Monday, March 25, 2013

painted hutch

We have this nice built-in hutch in our dining room, which we love and use a lot.  We need that storage.  But in 7 years of living in this house, I've never done anything to it, except throw all our junk there. 


The other day I got a wild hair to paint the hutch and chose Martha Stewart Plumage in semi-gloss.



 Here is the finished product, complete with keeping-it-real stuff that's stored there.  Crayons, wine glasses, DVD's, napkins....all essential mom items.


You may also notice my strange little dog portrait there.  He's from a children's book that my mother-in-law had back in the 1950's.  It was a book of pictures of ACTUAL live animals posed and dressed up in human clothes.  This is probably not PETA approved.  :)  He's a part of my favorite vignette in the house which also features a pair of George and Martha Washington silhouettes and a poster from my husband's grandparents basement.  I'm weird, what can I say?


antlers reveal

After much scraping and pulling and soaking, I finally got down to the bare skull on this 50 year old rack.  And....it was yellow. Very yellow.  Probably stained from 50 years of decaying grease since the fur and skin were LEFT ON this thing.  Gross.  I tried all kinds of whitening techniques - baking soda, hydrogen peroxide, bleach.  No luck.  Finally I threw in the towel and decided to dry brush flat, white ceiling paint over the skull to brighten it.  Good enough for me!



The screw holes were already there from the skull being mounted in the shed all those years, so I used those to screw it to the wooden plate, then put wood putty over the screws and the screw holes and painted over the putty.

I bought the wooden plate at AC Moore, stained the front and painted the edging BM Hale Navy (a sample I had laying around).  Coated it with spray poly and we were done  Not too bad.




The gallery wall is still a work in progress....



Thursday, March 14, 2013

dark powder room

Like the itch you can't help but scratch, I finally caved and painted our half bath.  The color was BM Bronzed Beige that I painted about 7 years ago.  It's not bad but somehow felt blah.  I also had practically no art on the walls and wanted a darker, more gallery look to this tiny room.  It's really tiny, like 5x8.


A glimpse into our pantry/laundry area and the kitchen.  And the paint samples on the set of cabinets that will soon come down in lieu of open shelving.  More on that later.  The ugly white tile you see there extends into the bathroom.  We'll deal with that later as well.  Probably going to cover it in Trafficmaster Allure faux wood vinyl.   

Back to the bathroom - I decided to go with a dark blue, inspired by some of these rooms.



I chose BM Mysterious and here's the progress so far...



The gems above the toilet slay me.  I downloaded them from Vintage Printables and had it printed out at Office Max.  Gotta get it framed and matted better though.  Lots to still be done in this room but wanted to give you a sneak peek....