That one thing I did that took me forever but was totally worth it.

I went furniture shopping last spring. I went to Furniture Row, and all those crazy warehouse places. I took the little girls with me, and although we got kicked out had a blast, I was loathe to bring any of that pressed board/oak veined/nightmarish over priced crap-ola into the awesomeness that is my brick house.

So....one day while cruising through an second hand shop, I spied this under a pile of dusty dust.

Love. LOVE! Except for the smell, and the color, and the SMELL.


Doubting the power of Kilz Primer to wipe out that Great-Aunt-Who-Smoked-Her-Way-Through-Six-Decades stench, and tormented by childhood memories of said Great-Aunt's yellow hair, yellow nails, and yellow skin, I decided I would sand the yellow smell off of my new dream furniture.

Yeah. Awesome.

It took me about....10 hours. So, four dust masks, sixteen showers, three nail files (seriously. my hands were a wreck for weeks) and lotsa good old fashioned swearing later, I had a freshly sanded yellow smelly piece of dream furniture. Bonus! I woke up twice that night terrified that my Great-Aunt was In My Room. Her smell lingered on my scalp.


Sidebar story: Sometime in the seventies, my aunt decided that because my uncle was clearly not ever going to mow the lawn again, she'd have to do it herself. As she smoked and mowed, a lack of gas in the mower became a problem. So, she did what any smart, modern, southern woman would do. She siphoned some gas out of her car with a long tube, using her mouth. When her husband returned home from work, he found a stammering, shaking wife, and a freshly mowed lawn. He questioned her, and she informed him that she hadn't smoked all afternoon because she didn't want her head to blow off. True story. These are my people.

So I went to my friendly neighborhood hardware store, and spent more on a gallon of Kilz and a throw away paint brush than I ended up spending on the whole rest of the project combined.

It's been six months, and I'm happy to report that the smell has not escaped the confines of two coats of Kilz. Those Kilz folks....genius.

And.....here it is.


My dorm room Living Room before placement of the new cabinet thingy:

Fun Fact: Those speakers aren't even hooked up.

And now......AFTER!

Ah, that's better.

Also, it's a big help that my brother-in-law was willing to drywall over that S.T.U.P.I.D window that let all the cold (or hot) air in from our old house's sun porch. Kinda hard to hang a big TV in a hole.