It Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time....

You know how you sometimes decide to start a task before thinking through things first? and then you start the process and realize that you just did a BIG "OOPSIE!!", but there is no going back now?

and then after you are finished, you just know you are in BIG TROUBLE!?

Well, I sorta did just that.

...and I'm a tad horrified at the moment.

(side note: Liquid Nails is a fantastic product that does EXACTLY what it says.)

Okay, here's what happened:

You know my living room wall that I was planning on putting my faux-fireplace on and how we had put that faux white brick behind it?

Well, due to the fact that we are now making that room into an office and moving the faux-fireplace into the main living room, the white brick needed to go.

Now, I could have been patient and waited. I could have not grabbed the crow bar. I could have listened to my inner-voice saying, 

"Jen, maybe you should re-think this before you pull sheet rock off the wall..."

but, I didn't.

Instead, I grabbed the crow bar and pulled on a teeny-tiny corner of the paneling to see if I could even pull any of it off the wall.

But a much bigger part came detached from the wall.

and then I did that thing that I always do, but know better.

I figured it was too late for logic and went a little crow-bar crazy.

The good news is the brick paneling is gone.

The bad news is that my wall looks like this:

(Now, I know why people end up just painting paneling instead of removing it during renovations.)

About an hour later....

Studly walks through the front door, right past the living room, and says "hi" when he sees me sitting at the kitchen table, innocently.

Me: Did you notice anything?

Studly: Oh, yeah, you moved the hutch.

Me: Anything else?

Anything?

Studly walks back to living room wondering what he missed and I hear:

"Oh, Shit!"

...My idea of doing Board and Batten in that room is starting to look a lot better, now....

Well, that's just "Fridge-Tastic"!

Okay, I get it. When you are renting, you have to deal with a few things like slightly overused appliances, but a couple of days ago, after we FINALLY went grocery shopping (we were literally eating breadcrumbs, it had been so long), we realized our fridge had some issues. Some we had noticed before, others we had not, and some of those we noticed before became a little more obvious and required the attention of duct tape due to the weight of the massive amount of food we had bought.

I'll give you the grand tour. 

With pride in my heart, I present to you...

Our "FRIDGE-TASTIC" Fridge!

(applause, please.)

Not bad looking, eh?

Well, except for a couple of buttons missing on the water fountain thingy:

Hot? or Cold?

Who really cares? Neither of them work. Luckily it's stuck on cold.

I think that's the most food we've had in our fridge, like ever. Still, there's a little something different about the inside of the fridge...

"One of these things just doesn't belong...."

(Oh, how I miss you, Sesame Street!)

Did you notice it?

How about now?

Yes, that shelf frame actually cracked in half, as I was putting juice on it. 

I was lucky enough to get away without injury.

I was not lucky enough to get away without spewing profanity.

It's actually what motivated us to start the fridge "makeover", as in that minute.

Anyway....

Moving on to the refrigerator doors:

We'll start with the freezer door first.

Nothing to see here.

Literally.

And on to the refrigerator door:

 where we shall see more duct tape...

Before the "repair", we just didn't put anything in that bin. 

But that was just one of them. 

We actually had two of them with the same problem. 

The other was cracked on both sides. 

But, we fixed that one, too.

I'm assuming so, anyway. 

We haven't heard a huge crash at 2 in the morning, yet.
Maybe, the Whirlpool man will accidentally drop one off at our door...

Not likely.

But, I do want to thank you for attending the tour of my "Fridge-Tastic" Fridge.

(Beat that, Miss Mustard Seed!!)

How To Tuft an Ottoman (like an idiot).

So...there's this ottoman that I've been reupholstering....Seems pretty simple, right? Like maybe it would take just a few hours?

Nope, not for this idiot. 

But, we'll start at the beginning of the story:

It all started when I saw this at my sister's house:

I totally loved it and in a delusional state of mind felt sort of confident I could totally make it look more like this:

"Nancy" tufted ottoman by Horchow 

It couldn't be that hard to reupholster it and redo the tufting, right? It already had the holes pre-drilled and so it would be easy to figure out where I needed to guide the needle in order to fasten the buttons on. I mean, I took about 5 seconds to scan another DIY bloggers instructions researched and read a bunch of tutorials on how to do tufting, and it really didn't seem that difficult. I figured I could pull it off.

I already knew what fabric I was going to use to reupholster it, too. I had gotten about 2 yards of this beautiful light blue damask print on the clearance rack at Home Fabrics for $4 and been saving it for something...I just didn't know what...until this unfortunate looking ottoman came into my life and made me realize that they would be a perfect match for each other.

So, after procrastinating for a few months, I started the process of recovering it one night a few weeks ago while watching a fine piece of cinematic art known as "Zombieland" (It was right before Dec. 21st, so Studly and I were getting some tips on what to do if the Mayans were right). As I was working on it, I ended up deciding not to tuft it (well, not so much decided, as I completely forgot to until I had 3 sides stapled tightly to the frame...). But, it looked pretty good without them, anyway.Then, I got to the corners and after fussing with them for almost an hour, I decided that at one in the morning I was in no mood to deal with their crap. I would work on it again the next day (which happened to mean 3 weeks later).

 Anyway, when I saw it sitting in the corner of my bedroom this afternoon, I figured that I better get it finished up since I had a couple hours to kill. Oh, and then I changed my mind and decided I wanted to do the tufting after all, so I got to work removing staples off of one of the sides, so I would have room to pull the fabric tight after I was finished doing the tufting. 

After I was through with that part, I grabbed the tufting buttons, left over fabric, upholstery needle and fishing line (it works just like upholstery thread, right?) and was ready to go. I thought it would be super easy to just snap fabric to the button after glancing at the pictures from the tutorial on that blog I read "in detail". It turns out that it wasn't so super easy. It was actually really hard and really frustrating! I could not believe how hard it was to tuck the fabric into the bottom of the cap part and then snap the base into it. After about a half hour of working on one button that just wouldn't cooperate, I took "Old Betty" out (my affectionately named glue gun) and just glued the fabric into place on the underside of the cap part. The bottom still wouldn't snap into it, so I figured I would just use hot glue on that, too. Why not? So, I proceeded to "finish" my fabric buttons via hot glue. Then, I grabbed some fishing line, and threaded it through the upholstery needle and the back of one of the buttons. I was feeling confident that I was finally in business. 

After a few misses (two huge puncture holes that I'm really hoping won't be noticeable if I do ever finish it), I was able to find the hole in the base of the ottoman with my murder weapon 12 inch upholstery needle and started pulling the fishing line through it, pulling really tight to make the "dent" in the ottoman with the button, but I soon realized fishing line may  not be the best type of thread to use when tufting an ottoman that is almost all foam, when I tied it and it disappeared back into the ottoman somewhere. Frustrated, I figured I would go to the fabric store in the morning and actually get some tufting twine to finish the job.

...and then I looked at the package containing the fabric buttons one more time:

Yes, I accidentally bought a REFILL pack AND it was a refill pack for only one part of the buttons! Apparently, there are 4 parts to a fabric button and they come in a KIT, which explains the issue I was having trying to assemble the damn things. Who knew? (probably about every other person who has ever done tufting.)

It appears that I need to learn to read before I run to the fabric store, tomorrow.