All is not lost!!

I'm helping my niece, Miriam, with her new home, so I figured I would take you along on our journey to create  lots of style with just a little bit of moolah. Sooo, in order to share this adventure, of course I have to document it with lots of pictures. In the process of doing this, I unintentionally deleted the before photos of the chandelier I found for her. @#$% new technology! But WAIT!!!!! Maybe I can defeat this alien form by using its evil for GOOD!!! Soooooo.....I Googled a solution, and found one!!!!! It is a free download called Stellar Phoenix Photo Recovery. It looks like it's working. Hopefully by the time I'm finished writing this I will have regained the before shots to share with you. (Just checked on the retrieval, it's taking a real long time, but I think it's working.) I don't think retrieving the before shots of the chandelier is worth this AGGRAVATION, so I will ask you guys to imagine what it looked like in its crummy old gross cheap brass finish before I started painting it.

I just found this picture of the antique store, you can see the chandelier hanging in the middle of the room. This is just great, in the picture it looks better in the brass. You'll just have to take my word for it, the brass was really cheap looking.

I will share the process of decorating her dining room as we do it, rather than the dramatic before and after. That way you can feel like you're right in the trenches with us.  My niece, is a computer programmer, and admittedly, absolutely clueless when it comes to this decorating silliness. Being a newly wed, she and her husband are figuring out what they want their house to look like, and who gets to decide what should be done. Her hubby, Ross, being the smart young man that he is, has decided that we can do pretty much what we want as long as we don't touch his study.

So last weekend we trekked out to Haverhill Massachusetts (neither of us ever having been there before) to look at potential sideboards. Miriam had found the source on Craigslist, and liked one she saw on the website.  Being her aunt, I explained to her that she was wrong, she just thought she liked it, but that (what a surprise) what she REALLY liked was the one I liked.

Now before you think I just brow beat her, riding rough shod over the sweet young thing that she is, she came around to liking this on her own, especially since it was half the price of the other one. Of course this isn't the way it will end up. This next weekend, we are making this sows ear into a silk purse with sandpaper and paint. It will end up having a 1920's cottage flavor with much more style than the first sideboard.

After we left the antique store, we hit Pottery Barn and picked up some pretty sheer linen window panels and an extremely affordable sea grass rug. It was so much fun, and it was ALL her money!!!!