Just sharing

Since I've given up sharing the inane minutia of my day on Facebook, I thought I'd take a moment here, in a place that's always all about me, to mention how I spent my weekend.

Frank and I finally painted our bedroom, nearly eight years after moving into our house. Here's a picture of paint drying and Frank watching it happen. (That may not be a totally true description). The beautiful wall colors really point out how hideous the 1984-era furniture is.

The other two walls are a light grayish lavender color that is hard to describe. It's Behr's Smoked Oyster. This color is Behr's Wine Frost, and I will guarantee you that neither color looks remotely correct on a computer monitor.

I'd like to mention that when it comes to painting, I excel at this task. I don't like it, but I am meticulous in the preparation, the cleaning, and the taping. I have a selection of expensive brushes, each meant for a specific painting purpose, along with foam brushes and carefully selected rollers in varying naps. My paint application techniques are meticulous and methodical. Alas, Frank likes to paint and thinks he's an adequate painter, but he isn't particularly wed to the idea of perfectionism on this front. He finds me to be anal and unreasonable in my level of perfectionism. We don't work well together as painters.

In an unrelated project, For nearly six years, I've been looking for a piece of furniture for the dining room. When I was single and interesting, I used to love antiques shopping, estate sales, yard sales, and auctions. I furnished my entire living space in the shabby chic style, and it was very pretty. I've seen magazine spreads that didn't do it as well.

Now that I live with a man in a 1950's ranch house, the shabby chic thing doesn't work on many levels. I've been phasing it out since we moved in. One thing that really wasn't working for me was an antique chifforobe that stored Tupperware on one side and kitchen linens in the drawers. A former roommate bought it at a yard sale and painted it with latex paint. She left it behind when she moved, and I always hoped to refinish it, but never got around to it. I desperately want to give it away, but Frank is determined we're going to use it.

I looked high and low and for eight years to find something to replace it in the dining room. The problem is the space is very specific in what it can accommodate, which is much smaller than any manufactured sideboard or buffet I've found anywhere. I needed something 40 inches wide and no more than 15 inches deep, preferably 36-40 inches high, and it had to be affordable and work well with the rest of the furniture in the dining-living area. It was my furniture grail.

Well, today, I found it while looking for bedroom furniture. I had wandered into the dining-living room area of the furniture store (having totally struck out in the bedroom department), when I found a large selection of cabinets from Jaipur, India made from repurposed wood. What a coincidence. The other large pieces in the room are from Jaipur. We bought them from a store that sells Oriental rugs that had imported some furniture on one of their shipping crates, and filled extra space with furniture they didn't really want or need or generally carry in their store (we got this furniture so cheap, it still boggles my mind). Anyway, we wandered into that area of the store, and there it was: The cabinet I had been searching for. Wood, perfect. Style, perfect. Size, spot-on exactly perfect. Price, very good. I could pay cash.

So, enough babble. Here are the before and after pictures.

The antique, latex-painted chifforobe

Now in that spot, the Jaipur cabinet and Haitian wall art made from repurposed steel

Now that I'm finished with that, I must get back to putting the bedroom back together and finding a home for my collection of vintage Mason jars (as seen on top of the chifforobe) and all of my dishtowels and table linens.

We really need to have a yard sale.