The Interior DIYer
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To paint or not to paint?

For my birthday earlier this week I was gifted this little gem of a curio cabinet from my parents. It’s an adorable piece with lovely details. It has a faux mahogany finish on the shelves but as you may or may not be able to tell, the back panel hasn’t been finished to the same standard and the shelves are chipped here and there. But my question – do I paint it or leave it as it is? To my surprise, my parents immediately suggested “it would look lovely painted black!“. I was surprised by their suggestion considering they’re forever trying to steer me away from black to, well, practically any other colour in existence. So when they suggested I paint it black I was pleasantly surprised. 
What pretell will I be filling said cabinet with? I mentioned a little while ago making the move to becoming a Level Nine Crazy Cat Lady by having a collection of Sylvanian Families kitties. As it happens, I got not one, but TWO SYLVANIAN KITTY FAMILIES for my birthday and I was so excited that I cried [they’re just so cute and I get emotional over cute stuff. Please don’t judge me]. I can’t wait to fill my cabinet with them. And for all our future visitors think I’m insane. 

So what do you think? To paint or not to paint? We’re expecting a lot of rain this weekend [yay] so a little painting project could justify being indoors all weekend. Now I can’t stop thinking of its gothic potential! 

As for my birthday; Robert surprised me with a stay at Powerscourt Hotel for the last night of my 20’s [seriously fancy], then on my birthday we ate black forest gateau, played Cards Against Humanity [thank you again, Kimberly!], drank way too much sangria and spent the day in inappropriate levels of hysterics. It was amazing. 

Also featured – waxing moon painting – gold tumblers – #DirtyThirty
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New second hand stool

Last weekend Robert and I wandered around Mac’s Salvage Warehouse to quench our my thirst for vintage markets in lieu of the no longer Merchant’s Market. I was originally on the lookout for an old wooden ladder with some character for our living room [for blanket and throw purposes]. Unfortunately they didn’t have any ladders, but Robert did happen upon a behemoth stack of bar stools. Originally, I had my eye on some dark red stools, but Robert insisted there were some ‘lovely green ones‘ [vom]. See, gentlemen, he didn’t use the correct annotation. He should have said there were some ‘fabulous viridian coloured stools‘. I was sold. 

We settled on this stool as it had the least ware on the legs and zero visible ware on the upholstery. There was a minuscule issue with the fabric as the pattern had red, blue, yellow and pink details. “Not to worry,” I said. “I’ll just fix that with a Sharpie when we get home“. And fix it I did.

Not the most professional of fixer-uppers, but more times than I’d like to admit I’ve used a Sharpie on a project or two. Or seven. I use them to touch up loads of things [nicks on black picture frames etc], so I simply used my black Sharpie to colour in the colourful dots. 

TIP – if you decide to do this, make sure you don’t use the seat / fabric for at least half an hour after colouring it in, otherwise the ink may transfer. 

Something I am a bit stumped on is what to do with the wood legs. I quite like the dark finish that’s on them. It needs to be touched up in places, so I’m thinking of getting a varnish to fix the little scratches. But what do you think – would you just repaint the legs something entirely different? I was thinking black, but I like the colour of the wood too much. At the moment the wood doesn’t match anything in our apartment [other than our desk], but I keep reminding myself that we won’t be renting this apartment forever. I guess I’m still waiting to inherit that Victorian full of mahogany finishes. 

But for the moment, our new stool has been thoroughly approved by Juniper and Toshi. They take turns sitting, clawing and sleeping on it.

UPDATE: I painted the legs black! I was hoping to do it in high gloss black, but changed my mind at the last minute and chose mid sheen. I think it looks so much better. Except now I have my eye on updating my imitation Eames chair legs too. It’s a slippery slope, I know. But still … Can you imagine it with black legs?! Swoon!


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Spare bedroom spruce up + room tour

We don’t own our apartment, we rent it. I feel I need to write this every so often as a reminder that I don’t have complete control over the design of our place. I have to work with what came with our apartment as best as I can. Don’t get me wrong, the bones of our apartment are good, but for the most part it’s restrictive. Especially when you have a blog that’s all about design and DIY. Trust me, if we owned this place, it would be wearing a velvet cape and lasers would be shooting out of its eyes. 

Anyways! In recent months, I’ve gotten a bit ballsier. We live here. I have projects I’d like to do in our apartment and stuff I want to hang up, so I’m going to go ahead and do that. Well, really uninvasive projects. I’m not ballsy enough to start knocking down walls. 

One such project I had in mind was to create a repurposed bedside light for our spare bedroom. As the bedside table is so small, I wanted a light that wasn’t taking up valuable table top real estate. Maybe I could hang a light from the ceiling … of course! What’s even better, I managed to make it out of a recycled vacuum cord. Boom.

And I have to say I’m de-lighted with how it turned out [sorry / not sorry]. A streak of exposed industrial style lighting to offset as well as compliment the calming pink accents. And of course, I have a tutorial lined up next week for how you can DIY your very own recycled light!

UPDATE – see my vacuum cord pendant light tutorial here! 

Regarding the rest of the room, below is a little panoramic tour as I realised I’ve never shown anything other than one corner of the room. And I do mean a little tour as it’s a small room … 

I attempted to add a gallery to one of the walls. We’ve lived in our apartment for five years now and we have a scarce amount of pictures and artwork hung up, so I’m practicing in here. I hung the most calming and peaceful pieces in the spare bedroom; some of the weirder and darker stuff I’ve kept for the rest of our apartment as the last thing I’d want is a guest to be weirded out by something we have hanging on the wall.

This wall is also a work in progress – anything leftover from updating our bedroom will be hung up here and added at a later date. 

The narrow white shelving unit above houses our DVD collection. It’s not very wide so it doesn’t get in the way of the bedroom door.

My first attempt at yarn art is up! Again, I kept the yarn colours calm and neutral. If this were anywhere else in our apartment it would probably have black or red yarn. But, guests. It’s not good if your guests want to hide. This is another work in progress as I might add more yarn.
Another small update I made was to the window. I added a longer curtain rod to extend the curtains all the way to the walls. It makes the room look a bit more finished as well as covers the unsightly vent. And it looks all hotel curtainy. I love hotel curtains! 

I showed husband the completed room yesterday evening. He looked around for a good while and finally said, “I’m actually jealous this isn’t our room” and walked out. Seal of approval I’d say! I can’t wait to work on our bedroom and get some artwork and a bit of attitude up. 

And to anyone that’s stayed in our spare bedroom up until now, I’m sorry. You are more than welcome to come back now that it’s a proper room with a bit of character! Give give me a couple hours notice to buy in some breakfast. xx