Procris's Profile

My family has a history of repairing caning. My grandfather was paralyzed when he was quite young, and he took up doing skilled repair work for a living (he recaned seats, rewove holes in suits, things like that). He taught my mom, and recently my roommate's possession of two broken caned chairs gave her an opportunity to teach me. I took them home over Christmas, and recaned them as my Christmas present to my roommate. By working next to my mom we finished both of them in three days. Roomie and I now have two really nice kitchen chairs and I got some solid bonding time with my mom.

It's not as difficult as people think it is, but after three days your hands do hurt. And boy, does it take time! It makes sense that recaners charge a standard $1.50 a hole. Now I'm on the lookout for real (perferably broken) caned furniture, because as long as it has the holes I can fix it, and you can sometimes get a pretty good deal from folks who don't want to take the time to find a recaner / don't want to pay for the fix.

For a cheaper solution than vodka (really, who can afford that?), get a big bottle of isopropyl alchohol from your drug store. A quart is usually around a dollar. It works wonderfully to remove the sticky residues from price-stickers, and typically won't harm your items, where some of the acidic recommendations on this list might. You can also mix it 50/50 with water, which will remove some residues that one or the other won't remove alone.

I certainly wouldn't paint them! They're gorgeous. It's a bit hard to tell your style from the one picture, but any colors associated with "craftsman" style would go with that wood tone, as would many paler blue-green-grays. With that kind of rosette trim, a historical color (many paint lines have colors drawn from specific historical houses) would be a great bet.

I want the bookshelves...

For the record, if you're having an allergic or other reaction to the mold, "at least it's dead" is not a particularly good final solution. The mold itself may be dead, but the spores aren't necessarily killed by bleach, and "killing" the mold itself can cause the spores to become air-borne.

ANY scrubbing you do in a moldy situation should be done with excellent ventilation and a fine-pored mask on your face (the professionals have Hepa-masks, you need something finer-grained than a typical dust mask and it needs to be taped to your face. I'm sadly not kidding).

Mold's no joking matter -- it can make you really sick. Is there no fan? Or is it just broken / clogged? This is something that should be dealt with ASAP, before you get sicker. (for some of us, with major mold allergies, this would be grounds for breaking the lease. ... no matter how Idyllic)

What about a really soft robins-egg blue for the walls? It'd play up the wood-tones (and the brick, although that'd look really good white too) -- and it'd be plenty bright.

My win was last summer, when I was attempting to furnish my new apartment on a tight budget: a simple, walnut chest of drawers, bow-front, clean lines. No idea who the maker was, but its classic and the perfect size for my small bedroom. Guy wanted $80... totally worth it, and he helped load it into my CRV, followed me to my apartment, and helped me get it up the stairs! ... but yeah, it took watching CL everyday at work (thank goodness for data-entry).

Maybe it's my monitor, but doesn't the third image have navy blue, and the fifth have cream in it? And I feel like I see rooms with sky-blue all the time on this site.

The one thing that many of the colors you have on your list have in common are yellow under-tones, which can make people feel icky in certain lights. But categorically banning colors, especially as broadly worded as "pale yellow" makes no sense at all.