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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Blue Nursery Dresser

I have this friend. We grew up together as fake cousins. Our parents were best friends and so we called them Auntie and Uncle, therefore making us fake cousins :)

When the college years came around she went off to college and I stayed home and married/had babies immediately. So we lost touch for a bit until recently. She came back, married and moved into a house 2 doors down from my parent in-law's! And is now expecting a little one :) I couldn't be more excited about this and so when her and her husband asked me to paint a dresser for the nursery I was thrilled!

They found this dresser on Craigslist and boy is it a good find. Very solidly built with great working drawers, it's going to last this kid's lifetime and then some. They chose the color themselves to go along with their gender neutral nursery. I know that is a blue dresser, but it's the perfect blue. Put next to some of Lainey's pink things and it's the prettiest blue you've ever seen, put next to some sports paraphernalia and this dresser is all boy :) 

The color is called Lazy Sunday by Benjamin Moore. I had it color matched at Home Depot in some Behr semi-gloss. I took pictures of the whole painting process for you to show how I paint a piece with latex paint.

This is what I started with.

We knew we only wanted one hole for a knob instead of two for a pull so I filled in the hole closest to the middle of the drawer on each side. Sometimes I fill in both holes and drill a new hole right in the middle of the two but in this case this placement was going to look best which worked out wonderfully for me! ;) After filling all of the holes and sanding I filled them again to be safe and then sanded the whole dresser with my hand sander.

Here's the sander I own/use. I usually just use whatever sandpaper I have on hand, a medium grit is good.

 Then I take a small piece of sandpaper and go over all of the small and curvy places my hand sander couldn't do on the drawers and dresser body.

 After that's done I clean the whole thing off with a wet rag, if there's any film left I rinse the rag off and do it again until it's clean.

Note: I only sanded to knock down a bit of the shiny finish on the dresser, I didn't try to sand it down to bare wood or anything.

Next I start priming. First I use a Purdy XL Cub paint brush to paint all of the small and curvy areas. A good paint brush will give you good results and less brush strokes!

After two coats of primer on the edges I roll out two coats everywhere else. I use a mini foam roller for this.

Then I move on to my paint. I start again with my paint brush and go over all of the edges and curvy areas. When it dries I give it a second coat. If it looks like it needs a third coat go for it, better safe than sorry.

Now just roll out a couple coats of paint and I'm done! 

Now I did run into an issue at the end, because it just wouldn't be me without some issues. The roller was leaving roller marks for some reason, I'm not sure why seeing as this is how I always do it. ??? But I just took some fine sand paper and went over the top to smooth it a bit and then rolled on another coat. I made sure to have plenty of paint on my roller and to use smooth even strokes and it looked much better after. That's what I get for telling people how perfect this project was going!! ;)

The knobs are from Hobby Lobby and I used smaller ones on the top drawers for some added interest.

Maybe this summer when the nursery is finished I can get a quick pic of it all to share with you. I Can't wait for your arrival baby!! Your fake aunt loves you!

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Playing with my new Nikon!

I saved and saved and I researched and researched and yesterday I went and bought myself a digital SLR camera!! I went with the Nikon D3200.

I decided on it because it had good reviews, was a starter priced camera (in other words less expensive!) and most importantly....Miss Mustard Seed uses a Nikon. I know I'm a nerd, Scott even asked me at the store why I was set on a Nikon and when I wouldn't answer him he guessed right. We all have idols we want to be like, right?! ;) 

I'm the kind of person who opens up the box, inspects every item and then sits down and reads the entire manual. So that's exactly what I did :) I didn't want to just turn it to auto and start shooting pics that I could basically have gotten on my point and shoot, so I read and read about all the features before trying it out. Here's some of the fun I had once I was done reading...

Ummm, the wreath behind their heads is a bit distracting...but look how cute they are! ;) Also Casey has now entered that stage where he thinks he looks "funny" when he smiles with his mouth open. Since when does he care about how he looks?!?!

Loving the sharp foreground and blurred background!

We had a short little modeling session this morning.

I'm also a big fan of blurred foregrounds. Fun fact: One time on HGTV someone said, "Candles are for burning, not dusting" How many of you have dusted a candle?! Guilty!! I now make sure to burn all of my candles from time to time!!

So there you have it, my first day with a DSLR. I think it went pretty well. I mainly wanted one to get great pictures of furniture for my blog, but I think an awesome bonus will be capturing great photos of my family/kids. I'm now saving for a tripod, a 50mm lens, and some photo processing software. I'm thinking probably Lightroom. Okay, okay Miss Mustard Seed uses Lightroom, but I also read other great reviews about it from other bloggers ;)

Fresh Eggs Sign

Good morning :) Sorry I've been missing since last posting about my March Goals, I've just been really busy trying to accomplish those goals. Those chairs are proving to be a lot harder than I expected! Not a problem though, it will be worth it in the end.

To keep my spirits up I decided to make a new sign in my spare time. I wanted to try something different this time and use a new font. I'm realizing that I really enjoy making these signs!! Just picking the words and the fonts is so much fun and the result is always as cute as I hoped it would be! That's always a nice surprise :)

So here's my newest creation...

I used the color French Linen from Annie Sloan and Old White for the letters. The font is called PilGi in a size 400 and after some research I was able to figure out that to make a cents sign on a Mac you hit the option button and the 4 at the same time. What on Earth would I do without google?? 

I outlined the letters with some Graphite but didn't make shadows this time, and the 50¢ is in Graphite also. After distressing the whole sign I waxed it with clear wax, I thought I'd finish there but it just didn't look done to me. So I also waxed with dark wax and sure enough, it was perfect.

The color ended up looking more like a grayish tan in the end, but it's just so perfectly aged looking. If you would like to see how I hand paint the letters you can go here for a tutorial. 

I'm hoping to show off those newly upholstered chairs in a couple of days!!

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March Goals

So I'm a few days late to post this month's goals but I have a good excuse. We took a mini-vacay with some friends to the Wisconsin Dells over the weekend and I didn't get on the internet once the whole time :)

It was actually my first time ever going there, we're about 3 hours away. I have to say that the hotel we stayed at was wonderful and the indoor water park was so much fun. But driving through the actual town I couldn't help thinking that somebody took an absolutely gorgeous part of this country and turned it into some kind of looney toon town! The over the top buildings and roller coasters going right through the center of the town made me feel like I was in a cartoon. It was weird.

But anyways!! The last couple of months I've been focusing on projects around the house. This month I want to focus on furniture. 

I've got a whole garage full of awesome furniture just waiting to get worked on. My problem has been that I'm not exactly sure how I want to sell it. But I've decided that no matter how I end up selling furniture in the future I have to start by getting a bunch of pieces ready to sell. 

So this month I will finish this chair and it's twin.

And I don't know what else! I have to go out to the garage and choose once I finish the chairs. Wish me luck!!! 

Basement Picture Collage

One of my goals for the month of February was to finish the little hallway area at the bottom of my newly painted stairs. You may remember I needed to paint the walls, paint the paneling, add baseboards and finish it off with a picture collage. 

Here are some of the befores.

Real beautiful, huh? Well I worked on it slowly over the course of the month and I'm happy to say it's all done and looking very finished! :)

I first painted the walls at the top of the stairs with some light tan paint I already had. It's called Natural Linen by Glidden and my whole 1st floor used to be painted with it until my husband talked me into going darker. But after doing these walls I let him know the rest of the house was going back to this color at some point ;)

Then I painted all of the paneling. We had primed it almost 2 years ago and then lost steam. I used Behr's Ultra Bright White in semi-gloss, they sell it ready to use, no mixing required. I decided this hallway will stay white and the paneling in the rest of the basement will get color.

I measured, cut, and installed all of the baseboards with very minimal help from Scott. He only needed to hold the long board in place while I nailed but other than that it was all me, baby! I even caulked afterwards for the very first time! 

Boy do the baseboards and bright, new paint make a huge difference!  

(please ignore the mess in my office!)

Then I started the hunt for picture frames. I ended up finding enough at Target, Hobby Lobby and Ikea. For all of them I ended up spending about $30. Not too bad for 13 frames! I painted 3 of them with my wall color and stair color to make them work. 

Ugh. These pictures turned out horribly. And no amount of editing was fixing them. This is just a difficult area to take a picture of!! Sorry :/

I filled the frames with pictures of us, our kids, and kids that I've babysat over the past 4 years. When I'm babysitting we play all day in this basement area and I want to fill this space with all the happy memories I've made with so many wonderful kids! I didn't have good pics of every child I've sat for but I plan on adding to this wall with more frames and more color as I go :) 

So there you have it. I finished 2 out of 3 of my February goals this month. Our coat closet didn't get worked on at all, but Scott dealt with some sickness this month and a trip to Home Depot for plywood never happened :( Oh well! I've just informed him that really that closet needs a lot more than a shoe rack....so we'll see if I add it to March's goals. Speaking of, I need to write that post!!!



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