The Overdue Bar Stool Post

The last time you saw our Craigslist-scored bar stools, they needed a little love.

We actually liked the green vinyl on the seats, but they had seen better days. So we disassembled the stools...

and cut the vinyl off the seats (plucking off a million rusty staples along the way)...

until they were ready for some new clothes.

We covered them in a vinyl we found at a local fabric store. And since my mom is handier than us with all things upholstery, I asked her to help us cover them.

It's a little hard to see from far away, but the fabric has this greenish cross-hatch pattern that drew us to it.

Finding the stools on Craigslist (for $70) and scoring the fabric from the bargain bin at a local fabric store definitely saved us some dough. We would have spent about $160 (not including shipping) if we had gone with the Target stools we were originally going to buy.

Thinking About...Room Dividers

Since our living room/dining room/kitchen area is essentially just one big room, we've definitely struggled with differentiating space and furniture placement. We got the living room and dining room arrangement/placement figured out fairly early on, but we really didn't know what to do with the space "behind" the living room area for a long time. I used to call it "No Man's Land." Other than a low Ikea bookshelf, there was nothing in the space.

This is actually my take on what the space will look like with a sectional (which we don't have yet).


We eventually acquired a couple of lounge chairs and a coffee table for the space and I decided to make it a little lounge/reading area.

The lounge area in real life.

But without a way to define where the living room ended and the lounge area started, it kind of just looked like a big room filled with furniture. Enter the low Ikea bookshelf that used to sit next to the carport door entrance. It had to find a new home when we moved the built-in over to that side of the room. Luckily, it worked great as a way to differentiate the living room from the lounge area.

I'm glad we could reuse a piece of furniture we already owned and I suspect the Ikea bookshelf will stay there for a long time...but...I still picture something a little more grand for that space—a floor-to-ceiling divider with a retro feel. This picture always inspires me when I think about it...

So I started to do some research about pole shelving (which is what this kind of style is called). That's when I came across ISS Designs and fell in love. They offer preconfigured and custom made shelving with mid century flair, including floor-to ceiling room dividers right after my own heart:

The preconfigured dividers here range from about $1000 to $1900. You can also design your own shelving through the ISS website and they'll come back to you with ideas and pricing options. Pricing also varies depending on what kind of materials you choose for the shelving (e.g., aluminum versus wood).

I think my next step will be to take detailed measurements of our space and try to design some shelving through the ISS site. Then I can see whether my design is more economical than the preconfigured options...