Jazzin' Up Some Dressers!

Welcome back! I hope you have been enjoying this beautiful weather as much as I have! Us in Georgia sure did have a crazy couple of weeks-- ice storms, tornadoes, 70 degree weather, earth quakes...

I have been busy around the house completing some projects and thought I'd post some how-to's and show some before/ after photos since that's what we really love about DIY anyways :)

First up is my Grandmother's old dresser. This thing was COATED in some Poly like no other. I'm talking multiple coats of stripper to get this stuff off plus tons and tons of sanding. 

I decided to finish the front with a map. The hardest part is finding the paper map honestly.. luckily my dad had a stash of old maps of Georgia and Tennessee so I chose the map of Nashville. 

to do this, I took the map and put a layer of modge podge on the drawer as well as the top of the map. Once covered, we smoothed it over and let it dry. It really doesn't take much more than that! Now to find some knobs...

 Next up is our $25 dresser from goodwill!

as you can see, it was a bright white dresser with very ugly handles. I already started the top before I realized I needed a picture! I had a few repairs to make to the structure of the piece (re-attaching some of the trim, fixing the drawer tracks and repairing some broken wood inside). 

I decided to go with a mustard color (obviously) and made my own chalk paint for it. If you have used chalk paint before, you know it's pretty much an investment to do a few pieces of furniture. I looked up several recipes and landed one that works really well! 

DIY CHALK PAINT

1. 1/3 cup plaster of paris
2. 1/3 cup warm water
3. mix these together until you don't have any clumps
4. add in 1 cup of latex paint, any color
5. stir well!

if you need more, double the recipe. I usually keeps any extra in a cleaned out pickle jar but noticed the more it sits the more it settles. Go ahead and throw out what you don't use since it's so cheap to make :)

I did a few coats since the white was so glossy (no sanding necessary with chalk paint!)

because I didn't want white showing through when I sanded it, I took a sharpie and marked up the edges where I figured I would distress.

I painted all surfaces about 3 times. After it was dry, I did a light sanding to get rid of the rough texture (chalk paint is meant to be dull and a little rough. With a little sanding it becomes nice and smooth!)

I found some $1 hardware on Etsy from China? The old brass pulls were perfect with the mustard color. I also added some brown glaze to the surfaces so it didn't look like literal mustard. Now it's a more... aged mustard.

Voila!

Now for some views around the somewhat-finished room.

This is my first room that I love in this house. I love the wall, the old furniture and accessories, the $30 Nate Burkus curtains (!!!) and the new comforter.  Anyone lookin' for a place to stay anytime soon? :)

Thanks for reading!

A new twist on displaying guitars!

4. A NEW way to display guitars!

So for this project, there has to be a little bit of a back story. At our old apartment, we hung all of the guitars around the room randomly, filling almost every wall. When we moved, Andrew decided to go ahead and do the same thing. Unfortunately, this room was much smaller and it never really sat right with me.

See what I mean? Kinda blah.. and didn't really fit well in the room with the piano and ridiculously large sofa.

SO... I had this amazing idea kinda pop into my head one day. I thought it would be cool to place them all together in one area in the corner, and create a fun, art piece. I layed out the guitars on the floor and came up with an arrangement I liked, and then traced them onto the wall.

I could have done regular outlines of the guitar shape, but decided to do something a bit more interesting. 

Each guitar has it's own "personality". One is melting, one is on fire, one is boxy, the ukelele, my favorite, has some Hawaiian flair, and the others just have interested shapes. 

I added the other art things I had- the melted record, the different notes with quotes on them and some other things.

I went with a pop of tangerine on a grey wall.. and black and white accessories/ pillows. 

This actually ended up taking forever. I free handed all of the orange, then painted the grey, then had to do all of the outlines of the orange back with grey. It took about an entire weekend to get the lines really crisp and finished.

I think it turned out really neat! What do you think?

Re-Purposed Antique Sewing Table

Hello everyone! (if there's anyone...)
I am finally at the point where I can sit down and show you all of the things I have been working on in the past 6 months or so.
The last post was all about the new house. Well, since then, I have changed/ added/ decorated/ re-purposed/ salvaged/ painted/ etc. MANY things.

Let's have a look... shall we??


1. Antique sewing table turned hall entryway table!

Found this at a local flea market.. someone had painted the top a weird grey color. The first thing I did when I got home was sand it back down and stain it dark. I kinda liked some of the grey still showing, so I went with it!

Next thing I did was polish up the iron legs and pedal

Love it!

Painting the time away...

So I've been working on something a friend asked me to do for her wedding in September. 

She gave me a HUGE letter 'R' like this:

She wanted it to be painted with paisley-ish designs.

I cut out a few pieces from a piece of paper she gave me, but decided it was much easier to free hand the whole thing and add in my own designs.

using the colors from her "fall" inspired wedding, it turned into this!

I kind of like the crafty brown paper texture as the background instead of painting the entire thing. some of the inside edges are also painted up and fancy-fied.

hope you like it!