The Chalkboard Project

I'm on a crafty roll right now, and I decided to continue with it last night. When your best friend from college comes for an overnight visit to have a Boy Meets World marathon, you might as well add a DIY project in there too. So I tackled my chalkboard project.

I'd seen a picture of a chalkboard on Pinterest a long time ago that really inspired me, and I've had it in the back of my head while thrifting since then.

http://thedabneyhome.blogspot.com/2012/02/from-mirror-to-chalkboard.html

I figured it would be relatively easy to find a piece like that someday, and I was right. My sister was visiting from Memphis and we opted to spend our day together bouncing from thrift store to thrift store, and I found this guy in the middle of a Front Royal mad house of a flea market.

The best part is that it cost a mere $20. Score yet another one for thrift stores. And look at those details on the top! It's got a lot of character for a $20 mirror. I snatched it (after a phone call to hubs) and have been storing it in the guest room for a couple weeks until I got a chance to paint it. A $2.50 bottle of chalkboard paint made for glass and a $4 white paint pen, and I was good to go.

First step: tape off the wood. We spent a lot of time going back and forth about whether to paint the frame white or leave it this wood, and in the end the wood won out. I have kind of a white frame theme going in the house, but it's good to switch it up every once in a while. And I think it does add to the character of the piece. So wood it stayed.

Second step: paint the mirror with the chalkboard. Pretty straight forward, really. It took two coats and I had to do some touch ups after I took the tape off and it took some of the paint with it, but it wasn't bad. I will say that I used an artist's brush to paint it, and in hindsight I would have used a roller. I honestly meant to roll it on, but got caught up in the moment and forgot. There are some uneven lines from the brush edge, but it's not bad and it's not that noticeable. Once there's chalk on it it will be even less noticeable.

Third step: write out the "Verse of the Week" header at the top. I saw a different chalkboard on Pinterest a while ago that had a chalkboard like this that was turned into a "Verse of the Week" board, where scripture is shared with the family all week and memorized. I loved the idea, and decided that when I make my own chalkboard I'd do the same thing. I wanted to write out that header with white paint, meant to look like chalk but more functional in reality because it won't wipe off. If I ever decide to change the purpose of the board someday, I can just paint over it.

Please ignore my eraser marks from when I penciled it out, didn't like it, erased it and drew it again.

I used a white paint pen to do the writing, because it's just way easier than using a paint brush. Why put yourself through that kind of stress? It was a super fine point though, so I went over it a couple times to thicken the letters.

Fourth step: something to hold the chalk...which was also stolen from Pinterest. I used a drawer pull, attached up-side down. I used super glue to attach it straight to the chalkboard, rather than screwing it into the wood. Chalk is super light so it wouldn't need to bear much weight, and I just couldn't bear to mess up the wood.



 

Fifth step: hang it! This step was super easy because the mirror already came with hanging hardware attached. How lovely.

 

Pay no attention to the weird reflection of my Kitchenaide on the wall. Or my dog.

 

 

How great is that? I love it. It's huge, it fits the space really well, and the wood frame perfectly complements all the wood that's in that space already. Now I just need to choose a verse for the week...



"After" Paint Pictures

A little while ago I posted some pictures of the house before I did much of the painting. It's been a chore but - with the exception of a couple touch ups in the laundry room and the two empty bedrooms that will be done at a different time - all the rooms have been painted. It's made a humongous difference in the look and feel of the house, and it's also been a big part of making the home ours.

I wasn't going for much style or perfection when it came to taking these photos, and I also didn't try to get into the details of each room. I still have big, crafty plans for each room and I'll post about those details and changes as I go.

When we moved in, the entire house was a flat beige. Neither of us are beige people, but I didn't realize how much I hated flat paint until I had lived in this house for longer than three minutes. Why on earth would anyone paint anything with flat paint? I painted these two rooms, the den and the guest room/office, soon after we moved in. When we were beginning the process of painting the rest of the rooms about a month ago, I realized that the laundry room - which was actually white and not even beige - wasn't on the list. As a laundry room, it just wasn't high on the priority list. When I remembered I had extra paint left over from both of these rooms, though, I decided to use it to paint the laundry room for free. I wanted to paint the majority of the space with the dark gray and have two accent walls around the washer and dryer painted the mint green color of the den. As with most things, it didn't work out exactly how I'd imagined it, but I was able to squeeze three walls (tiny, awkward walls) out of the gray paint and only one accent wall out of the mint. Unfortunately, the laundry room was an addition at one point and the walls weren't really painted in the traditional sense, which meant the paint just didn't stretch as far as it should have. We did have to spend some money on getting this space painted, BUT it definitely wasn't as much as it would have been if we hadn't used the leftover paint we already had. We'll tweak it in the future, but for now it's much better than the dirty white that it was.

Laundry room before...

And laundry room after...

Clearly, the laundry room is paint central because of the slop sink. (A brief side note on slop sinks: get one. Always, always, always have a slop sink somewhere in your house. I can't even tell you how gross the inside of that sink is right now because of all the paint rollers and brushes I've cleaned in it over the last couple months. The fact that that's not what my kitchen sink looks like is extremely important...and yes, I will clean the slop sink once I'm done with all painting.) You get the point of the transformation, though. The mint accent wall is behind the washer and dryer, and since the huge pass through window is in the wall to the left of the units I was able to use the very last drops of paint to get that one too. It's not the dramatic accent wall I pictured, but I have plans that involve using some other leftover paint on it one day. Just not right now, because I'm tired of painting right now.

Next on the tour is the kitchen/dining room.

Kitchen/dining room before:

And kitchen/dining room after:

This one is really subtle, I know, but the new color in here is a brown that's several shades darker than the original beige. It's quite a bit more impressive in person, I will say. You can really tell the difference when you look at the contrast against the white trim in both sets of pictures. You can also see the original beige in the hallway when you look through that arched doorway, because we haven't done anything with the entry way and hallway yet. We're really happy with this color; we kept it somewhat neutral but it does make the trim pop a lot more and it's just a better color than the blah beige (I just hate beige).

Next, the family room.

Family room before:

And family room after:

This green is probably the boldest color choice we made, but it's also probably my favorite of all of them. I love how it looks next to the stone of the fireplace, and I also love how it looks against those French doors and the couch. It's a really great room.

Last up on this new color tour, the master bedroom and bathroom.

Bedroom before:

And bedroom after:

I didn't take much in the way of pictures of this room, and I honestly can't remember why...but I will say that I have a lot of fun plans for continuing to redo our bedroom, so more pictures will come soon. But isn't it a fun color? It turned out a little bit brighter than I had envisioned, but it does look great against the white trim and photo frames, and makes the dark furniture pop. The bathroom got the same color treatment.

Bathroom before:

And bathroom after:

The blue looks really good against the cabinet - which for some reason came out super dark on here - and the dark floor tile, and all the white accents in here also look great against it. I'm a fan. I'm not, however, a fan of painting bathrooms. Definitely my least favorite room to paint, and I'm completely glad it's over.

So that's it. Color really does make a huge difference, and it is the most reasonably priced ways to make such an impact. It can take a lot of time and be a huge pain in the butt, but all things considered it's probably the most painless DIY/home renovation project you could tackle.

Now that that's behind us, I'm excited to see what else we can do in these rooms!

The Jewelry Board, the Valuable DIY Lesson in Patience

So, sometimes things look ridiculously easy to accomplish when you're looking at a picture on Pinterest. Sometimes it's because it actually is that easy, and sometimes it's because Pinterest lies to you. And yet there are other times, the most frustrating of times, when it should be as easy as it looks...and yet it still kicks your butt. This was one of those. And honestly, I'm being dramatic. It didn't kick my butt that bad. It just seemed like it did because it stretched out over several days and various shopping trips.

We've all seen a thousand examples of how to better organize and style your jewelry on Pinterest, and they're all adorable and guaranteed to make your closet prettier. I finally decided to make mine happen, and even though I wanted it to be the most adorable thing ever, I had to continue to remind myself that it's going to be hanging in my closet. The closet that's the part of my bedroom that no one sees, and the bedroom that's the room of my house that no one sees. So...perfection really isn't entirely necessary. Really and truly, that's key. Don't let Pinterest get in your head. Don't do it.

The backbone of this particular jewelry board is a bulletin board, which I found at a thrift store for $3. It was a little beat up around the edges but basically in perfect shape. And it's kind of huge, as far as $3 bulletin boards go.

First step: paint the frame white. 

Second step: cut the burlap to size.

Third step: create the border. I used white thumbtacks, which was doubly great because it was how I attached the burlap to the board and also created an additional border and detail. Here's the thing though...it was so much less of a neat and tidy process than I imagined it would be. The tacks were nearly impossible to figure out how to space perfectly so they're crooked and bunched and overlapping, and you know what? It's okay. Because where is this getting hung? In my closet. That's right.

Here was where the first opportunity to practice some patience came in. I didn't buy enough tacks, because I severely underestimated how big this thing is and how small the tacks are. So I had to spend half a movie staring at my unfinished border from across the room one night, but oh well.

Fourth step: lace. This is to hang the earrings from, and I have to say I was pretty ridiculously proud of myself when I thought of it. Partly because it's really functional and partly because it's super pretty.

Fifth step: add some support for that lace. It's just way too long a stretch and the lace is too thin and flimsy to support earrings hanging from it. So I measured it out and added the extra tacks.

Sixth step: try a million different ways to get the beads to stick to the stinking thumbtacks.

Most of the Pinterest examples I've seen involved knobs of some kind for the necklaces. I didn't feel like spending money on knobs, and I also felt stumped about how to attach them to the actual board. So I decided to make my own. I found big round turquoise beads real cheap and on clearance at Walmart, and thought they'd be perfect to glue onto some of the leftover thumbtacks. It was a great idea, it just took lots of trials and several nights to make it work. I tried craft glue first, and got super excited about it because I assumed it would work.

I mean, it does say "all purpose," after all.

I thought we were all systems a go until I stood the board up and tried to hang a necklace. And they all started to fall.

So that didn't work. I tried the super glue that was in the garage. But it was super glued to the insides of the bottle and wouldn't come out. So I thought I'd use the Lock-Tite that was also in the garage, but not only is it not a glue at all...it's also apparently pretty expensive. So I wouldn't recommend that option for all kinds of reasons.

I almost gave up and bought the stupid knobs but hubs encouraged me to get some new super glue and try that option for real. So I did, and it worked. Praise the Lord for super glue.

Seventh step: attach the box. At some point during this process it occurred to me: rings. I don't have anywhere to put my rings.  I had an extra drawer organizing box laying around with no purpose, so I painted it and glued it onto the edge of the board with that all purpose craft glue. Because even though it doesn't work well for beads and metal thumbtacks, it's awesome with wood.

Eighth step: measure out where the "knobs" will go. You might have noticed in the picture above that I didn't necessarily make the knobs perfect when I hung them the first time. I was stuck on the "it's going in my closet" concept and just kind of eyeballed it. And when I was given the chance to do them again, I figured that I could handle making them straight and even. It is going in my closet, but I do still have to look at it.

I drew a dot every inch along the entire length of the board, which left me with eight more dots than knobs. So I spaced them out accordingly, put in some plain thumbtacks as space fillers, and there you have it.

These pictures turned out really dark, which I don't understand because I'm not much of an expert when it comes to my camera. But there's the finished product. The knobs work, the lace works, the box holds not only my rings but the two bracelets that I own as well.

The cons are that there are two necklaces that don't fit on the board because they're just too chunky. Someday soon I'll come up with a solution for them. I also don't have a space on this board for my nice pearl earrings that I keep in the box, but I have a drawer I can easily keep them in. The rings are a bit of a mess in there in that box - as opposed to a jewelry box with the organizers, but I honestly don't wear my rings too often and I'm okay with them being like that.

Overall, I'm a fan. And I really really love burlap. I'm kind of obsessed with it, actually, so I love that I got to use it. It's not perfect, but I'm happy with how it turned out. So there, Pinterest.