Making New

When we listed our old house, we sold our entertainment center with the double book cases. It was huge and making the room look small, and we didn't know if we could use it in the new house anyway. So out it went. It served us well while we owned it, but it was time for it to move on.

In the new house we put the TV in the basement. The previous owners had left a black plastic-y cupboard thing, and we put the TV on that, but I knew it was very temporary. (I like to have my TV unintrusively behind doors. Out of sight, out of mind, as the saying goes.) And I waited for something to come along.

A friend from our old neighborhood was getting rid of this black  TV cabinet. She listed it on our old ward's Facebook page for $90. And I thought, "That's just the thing I need downstairs, but not for $90, not right now." A few weeks later, I saw another post from my friend, she had not sold her TV stand. She talked up it's excellent qualities, like how it was made almost entirely from real wood, and how it was sturdy and solid. And she dropped the price to $50. And I thought to myself, "Oh man. Real wood. That is exactly the kind of thing I'd love to have downstairs because not only does it have doors, but it's also sturdy. But not for $50, not right now." And I put it out of my mind. Weeks later, maybe even a month and a half later, I again saw a post from my friend, she couldn't believe she hadn't sold her TV cabinet; but they had started building a built-in entertainment center on their wall, and she no longer had a place to store this one while she waited for someone to buy it. She needed it gone asap. For free! Just please come take it off her hands. Boy did I jump on it!

I met Aaron at her house after work, and the three of us (so mostly Aaron) loaded this very solid and heavy piece (which was quite a bit bigger than it looked in the pictures) into the back of Aaron's truck and he drove it home.

And let me tell you, we had ourselves a time getting it out of the truck and up the garage steps, down the hall and into the kitchen, where the door to the basement is. And once we got it to that point, we tried every jerry-rigged scheme known to man-kind to try to fit it down the stairs...but no dice. The thing did not come apart....solid wood, right? So there was no making it smaller. And because of where our kitchen counter top is, and the narrowness of the stairs, and the slant of the ceiling above the stairs, there was NO WAY that thing was going down in one piece.

So we sawed it in half.

Yes.

We absolutely did.

Well, Aaron did. He sawed it horizontally, so the top cabinet piece came off from the bottom drawer piece.  Then we carried it down the stairs, and put it back together. My husband never ceases to amaze me with the ways he comes up with to problem solve. I absolutely 100% truly believe that if I can dream a thing up, he can think of a way to bring it about. And in almost 12 years of marriage he has never proved my theory wrong. He dazzles me.

So Aaron's job was to get the cabinet in place. The rest was up to me.

The cabinet was black, and that needed to change asap. Not only do I generally dislike black as a decorating option, but since it was in a room in the basement, the blackness of the cabinet seemed to create a black hole, sucking all the light out out of the space and making it feel oppressing.

Also, I have this beautiful forest mural on the opposite wall in that room, left by the previous owners. It's gorgeous and I love it, but how in the world do you decorate to match it?

I sat on it for a month, thinking it over. I could have sanded the whole thing down to start from scratch, but I didn't really want to. That takes SO much work. I know that several years down the road from now, we want to put in a fireplace on this wall and a built-in entertainment center of our own, so while I want this to look nice and be awesome for a few years, I didn't want to put loads and loads of effort and time into it, for the same reason I didn't want to spend a lot of money on it....because I know it's semi-temporary.

When my friend Wynter was refinishing her basement, she did her railings and a coffee table using chalk paint and antiquing wax. They looked awesome, and I knew that sometime I wanted to try it out, but at the time didn't have anything in mind, so I tucked the idea away in the back corners of my brain to rediscover later when I needed to. That time was now. I was walking through Wal-Mart one day, looking at art supplies for one of the kids' school things, and stumbled across the chalk paint on the shelf. I remembered Wynter's projects, and my black TV cabinet, and everything just came together in my mind like a lightening bolt. I bought some moss green chalk paint, and some antiquing wax on a whim, and rushed home to call Wynter and glean from her everything she knew about chalk painting projects. Haha!

It was quite the mental process that she had to talk me through step by step. The actual physical process of painting and antiquing was SUPER easy and fun. But the way the cabinet looks changes drastically from one step to the next, and I wasn't sure if I liked it or not (which is actually pretty typical of all projects I do) until I was all the way finished. But now I LOVE IT!

Moss green chalk paint without any antiquing. 

Chalked, and half antiqued. I was REALLY unsure of myself at this point. I actually ended up putting a clear coat of wax on over the antiquing wax to calm it down and blend it together a bit more, and I'm happy with the end result. 

I feel like the antiqued style goes really well with the forest mural. It sort of makes it feel like the TV cabinet belongs out in the woods. I'm envisioning pictures of fern leaves hanging on the walls, and maybe some stained-wood floating shelves and some houseplants to match.

Oh! And we found couches! I was so excited. We didn't have a basement family room in our old house, so when we moved here, I had no furniture to put down in this room. So the extras that I didn't know where to put, sort of ended up here.....the chase lounge that really belongs in the school room, and a rocking chair that goes up in Cal's room, an extra book case, and a rug from Aaron's mom's house that she was getting rid of. All of it is a super temporary hodge-podge. I've been searching KSL and the Facebook Classifieds for months and months to find just the right thing. Finally, right before Valentines Day, I saw a listing for a forest green leather couch and loveseat set in SLC for $100. It just so happened that when I found it, Aaron was scheduled to go to SLC to work at L3 for the day on a project. So he was able to swing by and pick up the set without making an extra trip. The reason the set was so cheap is because the sellers were moving to Germany and needed to get everything out of their apartment. Truth is they are bonded leather, so they won't last forever, but they ARE in really great shape. And the way I see it, for $100 bucks, my kids can pretty much be kids on them and I don't have to be furious about it. If they last us 4 years, that's $25 a year, and we can get something else at that point if we need to.  The only real challenge will be getting them back OUT of the basement; because like the TV cabinet, they were a beast to get down that narrow stair case.

Getting the couch down the stairs.

Here are some not that great pictures of the couch and loveseat to give you an idea.