the weekend I spent dying from accidental gluten intake.  Let me just tell you, if I had any temptation of ever wanting to cheat, I am completely over that now.  Worst. Pain. Ever.  Ok, probably not EVER.  But it really did suck.  It was about 3 days of miserable-ness.  On Sunday, I was finally feeling like doing something somewhat productive.  I worked for awhile on stripping the buffet.  That is turning into quite a process.  I am now on to the legs and other curvy parts which is much harder to scrape then the flat surfaces.

Other exciting news - we hung our gallery wall! We had a bunch of random frames we've collected over the years that we wanted something to do with.  We don't really have any surfaces to put frames on, so we decided to make a collage, gallery wall.  A lot of the frames are empty still, but here is a general idea of what we've done:


Templeton (the deer) is my favorite part!   And the ampersand.  I have a slight addiction to ampersands.  We also (finally) reupholstered the chairs.  We had the fabric and the seats all ready to go but hadn't got around to them.  I realized that the picture of the completed chair is on the other camera! Boo!  I will post those soon.  I LOVE them. 

I ordered some living room chairs (the floral ones won!) and will get those delivered on Thursday.  After that, it's on to couch shopping for the living room.  It feels so good to finally have some rooms coming together!

PS - Meaghan Dunklee - do you see those empty frames? FIX IT!!  To anyone awesome out there reading my blog, go check out my friend's side business - Ex Libris Journals and Ex Libris Paper Designs

Tuesday, September 18, 2012

Puppy!

My apologies for my absence.  Luckily, you haven't missed anything too exciting in the Wilcox household.  We painted one of our extra spare bedrooms and picked up some Craigslist furniture.  I have 2 more bedrooms to paint (including the master) and then we are ready to start our 1/2 bath remodel.

We are working on stripping the buffet we purchased off Craigslist.  It's a hot mess right now.  The people who we purchased from did a horrible job painting it (lucky for us).  They did absolutely no prep work so the paint is peeling off.  We are attempting to see if we can get the paint off so we can stain it (ideal) rather than repaint it.  This lovely couple (they really were nice even if they were furniture refinishing challenged) also happened to have 2 dining room chairs that looked like ours.  They weren't for sale, but I think they got sick of me dropping the not so subtle hints that I wanted them, so they told me for $20, they were mine.  SOLD! They almost match the chairs we have, but are enough different that I think it's OK.  We needed 2 chairs for the ends of the table.  They need new seat covers and a good scrape and repaint, but I can deal with that.



I also picked out some accent chairs for the living room (attached to the dining room).  They're from Target and cheap as hell.  I'm sure they're not that comfy, but who REALLY sits in a front room other than Snuffers?  Speaking of Snuffers, check out this hilarious photo of her...



And yes mom, I know she's fat.  She also happens to be old, diabetic, a drunk and possibly a huffer.  I'm not sure what she was doing on the dining room table, but that's for another debate.

Back to the chairs.  So I found them at Target and with their current B1G1 1/2 off sale, they end up being less than $100 each.  The chairs I had snagged for free from a garage sale I believe had been peed on by an animal before coming to my house.  The new dog (read on for details on that!) has a weird thing about peeing on the legs of one.  Considering he is completely house broken and not done that ANYWHERE else, I'm blaming the chairs.  So the chairs now must go.  I am choosing between 2 chairs.


I like them both but lean towards the floral print.  The second chair is the exact same fabric as the chair covers, which may be too matchy matchy for my taste.

For slightly more exciting news, we got a puppy! And by puppy, I do not mean cute, little and cuddly.  I mean large, energetic and NUTS! But that's OK.  We already love him.

Meet Baker!


And all three of the puppies together (excuse the blur!):


They're such a handsome group!