The JustinKays Chronicles

Ever gotten a new piece of furniture and had to shuffle some pieces around to make everything fit? We haven’t quite gotten to that point in our house yet, but when we get a new piece of furniture it’s exciting to be able to fill a blank wall. Hence, the furniture shuffle begins!

Nancy found us a sweet dresser at a garage sale that definitely needed some love. I don’t know about you, but we aren’t crazy about white and pink anything, much less white and pink furniture. Regardless of the heinous paint job, we could see the potential in this piece and were excited to clean it up.

looking good… kind of…

We used the same materials and strategy we used to paint our first dresser (and dining room chairs), but this time we went with a soft shade of green instead of navy. Enter TSP and our trusty paint sprayer…

who doesn’t paint furniture in a bikini?

what a great painting set up

Now for the furniture shuffle. We wanted to put this new dresser in our bedroom and replace the two dressers we had smushed together under the mirror. These are perfectly functional dressers, but we weren’t crazy about the look they created when pushed together.

before…

We swapped them out for this newly refurbished dresser and couldn’t be happier with the result. I love the pale green and the dark wood frame of the mirror. The high contrast (and the much needed pop of color) make this room look a lot less hodge podge and a lot more sophisticated.

after!

more after (a little less bare)

one more!

last one, I promise 🙂

We were left with two perfectly functional unused dressers after stage one of the furniture shuffle. We decided to fill up an empty wall in the guest room with one dresser. See this bland empty wall? Even though the baseboards and paint look gorgeous, it was definitely lacking something…

incredibly empty wall

In goes the dresser. We also added a frame, so now when you come visit us there is a table top and a mirror for you to use 🙂

much less empty wall!

The second dresser is hanging out in the west wing until we figure out a new home for it. Which will happen eventually…

I should start by apologizing for the serious lack of posts lately… it’s  not that we haven’t been doing fun and exciting things, more that I have been too busy working in fault trenches and working on a somewhat time-sensitive surprise project. But more on both of those things in a later post!

Up to this point in our home renovating, we have tried desperately to keep costs down and work on projects that don’t break the bank. And don’t worry, there are many more budget projects to come! But today I want to share our first (and so far only) splurge. We decided to put plantation shutters in the two front windows of the house! Specifically, the big picture windows that face the street in the living room and dining room. The beige pleated drapes that hung in these windows have been a serious eyesore since we moved in. We did give them a good washing and steaming (thanks, Mom!) to make them look temporarily presentable, but the ultimate goal was always to ditch those dowdy drapes.

Here are some before pictures of our main living spaces with the clean, wrinkle-free, yet still hideous curtains:

See what I mean? Just all-around bad. Definitely not the vibe we are going for in our first home! So we found a reasonably priced vendor, picked out our shutter style, and swiped the credit card. Next thing we knew, our living spaces had been transformed into more modern rooms with a cleaner, brighter feel. I must say, the splurge was well spent!

LOVE LOVE LOVE!!! That’s all I can say, and I sincerely hope you agree.

I should also mention that we snagged these dark brown leather chairs on craigslist for a steal and just love what they do to the room. Plus, they are sooo comfy. The couch that was previously under the window has rejoined its twin in storage. I also feel inclined to mention that the shutters do a surprisingly good job of blocking out the street noise. A nice, unexpected perk. With every project, our house feels more and more like our home 🙂

The lighting in the dining room has been driving Justin crazy for months. Probably since before we moved in. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not crazy about our dingy, uncentered light either. But I just figured it would be one of those things we would get around to changing eventually, when we had  a little more time and money. Well, my assumption was completely incorrect. Apparently, I forgot who I am married to? Regardless of my miscalculated assumptions, my wonderful husband had big plans to change the lighting in our dining room, and to change it right now.

We took inspiration from a chandelier that we saw on an unrelated trip to the hardware store, that looked something like this:

Inspiration

We liked the casual feel of the mason jars, and thought this was the kind of design that we could handle for our first chandelier. Actually, for our first real electrical project… we’ve installed new lights and added a few new outlets around the house, but this was the first project that would involve some serious electrical knowledge and prowess (of which I still do not possess, so I won’t go into detail for fear of sounding light an idiot). All I know, is that we had to do some serious wiring and relocate the existing, incredibly off-center junction box. Needless to say, Justin learned a lot about all things electrical, I did as I was told, and we ended up with a gorgeous, one-of-a-kind, handmade chandelier!

This is the only picture I can find of “before”. We’ve done a lot to that frame, and I realize you can’t see the terrible off-center dining room light… but it’s a starting point at least?

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Before we could do anything related to electricity, we had to design our chandelier. We settled on the longer, more slender mason jar style instead of the traditional more bulbous jars. We like the look of these jars better, but we also needed the extra jar height to ensure the light bulbs would fit inside with a little wiggle room. Which brings me to the next decision: light bulb types! When you have a lighting fixture with bare bulbs (or bulbs in clear glass jars), they are a definite focal point and they must be really cool. So we splurged a little bit on the light bulbs, and upgraded to the old school Edison-type light bulbs. And the splurge was worth it. Once we had our materials and our design all squared away (and delivered from that magical place called Amazon), we got to work.

Chandelier materials. Yes, wine is a necessary chandelier-building material…

Justin started by constructing the “box” of the chandelier. The design he came up with involved a box that would be attached to the ceiling to conceal all of the wires and other unseemly parts of a light. The box consists of two pieces: the first piece has three sides, and the second piece is the final side and the top of the box. Justin cut a groove in the first piece of the box so that the second piece could slide in and out, to allow for any changes in the electrical work or to change the height of the jars. After the pieces of the box were constructed, we drilled holes for the “strings” to hang through and stained the box with our favorite espresso finish (this is starting to become a habit!).

Mmmmm espresso. Oh, and you can see the two pieces of the box on either side of the can of finish.

While the box was drying, we started constructing the jars. We had to drill a large hole in the center of each jar lid (for the light bulb and string to go through) and several small holes for heat to escape through. Have you ever tried to put a round hole in the dead center of a round lid? Sounds pretty easy, but it’s actually surprisingly difficult. Justin ended up making a template and printing it out, making the process a lot smoother!

Impromptu template = huge time saver

With the holes, drilled, we assembled the jar lids, light bulb sockets (I have no idea if this is the proper term?), and fabric-wrapped wire from which the jars were to hang. We protected the wire to keep it clean during painting, and painted the jar-lid apparatuses (apparati?). We had decided in the design phase that we didn’t want to leave the jar lids and light bulb sockets silver. Instead, we wanted them to match the fabric-wrapped wire and at least somewhat match the espresso stained wood. In essence, we wanted everything to be a shade of dark brown so the light reflecting from the bulbs would be warmer and less metallic.

Painted jar lid ensembles

Now that we had all the pieces built/assembled/procured, it was time for the electrical work, that I know not much about. I’ll just show you  a few photos and tell you that there was some swearing and lots of time spent in the attic. However, there were no electrocutions and the junction box relocation was successful, so all in all I would say things went rather well.

Electrical mumbo-jumbo. That’s all I have to say about that…

Chandelier, assemble!

We had already decided where the chandelier was going to go, and had marked out exactly where the box would go on the ceiling. Now was the time to put it up! This was actually a relatively simple act, because Justin had designed it to be so. I just held up the box while Justin screwed it in, then slide in the second piece of the box to hide the wires, screws, junction box, etc., then we added the light bulbs, and finally the jars!

New chandelier location marked on the ceiling. If you look closely, you can see the old light fixture on the other side of Justin

Here you can really see the “box” construction. You know, how one piece slides into the other piece to hide all of the electrical uglies? Yeah, I know… there is probably a better way to describe that, but hopefully the picture helps!

Determining the height of the jars

We screwed in the first light bulb and… ta-da! It worked!!! Justin was really excited. Actually, we did a little dance around the house at this point in the project 🙂

At the end of the weekend, we had this work of art:

So pretty 🙂

And with the kitchen lights on

Up close and personal

From below

We couldn’t be happier with how things turned out. We definitely learned a few things along the way and got frustrated a few times, but it was worth it. I find it highly amusing that when someone asked me what I did last weekend, I replied: “My husband and I built a chandelier.” I didn’t think much of this response, because it’s not that out of the ordinary for us to make/build/improve on the weekends, but apparently building a chandelier as a weekend project is not all that common for most people!

And another one… of the whole room this time

Last one, I promise. Isn’t the light pattern on the ceiling gorgeous??