More About the Library

So yesterday I left off by saying I couldn't yet tell you about my potential future plans for the library because I had to go watch Doctor Who (I didn't mention that it was Doctor Who. It was). Today I've decided to do something extraordinary and actually write the future post I promised.

Oh, first off: I realized I forgot to mention that we did this when we were moving stuff around in the library:

There's that beagle again. That round rug used to be under the chair in the library. It doesn't work in there anymore, so I tried moving it into the foyer, where my overgrown doormat was going to live if it were bigger.

It's super practical there because I can toss it in the washer easily (and have many times). It's cushy, and the dogs love it. I don't think it will stay there forever, but I'm happy with it for now.  I think it's supposed to be pushed closer to the door than it is in that picture; it's too lined up with the other rug. But I cut down the mat under it go under the blue and purple rug, so now it kind of moves around a lot anyway.

But back to the library with its teeny loveseat:

As I mentioned yesterday, more seating was one of the goals when we bought the loveseat and, if you pull out the chairs because they're suddenly too damn big, you don't get that. I'm thinking about two small chairs on either side of the loveseat and then a low coffee table.

Like maybe these chairs:

Ikea Stockholm Chair

I haven't seen them in real life to see if the scale is right. But my experience is that Ikea things are generally smaller than I expect them to be. These would be terribly impractical because of the arms; Milo and Dave need to play guitar in the library chairs, so armless is much better. But this one is so pretty.

Still, I might look instead for some vintage mid-century-esque chairs on Craigslist instead. Armless. Sigh. Or Milo can play guitar somewhere else. We have armless chairs in the dining room. They're not that heavy. He can drag them over to the library (where the amp is).

And then I'm itching to find a place for this rug:

Stockholm flatweave rug

And then I have big DIY project plans for the coffee table. 

Something like this:

Source: A Pair of Pears

Or this:

Source: Triple Maxtons

I feel a little silly pouring all this energy into the library when my back porch is practically falling down. But the porch is way out BACK. The library's the first thing you see. Also it's easier and cheaper to deal with.

The Library Gets a Loveseat, or: Perspective Rears its Ugly Head Again

It's been nearly a year since we bought a bunch of Billy shelves for the library. We're still very happy with the shelves, but the armchair in there was always just a placeholder until we could get something nicer. We picked up the chair for $40 on Craigslist, and I think we've gotten $40 worth of use out of it. By "we" I mostly mean the dogs. They love that chair. You can tell from looking at/smelling it.

Here's what the library looked like until last weekend:

There's a beagle wearing a sweater in that chair.

So the chair was fine. Very basic. A little more traditional than I wanted. It wasn't in terrific shape even before our dogs slept in it for a year. My plans for replacing it changed over time. There was a period where I really, really wanted a Strandmon chair from Ikea for example. But one of the nice things about sticking a cheap placeholder chair in your library for awhile is that it gives you time to figure out what you really want. And it became clear over time that one thing we wanted was a bit more seating in that room. It's a lovely room; we all like being in there, but there was only room for three people to sit down before. I thought a full size sofa would be too much for the space, but a small loveseat might be perfect.

I started casually eyeing Craigslist awhile back. And then, sometime last week, I spotted the one we finally wound up with. When I first saw it, it was priced at $150. I wasn't in a rush, and I wasn't totally sold, so I didn't make a move for a few more days. By the time I did get around to showing it to Dave and then e-mailing the seller, it had been sitting on Craigslist for...maybe a week? And she was eager to sell. "Make me an offer; it needs to go!" she told me. So I offered her $100, and she said yes.

Here it is:

As you can see, foster beagle Bella already loves the new seating. When I'm not taking pictures, there's a sheet on it, though. Spot the baby! (hint: he really loves electrical cords)

It's a pretty basic, dark gray, velvet-ish loveseat. I'm really liking it in front of the shelves. I thought it was going to go in front of the windows, but no. It definitely wants to live in front of the shelves.

But here is my problem.

It is so...petite that it makes the green chairs and chess table look ENORMOUS. Like a giant might sit in them, while chatting with the elves who hang out on the loveseat.

Let me show you:

It actually doesn't look quite as ridiculous in the picture as I expected. But still not what I want. (The chess table I had to just shove in another room entirely. I think it's going on Craigslist itself very soon).

So that's the story of how my $100 Craigslist loveseat means I have to buy new chairs. And a coffee table. Maybe also a rug. I kind of love it with just the loveseat. So dramatic! Shelves pop! But the whole point of the loveseat was more seating. So.

I have some ideas for that, but it's late and I need to go watch TV, so I'll save them for another post. Let's just say that I think I need to ask for Ikea gift cards for Christmas.

What do you guys think? What else would you put in this room with the world's most miniature loveseat? Besides more beagles?

The library--finished! (enough for now)

I'm calling it! I mean, there are still things to do, like organize the bookshelves more and hang up the Beagle picture I bought on Etsy when it gets here...but it's more finished than any other room in the house.

Earlier documentations of library progress are here and here. And here's a reminder of what we started with:

And here it is now:

Changes, big and small (well, mostly small), since the last update:
*Finally got all the doors to the bookshelves and installed them, along with the rest of the height extenders. Notes on Billy shelves: it is very hard to get all the doors to close right, at least in this house. I don't know if it has to do with floors not being entirely level or what. But a lot of them still don't close exactly how they should. From a distance, you can't tell. Also, as I've mentioned, it took us THREE separate Ikea trips to come home with all the correct doors. And one of them is STILL messed up. It's a screwed up place on the inside of one of the doors; it doesn't affect the functionality, and you can't see it from the outside. But I think we'll take it along next time we go to Ikea and try to exchange it.

*the floor lamp: on clearance at Target for $17!

*the rug. I had the big rug/no rug/small rug dilemma, and finally went with this one just to keep the chair from sliding back into the shelves every time a kid sat on it. It's a chenille shag rug from Overstock. The cats love it, which makes it especially nice that it's small enough to go in my washing machine.

*magazine holders from Ikea, spray painted gray, to hold sheet music.
*lamps from Home Goods to give a little light for evening piano playing.

*snow globe with Chicago in it; from the thrift store
*picture of kids outside the Morocco bathroom at Epcot
*another of my grandmother's paintings
*framed....stuff the kids have done. Program and cast photo from The Jungle Book and flyer from a filmmaking class Ari took. Plan is for this wall to expand (and boat painting will probably find a new home at that point)

*Dave's guitar has a stand now, too! Milo's guitar is not lonely anymore.

The plaid chair has always been a bit of a placeholder. I think Ikea's Strandmon chair is going on my Christmas list to replace it (and the plaid chair may make its way up to the nursery, assuming I don't find anything fabulous to go in there before that)

How about a source list?
paint: Benjamin Moore's Nantucket Fog
shelves: Billy shelves from Ikea
curtains, rug: Overstock.com
floor lamp, green accent chairs: Target
table, magazine holders: Ikea
piano lamps, horse lamp: Home Goods
chair: Craigslist

Linking with:

Chic on a Shoestring's Flaunt it Friday

 

DIY Chalk Paint: A First Attempt

Update: Psst....another chalk painting attempt, with a more exciting project here

A post about chalk paint is sort of a rite of passage if you want to blog about your house, right? At least that is the impression I got from reading 80 gazillion blog posts about chalk paint in preparation for this project.

But, truthfully, I had not even heard of chalk paint (or at least I hadn't paid any attention to it; I'm sure I must have come across some of those posts at some point in the past) until a month or two ago, when my friend Kristi started talking about it. And then painted her bathroom cabinet with some she made herself. And it looked really great. And I have a lot of furniture around here what needs painting. So I could ignore it no more.

One can buy Annie Sloan's chalk paint, and, word is, it's awesome. It's also around $37 a quart and comes in a limited range of colors. So there are lots and lots of tutorials all over the internet for making your own knock off chalk paint. You can make it either with non-sanded grout or with plaster of paris. I opted for the latter and used this tutorial from I Heart Naptime as my guide.

The test object: our Norden table from Ikea that we use as a chess table in the library:

Why chalk paint? I actually wasn't planning to go with chalk paint for this at first. It seemed like such a tiny, simple little project that I wasn't sure it was worth it. But then I figured that a tiny, hard to mess up project was actually the perfect place to experiment. And the big advantage of chalk paint is supposed to be that you don't need to sand or prime first. Since it was bare wood, I doubted I'd be able to get away without primer otherwise, so it wouldn't really be any more work.

Last night Dave was brewing beer with a friend all evening, and two of three kids were off at a sleepover, so I had nothing to do but deal with that table. Sorry for the lack of pictures of the first part of the process. It was dark; I hate the flash....what can I say?

I recreated the scene the next morning, though. Well, a little bit:

I bought the plaster of paris and finishing wax at Home Depot yesterday. And for the paint, I used one of the reject samples from the dining room/library paint selection. Not the one pictured; I accidentally threw it away before I could either take a picture of it or note the color. I hope no one is super in love with the color, because I have no idea what it's called. It's flat paint, by the way. I found remarkably little information on what kind of paint to use. What I did find said anything will work okay and end up with a flat finish regardless.

The I Heart Naptime recipe calls for 4 tablespoons plaster of paris, 2 tablespoons of water, and 2 cups of paint. The paint samples are just under one cup (7.75 oz), so I halved the amounts of water and plaster of paris. Which made for a very tiny amount to work with. I mixed the water (cold water. Some things I read said to use warm or hot water, but Kristi told me she found the hot water harder to work with. I didn't have any trouble with cold) and the plaster of paris in an old yogurt container until all the lumps were gone. Then I poured the mixture together with the paint and mixed some more.

Then I started painting. And all went smoothly. The paint was really easy to work with. I am trying to thinking of something remarkable or at least slightly....unusual to say about it, but it was just kind of like...painting. I let it dry for less time than I was supposed to--maybe an hour and a half--then put the second coat on. Here's what it looked like the next morning:

It has a little bit....uhh, chalkier finish than regular paint. You can, in fact, at least according to all the blog posts I read, actually write on it with chalk. To take the edge off the chalkiness, most people finish it with wax. I was no exception. The Minwax I bought was kind of a pain to work with--very hard, didn't want to come out of the container, and extremely stinky. Word is there are better, softer waxes one can buy online.

I also began to understand why most chalk painted furniture gets distressed, as I managed to chip the paint in two places before I got the wax on. Apparently, it's a little hard NOT to distress chalk paint. I'm curious how it will hold up to kid chess use.

Here it is after the wax; I don't think the change is that dramatic, either in pictures or in person. I might have been too skimpy with the wax. But, you understand, I hated the wax.

Note that the dogs have shredded all the paper and cardboard I put under the legs to catch drips.

And here it is back in its place, with all its stuff on it again:

So I'm happy with how it turned out. The painting was trouble-free. I like the color and how it is unobtrusive against the wall but not exactly the same color, and how I put that paint sample to good use. I hate to waste $2.99 if I don't have to.

Next up in Adventures in Chalk Painting: the dresser for the nursery. And our headboard. I bought a light gray to use for both of those.
Linking with:

Library tweaks

I ordered curtains from Overstock.com last week, and they showed up on Friday. For some reason they're called "conspiracy curtains." There's a rug on its way next, for under the armchair (mostly so it doesn't slide back and break the glass doors....when we get the glass doors). We had trouble deciding between rug and no rug for this room....Dave says no rug is better for the acoustics, with the piano and guitar, but we weren't sure our family's musical talents are really at a high enough level for us to care that much. So rug just under the chair is the current compromise.

Then I picked up curtain rods at Lowes and put some stuff on the chess table. Like a chess board. And the horse lamp (works thematically with the chess board, you see!). I think I've decided to paint the table gray and go with no chess board painted on it for now. Because our existing chess board likes it there. The chess board's move to an accessible location (it used to live on top of our tall TV armoire) has meant an approximate 300% increase in the amount of chess played around here in the past few days.

And we hung the picture on the wall! No more leaning!

Hmm....tips for backlit photos? I feel like I should know this.....I tried the flash, but things were even worse then. Wait for a cloudy day?

Oh. I think this is with the flash. Maybe it is better.

Picture on wall!

Library progress

Moving right along with two post/one day madness! So this room is supposed to be the formal living room, but, like almost everyone else, we don't need one of those. But we do need somewhere for the piano to live, and for all the books to stay, and for Milo and Dave to play guitar, and maybe to play chess? So we're going with library/music room.

One more time, here it is before and empty:

And here it is today:

Here's the run down of what we've done so far. 

Paint. The whole front of the house (dining room, foyer, library) is this color now. It's Benjamin Moore's Nantucket Fog. I spent a long time obsessing over the perfect gray-blue paint. I had actually picked out Nantucket Fog online months ago, but bought samples of four other colors and painted swatches on the wall anyway to make sure. It's a little bluer than I was originally thinking we'd wind up with, but I'm really liking it. And we went to Nantucket for our honeymoon, and we think fog is kind of nice, so it seems meant to be. 

Shelves. They're the ubiquitous Billy shelves from Ikea. At first we planned to frame them all in to make them look like built-ins, as seen in a million and one blogs, such as Centsational Girl. But then, the more we thought about it, the more concerns we had. Such as: we wanted it to go around the corner, and it seemed like accomplishing the whole built-in look was going to get a lot more complicated once we rounded a corner. Well, mostly that. That and just general concerns about our ability to actually make it look as lovely and built-in as we wanted. 

I really liked the look of the library from Making it Lovely, so we finally opted to splurge and go for the glass doors, to make things look finished without making ourselves crazy. 

As you can see, only two of the shelves have the doors so far. We bought doors for all of them, but then we got home and realized that we'd mostly bought the wrong doors! I suppose we have only ourselves to blame for this, but I would like to at least partially blame Ikea, too. Here is what Ikea does with its Billy shelf doors in the self service area: it puts all the doors, the ones with glass all the way down and the ones with half glass and half solid (fake) wood (that's the other kind we came home with) in one big pile, in the same section. Then it labels the all glass shelves thusly:

See those little lines going diagonally across the panels? Those show that there is glass. The picture on the doors we bought by accident looks exactly the same, except that it doesn't have the little diagonal lines on the bottom panel. So, when we were grabbing 11 of these things, we didn't check carefully enough. And THEN, as if that weren't aggravating enough, when Dave went to return the wrong doors the other day, they were all out of the right doors, even though the website told us they had them. Sigh! So another trip to Ikea (preceded by a phone call this time!) will be required to finally finish the shelves.

Perhaps you will also note that there are no doors on the height extender shelves. Initially, the reason for this was that Ikea was out of those, too. But when we got home, we discovered another problem: oversized books. The Billy shelves come in the depth we bought (11 inches I think) and also in a deeper, 15 inch size. But the height extenders come in only 11 inches. Back when we were planning on framing them out, I considered the oversize book issue, but decided not to worry about it because I didn't think the occasional book poking out over the edge was a big deal. Then we got the doors. And completely failed to revisit the oversize book issue until we got home with our mess of shallow shelves. The solution we settled on was not going back for doors for the height extenders and just leaving them open to hold all the big books. 

Billy shelves require so much thought! Yet another dilemma was what to do with the backs. We'd planned to leave them open (i.e. not nail the flimsy cardboard panels to the back) and then paint the wall behind them a different, darker color. But when I got the first one put together, sans back, it was super wobbly. I don't know how it is that the flimsy cardboard makes that big of a difference, and I have seen lots of other bloggers leave the backs off with apparently perfectly good results, but I'm just telling you what happened to me: wobble, wobble. We also figured that, since the shelves were mostly going to be holding lots of actual books instead of decorative stuff, the backs weren't going to show that much. Eventually it's possible that we'll get ambitious and paint the backs or put some cool wallpaper on them or something, but for now they're staying austere and white. 

Chairs: I spent almost as much time thinking about chairs as I did about paint. I knew I wanted two armless chairs to go with a table and to be used for guitar playing (my 9 year old and my husband are learning to play, and no arms works better) and then a comfy arm chair for reading. My plan was to get something in a solid color for one or the other of these chair types and something in a fun print for the other. I went on a shopping expedition with my mom one day and found a few possibilities.

Like these from Homegoods. But I was really envisioning brighter colors in the library, and also Dave didn't care for these.

Or these from Pier 1. I like roosters. But I worried I might tire of the whimsy. Also, mostly white + kids and pets is not the best combination.

And I'm still mourning this one, from Haverty's. Sigh. The Prettiest Chair In the World. LOVE it. But look at that price tag: $649 (and, yes, that's without the ottoman, which would be another $300). And we have cats. Cats with claws. Even so, I came pretty close to going for this one, so very in love with it was I. 

Especially after I found the green armless chairs pictured above. They were on clearance on Target's website for $60 each. The reviews had a lot of negative stuff to say about the color, but on my monitor it looked an awful lot like the green in The Prettiest Chair in the World. And they could be returned to Target if I didn't like them so I ordered them. I like the green. I think it would have gone great with the expensive chair. But the cats also took a pretty big interest in the clearance chairs right away, so finally I decided: we cannot have cats and nice things. Or at least not nice upholstered furniture. At least not nice, expensive upholstered furniture that would cause me to spend most of my time freaking out at the thought of cat claws tearing into those lovely circle-y designs. 

So instead we bought this serviceable, cheap ($40!) chair off of Craigslist. Gus declares that it is very comfy:

Other stuff: in between the clearance green Target chairs is a table we bought at Ikea. It's the Norden, plain old unfinished birch, $79. We're not sure what we're going to do with it yet. We might just paint a chess board on it and buy some oversize chess pieces and....well, play chess. Not me. I don't like chess. But the kids and Dave. Or we might end up just painting it a solid color. Time will tell. That painting (that will eventually be hung on the wall instead of just leaning there) is one my grandmother painted. I had it hanging in the den, but I think the colors in it will look lovely in this room. 

The other corners of the room:

Music! The lamp on the piano is shaped like a horse. I don't know that it has found its permanent home yet, although I'm not sure where else it can go. Right now it's also the only source of light in the room. This must change.

Still to do: 

*more light! we might get more lamps or we might go crazy and call an electrician and get an overhead light. I'm not sure why there's NOT an overhead light. I mean, who doesn't want one? What was the builder thinking?

*more (than none) stuff on walls! 

*get the right doors and finish the shelves

*do something or other for that table

*get ottoman for the armchair

*organize books more and perhaps put more pretty things on shelves in strategic locations

*make nice display on piano, instead of just a couple of random pictures in frames and a horse lamp. Perhaps I could even make something crafty to hold the music books (I am not crafty, as a rule, but that seems like a manageable project, even for me)

*curtains. probably with a fun pattern, since I did not wind up with a fun pattern chair

*rug? not sure. Dave says no rug is better for the acoustics, but without one the armchair keeps sliding back against the shelves (which eventually will have glass in front of them). So maybe a small rug just in that corner.