Run With The Fishes

A few weeks ago, Nathan had a school project that involved making some messy flour based modeling clay and building a topographic representation of geographic shapes. Allison and Zoey insisted on helping Nathan and building their own sculptures. In the course of doing this, the fabric on my kitchen chairs quickly became covered in a floury paste. Heck, not just the chairs, but they are the only part that I couldn’t get clean. Because I knew how to recover the seats, I began deciding how I wanted the chairs to look this time.

I decided to take some pictures and write up some steps on how to do it. If you decide to recover a chair, you’ll need a few things.

Staple gun with staples, or upholstery tacks if you don’t have a staple gun. without them you will never get the job done.
New fabric – picking this out is the best part for me.
Pencil to trace old fabric pattern onto new
large screw driver and pliers to remove old staples
Phillips screw driver to unscrew seat cushion

Pick out some fabric that is both functional and suits your style. Mine will be used on our kitchen chairs. I wanted to use something that would be sturdy and easy to clean. Plus, my kids aren’t exactly the neatest eaters. There is hardly anything easier to clean than vinyl. One click wipe and the mess is gone. When I think of vinyl though, I also think of those old retro diner chairs. Not really a look that matches my kitchen. I was lucky to find some that wasn’t bright blue or red and sparkly. It seemed like a good choice for now. Later, when my children are a little neater, I can always recover the chairs again.

Since they helped make the mess, I gathered up some child laborers to help clean it up. It’s a little like Tom Sawyer, I made it look like so much fun that they insisted on helping me. I usually use a chain assembly method, remove all of the seat cushions, clean all of the frames, take off the old fabric, measure and cut the new clean, shiny fabric, staple the new fabric onto the cushions, reassemble the chair and enjoy how it looks.

Remove the seat cushion from the frame.

Clean the frames

Remove Staples

Easiest way to remove staples, slide screw driver under staple or tack and twist, if the staple doesn’t come all the way out, just use a pair of pliers to pull it out the rest of the way. The first time I tried recovering chairs for some reason, I thought I could only use a screw driver to get the staples out. It took me hours to get the whole set of seats done. Then someone suggested that I use a wrench along with the screw driver and it shortened the time to about 5 minutes a seat.

Pay attention to how the fabric comes off of the seat because this is how it is going to be put it back on. Sometimes the corners can be a little tricky if you don’t know how they should go back.

Use the old fabric as a template for how to cut the new fabric. Trace it onto the back of the new fabric, then cut it out. It doesn’t have to be perfect, but you do have to make sure it is not too small. It has to be able to cover the top, with room enough to staple into the wooden seat bottom. It’s a good idea to measure your seats before you buy the fabric. Especially if you don’t want to end up like me and only have enough fabric for four seats instead of six.

After the fabric is cut, it’s time to staple it back on. I start at one side, then do the other side so that I can make sure the fabric is pretty tight across the top. It sucks to have finished and have loose fabric on the seats. After the four sides are done, I do the corners since this is where adjustments can be hidden.

Really after that, it’s just reassembling the chairs. Pretty easy if you remember how you took them apart. Now I have new looking chairs that are super easy to clean, all for about 20 dollars and 2 hours worth of time.

So, I know you guys are anxiously awaiting an update on the bathroom status. While it isn’t really that hard (at least for me, because Greg did almost all of the work) it is completely time consuming, at least a 3 day process, and messy. We started by laying out all of the tiles before we (Greg) cut them. You might not remember but I’m not really to be trusted around cutting tools, when you add in flying ceramic pieces, it becomes really dangerous.

Then started the messy part. While most of us were out of the house at work or school, Greg mixed the mortar and started sticking the tiles onto the floor.

We waited at least 24 hours for the tiles to set. Okay, the mortar was only slightly messy. The grout got everywhere. After scrubbing the tiles for the third time, I used 1/2 vinegar and 1/2 water mixture to remove the haze. It was a magic recipe that cleaned the tiles completely.

After waiting another 24 hours, we sealed the grout and were ready to put in the new toilet. That’s right, I said new. The two most frustrating parts of the bathroom makeover were the toilet and the base trim. The tiles under the toilet weren’t quite level so we had to use some makeshift shims and grout under the toilet. The trim was just a pain because of the angle cuts.

Man, oh man, all of the time and work were completely worth it. The bathroom looks a million times better. We finished it tonight. Before it looked like it needed some work. Now it looks like a brand new room. I can’t wait to get started on the girls’ room.

Remember way back, like two years ago when the tub had to be replaced? How we ended up having to finish the job with the drywall? We did a slap together solution for the floor where part of the vinyl tiling had been torn from the new tub install. The week before last we bought tiles, mortar and grout to finish out the floor the right way. With start of school, work, and labor day weekend, we haven’t had a chance to really work on it.

When we laid out some tiles, just to see how they would look, it became clear that the light bluish gray wall color was just not going to work. It kind of sucked because except for the floor, the bathroom looked great. Bright, cheery, crisp and clean. I guess we could have opted for a different tile, but Lowe’s is an hour away and it took me forever to finally decide on these.

Have you ever tried picking out a new wall color when you just really didn’t care as long as it looked ok? The color choices are overwhelming. We needed something warmer than what we had but didn’t want to make the bathroom feel small and it had to match with the existing wood and the new tiles. We settled on this 70′s looking green color called Basil (puke green, if you ask Greg). I’m trying to decorate along with the age of the house. Haha, isn’t that what they say on shows when they are remodeling turn of the century houses?

So, Friday night Greg started the repaint job, then I finished up part of the room. Saturday I did the second coat on the walls we painted the night before and finished up the rest of the room. Just for the record, I like painting walls. It’s pretty fun for me. That being said. I despise painting above the bathtub. Shorty that I am, there is just no easy way for me to reach the tops and corners.

I have tried to take some pictures as I went along (Greg suggested too late that I just set up the video camera and do a time lapsed video for everyone). I decided to try and pull up the old vinyl flooring to see if we would run into trouble with the adhesives or not. The answer was not. I didn’t take a picture during because it took me all of five minutes. I don’t think they had any glue on the floor.

So, round one of Bathroom Makeover Take Two is complete. Greg is going to work on the actual floor part during the week (when it is not football Sunday). It’s the first time either of us has really tiled anything. Wish him luck.

The other day my Mom commented that I never actually showed the completed kitchen wall project from a couple of years ago. While you can sort of catch a glimpse of it in some of Allison’s first birthday photos, I snapped a couple of just the wall. Thanks again to Jennifer who got me started by showing how to paint the flowers. She did the awesome tall pot with pink flowers and the pot with white fluffy flowers.

It brings out the lighter colors in the late-70′s style wood panelled walls, making them tolerable. It looks so clean and unblemished right now. I wonder how long it will last.

The tub in our house had a huge crack in it that was actually leaking into the walls and down the hallway. At first we didn’t realize that the crack actually went through the whole bottom of the tub. After the 3rd or 4th soaking of the hall carpet we knew that something suspicious was taking place.

The plumber was called in to replace the tub since a new tub would cost less than repairing the bottom of the old tub. Good riddance to the old tub with sliding glass doors. As it happens, this is what a plumber gets paid the big bucks to do. Cut the old tub out from the wall, insert the new tub, connect all pipes back and he was done. Huge gaps in the wall where the tub no longer met up with the drywall? 6 inch space between the floor tile and the bottom of the new tub? He was not a carpenter, so was not his responsibility.

One of the good things about being a renter, is that we get to learn how to do all of this repair stuff on a house that isn’t our own, at no cost to us. By we, I mostly mean Greg.

We pulled down the wallpaper in the entire bathroom. Greg hung drywall, taped and mudded all of the joints, then I got to work on the priming and painting. Eventually we got around to fixing the gap in the floor between the tub and vinyl tile, repairing the base boards, and painting all of the trim. Here is the finished product.

About a week after we got it all finished, one of the seals broke on the cold water faucet. After much tinkering Greg, along with sidekick Allison, was able to get it fixed.

Maybe someday we will do something about the matching harvest gold toilet and tub in the other bathroom.

*project started in February and put the final touches on at the end of July. We know how to make a project last*

When we moved into this house we knew we would need to repaint a room or two. One of those was Zoey’s room. By itself it seemed like a really awful color of lime green. For Zoey’s birthday we decided to give her room a makeover. We bought things that would make the green seem brighter and more like a little girl room color.

Zoey and Nathan were at my dad’s house for the past week. This gave us time to redecorate the kitchen and Zoey’s room (for her birthday).

The kitchen was a dingy white and had a funky wallpaper on one wall that was starting to peel. We also needed to repair and paint the ceiling from the leaky roof that was replaced last month. We started by sanding down the walls to get the painful spikey texture smoothed out. After we washed the pounds of dust away, we patched all of the holes and primed the walls. The ceiling has a popcorn texture that had fallen off around the leaks. We thought it would be easier to patch than make a huge mess pulling down the rest of the ceiling. We bought an aerosol can that sprays the texture up to the ceiling. Greg taped of the area around the spot that needed patched and hung some papers from the ceiling around it to catch the spray. The directions say to shoot it from the inside of a box. We found out why when Greg started spraying the texture all over the kitchen. It was pretty comical and thankfully easy to clean up.

I decided that all of the walls would be painted a buttery yellow that matched both our table and cabinetry and wanted to have one wall that was different for accent. I picked out a tomato red that looked really good next to the yellow color. After 4 coats of primer and 4 more coats of red, the wall looked pretty good. The only problem was that when you looked at the whole kitchen it looked like someone had squirted mustard all over 3 walls and ketchup on the 4th.

All in all, not too shabby. The plan is, with Jennifer’s help, to paint a mural on the red wall. That should help tone it down some.