Before & After

When we bought our house all of our furniture fit in 480 square feet. We moved from a studio condo into a 4 bedroom, 2200 square foot house. Technically half of that space and two of the bedrooms were basement storage, but still.

Naturally, I wanted to go furniture shopping CRAZY, but we spent so much money on the down payment that hubby had a hard time even letting me buy drapes. My solution? I became a craigslist stalker! At first I mostly stuck to the free section - but quickly moved on from there. In the beginning we needed everything, but I focused on the living room, specifically chairs. My first big 'find' was a little misleading. The posting was for a 'cool mid-century chair' for $60. I scheduled time to look at it and when I got there I found out the chair was kind of vintage IKEA. It was sort of cool but was pretty worn and really needed to be refinished and because I was already there I felt obligated to take it, so I did.

Right away I bought fabric to recover the chair. But when I finally got around to taking apart the old cover, using it as a pattern, and sewing together the new cover, I'd already fallen out of love with the 'new' fabric - so the chair sat in the basement and collected dust. Recently I discovered some really cool 70's shag fabric that came from my parents old house. It only took me an evening to put the whole thing back together. Luckily the shag fabric was super forgiving and the chair looks like it came that way!