O Happy Day!

So, I keep hearing bloggers mentioning their local ReStore and the fantastic finds they'd... uh, found there.  The other day, I had the serendipitous realization that there happened to be one all of ten minutes away from my home.  Not to advertise or anything, but wow, did I manage to find some fun things!

I saw this adorable little side table, marked at $25.  I've been wanting to convert a coffee table into a padded bench for our entryway (which is rather barren at the moment), but I saw this and decided that a cute little stool would both fit better and be more my style.  So, Fred, as I've taken to calling him, came home with me today.  I plan to paint him Kelly green, and upholster him with one of two fabrics.

 Brown zebra stripe. Yum!  Bought a yard of this at JoAnn today.  

Incidentally, crafting things were much more expensive 

there than I anticipated.  Lesson learned!

Pretty floral.  

The green in this one leans more yellow than the green I'm thinking of using, but it might still work.  I'll have to paint Fred first, then see where I'm at.  Of course, if I painted Fred turquoise...

I also found this cute little vase for $3.  At first I thought it was a little cheesy, but I then I found I couldn't resist it. It's actually dark blue, leaning cobalt rather than navy, with gilded pheasants on it.

Ew, cheese! or yes please?

My major score for the day, though, was a set of Ethan Allen dining chairs.  We've been incorporating some aqua and turquoise into our living room and dining room, and I thought these chairs would look stunning.  We have three dining chairs that was once upholstered in a very grungy ivory (we thought it was tan, that's how grungy it was!).  I reupholstered them with some rust colored microseude that, while it's quite pretty, doesn't really fit with the current color scheme.  And really, three dining chairs? Made things very interesting when we had more than one other person over for dinner!  

So, here's my new friend.  He doesn't have a name yet, and he came with a twin. 

New friend next to one of the triplets.   

I think I'm going to reupholster the triplets.  Fortunately, I picked up some pretty fabric on clearance at JoAnn for this.   The wood tones don't match precisely, but I can live with it. I'm not ambitious enough to strip and stain either of them!

Along one edge, it says "Christie Brinkley 

Home."  I never knew that Christie Brinkley 

had a line of home fabric.  You really do 

learn something new every day.

I grabbed the two arm-chairs and brought them home - for $35 each, I couldn't resist.  When I got home, my husband liked them so much he sent me back to get four more of the side chairs (those were $25 each).  There is some staining on the aqua velvet seats, and I'm not really sure what to do about that.  I guess I'm going to try to remove the stains first, and if that doesn't work, I'll try my hand at more upholstering!  

So, those were today's finds.  Oh, and I can't forget the other fabric I picked up on a whim.  

Oranges, reds and yellows in a mosaic.

I have no idea what I'm going to use it for, but it made me smile!  So did the clearance sticker on the bolt. 

Hope you're having a wonderful week so far!  Tomorrow's Friday, and it's my weekend on, so no fun projects for me.  I will, however, try to post about last weekend's project - reorganizing our hall closet.  It was an adventure, but all's well that ends well, and I can, at last, find things in that closet.

I would love to hear what you think of my finds!  Is the vase cheesy?  What do you think of the fabric?  How on earth do I get those stains out of the aqua velvet?!   

Edited to add a few glamour shots of the new chairs in action.

I'm pretty sure it's against the laws of physics for me to take a picture and not have a cat show up in it.

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