Knock Off Pottery Barn Halloween Display

I've held onto this image from an old Pottery Barn catalog for a couple years now:

I love the spooky look...the black urn, barren branches, black crows and old book pages.  Do you recognize the Boo Rug from this post?  I decided almost immediately upon viewing this page that  I wanted to recreate the overall look, but I needed a black urn.  A black urn that I didn't want to pay Pottery Barn prices for.  I didn't want to even pay Home Depot prices for it, so I waited and waited.  Then early last month, Home Depot cleared out many of their planters including this one:

Originally $89.99, it was on clearance for $29.  Yeah to the hey!!  It's taller than the Pottery Barn urn and just looks nicer in my opinion.

I had put sticks aside for this project last year.  I grabbed them from my parents old house right before they sold it last fall.  The sticks have sat in the garage for over a year, and I've had to defend my need for them on many occasions to avoid having them land in our fire pit.  I've decorated using faux black crows and faux white pumpkins from Michael's for the past couple years, so I already had several of those on hand.  Finally, I used pages from an old Goodwill book and fishing line to hang the pages from the branches.  I tried to hunt down an old 'witchcraft' book with images, but that proved difficult.

Here is my front porch look now:

It's hard to see the dark crows against the color of our siding, but I still love it! 

My porch is covered, so as long as there is no major precipitation I'm in good shape leaving it as is for a couple days.  However, if I wanted to make it more weather proof, I'd need to laminate the book pages and perhaps invest in some indoor/outdoor birds or be okay with a poly'd bird look:).  As for now, this works just fine.

Cost Breakdown:
Urn: $29 (I also bought a second one in case I decide to do 2 on either side of the door...I like planters in pairs)
Sticks: FREE
Faux Pumpkins and Crows: FREE (already owned, but they have crows at the Dollar Tree and the Faux Pumpkins at Michael's.)
Book: $0.15 from Goodwill Clearance Book Bin
Rug: $8

Total for Look: Under $40, although it would be closer to $55 if I count the original cost of  black crows and faux pumpkins.

Maybe next year, I'll add the scroll, bench and lanterns from the original inspiration image to our overall Halloween front porch look:).  As for now, I love our porch decor!  And if you couldn't tell already, we love Halloween around here.  I'll actually be back this afternoon with a post about our pumpkin decorating adventures.

Linking up to Finding Fabulous!

Colors of the Month: Black and White and Orange

The choice for October's Colors of the Month was a no brainer: black, white and orange to keep in the spirit of Halloween.  I've shown a few projects I've worked on already this month including my bird cage light fixture, my DIY mercury glass pumpkin, my work in progress witch hat bookshelf and my black crow lampshade update.  Here's the room as a whole:

Bill picked up about 15 more 15 cent books at Goodwill a few weeks ago.  Total cost $2.25.

I can hardly believe it's almost Halloween...which means November is just around the corner!!

Decorating cost this month:  

$2.99 cord set for lamp

$1 for crow silhouettes

$2.25 for black books

$10 for mercury pumpkin

Total: $16.24

Nearly Starting From Scratch: Our Front Room

We have a room in our house that doesn't have a real name.  It's the first room you see as you walk in the house.  It's supposed to be a formal living room, although, I suppose you could make it a formal dining room if that was your thing.  We have called it a play room since we moved in because it is the only non-office room that is carpeted on the main level.  It was the room we gated off when Charm was 1 and getting into everything!  Now we have a full basement play space, so we don't need the main floor room to be so kid focused, especially since it is the first room you see upon entering the house.  We still want some toy storage in the room, but we don't want toys to be the primary focus of the room.

Over the course of our nearly 18 months in this house, the room has looked like this:

And this:

And this:

And most recently this:

It's all cleared out!  Talk about nearly starting from scratch! Yup, we're working with a big green couch that used to be in the living room at our old house:

It is the same couch that used to be in the basement until we moved it upstairs when we cleared out our old nursery and moved the little kid furniture that used to be in the front room upstairs. 

Old Basement Set Up:

New Upstairs Sitting Room:

Did you follow that?  Yeah, we play a full-time game of 'let's rearrange the furniture' around here.

As far as inspiration for this space, I narrowed down the possibilities to two looks I loved. This one is from Jen at IHeart Organizing who used standard IKEA Billy Bookshelves and created a built in look with some molding, wood and paint:

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Isn't that look amazing? 

Inspiration also struck while e-flipping through the last issue of House of Fifty magazine.

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Amber Interiors

I have just been loving the look of gold with black and white. The credenza is AMAZING and the sunburst mirror is just gorgeous.

The way I calculated it, the cost for the IKEA based built in look would be about $225-$250 depending on wood costs for our room. The House of Fifty look would vary based on the pieces I was able to track down.

Bill and I chatted about our options, and after we came across this piece on Craigslist for $100, we decided to go for the House of Fifty look.

We love the sophisticated look it provides and the closed door storage for toys.

Here is how the room looks with our new credenza:

Admittedly, it's not that impressive currently, BUT I think it's going to be awesome once the rest of the pieces in the room are in place!

After getting the credenza in place, I decided to try out some side chairs that we already have on hand:

Here are the side chairs that had been in our dining room until they got bumped by the settee.

These chairs looked good in my opinion, but I wanted to try a couple other looks.  Plus the grand plan is to slipcover these chairs and get them back in the dining room.

Here I used a pair of extra Target Modern Stacking Chairs that we had in the office.

(We got ours for $17.48 for two chairs when they went on 75% off clearance in store.)

These chairs didn't look so good in this space, in my opinion.

Finally, I tried out our Lou Lou Ghost Chairs from this post.  I love them!!  

Maybe some day I'll get a pair of the adult size version, but for now...this works!  Plus, this is still a game/reading room for the kids, so I like that there are a couple of kid sized chairs in the space.

Next, I rolled out the rug I recently purchased (see this post), and added a coffee table that we had in the basement (originally purchased at Goodwill for $12).  This rug is a temporary one for this space, but it works for now and can be 'stored' here while it's intended resting place awaits a makeover.

While the room is shaping up, here are the items we plan on tackling in the near future:

1. Sunburst Mirror
2. Credenza Lamps and Accessories
3. Perhaps Larger Side Chairs?
4. Pillows for Side Chairs
5. Gallery Wall like this from Emily Henderson:

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6. We'd also love to place a large wall mirror in this corner of the room for the kiddos:

They love to look in a mirror and sing and dance.  I can just picture us coming to this room at night for a little post dinner entertainment!

7. Curtain Rod and Curtains

8. Rug

9. Another Chair by the Window

10. Paint the room and remove/patch the four mid-wall outlets that were used by the previous owners to light up their formal family portraits.



We've already completed a couple of these items, and I'll be posting about those updates in the near future. Some updates will take some time to tackle. Regardless, the space is already looking so much better than it did before!!

The Story of Our Settee

This story could also be titled, "How to Make a Granny Couch', but it's less of a tutorial and more of a narrative.  Here is the short version (that in retrospect I should have broke down into several posts..sorry!):

In May, I found this settee on Craigslist for $25:

It was located about 10 minutes from our house, so Bill went and scooped it up for me.  It was in much worse shape than the images show.  The fabric was torn and there were holes in the foam below the fabric.  The legs had scratches galore.  It was rough.  I loved the frame of the piece, but I honestly had NO idea where it would go in our house. Settees are strange pieces of furniture in that they just aren't that comfortable. You can't easily lay down on a settee and take a nap.  They are just formal and sort of stiff.   I thought about it for awhile and decided that since we're booth people (we prefer booths over tables at restaurants), we'd enjoy a settee in our dining room.  Here are some inspiration images:

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I measured our settee and found that it would work well with our table, aside from being a little on the low side seat wise.  Next up was the terrible paint and fabric decision.   I had such a hard time with this decision. My number one goal in choosing a fabric was kid friendliness and durability.  Although I would have preferred a lighter fabric to complement our dark table, I worried about stains ruining the settee immediately.   I wanted the piece to be one that the kids could sit at to eat and be their messy selves.  I was immediately drawn to indoor/outdoor fabric.  I found this fabric:

I loved it and still do (even after working with it for months and months!). I like that it was dark based and had a pattern. We felt like a floral pattern would help to hide our first timer upholstery mistakes well and also any stains should they occur. We were timid to try stripes or another geometric shape because we've never taken on such a project before and feared that lining things up appropriately may prove difficult.  (In retrospect, we could have handled it, I think.)  Also, most geometric fabrics have a light/white section that made me timid in the dining room of a household with kids. For some reason, I assumed that even light colored indoor/outdoor fabric would stain, but check this out:

Before:

ketchup and mayo piles

After:

Absolutely no residue at all.  None.  It just beaded up in parts and wiped away easily.

This was leftover fabric from our patio chair cushions. I discovered this highly stainfree characteristic after we already had the seat upholstered on our settee, and I was feeling a little like I was on floral overload. I had a mini panic attack at this time. All this time spent and I wasn't sold on the fabric!! I kept thinking the number one design rule is keep fabrics on big pieces neutral! Goo. We pressed on, however, because the fabric was bought and we had already invested so much time hunting down the fabric and upholstering the piece already. Also, I knew that a good chunk of the settee would be covered by the table, so there would be less floral action exposed on a daily basis.

Here are some photos of the process:

Leaving our mark on the frame:).

(Sadly, I have no pictures of adding the foam and fabric to the arms, adding the nail head trim or trimming the fabric (scariest part) because those pictures disappeared in the great photo card tragedy of 2011.)

There is no way I could write a tutorial on this project, because from start to finish, this project lasted about 4 months. It actually lasted six months if you could the two months that the settee sat untouched in the garage. And also, I couldn't write a tutorial, because we winged the entire project. We didn't look into any upholstery 'how to' books or read any blogs about upholstery work. We just took a ton of pictures as we were taking the settee apart initially and then used the old fabric as a guide to cut the new fabric. In general, here were the steps we took:

1. Take 1 million pictures of the piece.
2. Remove old nail head trim. Thankfully, the previous trim used was a trim kit with nailheads every fifth hole. If it hadn't been this product, I think we would have given up before really starting the project. Removing individual nail heads on a piece this big would take forever! As it was, it took about 20 minutes.
3. Remove old fabric. This is an intense process. Just when you think you're almost done, there's another layer. This step took a long time. We'd work on it an hour every night after the kids were in bed for about 8 sessions over a 3-4 week period.
4. Take lots more pictures and remove old foam and shove the foam in bags with labels. This took about 1-2 more one hour sessions.
5. Prime and paint the settee. I used Kilz primer and 3 coats of Satin Dutch Boy Refresh Paint in Moss Point Green.  When the frame was primed, I definitely had second thoughts about keeping it white.  It was gorgeous.  The green suits the fabric much, much better though!
6. Take the settee inside and get the foam seat piece back in place. We did some foam flipping to cover up old holes. This took about one hour session.
7. Iron and cut the fabric. Be insanely careful to line up the fabric appropriately before you cut it. This took several hours (probably 3 for all pieces).
8. Staple the fabric on the settee seat. We used staples sparingly to start and then in step 12 went back and really secured things once we were sure we wouldn't have to redo any sections.
9. Put the settee back foam piece in place and staple the fabric seat back onto the settee.
10. Put the foam and fabric on the arms of the settee.
11. Put the foam and fabric on the very back of the settee.
12. Put in lots of staples to secure everything really well now that it is all in place well. Let settee sit for about 6 weeks unfinished in your front room while you focus on things like major landscaping work and major paint projects
13. Hold your breath and trim the fabric just past your staple line using a utility knife.
14. Tap in nail heads using a kit because individual nail heads would take an insane amount of time to install. Here is my fair warning on nail head trim kits: THEY ARE SHARP. BE CAREFUL!! While we didn't spill tears over the re-upholstery process, we did shed blood. Both of us on several occasions (not just working with the trim kit, but with pliers too) scratched, poked and scraped ourselves. Bill took a pliers to the hand. I took a pliers to the nose while trying to remove staples. I cut myself with the nail head trim while it was still in the package...right before our landscaping project:(.
15. Turn the settee over and staple some of that cheapo black fabric stuff to cover up all the settee innards.
16. Finally, Finally, Finally. Do any touch up wood filling or paint to the frame. We had a few errant staples that went too high and one gouge from a staple that was angled too much. Also, the nail trim itself scraped up my paint job a bit too. Did I mention that stuff is sharp? Also, trim away any fabric that passed the nail head trim line as best you can. We used a very tiny scissors to do this.
17. Stand back and admire your granny couch!

I love this settee. Not because it's finished perfectly (it's not!) and not because it has a super cool, timeless look (it doesn't), but because Bill and I conquered it together!   We learned so much about staple guns and nail head trim and fabric in the process.   And we learned other things, like how we are never, ever, ever going to take on such a big upholstery project again:).   Mostly, however, we learned that together we can do anything!!

Here she is in our dining room:

The kids love it, and it has definitely fulfilled our number one objective: kid friendly dining room seating! They immediately began playing restaurant without prompting once they saw it in place. It definitely is a unique piece that adds some depth to our dining space. The floral Pier 1 chair/s from this image had to go, obviously:

They are living in our office right now. Since they are slipcovered, I plan to make some neutral slipcovers for them so we can use them in the dining room in the future. The dining room is starting to really come together.

Here is a picture of our dining room from about a year ago:

And here it is today:

I made a few fall changes that I alluded to in this post:

I moved my blue lamp from the great room to our buffet, and I moved over the gold frames from our great room as well.

On the bottom shelf of the buffet, I added a couple harvest baskets that I picked up from Pier 1 for $2 each (they were the old display baskets for the store) and filled them with some of my faux pumpkins.

I still have a couple more tweaks to make in the space, and then hopefully, I can call this room 'done' for awhile.

Settee Cost Breakdown:

Craigslist Settee $25

7 yards of Fabric from Joann's $80

French Natural Nailhead Trim Kit: $40 with shipping from Perfect Fit because Joann's was out of stock for the month leading up to the time we needed it (I still have at least half of one roll left for future projects)

Cheapo Black Fabric for bottom of settee: $6 with Joann's coupon

TOTAL: $151 + OUR TIME = 1 INCREDIBLY PRICELESS SETTEE

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