Champagne taste, beer budget

So many ideas for things I set out to make originate in a trendy store or a high-end catalogue or a friend's house where I have an intense moment of pure, green envy. My husband calls it my privileged upbringing, where I see something I want and I have no sense that it cannot be mine by some method or another. And so I have developed a sort of creativity by jealousy. I want-- so I make.

Our living situation (we live in a big old house with another couple and their young son) makes dinner gatherings an automatically numerous affair. I've found that my tendency towards dainty, old chairs with smatterings of paint and missing rungs in the back support does not lend toward good hospitality as our housemates and guests tend to sit carefully in their chairs, wobbling gently and worrying that any stray move might land them atop a pile of chair shards broken to peices below them. So our two reasonably stable chairs will no longer do. What I really wanted was a set of mismatched vintage chairs, painted robin's egg blue. But stable, vintage chairs are hard to find for cheap or in my case, nearly free.

I sat looking at the old bench I use as a coffee table and thought how easy it might be to build furniture. That I had not used a saw or a power drill for anything other than assembling ikea shelving and hanging frames on the wall worried me only slightly and within hours I had a pile of lumber from Home Depot leaning on the wall in the laundry room.

A few hearty splinters and some sawdust accumulation in my contacts later, these benches emerged. I had to take the legs off and screw them back in wider to lend stability and I still worry a bit that they might tip over on a small kid pulling himself up by its edges. But they are actually benches. And people actually sit on them, all the time. So that's something for my first furniture building forray. Next I have my eye on an armless sofa