Café Design

Happy Monday! Hope your week is off to a good start. Instead of a usual blog post, today I want to share with you a little furniture makeover I worked on over the weekend. This old dresser came to me from a friend who was clearing out her basement and asked if I wanted it. She knew I love old furniture and seeing that this is such a great piece, I said yes. The dresser is an antique and I liked that it had good bones and pretty drawer pulls that were original to the piece. But the layers of cobwebs and gunk, and thick green oil paint made me instantly regret my decision so I cleaned it up and left it out in the garage for a while, not knowing whether to chuck it or keep it.

About a month ago I spotted an antique china hutch on Facebook Marketplace (as one often does) that I fell in love with and thought would be perfect for our little dining room. (Who can resist turned legs and scalloped aprons?) The proportions were right and the time-worn walnut finish – not too orange, not too yellow – was exactly what I wanted for the space and tied in really well with the highboy in our living room (another Facebook Marketplace find!). 

Dear readers, my apologies for being so loose with my blogging schedule lately. It’s taken me longer than usual to catch-up with your emails and messages, and I’m sorry for that, but it’s been a whirlwind month and I’ve had so much on my mind that writing on here has taken a backseat. We’re about to start 3rd grade online, with all the anxiety that the new learning format entails, and there’s a lot to figure out right now. Our schedules look quite different this fall, don’t they? We’re all doing our best to navigate these uncertain times, working from home, learning and enjoying our time together the best we can so please bear with me while I regroup and figure out a new blogging routine. In the meantime, I thought I’d share with you what’s been on my mind (obsessively) over the last couple of weeks.

Apologies for the lack of a Wednesday post, the tropical storm the other night left our block in the dark and our gardens a hot mess. Luckily no major damage was done to our property but the amount of leaves and branches and young trees that have fallen is beyond anything we’ve experienced before. (On the positive side, all those dried-up branches on our 20-foot tall trees were downed, a job we could never have tackled ourselves. Silver linings…) Anyway, we spent the best part of our day yesterday clearing out the front yard, hence the change of schedule. I managed to clip a few Stargazer lilies from our garden before the onset of the storm on Tuesday so I now have a sweet little bouquet to remind me of my pretty flowers before the storm. As I snapped a photo this morning, I thought I’d show you a quick before-and-after of how a neglected corner of our living room has changed over the last year. This image below was taken a couple of days before our move last summer…