Pub Bench

When we moved into this house we bought a great OLD table and 8 chairs to go with it. We are still a small family but we love to have people over so a big kitchen/dinning table and lots of chairs are a must.

The chairs were old, some of them have started falling apart, one broke when I sat down on. Gorilla Glue has been one of our best friends but when you have glued the same joint 10 times in a month you start to think about getting something a bit more sturdy. We have only lost two of the chairs but we were still finding ourselves short on chairs. My solution was to find a church pew or pub bench to put along one side of our table.

I searched and searched, do you know how much antique church pews sell for??? Lets just say a little more than I had to spend. Then one day I was stalking browsing a site for local second hand sales and there it was a pub bench for about the price I was willing to pay. Justin was out of town at the time and so I had to send him e-mails asking him what he though.

Side note, I like to rearrange things in my house, my husband likes things to stay where they are/where. A purchase of a major piece of furniture means I need to explain to him what I want, why I want it, and how I'm going to fit it in our house. The last because well we are running out of room in this house and have no storage space. When he is gone, even for a day of work I usually send him a photo of what I have done so he isn't surprised when he gets home.

Back to the bench. This piece is great, at 7 feet long it will seat a lot of people for gatherings. Someday it will go in a pub themed man cave but for now it works in our kitchen.

This is the before, the fabirc is very pub like, not very child friendly this needs to change a little.

Fun cooking themed cotton and a vinyl table cloth will help that.

Looking forward to lots of gatherings around our table with plenty of seating.

We still plan to fix up the wood on it.  It will probably wait until we have a home with a garage though, or if we just happen to find a weekend with no rain and no plans to be out.

The Story of a Headboard

I like interior design.  I am always tweaking things in my house and it drives me nuts that my living room is so long and narrow and no solid walls, but this isn't about the living room, that's another post.

This post is about a headboard for my bed.  For over a year my bed has been a blah mattress and box spring on a metal frame I'm on a mission to change that so I have been looking for ideas.  The problem I am having is I don't really know what I want.  What ever I do has to be able to mounted on the wall because right behind our bed are pipes leading from the boiler to the radiators and hot water taps in our house, not only to they create an obstacle but after you put a king sized bed in a 10'x12' room there is very little room for anything else.

I'm leaning toward an upholstered headboard mounted on the wall like this

If we were in the US I know I could pull this off, however I have yet to see a set of folding doors here.

I'm leaning this way because other than some wood and possibly some trim I have all I need to make one. The current issue of BHG has a shorter headboard a compilation of art work above it and I really like that. Or I could get some long narrow pictures for either side of the bed.

I really like this one

Just a couple of minor issues, the whole radiator pipe like I mentioned before, and the fact that I'm pretty sure this headboard is wider than my entire room.

Doors also seem to be all the rage for headboards. I wish I could find a picture I saw the other day of a set of doors being used as a head board it was beautiful and made we rush to EBAY UK to look for doors, unfortunately I did not see any that inspired me.

Lovely dark wood, I could probably make a new door look like this.

Hum, now this is a possibility.

This has the height that would go well on our wall, if I could find folding doors. It would also have to be a different color as it would blend in with our off white walls too much and I'm just not feeling painting in this house.

Hum, now this is a possibility.

As I was looking online today I noticed a lot of fire place surrounds being used as head boards.  LOVE the idea.

 Just enough detail and the middle can be filled with a piece of fabric covered MDF.

 This is just eye candy.

 I like this one but I don't know if I could trust it to stay in the wall.

Now if I wanted to do some painting there is this, I could actually see this in Olivia's room with a pink background.

I pulled this photo because this is what my room really needs as a whole, but Alas the whole pipes coming out of the wall and no room to walk at the end of the bed if we have to accommodate a large headboard behind it thing.

Then as I sit here writing this I relize I could let my husband expand his colections of giant pub signs, maybe.....

Picture credit www.BHG.com

Wardrobe Fun

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We did some switching around.  This wardrobe was in Erik's room, I swapped it for a dresser so I could stand up to change diapers instead of sitting on the floor.  When I find a big boy bed for Erik I would not mind finding another one of these wardrobes and doing something similar for him.

I'm sure that like my house many houses with toddlers have had their walls fall victim to a creative mind.  If we owned our house, or knew we would be living in one for more than a couple of years, I would paint a whole wall with black board paint, or a good portion of the wall, even the appliances ( well maybe not the appliances, truth be told I have a hard time with even magnets and art on paper on my refrigerator).

Back to the project, this is a pine wardrobe.  We bought it about a year ago, maybe longer, maybe more like a year and a half ago.  It was unfinished and just calling for something to be done with it.  This last week it happened.  The insets of the doors are painted with magnetic blackboard paint, I haven't tested the magnetic part yet but as a blackboard it works great.  Now my little artist can draw to her hearts content, on a piece of furniture.  I painted the drawers and trim of the doors in just a light wash of pink, her favorite color.  I would like to paint the wardrobe itself but I have just way to much going on right now to do that, I'm also going to do something with the door handles and drawer pulls, as I type this I'm thinking decoupage as one pull is glued in place and not coming off.