Hale to the Navy

September 9, 2014 By 1 Comment

No, my grammar nazi friends, I didn’t misspell the title, I just painted the wall in Reese’s new study navy! Last I left you, the room looked a whole lot like this:

roffice1

I told you guys in this post that my husband was going back to graduate school in the spring and we decided to do a little change-up upstairs to give him a room of his own to study in. So the goal with this room is definitely to make it more masculine and a calm place that is all him and relaxing for him to use. I bought him a desk that just arrived last week (thank you backorders!) but before we got that arranged in there, we wanted to paint the room! Paint is my favorite (ahem… cheap) way to change the whole feel of a room! After spending a fair amount of time looking at rooms on Pinterest I settled on the sort of rustic industrial look that Reese likes and decided Benjamin Moore’s Hale Navy was the right way to go.

Since this room has only one small window painting the whole room would feel a bit cavernous, so we settled on one ‘accent’ wall.

halenavy

And this is the point in the story where I really started to feel like this room was NEVER GOING TO BE FINISHED.  Do you ever have projects like that? After I had picked the paint color,  I also ordered this duvet in the gray color to fit the twin bed.  Welllllll it arrived and it was king sized.  Wah wah. So I called to see if I could return it and get the right size, but apparently Pottery Barn had a glitch in their online ordering SKU numbers so everyone who ordered the twin size received King size and the twins were backordered until November. And since there is a HUGE fabric difference in king and twin I decided I’m going to see if I can just alter it to be the right size .

But at least I would have the two Euro size shams and pillows I ordered too right?! WRONG! Apparently those were in wrong too… so I received two Euro pillows and two STANDARD shams… COME ON Pottery Barn!! You are killing me here!!

So I returned the two shams, but kept the pillows and will either make pillow cases out of my extra fabric from the duvet or find some coordinating color/pattern to go with it!

So after all of that, this is what the room looked like:
halenavy1

 

It’s looking more manly already, don’t you think?

Filed Under: Office, Uncategorized

My Front Door Just got a Little Moodier

September 3, 2014 By 1 Comment

So this is one of those projects that I finished right before I had to go out of town and didn’t get around to posting… or really finishing.  But say la vie… I’m going to post about it anyway.  There will be more of these to come… get excited.

So my front ‘hallway’ looked a little like this:

frontdoor

Inspiring huh? I mean… really mixing white and cream is the new color scheme right?! Kidding… kind of.  Our front door opens into our dining room and I painted that room before I had met my husband to give you an idea of just how long this has been like that.  I decided at the time that I wouldn’t paint the door because I would come back soon and finish it off… and three years later… I painted the door!! (but have no fear friends… the door frame is still cream)

frontdoor1

So even the painted door isn’t complete because it was 102 when I painted, and that is not conducive to painting outside… so I still need to paint the other side of the door.

But I love how dramatic and moody it looks! I think it makes the whole space look a little classier!

And it was a super easy project.  First I painted the recessed parts with a brush:

frontdoor2

and then rolled on the rest with a small roller.

The first coat was SUPER thin.

frontdoor3

And the second coat covered the rest really well.

frontdoor4

I still need to paint the trim to match the rest of the room, paint the other side of the door and replace that doormat (which btw I inherited from the previous owners and don’t really like but haven’t found anything to replace it with).

The paint is an interior exterior paint from Benjamin Moore and I think the color is true black.  The guy at my local hardware store recommended replacing the white with black in the mix… to get a truer black, and I think he knows what he is talking about! This color is pretty true black!

Have you jumped on the black interior door bandwagon? I don’t usually like trends, but this felt like a total success of a project.  I might have to jump on a few more bandwagons because every time I come around that corner I think… MAN that looks so much better!! And that my friends is a successful project!

Filed Under: Paint

A Piece of the Mass House

September 2, 2014 By 3 Comments

When I was in college my parents bought a house that they then rented to my brother and several of his friends over the next few years.  I lived there with 5 guys for about 1 month during one summer (and ps that was about as good of an idea as it sounds like it would be… hence only being for one month!)

But over the course of several years at KU, several of our friends lived in that house and it is a cute little yellow house on a busy street.  It was the perfect house for the guys to live in, and I have a lot of good memories there.  For several reasons my parents kept that house for several years after we were all gone from Lawrence.  They have sold it now, but during all that time it was discovered that the big tree in the backyard needed to be taken down.  When the guy came to cut down the tree, Mom had them save two sections of the tree stump for me in case I wanted to do something with them.

So for about 2 years those tree stumps sat in my garage (one is still there) waiting for inspiration to strike.  Well, one day inspiration struck in the form of a blog called The Art of Doing Stuff.  I’m not sure really how I got there, and it has been about 2 or 3 years since I found it, and my memory doesn’t last that long!

But she has a fabulous tutorial on how to do this, and since I did it pre-blogging I have no in process pictures for you all, but it is such a neat project and has a great memory to go along with it!

stumpstool

I did not stain mine because I liked the variation already in the stump.  And I will say it is not very easy to sand a round log, but I think the whole project took me only a few hours from start to finish.

stumpstool2

 

And as you can see in the photo above, if you don’t have control over cutting the log so that it will be even, the adjustable legs from Ikea are key… otherwise this would be a VERY uneven table.  It is still mostly decorative, but pretty close to level.

Filed Under: Wood
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