Priorities

After 8 weeks and 2 days, we are finally moving back into our home! I am so excited!! All week I have been trying to prepare our home by cleaning and cleaning and cleaning and cleaning!! Construction leaves a LOT of dust and grime around!

I am basically redecorating my entire house (minus the kitchen) because EVERY room has been affected! The old master bedroom is going to be a guest room, the old guest room will be an office. We have a NEW master bedroom and TWO new bathrooms and LOTS of new closets (which means I can re-organize all of my stuff- probably my favorite part of this project!). The sun room lost a wall of windows and needs to be re-done. The dining room and living room have been our main storage areas and are a disaster (so they just need to be re-set up, not redecorated... although now's my chance!)

So with that major list and huge task of moving, swapping, organizing and cleaning... I chose to spend my time this week on 2 projects...

~ a dish closet

~ reupholstering a bench

Obviously those projects were VERY necessary to accomplish first and foremost (not!)

nonetheless, here is my work...

this closet used to be in our bathroom, now it's in a hallway. It was grimy and yucky- but large and full of good shelves. So after some Clorox...
it still looked yucky. I guess that's the result of being a bathroom closet since 1938.

So, off to the fabric store!!
I found this precious floral and pink stripe, on sale... so I bought it. Bought a staple gun. and set to work wrapping the shelves. Cute huh?

I had this shoe organizer in my closet before, but won't need it anymore. So I tried using it for my cloth napkins, but the pockets weren't wide enough. Here I have my napkin rings in it. I liked that okay, but in the end I took them out and put them in a drawer. So I think the shoe organizer is moving and will find a new use- but I liked the idea.

finished wrapping and here are some dishes! (more pics at the end of the post - I'm out of order because my house is greatly out of order and I can't think straight!)

on to the bench!

I was given this bench by a friend.. it was his grandmother's. I figured it would be SOOO easy to unscrew the seat and recover. However, underneath I found this...

NO SCREWS!! I was shocked! and clueless as to what to do next. But I figured, they were throwing it away anyways, so I might as well try to deconstruct it and figure it out.

Here is the bench before I took it apart.

Love the details!

Here's what I found... Under that cording was a hundred million staples! The fabric was stapled into the wood and then cording was glued on top.

So I went to the internet and tried researching how to re-do this. I found nothing.

So I grabbed my pliers... very thin pliers that I have for jewelry making- which I don't do. Just have the tools.
and I set to work removing the one hundred million staples.

SUCCESS!! Yucky stain and yucky smell... but instead of removing the cushion- i just soaked it with febreeze.

Here's the fabric I chose. I LOVE IT!! I am totally afraid of patterns- so this was really out on a limb for me.

I laid it on and started stapling! I went slowly. I worked super hard on the corners trying to figure out the best way to wrap them. Then I cut off as much of the hangover as I could.

I used a hot glue gun to glue the extra fabric over the staples. Then I started gluing on the cording. I found that 1 row of cording wasn't going to cover the extra fabric and staples, so I finished row 1 and went back to the fabric store for more cording. Row 2 complete- a little Liquid Gold cleaning on the legs and ....


VOILA!

(our bed was not yet made, but I HAD to see what it looked like with the bench- so that was project number 3 of the day- finding all of my bedding - which was literally stashed in EVERY room of the house)

close up of the cording. one side is definitely better than the other, which is great that I have this up against the bed :)

Here are some pictures of our bed (for my parents to see) since we JUST bought it!! Four years without a headboard (because we had a tough time agreeing on one) I am SO excited for this poster bed! SO cute!!

For now I am leaving the wall blank above the bed. But I have been looking at plate collages on pinterest and might start collecting some plates and platters... NOT a priority right now.

The whole room!! I did buy some brown (fake) raw silk curtains. One panel for each window, they will be swooped over to the outside of the room. I think it will look very nice. Just need to hang those rods :) Isn't the bench a great accent??? I had a little left over fabric which I think I"ll make a pillow for our bay window seat... tie it all together!

back to the FULL dish closet!

1 shelf for my china

1 shelf for my fun colorful dishes (which I LOVE to always have set on the dining room table)

1 shelf for placemats

1 shelf for oversized platters, bowls, and serving dishes that don't fit anywhere else.

At the very top I have my chargers and glasses...

close up of the fun dishes!!

how pretty!!! I love these glasses~!

So in the midst of chaos, messes, and a million things on my to-do list... these were my priorities and projects the other day!

Today- moving in! I have unloaded all of my stuff that was at my in-laws, I'm setting up a bathroom, closet, and bedroom and tonight we sleep at HOME!!