Projects Galore!

So for a while there I'd been working on quite a few projects.  The first is this one...

Wanna see my laundry room?  Well, it's more of a laundry closet actually.  I'd been seeing chevron walls all over the blogging world and wanted to try my hand at it. Surprisingly, Remy was all for it!  So I called up my mathematically inclined sister to come over and help me figure it all out.  After some trial and error, and sheer luck...

{cough}

I mean skill...we figured it out.  And it turned out awesome!  I'm seriously impressed.  I have a habit of just jumping into projects with only sort of  thinking all the details through and I did NOT want to do that this time around!  Luckily Heather (the mathematically inclined one) was able to slow it down and figure it all out.  It definitely took some time to work through it all and finally get the system down, but it was worth it!  Remy even jumped in and helped me out!

Wanna know a funny story?  When we went to the paint section I found the color I wanted and had the guy mix up a quart.  Well as it was mixing we were looking through the "mistake" paints that are discounted, and I found the EXACT color in a gallon size for like $2 more or something.  The paint guy was really nice and let me take the gallon.  I felt kinda bad for wasting that quart, but I got over it.  :)

So here it is:

We finally figured out the right technique for the taping!

Ta-da! 

Here it is all finished, but before I moved all the crap onto the shelves (obviously).  Sadly I didn't take a before picture, but esentially it was all white walls, with one tiny shelf that wasn't screwed in properly so if you put too much pressure on the right side of the shelf it would flip up and dump detergent everywhere...not like we know from experience or anything. {shifty eyes}  And everything was just piled on the shelf and it was just a mess!  Originally I had wanted an EXPEDIT shelf from IKEA to mount to the wall.  I wanted the one that had like 6 cubes, but after looking at them, we decided they wouldn't really work for our space.  So we started looking around and wound up in the kitchen cabinet section where we found the shelf you see.  It's not pictured here, but for the bottom shelf we actually purchased the microwave shelf which sticks out a good 6 inches or so farther than the regular shelves, just to have a little more workspace.  It's been REALLY nice.  If I get around to it (don't hold your breath), I'll take a pic of the space now with everything in it.  It's awesome!  I can't even fill up the shelves!

BUT WAIT, THERE'S MORE!

We had been wanting to replace the two chairs in our livingroom and had looked and looked and looked for a love seat or something that would work, but we just never found anything we liked.  The chairs are a dark brown vinyl that match the couch, but the freaking cats run all over them with their claws and little Grey, who is an angel in every other way, decided to make them her scratching post.  Which is weird because it's the only thing other than their scratching post that has ever been scratched. 

Whatever.

The point is they were looking bad.

So one day I had an epiphany and thought, "I can sew, why  not make some slip covers?!"

And that's what I did.

I did some searching for some fabric and after consulting with Remy, who again surprised me with his acceptance of the brown zebra print, put in the order for the fabric and got to work!  I made templates out of paper first because I'm REALLY bad at measuring directly onto the fabric.  Then I started piecing the first one together.  Most of it went really quickly, until I got to the top corners of teh seat part.  I had cut the pieces a little larger than I needed it took some finagaling.  THEN I realized I had completely forgot to cut out one of the pieces for the skirt part.  THEN I realized I cut all the skirt pieces too short because...I'm not sure why, it just happened okay? 

So all in all the first cover took me 20 minutes to put together 90% of it.  Then probably another week or so to finish the last 10% because of the order I did everything which caused me pain.  The second chair cover was probably done in like an hour since I had figured out everything I did wrong in the first one. 

I also made some covers for the pillows that we have that go on those chairs.  They aren't pictured here because I hadn't made them yet, but they're white and really cute.

Just trust me.

And last, but not least, I painted this night stand for my youngest sister Amy.  I found this at the DI for like 6 or 8 dollars and it was just white wood. I think it was homemade actually.  So I gave it a sanding, spray painted it with ValSpar Grass Green.  I made the mistake of only buying one can which wasn't enough.  And I had to go back to freaking Lowes about 50,000 times before they finally had more.  Every time I went, and I went to probably 3 or 4 different locations too, they were out.  One time I bought one that I thought was right (really knowing it wasn't, I was just hoping they changed the name or something :) )it was too light.  But it worked out because I ended up using it for the chevron on the top.  And it was glossy and the rest is satin so it gives it even more dimension.  Then we just picked out the knob from Hobby Lobby.

So there you have it...oh wait, I forgot...we also painted our vanity cabinets.  But we haven't finished with the hardware so we'll get to that another day!