Painting the Front Door

This month is flying by. We've been working our tails off on all of our May Goals but aren't quite ready to show off the results. Except for one, the front door!!

I'm so relieved to finally have it done and everyone in the neighborhood loves the color! :)

Here again is the before:

We ordered the door unpainted so that is actually primer on it. I wanted to take my time picking out a new color scheme for the front of our house and also it saved us money to order it unpainted ;)

I'm SO glad that I took my time with this decision. If I had painted the front door last summer it would have been tan or green. Those are my safe colors. Blue is definitely not a color I have used much while decorating this house or our last house.

But I've been trying to change things up and step outside my color comfort zone, and I'm so glad I did! Also, I looked up and down my street at all of my neighbor's doors and noticed a lot of black, white, green and tan. I wanted my house to stand out and a beautiful blue door will definitely help!

This color is called Blue Suede and is a Martha Stewart color from Home Depot. I had them mix it for me in an outdoor Glidden paint in semi gloss. I used only a brush to paint the door and it only needed 2 coats. An hour in the morning and an hour in the afternoon and I was done!

I ordered some house numbers for the door too.

Our house actually has no house numbers and our mailbox is at the street along with our neighbor's. I've had many confused pizza delivery men at my door over the years and am glad to finally help everyone out!

I ordered these vinyl numbers from a great Etsy shop called WelcomingWalls. Candi had them made and shipped to me in less than a week, and for only $9! I couldn't be happier with my front door now! :)

Improving My Front Entrance

I finally painted the front door!

The inside of it :)

As soon as I finished writing my May goals last week I decided I was going with that blue color for my front door, and I wanted to get started immediately. But unfortunately the weather didn't cooperate with that plan. It turned rainy and cold and I wasn't able to do a darn thing outside all weekend :(

But this week is looking promising!! I decided that if I couldn't paint the outside of the door I'd at least do the inside of it this past weekend. Here's how it looked before.

Please, try not to be overwhelmed by how beautiful it is. Okay, now that you've recovered I'll tell you about it. I got a 4 panel door in an effort to be different because all of the houses around here have 6 panel doors. I would have loved to have a window at the top but windows made it more expensive and we really do get plenty of light in the living room.

 That wood door to the right of it is our coat closet. It's the last door on this floor of the house that needs to be replaced. It's not a very big closet, but just the fact that I have a coat closet makes me very happy. Living without one for the first 4 years of our marriage drove me crazy.

I painted the door in Behr's Ultra Bright White which is what we used on all of the trim and wainscoting in our house. First I taped off the hardware, hinges and rubber weatherizer thing at the bottom.

I trimmed it out with a brush but once I got to this point I decided I wasn't taking out a roller and pan just for this. So I finished the whole thing with my brush. I've done 2 coats and I should probably do 2 more but it looks good enough for now ;)

Better, right? Now just that last door....

Our Florida Vacation and May Goals

Hey guys! So in my last post when I told you how April completely got away from me I was dying to say, "But we're going away to Florida this Saturday, Hallelujah!!!!" But announcing to the world that we're going out of town didn't seem like the best idea ;) 

We had a wonderful time on Anna Maria Island with Scott's parents. While we were there I got to play with my camera a little :)

I was really excited to get some great family shots so that my new camera felt like something for the whole family instead of just for my blog.

When we left Chicago it still felt like winter, but when we got home it was suddenly Spring!! Our flowers and bushes had suddenly bloomed all of the trees had buds and even leaves, the yard was lush and green and nicely mowed thanks to a wonderful neighbor! So that brings me to my goals for the month of May.

This month in addition to working on some furniture I would like to focus on the outside of our house.

First up the deck:

We worked long and hard on it last Spring but never finished. I'll give you a review of how the Deck Restore is working out for us and also we'll be painting all of the lower lattice white.

Next up our playset:

Last Spring we power washed it which removed most of the old finish but then we never finished it by reapplying a new finish. I think it's going to be the same color as the deck but the jury is still out on that one.

Last but not least the front door:

We had a new door installed a year and a half ago and to save on cost we decided to paint it ourselves. It just hasn't happened yet! That color swatch on the door is Blue Suede by Martha Stewart. The jury is still out on that one too.

So there you go! A long list and it's already the 8th today!! Thankfully these are goals that Scott feels strongly about too, so there's a better chance that they'll actually get done ;)

April Goals

So it just occurred to me the other day that I never made any April goals. The truth is that my April goals would probably have been the same as March, paint a lot of furniture!! But April has not been the best month for me.

It started with helping out a friend by watching her sweet and wonderful boys. A little bit too busy to be painting furniture. No problem. It then turned into sore throats and colds and a lost voice all during the last week before the Little Lambs spring program. I'm the MUSIC teacher at Little Lambs. My voice is kind of needed. 

And then it ended with torrential down pours, a flooded basement and crawl space and our church's basement flooded. We hold Little Lambs in the church basement. And it was now the actual week of the program.

So needless to say the month of April got away from me. And let's not forget that the stomach flu has now come to visit my house. sigh. I'll be back in May with some goals and hopefully a finished project to share. Thanks for putting up with my sometimes sporadic blogging :) 

Spring Chalkboard Calendar

It's been a cold and rainy week here in Chicago. So I decided that maybe if I gave Spring a chalkboard welcome it might decide to finally show up! Worth a shot, right?

My last chalkboard creation was nothing to write home about...well I guess I DID write a blog post about it which is about the same thing....but anyways. I didn't love it and so I never bothered updating the week's activities. Which just made life even more confusing when every week someone asked me what we were going to have to eat at grandma's on Thursday night.... 

So this time I worked extra hard and used some tips I found on Pinterest making sure that the end result would be something I'd actually want to update every week :)

That's the view when you walk in the back door....and a close up...

Not too shabby, huh? Especially for someone with TERRIBLE handwriting! Even those little flowers are a tiny miracle for this untalented doodler. ;)

My tools were a bowl of water, a towel, a yardstick, and a ruler. I was hesitant to wet down my chalkboard before writing on it even though multiple sources had said to do it. I was afraid it would leave unsightly smudge marks every where making it obvious where I had wet it down, but in the end as it dried it still had a hazy, chalky finish making it not so noticeable. And really, who says my entire chalkboard should be smudgless??? (other than the voices in my head of course)

So WELCOME SPRING! Come quickly please and warm up this tired woman who desperately needs some fresh air!!!!

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Dry Brushed Antique Dresser

So March is over. My goal was to get lots of furniture painted so that when I figure out where to sell my furniture I'll be ready. I started with 2 chairs that needed painting and reupholstering but the reupholstering was pretty darn difficult and so those are on the back burner for now.

I was able to complete a beautiful dresser for a wonderful couple I'm friends with who are expecting their first baby. I made a fresh eggs sign which is a quick, fun project that I would love to sell along with my furniture somewhere. And I did a quick re-do on two little tables that were collecting dust in my garage. 

But I finished out the month with an incredible piece of furniture that I will be very proud to sell as an "All That Brings Joy" piece.

I got this dresser along with it's short and wide sibling on Craigslist last year. They weren't a steal and are such nice pieces of furniture that I was a little scared to put a paint brush to them. All along I knew I wanted to paint them gray with white drybrushed over but I let them sit in my garage while I thought and thought and thought, making sure that was the right decision! Now I know it was :) 

The colors I used are Annie Sloan's Paris Grey with Pure White dry brushed over it.

It started out beautiful but a little orange.

I decided to strip the top and restain it darker. I went with Minwax's Jacobean stain. I was surprised when it didn't take the stain as easily as my Primer Red dresser had. I'm guessing that this dresser must be made out of a harder wood. But even without the top getting as dark as I had wanted it turned out gorgeous.

I loved all of the details on this piece and knew that once painted they'd stand out even more.

It came with all of the original hardware still in great shape.

I'm finishing up the short and long sibling this week but would like to make a video of how to achieve this dry brushed look so it may be a few days before I figure out how to do that!! ;)

As far as selling my furniture goes I have a few ideas in mind. I'm thinking about having a sale at my house and advertising it around the neighborhood as much as possible. My only concern is that it will resemble a garage sale and people who stop in expecting that might be disgusted by my prices!! I don't like upsetting people,  100% people pleaser right here folks. 

There's the Kane County Fair that is about 30 minutes from my house which is a good option if I can figure out all of the logistics of it (hauling that much furniture!!). 

And when summer comes and my babysitting slows down I plan on visiting as many antique shops as I can hoping to find a store that feels like a good fit for me.

In the meantime I'll just keep on painting!! :)

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A Quick Paint Job

The other day I was super frustrated with a reupholstery project I've been working on all month, so to calm myself I went out to the garage and found something to paint! I actually found TWO somethings :) Two nice, small tables that I could whip up in a day and feel like I'd accomplished something. I'm realizing how much I love painting. Sewing, reupholstering, refinishing, they're all fun and everything, but I love painting.

Here's how they turned out...

The tan entry table was literally done in one night. It was my grandma's, I think she had it in a spare bedroom. Here's how it started...

oh poop.

Sigh...the other day I was putting my pictures from my camera onto my desktop and on mistake instead of hitting open I hit delete. I looked in my "trash" but I couldn't find it anywhere :( I didn't realize that these before pictures were on there. Well that kinda sucks, huh? 

Oh well, the tan table started as being a very old dark stain, nothing special about it. So I painted it with some Annie Sloan Chalk Paint in the color Cocoa and accented parts of it with Old White. 

The little white table started out with three drawers and an awful lime green paint job. The top drawer had lots of damage so I took it out and nailed in some plywood so it is now more of a cubby or shelf. I sanded down the whole table with my hand sander because the previous paint job was so bad and bumpy. Then I painted it in Pure White and waxed it. 

The knobs are from Hobby Lobby and I loved that they look like they've been painted with some Annie Sloan Chalk Paint!

Sorry again about the lack of before shots. Afters aren't nearly as fun when you have nothing to compare them to!!



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