a liitle paint

One of the house projects I worked on this year was painting the room I call my office. It's a really small bedroom that looked dark and dingy because of the taupe/mauve paint on the walls. Honestly, I don't know what the previous owners had against color. Every wall in the house with drywall was painted this ugly shade. You can see it in the hallway through the doorway.

I had some leftover dark blue paint from my bathroom project and a sample container of light blue paint I wasn't crazy about. Neither amount was enough to paint a room or even an entire wall, so I thought I'd try painting horizontal stripes to see if it would make the room look larger.

I had just enough paint to do the two shortest walls in the room.

I made a narrow shelf to display photos & postcards and painted it to match the wall. I also spray-painted the old filing cabinet and shelf brackets. The color's not quite the same, but it works for me. Here, I've begun putting up some of my Dog Art.

Reupholstery Project

I've had four of these dining chairs for about 20 years, and I decided it was time to change their look. I found some upholstery fabric, watched a lot of videos on YouTube, and dove into my first reupholstery project. After removing the fabric from the first chair I knew I was right about change: the old fabric was so dark and filthy when compared to the original color. You couldn't tell so much when it was still on the chair.

I used a manual stapler to attach the new fabric to the seat, which is made of particleboard.  I have some arthritis in my hands and sometimes had to use both hands to pull the lever on the stapler. It's not easy to hold the fabric in position if you need two hands to staple! I also had to allow a day or two between stapling sessions for my hands to recover. I felt it was worth all the trouble after I got the chairs put back together.

Here's one of the finished chairs. I love the new fabric; it's called "Jungle Jam". It's like getting a whole new set of chairs.

If I do another upholstery project in the future I think I will buy a pneumatic stapler. So much easier on the hands, and faster, too.

Wallpaper Bits

The last house I lived in was a circa 1890 Texas farmhouse. It was owned for more than 50 years by a family whose breadwinner was an old-time wallpaper hanger. The kitchen was in desperate need of remodeling when I purchased the place and during demolition of the plaster walls we found many layers of different kinds of wallpaper. Over at Retro Renovation today they're featuring some fabulous wallpaper from 1928, and while my examples aren't exactly fabulous, they're from about the same era, so I thought I'd throw them into the mix. The wallpaper was variously underlaid with muslin, newspapers from Dallas, and burlap sacks from an Oklahoma flour mill. Little could be salvaged because of water damage and almost everything was literally falling apart. The silverfish were having a feast! I photographed and scanned what I could before it all went to the landfill.

Two inseperable wallpapers

Probably the most colorful piece in the bunch. Interesting geometric forms scattered about.

I really liked the green dots on the grid. It's stuck to two layers of muslin.

Bits of two comic strips from The Dallas Journal, whose name was changed in 1938. Some of the newspapers were dated 1928, but Broncho Bill ran from 1932-1950 and Sky Roads from 1929-1942, so this particular part of the wall was probably laid between 1932 and 1938.

orange & turquoise

A vintage Anholt ashtray I got for Christmas and a  lighter I picked up off the ground on one of my walks (It still works!) These ashtrays were originally ceramic and made by the Coors company of Colorado. This one however is a "safety" ashtray made of melamine and boy, howdy, do I love that boomerang shape. It just shouts "mid century" and that deep orange perfectly complements the color scheme I'm working on in my living room. One of these ashtrays appeared in Betty's interrogation scene in "Mad Men" a few years ago.

I'd never heard of the "Clipper" brand of lighters and noticed the URL had a dot.eu appended to it, so I looked it up; Clipper is based in Barcelona, Spain. There's an official site for the UK but not for the US. Upon a bit more searching I found these lighters are favored by pot smokers and except for online retailers are usually only found in head shops in the U.S. Judging from the prices listed on Amazon these lighters cost about twice as much as the disposable lighters I usually find laying around. This one's so cute with that Texas boot on it I'll probably keep it with my collection of miscellaneous junk after it stops working.

Mid Century Table Lamps

I love looking at old table lamps, and I usually wonder where and when they were made. I found this page from an old book on interior design printed in 1954. I was surprised to see one of my favorite lamps, the "Modern informal" in the upper right corner. I see them on ebay now & then and I've bid on several of them without success. I have a pair of table lamps, probably from the 1960s that I'm pretty happy with, but someday I'd like to replace them with a pair of those "modern informals". I don't think I've ever seen one with its original shade, but it's nice to know what it looked like. Vintage shades seem to be harder to come by than the lamps themselves.