Good Lines, But A Total Mess

No, not Neeley O'Hara. Our credenza. It's a nice little mid-century piece with great lines (love those skinny legs), but it's become a total mess, probably because it serves many purposes. It's our landing strip. The drawers hold...well, almost everything. Stray electronics, important papers, wrapping paper/letter writing materials, and craft supplies all find a home here. The center sections holds magazines, books, and various decorative items. The top is our biggest flat surface, excluding the dining room table, in the house. A lamp, our key dish, books, pictures, the television...

Why is it such a mess? It's multi-tasking ways, the fact it's so convenient to drop things here, and not editing it as how we use the space changes. The ancient television isn't even hooked up, because we never watch television in here. And yet there are cords everywhere! J's pile of magazines is falling all over the place, the DVD player has migrated in here for reasons no one can remember (and is backwards, so obviously it's never been used in here!). Really, what's up with this mess? And I really like the credenza! In fact, I'd like to redo it, something I'll pontificate on in a later post. It's starting to stress me out, so time to attack.

After moving the tv and backwards DVD player to the Future Den (more on that UNHOLY MESS some other time), our t-shirt lamps are united for the first time! This also means I can eventually move the side table out of here, which is awesome, because as you can see here it's much to large for the space.

The rest of this fast little credenza makeover consisted of editing down the decorative items. I was hoping to edit the magazines, but J swears he needs all of them. Ahem. Anyway, in the name of marital harmony, I simply turned them around so they became a white block and popped a picture of Lila in front of them.

The credenza now reveals one of my deep, dark secrets. I collect vintage books. There, I said it. “Valley of the Dolls” has had pride of place for awhile now. “The Godfather Papers” now joins it to create a little vintage book/awesome for different reasons movie vignette. On the lower shelf is a stack of cookbooks and craft books from the '60s. Love the cover design on all of these books (and yes, I actually read them).

I love milk glass, and this little vintage hobnail milk glass “I Dream of Jeannie” bottle is one of my favorite things. Unbelievably, I found it in the trash! I think it looks great with the milk glass ashtray we use for a key dish.

And the ugly old curtain/homemade shade things are gone as of tomorrow (I'm making a new window covering as part of the Pinterest Challenge)! The window sported broken, plastic mini-blinds when we moved in with shorty curtains on the side. I threaded a tension rod through the hems of the shorties and hung them as a replacement for the blinds/temporary solution. Almost two years ago. Sigh. Still, they were the best I could do at the time and definitely better than the old blinds!

Did anyone else spend the weekend taking care of an overused/cluttered spot?

My Lamps Wear Underwear!

Even as we struggled to find a color palette that worked with J's dark leather sofa and our living room's cave-like light, I knew I wanted to use bright blue as our main accent color. It's bright, it's happy, it's color we both like (important!), and it ties in to the fact we live at the lake. So one of the first things on my "We Really, Really Have to Buy" list were lamps for the living room. I wanted a matching pair, and I didn't want to spend more than $12 for the set. Lamps are one of those things where I just can't spend money. Thrift stores, yard sales, and other resale places are full of lamps. Most of them, undoubtably, are hideously ugly. But if you look past horrid colors and terrible patterns, you'll see nice shapes. Zero in on the nice shapes. Lamps are so very easy to fix. So we found this set of lamps for $10. For the pair! Yes ma'am! So while the 1980s flower power pattern isn't my taste, the classic Chinese vase shape is. No complaints there. And they even came with shades.

Ugly pattern, cute lamp...painting supplies at the ready!

After bringing the lamps home I taped over the cord and bulb socket with painter's tape, sanded them down with my trusty sanding block, wiped them off with a damp cloth, and spray painted a few light coats (light coats and staying in motion while painting are the keys to a successful spray painting experience!). That still left the shades. Finding lamps with shades is awesome, and rare. Shades are expensive! These, though...they look older than the lamps, and they were brittle to the touch, yellowed, and made me think I smelled smoke every time I looked at them. They needed help.

Painted, but the stinky shade remains

We lived with them for awhile. My first thought was to buy some remnant fabric and recover. Then, as I folded J's undershirts, an idea was born. I raced to the living room and pulled a shirt over the lamp shade. J looked at me like I'd lost my mind. Well, the shirt was way to big! So then I looked through his drawer for a smaller shirt. The medium was practically a perfect fit.

 The first step was to cut the collar and sleeves from the shirts. Then I cut and ripped the old, nasty fabric from the lamp shade. After a quick wipe down, I set to work on recovering the frame. (I really, really wish I'd spray painted the frame at this point.)

Naked Shade!

I pulled the shirt over the frame, pinned into place with straight pins, and then trimmed excess fabric from around the pins (this step made it much easier to sew the fabric). Pull the fabric tight, and keep good tension as you pin around the top and bottom of the shade frame. You don't want the fabric to gap. After raiding my embroidery stash, I found some pretty blue thread that matched the color of the spray paint I used on the lamp bases. Leaving the pins in place, I used a simple back-stitch to sew the shirt to the lampshade frame.

This is a simple, back-stitch diagram:

 E FC DB A

The needle comes up from the bottom of the cloth at A, C, and E. Check out Jenny's superior tutorial for much, much better diagrams.

 After sewing the top and bottom hems, pull out the straight pins. Here's a close up of my stitched shade:

Do any additional trimming needed. And...you are done! These are the cheapest lampshades ever! And so easy! I spent maybe 90 minutes doing both, and I was watching Bravo at the time. So...I was probably distracted by the nonsense displayed by a random Housewife of Some Place. I did these about six months ago, and the shades still look great! Here's lamp one, with the light on (the ugly curtains behind are soon to be history, thanks to the Fall Pinterest Challenge, which I will unveil on Tuesday!):

No sagging, no bagging, nothing. The total cost of a pair of matching lamps, with new-ish shades? $13. $10 for the lamps, $3 for some cheap spray paint. I used J's shirts and already owned thread for the shades. Here's lamp two.

See this post at Snap and Someday Crafts.

Love of Family & Home

The Francis Family Blog

House of Rose

Blissfully Ever After

Crafty, Scrappy, Happy

Design, Dining & Diapers

Our Fifth House

I Love You More Than Carrots

 Liz Marie Blog

Snapshot!

Sadly, this post isn't about instagram or even taking actual photographs. We recently got a new (old) car and shopped around for new insurance. Progressive offered us the best deal, so we went with. Going with Flo the Progressive lady meant accepting her newest accessory. Snapshot. Snapshot is a little device that plugs into your car's data port and reports back to Progressive on the times you drive and the amount of "hard braking" you do. When you "hard brake" Snapshot beeps at you. I love data, and it is pretty cool to log onto the Progressive website at the end of the day and see a breakdown of how I drove that day. Although Progressive says they don't take your speed into account, it does give you a graph of your speeds. I drive faster on expressways than I thought I did.

You can see how Progressive breaks up the day into low, medium, and high risk. You can also easily pick out the time of day I drove on the interstate!

Okay, so the hard braking thing...I don't like it. Progressive defines hard braking as any time you slow down at a rate of more than 7MPH per second. This isn't "slamming the brakes" territory. On cars with standard transmissions, it sometimes counts shifting as hard brakes. I've noticed it tends to count stops on hills as hard brakes, even if it doesn't feel like I'm coming to a hard stop. It counts each second of 7MPH or more slow down as a separate hard brake. The five on the chart above are all from one incident, where someone cut me off, and I did slam the brakes. The beep the Snapshot gives out when you hard brake is annoying, and could be distracting with younger drivers. I might yell at it. Sometimes. When no one else is in the car. Installation was easy, after I figured out where to install it! My owner's manual wasn't helpful, so I went to Progressive's website where I put in information about my car and they showed me a picture of where to find the data port...except it wasn't there. I had to crawl under the steering wheel to finally find it. Progressive needs Snapshot to report more days before I'm offered a discount (oh...I just learned that days you don't drive don't count, unless you crank the car and move it around the driveway a little, so that's going to slow my discount down). I'll report back. Here's hoping the fact I never drive during high risk times and rarely during medium risk helps me out.

EDITED- So my Snapshot discount was calculated. 10% off the total cost of the policy. I've also developed an utter hatred for this thing. You know what doesn't help your stress level when someone in front of you does something insanely stupid, causing you to brake hard? Your Snapshot by Progressive beeping at you! Argh! Also, because of where it hooks into my car it is insanely easy to catch my foot on it as I enter/exit the car.