I am, by nature, a messy person and so is my boyfriend. When two messy people live together, it is not good. I always spend at least one whole weekend day cleaning, and it sucks because a.) I should be outside! but b.) it’s never anything important. It’s always stupid little stuff, like putting laundry away, straightening up, getting organized, etc. I H-A-T-E it.  And if I get myself into some kind of project?  Forget it. Before you can say craft, I’ve got an Elmer’s glue bottle in the bathroom, my fabric scissors in the kitchen and yarn just everywhere. And it’s not just me. I actually found two pairs of my boyfriends pants in the couch cushions once. Two! The end game of all this messiness is usually me flopped down on the bed with my hands over my eyes moaning that “it’s all just too much.”   Very dramatic, I know. But messy house – messy mind.

Which brings me to my point. Recently, and for the life of me I cannot remember where though it may have been Ramshackle Glam, I saw a tip that says whenever you move from one room of your house to another, bring along one thing that needs to be put away along with you and before you know it, you’ve got a clean house. It seemed so small a thing to do, I didn’t think it could possibly make a difference. But Oh.My.God. I actually now have an apartment that I can look around and say, wow, not bad.  There are no socks hanging over the lamps. (Yes, that has happened.)  My scissors are by the sewing machine, the Elmer’s glue on the desk.  The dishes – oh, the dishes – actually can now be found drying in the rack or when I’m very, very lucky, in the cabinet where they belong.  It has changed my life.

And when I wake up in the morning and just see all that floor space and cleanliness it makes me happy.  It truly is the little things, you know?

I needed to put in a frame to determine the best placement for the border, and while I was at it, I couldn’t resist a quick snapshot of the handiwork so far. Something about these just make me laugh hysterically.

Once I’m done (hopefully this weekend!) I’ll put up the pattern, as well as a list of my favorite online resources for finding the fonts, borders, etc.  Any other favorite rap lyrics you want me to make?!

So I thought some of you out there might like to see the video I’ve been using to teach myself to crochet (as I mentioned briefly in the living room redo post.)  You can find the link here.  I like this one because the quality is really high and the woman goes nice and slow so you can really see what she is doing.  Plus, this looks like the type of lady who crochets, and I just liked that.

So when we recently resigned our lease for two more years, I was really inspired to take the bull by the horns and actually make our house look like a home. The only problem is, as mentioned a couple of weeks ago, I’m on a very tight budget in 2012. But where there is a will, there is a way.

I have three main areas of focus: the living room, the master bedroom and the kitchen, as these are the areas where we spend the most time.  I showed a brief preview of the bedroom last week, but the living room came together a little faster thanks to some super-helpful tips from a truly wonderful book: SouthernLiving Style. Not only is the book absolutely gorgeous, but it offers really easy tips to update any room in your home.

I’m a big fan of cozy rooms, with mixed-yet-matching patterns that don’t shy away from color but aren’t super bright. For the living room, I wanted to create something calming, that takes advantage of the great natural light we get in the room.  The only problem? Without much money, you have to be clever.  How clever?  Well, the couches I’m working with look like this:

What you see here is a hand-me-down couch that despite being clean and extremely comfortable, looks anything but -covered in make up stains, food spills and other accidents from over the years.  The pillows were a little something I picked up in a bad attempt to make it better.

But with new couches out of the question, I was a bit stuck until I picked up SouthernLiving Style.  Imagine my delight when right there in the front of the book, they give a whole lesson on slip covers as an easy way to transform couches. Say what?!

So, I searched high and low for months to find two slip covers – one for the sofa, one for the equally disgusting love seat – that could bring these babies back to life. Since I loved my new pillows, I used their palette to guide me during my search – looking for anything in dark green or brown.  Finally, I found them at a great home store in my Queens neighborhood – two, dark green, corduroy slip covers from SureFit. The total cost for two?  About $130 – just a fraction of what a new couch would cost. Here is the transformation!

Please excuse that I did a less-than-stellar job at tucking everything in nice and tight before taking this shot and they are a little wrinkly on the bottom. But not bad right?

And that’s not all. To help finish the room, I:

• Painted the walls a nice tan color (Behr’s “Plateau”) to create a nice, neutral wall color
• Decided to use the end table I repainted last week in this room versus the bedroom.

• For more funkiness, I had salvaged these lamps from my apartment’s giveaway pile as their greens, blues and browns matched the pillows.  I put one on the end table, and one on the bookshelf to provide some symmetry.

• Put a comfy throw blanket a few shades lighter than the paint across the loveseat. What you see there yarn-wise is me teaching myself to crochet so I can crochet some cozy afghans to continue this trend!

• Placed my recently recovered lamp in the corner. I love how the lamp fabric and the pillows are getting that that mix-and-matchy feel going.

And though looking considerably better from where we started, the work isn’t done. I’d still like to:

• Paint this stool to serve as a nicer home for gadgetry and other doodads.

• Paint this chair to go with the pillows and recovered lamp. I think it could be REALLY cute when done.

• Find a rug that can fill the floor up a bit.
• Create either a window box or some nice, sweeping curtains for the windows

So stay tuned…more to definitely come on this front.  And find SouthernLiving Style on Amazon.com for just $19.77! It’s worth every penny!

It probably goes without saying, but I’m in the middle of book four and am completely swept up in Pottermania again.  Enter Pinterest!

The site is full of amazing and adorable ideas for throwing a Harry Potter-themed party (of course!). I guess this would be ideal for a kid’s party, but I have a feeling I’m going to do this for my adult friends sooner or later.

Just a few cute ideas:

Mark the party location, or if you’re really fancy, deliver invites, with a white snowy owl made to look like Harry’s faithful Hedwig:

Print out this poster for the Weasley fans in attendance:

Decorate your main table just like so:

Definintely make sure your dog is ready for the occasion:

And then invite your guests/thank them for coming with another owl-inspired piece!

]]> http://yaydiy.com/2012/01/harry-potter-party-inspirations-via-pinterest/feed/ 0 http://yaydiy.com/2012/01/splurges-on-one-kings-lane/ http://yaydiy.com/2012/01/splurges-on-one-kings-lane/#comments Thu, 12 Jan 2012 18:52:32 +0000 Lia http://yaydiy.com/?p=4420 Continue reading →]]> As I mentioned yesterday, I’m in full on apartment redecorating mode.  It’s kind of shameful that it took me two years to really make strides in terms of making our apartment look like a home that people actually live in, but better late than never!  And well, I bought a chandelier.

I bought it on One King’s Lane, which if you are not familiar is pretty much the best home decorating site in the world. I’m obsessed with it.  Several months ago, I purchased a Living Social Deal where if you paid $35 you got $70 worth of stuff on the site…so I used that and pretty much bought this $200 chandelier for $75 (my original $35 plus about $40 extra).  I have no idea where it will go, or how to even hook it up once it arrives, but I will figure both out because it makes me so happy.  I just think it’s so pretty and I don’t want to wait for the finer things in life! I want a chandelier now!

If you haven’t joined the site yet, today is a great day to go ahead and do so.  The site just unveiled a number of framed prints from John Derian (based on vintage wall paper he found in Paris. AGGHHH!) that are to die for. They start at $99 and the sale lasts just 72 hours. Here’s a few examples. I want them all.

I’ll let you know if I splurge again or take this as inspiration to DIY. I’m so torn!!!

That’s why I love spraypainting so much.  It does the work for you!  Since I’m redoing my bedroom in shades of French blue, brown and sage green, my hunter green nighstand needed a little makeover and there was no quicker way to get it done than spraypainting. Warning: as you will see in the following how-to, I was too lazy to drag this out in the cold so I spraypainted in my living room.  I do not recommend this. It involved opening all the windows in the house to avoid getting both the dog and myself high, which totally negated what I thought was the convenience of staying indoors.

Here is the nightstand before photo. It’s one of my favorite pieces. I rescued it from a friend who had no need for it anymore and it’s been in each and every one of my apartments as a faithful companion to my bed.

The first step was to remove the little knobs and prime the thing.  You always want to prime a dark color – it will save you from having to use multiple coats of your new color. Bye, bye knobs:

And hello tape to protect the wood.  As you can see, I didn’t bother with protecting the parts you won’t see.

Here it is primed as a new blank canvas:

Let the primer dry for about an hour before moving onto the color.  You can also let it dry for longer – up to you and the amount of time you have!

Then, the fun part.  The key with spraypainting is a nice, even coat.  This is also why I recommend doing your spraypainting outside – it will ensure you can move about freely to keep 10 inches or so away from the object your painting. I was confined to this sheet. Not ideal.  Notice on the left hand side where it appears to be smudged? This is because I got a little too close and the paint was dripping.

To fix, I simply took a paintbrush to smooth it out and then resprayed lightly.  Here’s another warning: only paint thinner removes spraypaint from your tools and your hands! I mistakenly tried to wash the painbrush with water and here was the result, which had to be Brillo-d off.  Not fun and my paintbrush was ruined.

But it was all worth it! Check out this before shot of our master bedroom, which has the new nightstand in place, knobs screwed back in. I took this quick photo so you can see the transformation that will soon be happening!  New paint, new bedspread, new wall art, curtains on the window – it’s going to be a different room in the next few weeks.

Stay tuned!

My answer was immediate, “Of course I do!”  But when I really thought about it, it’s more than that. I love having a dog.

I’m sure most dog owners think their dog is the best, but Pelusa is just such a cool character. We barely even had to train her. She just gets it. I’ve never owned a dog before so I am not sure how spoiled I am, but with very few exceptions, she doesn’t do anything bad ever. She peed on me while I was in bed once, but that was more my fault than it was hers. And with this face, I really couldn’t be mad for long.  Even though it took 20 minutes of bleaching at 7 a.m. to undo the damage.

Every night, whenever I get ready for bed, Pelusa marches herself first to the front door for her final walk of the night and then trots right back to the bedroom where she stands at attention until I get in bed, lift the blanket and let her burrow down near my stomach or feet. She’ll stay there all night. Sometimes we steal the covers from one another. Poor Giancarlo often gets the short end of the stick in battle. We’ve taken to just using two blankets. One for him…one for me and the dog.

I’ve never had a creature love me unconditionally simply because I walk in the door everyday (except my mom, but she’s womb-obligated to do this) so it’s funny to have this little thing follow me everywhere I go, demand to be curled up at my side and whine if I don’t give her the proper amount of belly rubs.

She’s just the sweetest little thing in the whole world and I love having her.

And that’s exactly what happened with this gorgeous lamp! All it had was an unsightly shade, which looked it may have been burned or otherwise dirtied in some way.  All it needed, though, was a little makeover to be as good as new. Whoever threw it out did not know this, but that’s why I have a DIY blog and they probably don’t. I live for finds like this.

All it took to get this lamp gorgeous again was a stretch of fabric, a pair of scissors, and a hot glue gun.  That’s it!  And it only took about 40 minutes.  Read on for the step by step and end result.

Step 1: Remove the outside fabric. When recovering any lamp, this is the toughest part. Oftentimes, the fabric is stuck to the shade, so just take this process very slowly.  Also, if you can – the old shade makes the perfect pattern for tracing onto the new fabric, so bonus points if you can remove it all in one piece. In this case, the fabric was lightly glued onto the shade, so removal was slow, but finally, I got the ugly fabric off intact.

Step 2: Place your old fabric on the wrong side of your new fabric. Using chalk (I had tailor’s chalk handy), a pen or some other tracing instrument that won’t bleed through, trace around the old fabric.  THEN! Go back around and make the pattern one inch bigger so you have room to anchor the fabric to the inside of the shade.

Look closely - see the original lines? Cut one inch around those!

Step 3: Once your pattern is traced, cut carefully! And then give it a good iron so its nice and flat.

Before the ironing board!

Step 4: Now you’re ready to put on the new fabric.  Place the shade in the center of the fabric and make sure you have it centered between the top and bottom edges, as well.  Then, using your glue gun, place a few dots of glue on one edge and secure the edge of the fabric to the center of the shade.  Press it down and then pull the other edge tight.

Step 5: Working your way around the shade, place a dot of glue (close to the top or bottom edge of the shade so that it doesn’t shine through when the light is turned on) at regular intervals to secure the fabric.  Soon, you should have the entire thing covered – with enough fabric hanging over the top and bottom.

Step 6: Working your way around again, but this time inside the top rim, place a dot of glue on the fabric and then secure it to the top of the shade. Before you do this, if you notice that the fabric is long and will reach deep inside the shade, give it a quick trim.  Otherwise, when you turn on the light, anything inside the shade will show up as a shadow within the lamp. Instead, cut the fabric so that it’s close to the edge. See below on how it hangs over just the littlest bit.

See? Hangs over just a little bit.

When you get to the wires inside the shade, give the fabric a small snip so you can fit it over the bars.

Step 7: Do the same on the bottom.  See how much more this hung over? I trimmed just more than half of it away so the overlap was the same as the top of the shade.

Step 8: Glue down anything else that is sticking up a bit and then place the shade back on the lamp, cause you’re done!

Don’t you feel bad for the person who threw this away now?? If only they knew!

For those who may not be on it yet, Pinterest is essentially a site where you post (or “pin) great finds and photos from the Internet and can organize it onto different boards on your page.  You can also repost from others.  I love it because I can easily file and later find, ideas that I like. Just a few recent pins I’m obsessed with recreating:

A lamp with fabric strips instead of a shade:

Smooth stones decorated with a paint marker. How insanely simple and cool is this? A Sharpie would also do the trick.

This drawing which I desperately want to turn into a painting, cross-stitch or drawing of my own:

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