I've been a distant admirer of CB2 for a while now. I get their catalogue in the mail all the time, but I'm that kind of person who has to see things in person before I buy them. Since there's not a CB2 in Denver, I've only purchased small little accessories here and there. NO LONGER! I want all of the things!

While we were in San Francisco, I had a strong suspicion that there was a CB2 somewhere in the city. After a quick search on Google Maps I expressed my excitement because we were staying a mere 3 blocks away from it! Our last day in San Francisco I speed walked myself with Matt and Marcus in tow to go check it out.

 

 

My celebration was slightly premature. I didn't notice that the store wasn't quite open until after I had pulled on the door handles once or twice. Ok, it was twice. After a quick stroll through Old Navy to kill some time we were greeted with unlocked doors. Look how excited I am!

 

 

First up, these sofas! Matt and I have been longtime fans of the Aidan sofa from Crate and Barrel, but the Avec sofa looks really similar and costs less than the Aidan chair.

 

 

There's even a smaller apartment sized version! These two are staying on our list of potential upgrades from our big L-shaped sectional.

 

 

I also saw a lot of stuff that I'd like to upgrade our bedroom with. You remember that right? No? Well good! Anyway, I'd love a low platform bed, but without the protruding platform that is just begging you to slam your shins into. The Dondra achieves just that!

 

 

These Junction dressers are what I envision fitting into our room someday. One tall one and one wide/short one.

 

 

And two of these Slice storage shelves would be perfect for night stands. I like them because of their ability to hide crap, they're so sleek, and they are floating!

 

 

The rest of this stuff isn't bedroom related, but I thought the Torino desk was genius! The top slides out to reveal yet another place to hide all your crap. Are you sensing a theme? My desk is always a giant mess, so much so that we never use it. Hopefully we can get to work on the loft and remedy that after we're done with the painting.

 

 

This little Cuckoo clock is an adorable modern twist on the old classic. Say hello to the tiny bird that pops out.

 

 

I'm always a big fan of lighting. Signal Floor Lamp, Chord Pendant Lamp, and the Cloche Table Lamp. I think the cloche lamp would be cool on a bookshelf, maybe with this sneaky on/off switch!

 

 

I also am a big fan of tea light candles. They are just so magical! These Glow Candleholders look like they'd reflect the light nicely.

 

 

And I'd like about a hundred of these Whirley Hanging Candleholders because, well look! (Maaaa-gic)

 

 

I also love plants, and want this in my yard now! Teardrop Vase and Beaker Vase.

 

 

Oh, and there was this Washing Machine Hamper. Ridiculous!

 

Do you have a CB2 near you? Or are you Ike me and have to admire them from afar?

Nikki Kelly

 

 

Last week I mentioned that I finished the changing topper for this desk that goes with the dresser I made over and gave to my sister, and now you'll actually get to see it. It all started out when I was painting that dresser, I looked over to a dark and unorganized corner of the garage (who am I kidding, the whole garage is dark and unorganized) and saw this lovely scene. Lets see, there's some mostly empty bags of potting soil, a punching bag, some pots, a few air compressor accessories, and I thing there's a razor for scraping things. All in all this screams "put your naked baby on top of me and change their diaper" right?

 

 

After a quick text to Sarah to see if it would be helpful/wanted, oh and a few weeks until it was warm enough to workin the garage again, I attacked it with my sander and pneumatic paint sprayer. I sure do love that thing!

 

 

In between coats of paint I worked on creating a box to sit on the top of the desk to hold the still to be purchased changing pad. I started with four boards to go around the desk top.

 

 

Then I ran them through my table saw with the blade just barely above the surface to carve out a little channel. I did this on all four boards so that I could slide a piece of really thin plywood in there. So when the changing top is sitting on the desk the thin plywood is on the desk top and the boards are just outside of the desk top. This will keep the thing from sliding around without having to nail or screw it into place, thus keeping the desk function perfectly intact for later.

 

 

Once the topper was assembled and stained I wanted to give it a little try out. With the adorable little embroidered art as well. Too bad baby Ellie's room isn't in my studio. Oh, and I still have yet to paint the handles, I ran out of paint after spraying the ones for the dresser.

 

 

So, I've got some more things to share hopefully later this week! But until then here is a little sneak peak.

 

I'm so excited spring is finally here! You?

 

Nikki Kelly

 

P.S. did anyone notice that I am not on my own domain? I feel so legit now. Too legit to quit, actually!

I am terrible at taking before pictures! At least this one is before I started painting it.

 

 

This is really just a sneak peek at what I hope to be posting next week. My plan is to paint this sucker of a desk grey (just like I painted its brother dresser for my sister) and then put a changing top on it so it can function as a changing table for sweet baby Ellie! Speaking of, lets take a peak at her one month picture. I swiped this from my sister's Facebook page because I just love this picture of her. I love the face she's making.

 

 

Anyway, this desk to changing table is taking much longer than it should thanks to the winter like weather we've been getting every couple of days for the last few weeks. Ok, I might be exaggerating but it seems like whenever I have some time to paint its freezing outside or a blizzard. Thankfully the forecast looks like those will be just a memorie soon enough. I was able to start cutting the pieces for the topper, thanks to the table saw being in the basement. Please ignore that nasty ass carpet. It's in our rarely used basement and it came that way. Just imagine carpet that is twice as bad and that's what we were left with in the living room. As Jimmy Fallon would say, ew.

 

 

Right now the last coat of paint is drying on the desk, and hopefully I can put the changing topper together before I head off to Seattle for a little spring break fun. There's also a high possibility that I'll get this adorable embroidered animal scene that I shared on Instagram framed. I've already washed it four times (ew!) and re-mounted it. I even bought a frame, but I need to cut the matte so the opening is just a little bigger.

 

 

Spring is right around the corner and I just can't wait! How about you? Any projects that are being prolonged because of crappy weather?

 

Nikki Kelly

 

P.S. I signed up on Vine. It's just clips of my cats right now, I guess I'm not clever enough to come up with anything else right now. I'm @nikiley.

 

This weekend I got an odd little collection of things done. Sadly, neither of them is a complete blog post because I either forgot a before picture or an after. I guess I was just too excited about the fact that things were actually happening that I was a little lazy with the documentation. That won't stop me from giving you a run down though. First up, is this crusty little dresser. Forgive me for not getting a true before picture. This is after sanding and a few passes of paint on the top.

 

 

 

I had been planning on giving this dresser to my sister since she moved back home. She was just a little pregnant when I offered it to her and I had a air compressor that hadn't been run over by someone. Now she has a month old baby and I was just getting started. Thanks to my dads awesome skillz we were able to bring my little air compressor back to life. This shot doesn't look too bad, but its a little off in person. It's like my own little Frankenstein.

 

 

After about four hours the dresser was looking a lot less crusty and spent the rest of the weekend drying.

 

 

Just look at that smooth paint job! I have really missed using my paint sprayer while my air compressor was out of commission. It's just perfect! Oh, and if your look past the top of the dresser you can see the desk that goes with it for an idea of what it looked like before I started.

 

 

And because I didn't want to put these dingy brass handles back on I gave them a bunch of coats of black spray paint.

 

 

Wanna see the after? Well, you're going to have to wait. Maybe a while. I already took it down to my sister on Monday. Since having little Ellie the amount of stuff in her room has gotten out of control. She called me a week or two ago asking for me to come help her organize and sift through her stuff, so that was my Monday. I was planing on posting about that, but it was just too chaotic! I know that makes for dramatic before and after pictures, but I didn't want to do that to my sister. Besides, we are not even close to finished. I'm planning on giving that desk the same treatment and possible adding a topper so it can be a changing table. We also want to paint her room and pretty it up a bit, so there's plenty of time for before-ish and afters!

 

Just to satisfy the after portion of this post here is the mantle we installed in the dining room this weekend.

 

 

It's just like the floating mantle we installed in the living room, which is on the other side. And just incase you're asking, there are no progress or before shots. Ha!

 

 

Now that the fireplace downstairs has mantles on both sides that just leaves the loft fireplace. It has a dumb one on it right now, but it's held up with 4 tiny screws and looks like it belongs in a gingerbread house. You can just see it in the top of this picture from when we finished the flooring up there. Basically this is your last shot at asking detailed questions about how we installed our floating beam mantle. Just leave me a comment.

 

 

Alright, me and my partially functioning brain are going to start planning our next project (Winter Pinterest Challenge!) before we forget something else. What are you working on?

 

Nikki Kelly

 

So I know I'm a little late to see some of the Parade, but I was out of town last weekend. But since the Denver Parade of Homes only runs on the weekends until Labor Day I was pretty anxious to get out there and see some homes! I even dragged brought Matt with me, he says he likes it. oh, and since there are over 70 homes in this years Parade, I'm just going to show you the things I like. First up, decorative moulding in the bathroom.



I really liked the taller one on the right, but maybe if the one on the left wasn't so contrasting I might like it better. Oh, and speaking of bathrooms, look at this wallpaper! I love it. Navy and gold, what's not to love?



In less pretty but more interesting news, this house has a deconstruction zone. Apparently that means they left many areas unfinished on purpose. You know, so those of us that don't know whats really behind our walls can see the bigger picture.



If subfloors aren't your thing then feast your eyes on this floor! It's pretty drool worthy with being on the diagonal, but what might not be apparent is the size of the planks. They were probably 5 or 6 inches wide! I compared the span of my fingers and had to stretch to get my pinky and thumb to meet the edges. It was HUGE! I bet it made the instal go really fast too.



And while we are talking floors, I noticed a lot more tile floors in the living spaces. That is a little weird for me because tile is usually so cold. I'm sure the more expensive homes have the in floor heating, but it still seems so sterile. I know that it's more common in the southern reigions but you just don't see a lot of homes with wall to walk tile in Colorado. Oh, and I may or may not have done my best Rapunzel impression while at the top of the stairs. Could you blame me?



In other tile related favorites, I really like the tile treatment of this fireplace. I think the configuration is a little off, but the tile is so much nicer than just finished walls. If I had one of those lame tv cubbie holes over a fireplace I would totally use this as inspiration and tile the whole thing.



And I would probably look for one of these sweet bi-leveled coffee tables. Or make one, you know me!



Now I'm not really sure why, but I loved the walls in this office. The bottom color is a deep navy if it's hard to see, but I dig it! Maybe it's because I'm a little over the subtle horizontal stripes and this is kinda a new update on that. I'm not really sure.





Oh, and Matt was pretty excited to find Peyton Mannings room while we were doing the tour. It's a little girly for the Bronco QB1 in my opinion, but I guess we're all free to have our own opinions.



I just love walking through as many homes as I can, just trying to soak up inspiration. Does your city have a big parade of homes during the summer? Hopefully I'll have more for you next week, as long as we go see more homes and there's stuff that I like enough to share.

You're going to be so jealous! I know I'd be jealous of me. I finally painted my old sewing machine cabinet and it looks amazing!

If you've been following me for a while then you might remember the post where I introduced our damsel in distress. The cabinet was a bit banged up and defenatly not ready for the ball. With the wood being less than desirable and the machine itself not having any sort of name brand I figured it wasn't worth much and I could do whatever I wanted to it.


What I wanted was to paint it. So I took everything apart and sanded all the old finish off.



After sanding everything down, I used my new favorite tool and sprayed 2 coats of primer over everything.


Then I decided that I wanted to add a little secret pop of color. I chose yellow and figured that I could get away with just using a little $3 test pot. It was plenty to paint the insides of all the drawers.





Before I gave everything it's final coats of paint I masked off the insides to protect the bright yellow paint I had just applied. For the main color I chose to go with the darker grey in our dining room, Silver Dollar from Olympic in a high gloss finish.





After I reassembled the cabinet I took it for a test drive. Not so good, it was very clunky and I couldn't get the machine into any sort of rhythm. It seemed as if something was sticking inside the machine. So I did what any sane girl who knows nothing about antique sewing machines would do, I googled it! I found out that my machine is a Vibrating Shuttle machine, which seems to refer to the bobbin system. It looks nothing like modern bobbins at all. This website gives some great information about how everything works and some tips on maintenance (here's another helpful website). From there I attacked my machine with some WD-40 and sewing machine oil. I even replaced the little piece of felt that is supposed to keep the bobbin oiled. It wasn't too difficult, I just took a little strip of felt, rolled it up, and stuck it in the little oil well. I did have to make a few adjustments with the scissors so it would fit, but the process took maybe 2 minutes.





This area on the side was probably the dirtiest of all. It was mostly covered in some furry dust, but some of the moving parts had a thick grimy deposit on it. I'm pretty sure this is where the problem was, and once it was clean and oiled things moved much more smoothly.





Now here she is all prettied up! Oh, and just ignore the fact that I still need 4 more nobs. I got the first 2 at Anthropologie and they be expensive. Like $8 expensive. I'll get them eventually, I just want to be able to pretend I'm not spending $60 on nobs.













Here is the bobbin winding mechanism. You just pop the bobbin in there and push the whole thing back so it catches on the leather cord and it winds itself up. That little stick thing moves the thread up and down the length of the bobbin so your thread winds evenly.









Look, it even still has the key so I can lock secret stuff inside! (Like the recipt for those knobs.)

















So, have you ever used an old sewing machine like this? Do you like to trick yourself (or maybe your significant other) into not realizing how much you're spending on something as frivolous as hardware? Do old things like this fascinate you?


P.S. Just so you know, Matt is fully aware of how much I'm spending on nobs. Besides, I wouldn't blab that kind of secret here if he didn't. :)