Cover-Up

Linking up with DIY at A Soft Place to Land.

We have a built-in desk in our dining area where we keep the family computer. The kitchen/dining/family room are all open to one another, across the back of the house. Although I wouldn’t call it a great room, because size-wise it’s not that great. Anyway, I like having the computer out in public where I can keep an eye on what’s going on.

Photo taken as we were moving in; from family room looking toward dining/kitchen, desk on right.

The problem is that it’s a mess magnet, and even if the mess is cleaned up, the computer and printer and all the cords create their own visual clutter.

You may notice the drawers pulled out with a board laid across for the keyboard. That was our solution to one of those what-was-the-builder-thinking problems: the desk surface is too high to use comfortably. When I sit in the chair, the original desk is at chest height. Typing was giving me lots of neck and shoulder aches. So while this may not be beautiful, it’s more functional. Theoretically, I can put that all away when it’s not in use. Realistically, it stays out pretty much permanently.

Today I had two goals: hide the mess, and recover the chair seat. Remember this chair makeover

using my garage sale fabric that was also used on the kitchen windows,

but that fabric on the chair seat literally shredded, just from normal daily use.

This time I used the garage sale fabric to sew a little curtain to hide the mess behind. Four straight seams and a tension rod did the trick. Originally I was going to use the small check to cover the seat of the chair, because the scale of the large check was too similar to the scale of the garage sale fabric.

But as Craig and I looked at it, the small check began to kind of quiver and do something weird to our eyes; I seriously felt a little nauseous. So, the big check it was, scale or no scale. But I still think the small check would look better.

The cool thing was that Craig got on board while I was working on the fabric, and he drilled a hole in the desktop and fed all the cords down through it. Now that mess is all under here behind the curtain

instead of all over the top of the desk. Perfect? No. Better? Definitely!