Moving on Up to the East Side!!!!! No more Card Table and Folding Chairs :)

That's right I said it "NO MORE CARD TABLE AND FOLDING CHAIRS"

Insert a photo of my borrowed card table and folding chairs from my parents. O wait.... that's right I was too embarrassed to take a picture of my dining room that I never spent time for the first 3 months of moving in. I hated to open my curtains during the day because I wondered if anyone could see in and see the card table. O well such is life.

So you have seen the post below that showed the actual table that I purchased from Overstock.com. Well I actually purchase one but ended up with two. The first one arrived damaged, seriously damaged, so I contacted Overstock.com and basically they told me to keep, sell or donate the damaged table (I of course asked for this in writing). So needless to say my parents now have the damaged table downstairs in their basement. Yes that's right we have matching tables and spare bedrooms. Ok our spare bedrooms arent's matching but the color is. When I painted my spared bedroom we weren't sure how much paint we would need, as this was the first room I painted with the Behr primer paint so dad picked up 2 gallons. So my mom asked if I would mind if they painted my old bedroom the same color. I so did not mind and was glad to give them the extra can of paint.

Back to the table, I didn't like the chairs that came with the table so I decided that I would purchase the chairs after I saw the table and decided exactly what I wanted. Below is a pic of the table in it's everyday size and also a pic of the table fully extended (54" x 54").

Living Room Wall Changes

I know, I know it's been forever since my last post but all of you know why and I think you understand. I'm glad to report that everyone one in my family seems to be doing better!!!!

So since it's been so long it has taken me a while to figure out what to start posting so I'm just going to go room to room and post different updates of the things I've done. That includes posting Christmas pics.

So ever since I bought my condo I've always been really intrigued by wall decals, so I bought a set and decided that I would hang it up in my living room. Let me first tell you that it was an easy but time consuming project. I used the corned edge of my driver's licence so transfer the decal off of the plastic paper and onto the wall. See below....

It looks like it's 4 large pieces and 4 small pieces, WRONG. If you take a closer look you will see that the 4 large pieces are really about 30 small pieces. I really, really liked the decal at the beginning but after a while realized this was not the right decal or the right location for a decal. Well that and the fact that a few a the pieces starting coming off. So I just pushed the pieces back down. Suggestions don't use the decal on an outside wall. Between the winter cold on the outside and the heat on the side, I believe that was the cause of the unraveling. I will for sure do another decal, in fact I think I've already got the next one picked out, but you will have to wait and see.

So one day I was out shopping at Bed, Bath and Beyond (one of my favorite places) and I came across this picture frame set that I thought would be a good replacement for the wall decal. O and by the way they say that the wall decal are reusable, um so not the case in my situation. Every single piece that I put up tore into many more little pieces instead of pealing right off.

Here's an up close picture of the new wall hanging in my living room. It's 8 separate pieces that took me a while to hang in an almost perfect rectangle. I'm still working on putting pictures in each of the frames but I've gotten a few of the pics filed. The top center has pictures of some of my cousins kids and my old roommates Jamie & Jamie and their first daughter Madison.

Well finally after 4 months, I decided on a table for my dining room. No more card table and chairs. Yes I said it I'm 33 and my dining room table is a card table complete with folding chairs!!! No judgement thank you :)

I've always liked the higher tables (counter height) but I just couldn't decided on what I really wanted. The only thing I knew that I wanted was a table that had a removable leaf so if I had more than 4 people over I could accommodate everyone. I also didn't want a huge table that would take over my entire dining area either. So today I received an email from Overstock.com regarding a sale on dining room furniture. Dare I say it was a sign!!! I looked through the sale and found the table on the and it was exactly what I wanted and needed!! So I purchased it.

Right now I have 2 bar stools placed at my kitchen bar (see picture to the left)... so these will serve as the extra seating and I don't need to store them when they aren't being used. Bonus

I didn't order the chairs that are pictured with the table, I just didn't like them. So I'm going to hold off on them until I find the right bar stools. I'd like to find chairs with some sort of fabric and I know I wont have a problem finding something that I like. If I don't find the right fabric it's an easy fix... it's called new fabric and my mother!!! The Queen of Reupholstering !!! I'm so excited and can't wait for the final product!!! Stay tuned

Art Work on a Budget

I know it's been a while since my last post, there's been a lot of things going on but I'm back :)

After painting the living room I realized the walls were extremely bare and needed some framed art work. Not sure exactly what I wanted I headed for the information highway aka the Internet for some inspiration. With ideas in mind I headed to Michael's to find scarp book paper and frames. Listen... after purchasing a condo and a brand new hot water heater I was not in a financial place to go to an art gallery (not really sure if I had the money that I would go to an art gallery) Anyways.... I knew that I wouldn't really know what I wanted until I saw it. So while in Michael's I hit the Martha Stewart Collect and find this great little book of 5X7 scarp book paper Perfect. Then I hit the frame section and found these long black frames with spots for three 5X7 pics. SOLD for under $40!!! Top that fancy art galleries!!

So home I went with my purchases ready to create and hang my cheap but pretty sweet artwork.

Here's one of the two frames and the Martha Stewart Scrapbook paper. Michael's always has sales on their frames so over course I got the frames even cheaper. The original price was around $30 and I had a 40% off coupon.

Here is the final project picture... looks pretty good if I do say so. What do you think?

Staircase Gets Painted!!!!!!!!

Each day when I leave work I go home thinking tonight's the night I'm just going to rest and not work on the condo.... well it's a nice thought

Once I get home and sit down on the couch and begin looking around, I get this strange urge to paint, decorate or rearrange. So basically every night this week I've painted the walls around my staircase and laundry room until I ran out of wall space to paint. I started off with the smallest wall on the top half of the stairs, then the next night I moved onto the largest wall on the staircase and so on and so forth. It's a great feeling to look around the living room, dining room and kitchen and see that every single wall has a fresh coat of paint on it. It's also nice to no longer see big holes in the walls or dents every where. I swear the old tenants ran every single piece of furniture they had into the walls when they were moving out.

Paint -it's such a sweet reward...

Office/Spare Bedroom

Little by little I'm trying to show you each room as it gets completed. The office/guest room was the first room to get painted. The day I closed my dad got to work on painting, while mom and I began unpacking the rest of the condo. This was also the first room where we used the Behr Primer paint and also where we realized how much we loved this paint and how much time it saved. The previous tenant's daughter loved the color purple and when I say purple I mean purple, deep dark purple.

See below... it's hard to see the actual color but you can tell by how dark the picture is that the walls were extremely dark!!!

So after only one coat of paint my office/spare bedroom was complete. Well, actually it was almost complete, there was a lot of purple on the ceiling and base boards. So my wonderful father painted the ceiling, window ledge and base boards ultra white. Thanks Dad for all of your hard work... The room looks great!!! I still haven't found the exact chair that I want for the desk. (Desk lower left with the red lamp shade)

I really really like the look of the floating shelves!!! So on one of my many trips to Home Depot I picked up two floating shelves thinking I would use them in my living room and ended up hanging them in my office. I know that my dad painted this entire room... but I hung the shelves by myself, in case you were wondering. I am extremely handy and love to build and put things together.

So here's a closer look at the floating shelves....

Living Room Updates

If you looked at the living room pictures that I posted earlier this week, you probably didn't see much. Sorry the pictures were too dark to see anything, so last night I took a few more pictures of the newly painted living room.

Hope you like the color, cuz I do!!!!

Well... since I'm showing you the newly painted living room I might as well move into the living room and turn the camera around to show you pics of the not so newly painted kitchen.

I woke up a few Saturdays ago and just decided that the kitchen needed a slightly different color, other than the standard contractor white paint. I was looking for a very light tan/beige and I got exactly what I was looking for. If I hadn't told you that I painted the kitchen you just might not have known. It's so close to the original color that it's hard to tell in certain light.

See for yourself below....