Home Love: My Favourite Space

I poked my head into blogland today and heard about the Home Love contest at Fashion for Home (thanks Kimberly!) where you show your favourite spot in your home and the prize of £500 to spend at their online store is very tantalizing indeed, so thought I’d enter (nothing to lose!).

For the contest, I am submitting my dining room, which has been a real labour of love in every sense of the phrase. Lots of labour and lots of love (and a teensy budget). Now that the labour part is over, there is just lots of love for the room.

My favourite room!

This room connects to the living room, the kitchen and the stairs, so it is pretty much the central hub of the home. For me, it is buzzing with creative energy while also perfectly fitting into the happy, relaxed and eclectic style that personifies my hubby and me. A mix of old and new, everything has been acquired over time from different places including an antiques saleroom, a local art and craft fair, even a flea market in Amsterdam, with a few items from retail stores.

The painting sitting behind the Dutch vases on the bookcase (below) is a reproduction of Edward Hopper’s Capron House (1933). I painted it just to see if I had any talent with a paintbrush.

My proudest creative endeavour is making over the vintage pine farmhouse table and chairs set which came from an auction house, complete with knocks and dents. I love how deep the table is – it makes it very social and we can fit up to 8 people around it at a squeeze. The original finish wasn’t quite our style though, so I got to work on it, staining the table dark and painting the chairs a lovely pale stone colour.

Yup, that’s me getting down and dirty.

When we put the room together, it was just for me and hubby. Now we have a little boy and he seems to be enjoying the room as much as the grownups do! And no childproofing required for the solid old furniture – any knocks he (inevitably) adds will simply add to the character and memories.

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What is your favourite spot or room in your home?

 

Seeing potential

I hope you’ll forgive my lack of presence in blogland lately. I could list my excuses but they generally point to my big belly slowing me down (in the third trimester now!).

I have finally started thinking about the baby things I need to get and this weekend, amidst watching the Olympics and sniggering at Tory MP Aidan Burley for showing the nation what a complete tool he is*, I finished working on baby’s first piece of furniture. On hindsight, (electric) sanding, priming and painting are best not done when 6 months pregnant, but I really didn’t have the time before now plus I needed some decent weather to do the sanding outside. I got there in the end.

Excuse the poor eBay listing photo, I forgot to take a ‘Before’ photo myself

I scored this solid pine chest of drawers for a bargain on eBay, in perfect condition, just the size I was looking for and the ‘tray’ around the top allows it to become a very useful changing station. But I wasn’t going to subject baby to the orangey-pine varnish… bleurgh!

You may have gleaned my love of sunshine yellow in kids' rooms from my nurseries post. Little Greene’s Mister David paint colour could not have been more perfect! It really is like sunshine in the room, even on a grey day.

Excuse the lack of styling. I couldn’t be arsed after all the tiring positions I had to manoeuver my big belly into in order to paint the dresser.

Now I just need to get a changing mat… and all the other baby paraphernalia… and get busy with my sewing machine to craft a few special things for baby.

Anyway, back to the subject of seeing potential in an old piece of furniture. A few weeks ago, this vintage bedroom chair sold for just £10 at my local auction house.

Old bedroom chair seeking new life

Besides looking a bit tatty, its frame was in pretty decent condition. My hands were itching at that price, I almost bid for it, but I made myself stay still. As much as I would have loved to have given it new life, I don’t have the resources right now (time or money) to be running around fabric houses and upholsterers. But just think of what it could’ve been! One rather snazzy example below –

Bedroom chair potential! Image via House to Home

 

If you found a couple of bedraggled antique chairs, what would you do with them? I love the modern twist given to these chairs -

via 508 (click on image to enlarge)

 

This card-cabinet-turned-console-table below is my favourite makeover to date. I love that they had the vision to see so much potential in an old humdrum card cabinet and turn it into a rather fabulous and useful console.

via Design*Sponge (click on image to enlarge)

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* That’s it for the subject of the post. But you may have noticed a little asterisk near the start. I don’t talk politics in this blog, because well, that’s not why you read it, but I feel compelled to say how utterly flabbergasted I am at the comments made about the Olympics opening ceremony by prize idiot MP Aidan Burley who called it “leftie multi-cultural crap”. Even after his comments caused a flurry of criticism, he continued to dig a deeper hole for himself.
  It would have been easy to produce a robotic bonanza of a show but Danny Boyle’s creative genius made the ceremony joyous and bonkers, charming, moving, humorous yet earnest, and human. It showcased revolutions that changed the way of life not just in this country, but the whole world. It rejoiced in what makes Britain great and in its people. It was a spectacle that evoked a heart-swelling pride at being British, certainly in myself and probably in most of the nation. And I wasn’t even born here. If anyone is interested, comedian Paul Sinha does a rather brilliant job of putting Burley out with the trash in his blog article “Aidan Burley MP. Hello, from a fellow Brit.”

Perhaps I should have titled this post “Seeing potential… and a touch of politics”. Don’t worry, I don’t plan to make politics a habit on this blog!
 

Furniture makeovers

If you’ve been reading my little blog for a while, you’ll know I am a fan of furniture makeovers.

Good looking storage is hard to come by without a hefty price tag so if you’re up for a bit of DIY, an old or humdrum piece of furniture can be made into something rather spectacular. If you don’t have a vintage piece that’s crying out for a makeover, have a look at IKEA’s untreated wood products which encourage you to get creative with the finish you want – paint, stain, wax, decoupage…

The RAST and TARVA chests of drawers are particularly popular as they are inexpensive and can be adapted to just about any setting. How cute would these two below be for kids?

 

Livet Hemma

 

Livet Hemma

 
Some more RAST and TARVA makeovers for ideas -
 

Images: Design*Sponge, Crafty Sisters, House to Home, Nothing but Bonfires

 

Images: Lucy Jane, Breadbox, Honey & Fitz

 
Have you seen or done any cool furniture makeovers lately?