Paint

House Paint Part 2!

February 9, 2015 By amusingmjblog Leave a Comment

So I left you guys last week with a glimpse of what the house looked like after the painters came. But I didn’t have time to put the upstairs back in order and take pictures, so I’m back today with a part 2 post for you! And I think the upstairs is the biggest transformation!! So… pictures:

And I am going to apologize, I apparently got pretty light happy when taking these yesterday afternoon (I’m not used to all the sunshine we are getting in TX!) so excuse the overly lightened pictures, but the wall color is actually pretty true in most of these!

Again we went with all Light French Gray by Sherwin Williams in all of these rooms. Eventually in this room we want to add some shelving to that wall on the right to be able to put our board games/decorations, but this room is actually probably the closest of any of them to being done.

And from the other view (the door in this picture leads to our walk-in attic storage):

For me the biggest change in the paint has been our master bedroom and bathroom:

Just to remind you where we are coming from, here are the pictures from the realtor listing: GetMedia (14)
And now:

It looks so light and so airy! We originally didn’t have the painter painting the cabinets in the master bathroom. But the morning they showed up, he asked us about it. So we of course said… well how much would you charge? I kid you not… his answer was $100. We couldn’t say yes FAST ENOUGH. And what a huge difference it has made in here! I love how fresh and clean it feels and just a lot more ‘us’. Nothing was wrong with these rooms before, they just felt more dark and heavy than we like! It feels like these rooms are really our own now! The color in the master bathroom is Storm Cloud by Sherwin Williams (the same that is in the dining room downstairs).

The upstairs guest bathroom: (the lighting in this room is hard… why are all small bathrooms so hard to photograph!?)

The very “in progress” nursery: Those red dressers aren’t staying in there, they just haven’t had time to move to their new home in our attic storage yet. And since we know it is a girl, that blue curtain will be coming down soon. Oh and that boob light… has got to go. Yay for getting to look for a fun girly light fixture for baby girl’s new nursery!

The office/craft room looks a little sad since I stole it’s bedspread for our master bedroom! Now I need to hang some pictures and find a new bedspread and this room won’t be quite as sad!

And that concludes the upstairs with fresh paint! Stay tuned this week since I’ll have another baby update and a garage update for you! Spoiler Alert: you can walk through the garage now. AMAZING.

Filed Under: Paint

House Paint!

February 5, 2015 By amusingmjblog 1 Comment

So remember this list of all the things we want to do to the new house? My mom called me that night and said: I’m tired just reading this list. And honestly I kind of felt the same way! I love projects as much as the next person and seeing the house transform over time, but as the husband and I were talking, we realized that ‘paint this room’ showed up on almost ALL of the rooms on our To Do List. If he and I were left to paint all of those rooms ourselves, it would be 5 years before we get the house painted… and probably the tall stairway would never get painted.

So this happened this week (want to see the before pictures? Click here):

We decided to bite the bullet and hire out the house painting. All I have to say is Best. Decision. Ever. These guys were awesome, a week and a half after calling them, they came, moved all the furniture, took what few things we had hung on the walls off, patched our holes, and painted THE WHOLE HOUSE in 2.5 days. Seriously… all of it. I only have pictures of downstairs because everything was drying and needed to be put back and pictures taken… I’ll show you those next week. Since I only had a week and a half to pick Sherwin Williams Colors (which I’d never really used before) I spent a long time googling/pinteresting colors and we mostly decided to paint the whole house just one shade of gray, except the Dining Room and Master Bathroom are a darker blue color.

I painted 6 different gray swatches on the wall, but ended up settling with Light French Gray (the painter used all Sherwin Williams level 200 paints… which bonus are 0 VOC which means they don’t smell all that bad and are safe to be around for baby).

I love this color! It is exactly what I was hoping for- a very cool gray that doesn’t have much (if any beige undertones) but also doesn’t read as blue. It definitely makes our white kitchen and white trim pop!

Since all these spaces are so connected we wanted to go with the same color in all of them to make them feel like one large space- and while they were at it I had them paint the laundry room the same color. I need to do some other things to make our laundry room more functional: like a drying rack, another shelf there on the left side, but since this is right off our kitchen, it has great storage space for us and is also the perfect space for Lexie’s food and water. And because the husband and I are super short… we need a step stool. But with this little step stool I can reach everything without having to climb on the dryer, which is getting harder to do as the months progress!

Then in the Dining Room we went with Sherwin William’s Storm Cloud which I found because I found a bathroom on Pinterest done in Jubilee and liked the shade, but wanted it darker and moodier, so I just dropped down a spot on it’s swatch. I worried a little that it would be too dark, but I think with such a large room with so many windows it ended up PERFECTLY.

I definitely want a new light fixture above the table, and desperately need some curtains on the window in the picture above, but I love the way this room is coming together!

It is definitely still a work in progress (and I didn’t notice that they didn’t center the piano… guess I should go home and fix that) but I could not be happier with the color!!

It feels like a brand new house! I’ll be back next week with the upstairs pictures… you won’t even recognize our master bathroom and bedroom… HUGE transformation!

Filed Under: Paint

A Colorful New Vanity

January 28, 2015 By amusingmjblog 2 Comments

Y’all… this is one of those projects that I just realized I never shared (took tons of pictures: check. resized and uploaded them: check. wrote blog post: fail.) But it was SUCH a fun project to do and turned out so great, I need to share it. But since I am so woefully behind I feel a few clarifications are in order: 1. I did this before I got pregnant… some of the things I used DEFINITELY are not safe for preggos. 2. YES this was done at our old house, so you can join me in remembering what it was like to have a garage free of boxes. 3. There are A LOT of photos in this post. You have been warned.

Okay, now that that is out of the way, on with the project. My sister-in-law had a piece of furniture that was given to her by an aunt: a GORGEOUS vanity, but quite a bit outdated and definitely not in Misty’s style. So she asked if I would have time to fix it up. After talking, she told me she wanted it in a bright teal color with some dark glazing to make it look a little antiqued. It was clear that this was the perfect project to try out some chalk paint- specifically Annie Sloan’s Florence. I was super excited about the opportunity to work on something that is not in my normal color scheme! This is a beautiful color and I love the way it turned out. But I’m skipping ahead. Let’s take a look at what we are working with:

Now that I knew what I was looking at, I went to one of the places in Dallas that sells Annie Sloan, and lucked into being in the shop at the same time as the owner: Lady Butterbug‘s husband. He was already giving some instruction to another newbie, so I (not so) nonchalantly listened in. Eventually he was telling both of us EXACTLY how to best apply this stuff, what glaze to use, how long to wait, etc. He was amazing! If you are in McKinney, TX or near one of their other Dallas shops, stop by and check out their stuff. He clearly is passionate about this paint and happy to share his wisdom with anyone who wants to listen!! I love people like that!

Anyway, I walked out of the shop with a container of the Florence Paint, both clear & dark wax, and a couple of natural bristle brushes to use for application. (I would still have TONS of paint left over if I hadn’t spilled about half on my garage floor… sorry new house owners! And I have barely put a dent in either of the waxes, so I’ll definitely be using them for more projects after the baby!)

So first up I wiped down/cleaned the piece and then I painted everything with two coats of the Florence chalk paint. After the first coat it looked very streaky and I could see some yellow peeking through, but the second coat definitely made everything look nice and even.

The next step was to apply the clear wax. One of the tips Mr Butterbug (I’m sure that’s not what he likes to be referred to, but I didn’t catch his name) gave us was to not apply the wax too thickly, but to have just a very thin layer. He recommended a round natural bristle brush to apply. Then on top of THAT (before it dries… so work in sections) apply the dark wax and then wipe it down with a paper towel. I used my favorite blue shop towels that I get at Sams. The easiest way for me to show you this whole process is with the drawers:

1st Step: Wipe them down (and remove hardware)

2nd Step: Chalk Paint (in the photo below they are still wet)

3rd step: brush on clear wax (you can’t see the clear wax in the photo… so just pretend you can see it)

Then comes the 4th and by FAR the scariest step: brush on the dark wax. This step is scary because you have worked so hard on this piece up until now, and you are about to make it look terrible. But things get worse before they get better, so bear with me:

Then wipe it down with your paper towel, working it into crevices and generally making it look better:

And here is where it is a judgement call on how ‘distressed’ or antiqued you want the piece to look.

And the good news is because you have put the dark wax OVER the clear wax, pretty much you can add more clear wax/dark wax until you get it exactly like you want it.

Then there were two other steps to finishing this project that I left out (But as you can clearly see from the picture above, I had already done this part by the time I finished the drawers). First, I wanted to spruce up the handles a bit, they definitely had a darker patina to them that was really pretty, but I thought bringing out the brassiness of them would accent this piece well. So I pulled out my can of Brasso and worked some of the grime off of these pieces. (You can see how they shined up if you skip down to the finished product below)

The other thing I did was freehand paint some of the accents on either corner with some gold craft paint.

Before:

After the first coat:

And the second coat, I’m not a perfect painter, and it was definitely harder to stay in the lines than I thought, but I do love the gold accents even if they aren’t perfect because they add a bit of glam to the piece. And they coordinate so well with the spruced up pulls:

So when it was all said and done, this is what we have:

I did let the piece sit in my garage and ‘cure’ for two weeks before we loaded it up to take over to Misty’s house. Mr. Butterbug told us that letting it have that cure time would make the piece much less likely to scratch or scuff… and since my brother-in-law and sister-in-law have 9 kiddos running around their house, I thought that sounded like a pretty stellar idea.

I’m pretty proud of how it turned out… and I think they were too!!

Filed Under: Chalk Paint, Paint

House Paint Part 2!

House Paint!

A Colorful New Vanity

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