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Dining Room
All Things Home

reupholstery tutorial | French wing chair | part 1

It’s time for another upholstery series!  If you missed my last one, I showed how to upholster a wood-framed, French-style chair.  You can find it HERE.  If you’re scared of upholstery, you’re going to like the way I upholster and teach.  I’m a DIY, self-taught upholsterer, not a “professional.”  I started upholstering dining chair seat cushions and benches with a manual stapler and then graduated to simple slipcovers, such as they were, and finally dove into upholstering an armchair about five years ago. I took the chair apart and then had a little freakout moment.  What in the world have I done to this beautiful chair?!  I had read upholstery books, but I really wasn’t sure if I would be able to get it back together.  I worked through it step by step, just like putting together a puzzle.  It wasn’t perfect, but it actually looked okay!  That gave me the confidence to

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May 31, 2015 15 Comments
All Things Home

how to gold leaf a frame

 When I was out shopping for the upcoming Lucketts Spring Market last week, I was looking for artwork for my living room as well.  I was really hoping for a pair of charming paintings, but I didn’t have any luck.  I did find two vintage Currier & Ives prints, though.  They were sweet farmhouse scenes and I thought they would work well with a new frame and mat.  The frames they were in looked a little dated and didn’t showcase the prints very well. I had a couple of black resin frames I bought on clearance a few years ago that were the perfect size.  The black looked too dark for the prints (and my room), so I decided to gold leaf them. This is what the frames looked like before.  They were a bit dusty, so I cleaned them off to get them ready for the sizing. When applying

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April 14, 2015 22 Comments
All Things Home

swapping chairs

Sooo…I’ve been know to rearrange, trade and swap furniture in my house.  I’ve always done that, but it’s so much more tempting (and easier) when I have a steady stream of awesome furniture coming into my possession as I’m getting ready for an upcoming antique market.  Sometimes I need to love a piece for a while before I send it off into the world.  There are other times when I trip across something I’ve been looking for and I know right away that it’s coming to my house. That was the case with these chairs… I have been looking for end chairs for my dining room for a while…over a year, I think.  The current end chairs are almost exactly like the side chairs and it looked a little “one-note.”  I felt like some really great end chairs would add a lot more interest to the space.  It’s the kind of

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April 12, 2015 46 Comments
Decorating

Christmas decorating | the dining room

Decorating the house for Christmas this year has been so much fun for me.  I stayed home from the studio three days last week to blast some Christmas music and fill the house with fresh greens and Christmas decor.  The decorating is all very understated and simple, which I have really enjoyed.  The rooms look festive, but it’s not a full overhaul that involves bins and bins of decor that need to be stored. The dining room follows that theme… (I caught this room in the morning light when the sun was streaming through the windows.  It casts the prettiest shadows) As I did with chandeliers in the other rooms, I tucked a mix of greenery throughout the arms, allowing it to look loose and simple.  Bunches of fresh greenery hang from each corner cabinet door. Eulalie is topped off with a garland of pine tucked over the frame. She

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December 7, 2014 36 Comments
Dining Room

tips for sanding floors

This is my second time refinishing floors and I learned a lot through my errors the first go-around.   Since scooting around on diaper boxes to wipe up excess stain (you can read about those antics HERE), I have learned a lot about finishing wood and have done a lot of reading on sanding and finishing floors specifically.  There are so many ways to approach it…everything from sanding an entire room with a palm sander (yes, some people do that), to spending hours getting each piece of wood back to the way it looked the day it was milled.  Our approach?  We wanted the floors to look nice, but weren’t concerned with perfection.  There are already tack marks from carpeting, large holes from old radiators and gas pipes, gouges, scratches, knots, chips and dents, so I didn’t freak out at sanding marks or inconstancies in the wood.   So, take

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November 25, 2014 23 Comments
Before and Afters

the sanded floors

This weekend, we finally took the plunge and sanded down our floors.  I’ve been wanting to for a long time…well, and not wanting to at the same time.  It’s a total pain.  It’s messy and it’s really hard work, but I got it in my mind that I really wanted it done before decorating for Christmas and then closing out 2014 and Jeff went along with it. In case you haven’t seen them before, this is what the floors looked like before sanding them.  They are the original oak floors from the 1940’s.  When we moved in, we removed the berber carpet that covered them and a year later refinished them in a dark walnut stain with three coats of poly. They looked great for a few years, despite the fact that I really didn’t know what I was doing when I finished them.  That finally started showing when the

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November 24, 2014 59 Comments
Decorating

a chandelier, watering live evergreens & blue checks

The living room is in the front of our house, which faces south.  Most of the day, the room gets beautiful light..streaming through the dining room and front windows in the morning and in long, golden beams through the west-facing windows in the afternoon.  At night, though, this room is dark.  That is because it has no overhead lighting.  The house was built in the 1940’s and having lots of junction boxes and outlets was just not the thing to do.  I’ve wanted to add pot (recessed) lights and junction boxes for light fixtures to the old part of the house for years, but with plasterboard ceilings and no easy access the ceilings, it would be a major, messy project.  I think lighting is so important for a room, but lines have to be drawn somewhere when you’re fixing up a home that you’re not planning to live in for very

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November 11, 2014 21 Comments
Dining Room

joss & main #holidayhostess event!

I know it’s not even Halloween, yet, but it’s about time to start thinking about the holidays and the parties, guests and decorating that comes along with it!  I’ve partnered with Joss & Main to kick off their Holiday Hostess events that will be running over the next few weeks.  It’s a great lineup of bloggers including the ladies from Stone Gable, French Country Cottage and Finding Home. For my event, I featured my dining room and guest room… I decked out the dining room in my usual blue and white with natural accents like preserved boxwood and pinecones.  This is meant to be a “transitional” table that eases you and guests into the holidays.  It’s not full-on-Christmas-in-your-face, yet, but it’s festive.   The subtle holiday decor carries into the guest room…   Most of the decor is seasonally neutral, but I added some swags of boxwood at the foot

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October 14, 2014 26 Comments

I’m Marian, a painter, writer, and lover of all things creative. From art and antiques to home projects and everyday life, I share my journey in hopes of inspiring you to embrace your own creativity and make beauty in the spaces you live.

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