After doing the first part of the living room makeover, continuing onto the bookshelves, and bringing the entryway into the same scheme, it's time for the foot stool we use as a coffee table to receive a facelift.
Sometimes I'm seduced by magazines and catalogs that have wonderful, chunky wood coffee tables in front of couches. They look so cool, and some have shelves for storing books and things.
But then I'm watching TV with my kids and we all have our feet up on our footstool and we're all comfortable with no table edge grinding into our legs, and I'm reminded why we have a footstool for a coffee table.
But see this lovely toile? I am growing weary of seeing the dirt on the side facing the couch courtesy of said feet. And, like, how silly would it be to tell people not to put their feet up on a footstool?
I just have to face that the light colored toile was never the right choice for a foot stool.
Unless I want to wash it every week.
Not.
My husband and I actually made this foot stool/coffee table more than ten years ago using some Home Depot legs, a thick piece of plywood, foam and batting. This lovely green (screams 1980's, doesn't it? So it must be way more than 10...) was the first layer and I think some other floral design was slipped over before the latest toile cover.
I'm bringing some black touches to my color scheme of white and sage green and also some texture by adding natural burlap and linen. I already had a large piece of burlap from some other project and decided it would be perfect to cover the stool since it's just the color of dirt. :-)
And here is the stool, newly covered in the burlap, after pounding 100 black upholstery tacks all around the edge to hold it in place.
I'm ready for the cleaner look and like how it turned out, but I was not prepared for how long it took me to pound all those tacks in. Sheesh, it was not easy getting them all evenly spaced (and they're not, so don't look closely!), and it took more than two hours and a bruised, painful thumb to get to this point.
Which is not done. If you look at the corner of the stool at the right in the photo above, you can see that I ran out of tacks with only about three more to go.
The same 3 that I bent putting them in.
Always get more than you think you need. Though in my defense, I bought all the store had in the design I wanted.
The corners were the trickiest parts to fold just right, keeping the material tight and yet not so bulky that the tacks wouldn't hold.
Some corners look better than others, but I figure no one's going to be looking at all four corners at once, are they?
Just to remind you, here's a shot of the living room before the makeover (I should point out that it's just a mini-makeover...no major remodeling will be undertaken here!).
I'm definitely liking it, and the clean lines of stool has inspired me to store the magazines in a basket and not pile them on the stool anymore.
Our feet would usually knock them off, anyway.
Next up are new pillows for the two overstuffed green chairs. I'm thinking a vintage linen I have with some black transfer designs on them...
Make sure to check back to see how they turn out!
-Jami
This is linked to DIY Day at A Soft Place, Get Your Craft On, Frugal Friday at Shabby Nest, and The Inspired Room.
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