ugly makeover – HOME ON THE CORNER

The day has come!! The great Ugly April Makeover Reveal! I’m so excited to show you all how this poor ugly stool turned into something lovely! I think it turned out great! So first of all, the before…

Ugly, ugly, ugly!

So without further ado…Tada!!

Lovely!

What do you think? I actually came up with the idea at about 10:00 pm, while laying in bed trying to go to sleep. This is usually my best thinking time! Go figure!

Neutral tones

Now for the process! We started out by taking off the top of the stool and the wheels.

Ugly April Challenge-homeonthecorner.com

Topless! 🙂

We wanted to take the ugly fabric off the top, but as Lauren was taking out the staples, she realized there was another layer of faux leather, then another fabric after that! Lots of staples to remove!

Staples galore!

More layers!!

We added a piece of wood to the bottom and a little extra on the side to make the recessed part even with the existing sides.

We scrounged through our stockpile of wood and found a couple of white pickets, brown pickets and some pallet wood. We measured how tall they needed to be for the sides and cut 4 pieces of each kind of wood.

Cutting the side pieces.

Okay, this next part got a bit tricky and we had to redo a couple of times. We measured them all and used a straight edge to attach them to the stool, but after we got them all on, they were at a slant. Bummer! We called in our reinforcements…Honey!! Dad!! He was kind enough to redo it for us and make it all nice and pretty!

Closed up the front and back.

Now all we have to do is some painting and find just the right fabric for the top.

Next is paint and fabric.

For the paint, I used what I had sitting around. I freshened up the white pickets by using some of the Simply White paint I had from Lauren’s room. The green is Fernwood Green, from painting our living room about 10 years ago and the turquoise was a mistake batch I picked up awhile ago from OSH for cheap. I dry brushed each of these on to add a little bit of my favorite beach colors. I also added the white to the sides.

Beach colors-my favorite!

Haley and I found the fabric at JoAnne’s on sale and thought the colors were a perfect match!

Pretty!

I almost forgot-we added rope handles to the sides! I love the look of the rope. I also added the little bit of trim on the bottom to help cover up the peeling veneer.

Rope handles

Now our ugly little stool is a cute little storage box! I used the leftover fabric to line the bottom of the box, just to add a little prettiness.

Inside

I can hardly believe this is the same piece of furniture! I spent about a total of $9.00 for the whole thing-$2.00 for the stool, $5.00 for the fabric and $2.00 for the rope. Everything else we already had on hand.

So what do you think? Did we rescue this poor little stool from a miserable life? I absolutely loved how it turned out! It’s not perfect, but I still like it! This really was a fun challenge!

I have a story for you today.

Once upon a time there was a little girl. She had a beautiful spirit, was kind and had many friends. She was not ugly, but … maybe awkward. In second grade she got glasses after the teacher said she may have some learning problems. By 6th grade she had to wear the headgear for braces. Not pretty! Her friends still loved her and stuck by her. We all saw her beauty. In 8th grade, she was the Valedictorian for her graduating class. So much for learning problems! In high school, she started discovering what her style was and her spirit and determination stayed strong. She made many more friends too. Her senior year, she decided to run for Miss Kings County. She figured she didn’t have much of a chance, but she did it for the scholarship. In the end, she won! She was crowned as Miss Kings County! She was, and is, beautiful on the inside and the out. She still has her same group of friends, is a wife and a mom, and she glows with beauty. She just needed time to come into her own. I know all this, because she is my niece, and I am very blessed to have her in my life!

Ugly April Challenge

I tell you this story because, we can’t always see the beauty of somebody or something until some work is done. So it was with this little stool. Lauren and I are joining the Ugly April Makeover Challenge, No, not for ourselves!, but for a piece of furniture.

Peeling veneer

It just needs some braces, maybe some contacts, and some care. We hope to give it a new life. I am just going to give you some glimpses of it today and we will have the reveal next Monday.