DIY Ikea Lack Table Upgrade

5.15.13

So I know that just about everybody in my generation, at some time or other in life, has owned an Ikea lack table. Don’t deny it. It was your coffee table in college; maybe now it’s your junk table in the garage or something weird like that. This one was holding our tool collection in a hall closet until recently. We brought it out and I decided to see if there’s anything you can do to it to hide its true identity. It may have worked. It also may not have. But either way, we tried, and so this newly fancy table is coming out to play.

Materials

Ikea lack table (or similar)
upholstery nails
stain-proof fabric (pleather works like a charm)
spray adhesive
pencil
scissors
needle nose pliers
soft mallet

Make Time: 1 hour

Cut out fabric for the top of your table. To do this, flip the table upside-down on the back side of your fabric and carefully trace the outline of the tabletop. Cut and set aside.

Add your nailhead trim. Hold an upholstery nail in place with pliers and gently hammer with mallet. Keep adding nails until you’ve covered all of the areas you’d like to trim.

Fully cover the back of the fabric with adhesive spray. Carefully align the fabric with the corners of the table and smooth it down, ensuring that the adhesive is secure.

There you go! Definitely an upgrade in my book. Put your favorite things out on your new(ish) table and enjoy. xoxo

Our Apartment // Photo Tour

2.21.13

I’m gonna go ahead and ask you all to ignore the fact that we’ve now lived in this apartment for seven months, and I’m just now getting around to having it fully decorated and sharing it. Let’s just pretend that it took me a sensible month or two to finish the place (and show you). Shall we? Great.

Now that we’ve got that all taken care of, here’s our apartment! Well, as it stands right now. I kind of like to change things (a lot), so who knows what it’ll look like next month. But for now, here she is in all her glory.

Isn’t that bar cart just the business?! Dear darling Roxy at Society Social makes the best bar carts you can imagine. I’d been wanting one forever when we were living in NYC but we just didn’t have the space. And now this little beauty has all the room it needs.

One thing that I loooove about this place is that we have a workspace! Just me and Mr. Lovely, in our snuggly side-by-side desks, taking on the world.

The living room is pretty cozy, too.

And for those of you with a keen eye, yes, that is a blank canvas hanging on our bedroom wall. We can’t for the life of us figure out what to put on it. Suggestions?

Oh, and I still have a hard time believing that we have an actual dining table where we can eat! (And a kitchen that we can both stand in at the same time because it’s not teensy.) Seriously. I mean, eating dinner on the couch is awesome, but a girl likes to at least have an option, ya know?

And just a few more bits and pieces: a little patio the perfect size for two, lots of storage for books (and an ever-growing population of musical instruments), and plants everywhere you turn. We’re home. xoxo

P.S. If you see anything you love and would like to know the source, let me know in the comment section and I’ll do my best to help you out!

diy copper bud vases on poppytalk

11.14.12

Are you guys ready for my next Poppytalk DIY? I have to say, it’s a little bit brilliant. Mostly because it’s the easiest thing you’ll do all week. I think there are literally three instructions, and BOOM! You’re done. And you’ll look awesome. And so will your new copper bud vase. Head over to Poppytalk for more photos and the full tutorial. xoxo

diy fabric pompom garland

11.6.12

Our new bathroom needed just one more touch to finish it off, and if you ask me, a garland is almost always the answer. I decided to use a technique that you might remember — I made these same pompoms for our moms’ corsages at our wedding! Today though, they’re getting strung up in front of our mirror so it looks like double the poms for half the work. Brilliant, no?

Gather your materials:

fabric
scissors
strong thread
needle

To make a pompom, cut five or six circles of fabric, about 2-3 inches in diameter.

Thread your needle. Take one circle, fold it in half, then in half again. Insert the needle into the folded point of the circle. Repeat this with all six circles.

After all circles are strung onto the thread, re-insert the needle into the original circle at the same point. Pull taught, knot your thread, and snip. Ruffle all of the fabric to make the pompom even.

Repeat that process until you have as many pompoms as you’d like! Then, string them onto a long piece of thread by inserting the needle through the center of each.

Hang your garland somewhere fun! There’s something about a pompom that just makes you wanna smile. xoxo

diy chalkboard quote

10.30.12

Those of you who are hardcore Lovely Indeed readers might remember our engagement shots from waaaay back in the day! Well, the bathroom in our new apartment needed a little something on the walls, so I dug out the chalkboard that we used in our photos and put something new on it.

I dug through my Pinterest board of quotes, searching for something cool that might be inspiring to look at every morning. Now, I’m neither an artist nor a calligrapher, but I decided to excuse myself for my inadequacies and just let it happen! I wanted really saturated colors for the board, so instead of plain chalk I used soft pastel sticks. And the awesome thing about it was that they’re really forgiving and erase easily (and I definitely did a lot of erasing).

The only tip I have for a DIY like this one is to sketch lightly first and have a slightly damp rag ready to correct any mistakes. Once you’re happy with the design, go over it with a heavier hand to darken it up.

I kind of love how it turned out! And it’s a pretty good reminder to look at while I’m brushing my teeth every morning. xoxo

diy belgrave headboard

10.23.12

We’ve been wanting to tackle this DIY for quite a while now, but we were scared it might be a little too tricky. Turns out, it was no biggie! If you’re thinking of making your own headboard, fear not.

One of the problems that was keeping us from starting was that the fabric we wanted to use wasn’t wide enough to cover a queen headboard. So this tutorial will allow you to use fabric that’s at least 55″ wide and still make a headboard that’s 60″ wide. First, gather your materials (Note: all measurements are for a queen-sized bed):

one 4′ x 8′ sheet of 3/4″ plywood
one 8′ long one-by-four
1 roll of batting
1 egg-crate style foam mattress topper
3 yards of upholstery-weight fabric, at least 55″ wide
sewing machine
staple gun
jigsaw
screws
drill
fabric nails
rubber mallet
needle nose pliers
hooks for affixing to wall

First, cut your plywood and one-by-four. The following measurements will yield a queen-sized headboard that’s five feet tall. Cut the plywood so that you have a 5′ x 3′ piece and a 5′ x 1′ piece. Cut the one-by-four in half. (You can ask at your hardware store and they should be able to make these cuts for you!) Then decide the angle that you’d like the curve on each side to be (tracing something round is the easiest). Cut the round portion out of each side with the jigsaw. Then, out of the smaller piece of plywood, cut a frame for the top that’s four inches wide and has the same curved angle on either side. Screw the frame to the top side of the large plywood.

Cover the frame in batting. Stretch the batting taut across the frame portion and staple down the edges.

Lay fabric across the frame and determine where you’d like seams. We chose to have seams on the corners of the rounded edges, because the pattern of our fabric was directional and we wanted all of the dandelions pointing in the same direction. If your fabric isn’t directional, this step will be a little easier.

Sew seams in your fabric and then staple it down onto the frame. Do this part with caution; it will take careful placement and stretching to make the batting underneath nice and smooth. It really helps to have an extra set of hands here. On the rounded edges, cut slits in your fabric on the backside to make it lay flat.

Next, cut your foam to size and lay it in the center of the headboard. We wanted an extra-puffy piece, so we used two layers of foam. If it’s cut snugly, you shouldn’t need to affix the foam to the headboard at all.

Finally, lay your large piece of fabric down over the foam. Be sure that it’s correctly centered and straightened. Rather than use a faux nailhead trim, we opted to use the real deal and hammer every nail in one by one. This leaves room for more error, so go slowly and keep checking that you’re creating a straight line. Some of our lines got away from us!

If it helps, use needle nose pliers to hold a nail in place while you use the mallet to hammer it in. Fold the fabric over to create a faux seam and hammer the nails through the fabric and onto the edge of the frame, to hide the connection point. Leave the bottom edge of the fabric hanging loose.

Once all the nails are hammered in, pull the bottom of the fabric taut and staple it around the back of the plywood.

See? Totally not as scary as it seems! We affixed our headboard to the wall behind our bed with some hardware hooks. I seriously can’t get enough of it — it’s exactly what I wanted and it looks so super rad in our bedroom. What do you think? Is this a DIY you’d attack? xoxo

diy nailhead trim pumpkins

10.16.12

Sometimes, you just don’t wanna carve a pumpkin. Sometimes you wanna stick nails in it instead. This is one of those times.

We had some extra furniture nails laying around from this project, and I got it stuck in my head that they’d look really cool in some black and white pumpkins. So we headed to our local pumpkin patch and picked some winners, came home, and got to work. This is one of those projects that’s kind of a no-brainer. You don’t even necessarily need furniture nails — you could use regular nails, thumbtacks, sewing pins with colored heads, etc. Just see what you have laying around in your toolbox or crafty stuff.

Then get to work! You won’t need a hammer to get the nails in — mine pushed in easily just using my fingers. I did most of my pumpkins freehand, although I did use some masking tape for the chevron pumpkin, to keep lines straight. There are so many designs you could do with these! And they’re kind of foolproof (every once in a while I’d misplace a nail, but you can just pull it right out and reposition).

So what are you doing with your pumpkins this year? Do you decorate? Mr. Lovely also picked out a gorgeous orange one so we could have something to carve — maybe I’ll post some photos after we do. Happy Halloween! xoxo