The Schorr Thing: More painting and building furniture

Hope everyone has been enjoying this beautiful weekend! We have gotten quite a bit more done this week and both rooms are starting to come together. The week started off by finishing the drywall so we could start to clean up the layers of dust that settled all over the house. We definitely could not have even made a dent in the dust without the help of Sara's mom Darcie, who came over with Callie to dust one room at a time. We were able to move everything from the kitchen and dining room to our second pantry (aka the guest room) to keep it out of the way. Callie is not a very helpful duster and likes to bite at both the duster and the person dusting, so we had to find creative ways to keep her occupied...Tequila moped in the corner most of the time, so he didn't help much.

While Sara's mom tackled the dust, Sara started painting the vaulted ceilings in the main room and by the time Brian got home from work, we were ready for the second coat and the primer on the walls.

Look at how tall the room looks now!

Starting to come together

The ceiling came out way better in the main room than the kitchen...mostly because Brian did such a great job sanding and we are so glad we scraped the popcorn ceiling. Once the primer settled, we started to add color to the room. We had looked at several paint colors over the last couple of months, and the one color that we kept coming back to was Benjamin Moore's Palladium Blue. The color is supposed to be a blue/gray/green color, but it looks a lot more like a sea green and we love it. It also changes with the light which is perfect with the skylight that we refinished.

View with the skylight and fireplace

A look into the kitchen...oh yeah, we also painted the top beam black to freshen it up a bit. Oh yeah, did I mention we are building a kitchen island? :) More to come on that later!

Now that most of the color is up we found some areas that need to be refinished, so we will be working on that in the next few weeks, but overall the paint has really transformed the space. Plus we started getting in some of the pieces we ordered including the kitchen sink, the new faucet, slip covers for the couches (so impressed by them), the new chandelier and the new hardware for all the drawers and cabinets. It's been like Christmas at our house and we (ok, mostly Sara) have had to restrain ourselves from opening all the boxes and getting everything out. We will be sharing pictures of everything once they are in place, so for now you'll have to wait.

The best part of this week was that Brian decided to use some of his PTO time to extend his weekend from Friday to Monday, so naturally Sara came up with fun new projects to start on. We had been having some trouble finding stools for the kitchen island we are building (more to come on that soon) and an accent table to go behind the couch. Everything that we liked was way too expensive and we would rather put our money into the flooring and counter tops, so we had to start getting creative. Sara is addicted to Pinterest, and stumbled upon the website http://ana-white.com/ which has plans for all sorts of building projects (she is amazing!). After some searching, we found plans for an accent table and bar stools that we wanted to try to build ourselves. All of her plans come with shopping lists, cut lists, building plans with diagrams and pictures along with a rough estimate of the cost of each project so we knew what we would be getting into before we started. Here are the pictures along with the links to the plans for each project:

Rustic X Console Table - We followed the plans for this table that will sit behind our sofa in the main room. We've never really built furniture before, but this wasn't too difficult to make and I love how it looks. Plus it's super heavy and sturdy, so it will be perfect to store items and decor for the main room.

Before the stain

With stain

We started with Minwax water based stain in Slate, and since it was a little too gray, we sanded the piece down a little, did a coat with a light white wash and played with the color a bit.We may do some more adjustments to the color, but it does look nice with the color in the main room.

Cheshire Vanity Stool - We really liked the look of this stool with the nail heads, and we customized the stools to bar stool height by extending the length of the 2x2s to 27.5". We also bound the legs together before we started to put the stools together and sanded down the ends to make sure that they sat flush and wouldn't wobble...I would definitely recommend doing that because they are sturdy and don't wobble at all.

We built the frames first...we don't have a kreg jig (yet) so we screwed everything in from the sides

2 coats of black paint...we started painting the stools a different color, but ended up choosing a black enamel that turned out much better

Make sure to paint the stools and let them dry overnight before you add on the cushions and the cover...it makes everything go on much smoother. We found a faux white leather at JoAnn's Fabric on sale for $8/yd and decided to trim them with nail heads. Note for the JoAnn newbies (like us), check the size of the nail heads before you dump them all into your basket, even if they come in the same row...we didn't realize that we grabbed 2 different sizes until we were hammering them in...luckily, we were able to cover the one stool with the larger nail heads, and had enough of the smaller ones for the last two. Our thumbs are really sore from tacking them in...and yes, the nail heads aren't perfectly straight...we eyeballed it while we took some time out from the sun and watched HGTV for inspiration, but I'm still pretty impressed :)

Final version...a lot better than spending $100 per stool!

While we were outside painting and building, we decided to spray all of the hinges for our cabinets and the ugly brass fireplace.

Fireplace - satin nickel spray paint

Lots of cabinet screws - best tip, put them all on a Styrofoam block and spray them...then keep them here until it's time to attach the cabinets (genius!)

It's a whole lot cheaper to spray paint the hinges than to replace them...

Oh, and on top of all the painting and building, Sara found a no-sew way to make pillow covers. So she made a 2nd trip up to JoAnn's to pick out fabric for pillows and Unique stitch, which is the best invention ever for people that do not sew and do not have the patience to learn how. Check out these babies...

Not too shabby...and yes, they are sitting on top of the couch with the new slip cover...yeah, we couldn't wait :)

It was way cheaper to cover the pillows than it was to find new pillows that didn't break the bank...I liked doing it so much, I may be making covers for all the pillows in our house, and my mom's. Plus, you don't have to be too exact and if you mess up, you can easily rip them apart and start again (I know from experience). Just make sure to let everything dry overnight, then cover your pillows!

We are going to take the rest of the night off so that we can work on plans for the bar area tomorrow. We'll have more updates and pictures soon! For now, I'll leave you with a couple pics of our little man...