Happy Spring and New Furnishings

I always love when daffodils are for sale at the beginning of spring.   They are so bright and sunny!   We had a very long, cold, snowy winter here in New England so it's so nice to start to see some signs of spring.

We also have added some new furniture pieces to our dining room.   Previously, we only had the dining room table Nick built, but it's a large room and it was feeling very empty.   Plus, I really needed storage in there.   I had been keeping all my linens, runners and napkins upstairs in the guest room, which really wasn't convenient when setting the table for guests.   

We had been searching on craigslist and at the Habit for Humanity Restore for a few months without much luck.  We eventually found a vendor who had 10,000 sq. of vintage and antique furniture.  Surely, we would find something there!  And boy did we!  We almost bought a different hutch but when Nick went to pick up the furniture the next day the vendor had just got in a matching mahogany hutch and buffet.  Both were in amazing shape and we immediately switch to buy both pieces.   The hutch was exactly what we were looking for, something with enough display space and not too ornate.  The buffet provided the perfect amount of storage.   The mahogany was just so beautiful, hardly a single scratch.   I think they are from the 1940's or 50's based on similar pieces I found online.  Unfortunately, neither piece had a markers mark.   

In the buffet the silverware drawers, lined with velvet, were the perfect size for my napkin rings!

We still have to sand and assemble our church pew seating, hopefully we will finish that in the next few weeks.   I also want to find a rug to break up all the wood.   Between the furniture, floors and molding, it's a little too much.   At least the daffodils are providing some much needed color for now!

If you can't buy it, build it

Happy New Year!  Here's to 2014!

Our new house is almost double the size of our last house.  Double the size means double the amount of furniture needed.   Moving in itself is costly, so there wasn't much left in our budget for furniture.  We did purchase a new couch, bed and mattress, but that was it.   Nick thought this might be a good opportunity to build our own furniture and save some money.  He had taken a few woodshop classes in high school and he really liked it however, he hadn't built anything in years.    In searching for easy to follow plans, he found Ana White's website.   It's fantastic, with so many options and its fun to see how others, who followed the plans, projects came out .    So far he has built a coffee table and dining room table and plans to try out more.

His first project was a coffee table for our living room.   Here it is unfinished before we stained and painted it.

We saw some where (not sure if it was a magazine or blog) a driftwood color stain and instantly loved it.   We decided to spray paint the legs cream for a two tone look.   The table is the perfect size for the space.

Our next project was building a dining room table.   When we have family over, it can be up to 10 people, so we knew we wanted a table large enough to seat everyone.   The dining room is luckily a long room so we had a good amount of space to work with.

We chose a walnut color stain that would stand out from the blonde maple colored floors.  I just love how its rustic feel pops against the formalness of the room.

It was so nice to have in place before the holidays.  We are using chairs currently, from the kitchen table but soon will have two 8ft. church pew benches on either side.   Can't wait to have those in place.