From Coffee Table to Window Seat

I have been looking for a chair or some sort of seating for my living room for nearly a year. I’ve seen a lot of things I like but none of them have fit into my budget. Several weeks ago I had a sudden urge to go to the local goodwill. There I found what was labeled as a “TV stand”. It looks like it could have been a coffee table. Either way the measurements were perfect to fit in under my window. The best part was the budget… $15.00!!!!

SOLD!

Thank goodness I have vision and thank goodness the hubby has learned to trust that vision.

Here’s the “window seat” before I got started. It’s sitting on a bench to raise it off the floor and make it easier to work on. The ends have some storage areas, which will help control the overflow of toys in the room. The doors were just awful looking with a deep grooved pattern and outdated handles.

You can see it’s pretty beat up in a couple spots.

Here are the doors after a good sanding.

I also lightly sanded the rest of it to help get it ready for some primer and paint.

The grooves on the door were fairly deep so I coated them with a little spackle to help fill them up and smooth out the door.

Here they are after priming and a coat of paint. You can still see where the grooves were. But that’s okay I had a plan….

I found some textured paper that matched the colors in my room. You can’t really see here but I crumpled the paper to give it a more aged look. Then I used decoupage to cover the door front with the paper.

Hubby helped me add some decorative molding to frame out the paper. You can also see here that after the decoupage dried I went over the raised areas of the paper with some sand paper to help with that “aged” look.

After all the molding and paint was done I covered the whole thing with some glaze tinted with brown paint.

Between coats of paint and glazing, I worked on finding a cushion for the top. I came across a body pillow that was close to the size I needed.

It just needed a slight alteration. I had to cut off a few inches and stitch the end closed again. The first row of pins will be the new end. The other row of pins was just to hold the stuffing back while I sewed up the end of the pillow.

This is the area where I needed seating and storage.

Looks much better now huh??

The seat was $15.00
The pillow was $10.00
The paper, molding and fabric to make the pillow cover all came in under $16.00. All the other supplies were things I already had from other projects.
So for around $41.00 I have a great custom piece of furniture that provides seating and toy storage.

Hmm, I wonder what I will do with the other things I found while thrift shopping????

New Arrival

There has been a whirlwind here the past few days. The humans successfully pulled off a beautiful first holy communion and the critters have welcomed and baby bird into the world.

Friday evening we peeked in to get a glimpse of the little guy (or gal) working hard at entering the world.




By Saturday afternoon we saw a hungry little thing waiting for Mama to come in with something yummy (to birds anyway).

We think this Robin might be a new Mom. She laid three eggs this time around but it seems this guy is the only one to hatch. She may be a little more skittish or not know enough yet to keep them warmer. We usually have a robin nest somewhere in our yard each year and she will usually produce 2 to 3 rounds of babies and usually 3 babies each time. This Robin may be dealing with her first nest. We hope this birdie gets some feathers soon.

The next creature on the critter watch is still safely tucked away.

According to Hubby this is a praying mantis nest. They should start hatching towards the end of the month. I hope I can catch it on film.