Tuesday, June 16, 2009

Furniture Facelift

As JJ and I approach our one year anniversary (holy cow!) as the newly married Justus family, we've been holding lots of conversations about re-evaluations of our life. Are we where we thought we'd be (both in marriage and in life)? What would we like to still do with our young, kid-free years? What would we like to put our money aside for to make our next big purchase? You know, the basic questions to answer, "Well that's where we were, here we are now, so where are we going?"

We've come to the conclusion that we're certainly happy, in love, and loving our life together, and we have just about everything we thought we'd have a year into marital bliss - with a still short wish list of wants - ie: get this girl a job! And we're keeping a running list of travel locations we'd like to take advantage of before we no longer qualify for the 'adult only' resorts. So that brought us to our big purchase question. With a new move on the horizon (aka: next week) to a new apartment we've narrowed our purchase choices down to furniture. (Keep in mind this is a very grown up decision for the couple who bought a new flatscreen tv as our romantic wedding gift to each other).

If you step into our current home it still looks like a bit of a Goodwill show room - my old dressers from childhood, hand-me-down bed frame, bachelor pad couches, and Target DIY shelving units. Mismatches galore and a nice long history of hand exchanges on most of the pieces. So after a year of wishing for a 'big-girl' apartment and nice newlywed pieces we've decided to save up for our first pieces of purchased furniture together...a new living room set. Something that is oversized (for my oversized JJ), modern, trendy, and dog fur resistant (but that's a whole 'nother topic).

With our summer savings going toward that, I have been researching my options to give the rest of our furniture a much needed facelift and to cure my own disgruntled self of my mismatch annoyance. Summer project, here I come!

Thanks in huge parts to my talented, crafty mother and my new neighbor, Lauren, who is a pro at furniture re-finishing, I have by-passed the highly toxic stripping and staining options and have opted for the time reducing practice of priming and painting. While not the classiest option or most beautiful, it's become the best way for me to blend the marriage of our furniture and the eye sore of our light vs dark stockpile of furniture. The winning team? Dark. I have selected a paint known as Chowning's Tavern Brown - a greyish, espressoesque color that depending on the light is rich in the mornings and muted at night.

With one dresser completed and awaiting a few coats of polyurethane I have six more to go - four more dressers, the legs of a chair, and a kitchen table and chair set. Ok, that's really about 12 pieces all together, but who's counting?

Wish me luck! Before and After photos to come...

1 comment:

  1. GF - where are the before and after pictures?! I can't wait to see!

    ReplyDelete