Lamp Re-do

I decided last weekend when I was at the Target in Pasadena (after a couple of margaritas at Chipotle) that I wanted new lamps. I bought these pretty teal ones and brought them home and they were way too small.

So I returned them. After discussing what Nate liked about his current lamp, we decided to try refinishing his lamp instead of replacing. But I wanted semi matching lamps, so we needed to find another lamp similar to Nate's. On Saturday, Nate and I went shopping.

Nate's lamp

 We went to the ICM Resale shop and found a lamp for 3 dollars. We picked it up and then went to Lowe's for spray paint.

New lamp (in front) with old lamp, all taped up.

Then we painted and lacquered. Ta-da!

My new lamp.

Nate's refinished lamp.

Total money - $15.

Total time - 2 hours (including time shopping)

Island Construction: Part 4

Weekend 2 of this crazy project brought great progress.

We cut out the beadboard for the two sides and placed it. The other side is the mirror image, just without an outlet.

Nate constructed a rough counter surface for us to work with.

And the painting began in earnest!

This looks like prison chic! 

It's starting to look like more of a cohesive whole!

Laundry Room Makeover

We just finished redoing the laundry room. Before:

And after:

 
What was involved?


 1. Remove old, cheap, cabinets. Discover the McVicker method of finding the studs in the walls.

2. Get rid of the white paint. I remember when I first thought about a pink laundry room while wandering through a WalMart one night, wasting time during the middle of a hot summer evening with friends. It's probably been three years. I don't know why pink, but what other room can you paint bright pink? The laundry room is only for us, and it's a room we pass through every day (since it's off of the garage) and pink is bright and fun, which laundry, everything laundry is not. The pink is actually Market Flower, a Valspar paint from Lowe's. We've only used Lowe's for paint, because we've had such great results, and the colors are usually fresh and bright. This is in the flat enamel.

3. Replace the light fixture for something that does not cost under $6 at Lowe's.


http://www.lowes.com/pd_74457-43501-FJ05-023WHT_4294925666__?productId=3389244&Ntt=light+fixture&Ns=p_product_price|0

4. Nate pulled apart the exhaust fan and we determined that the outlet was getting electricity, but the fan motor was dead. The fan also looked like the 1986 install, so that's not too surprising. We bought a new exhaust fan at Lowe's. Nate installed it in under two hours, and now we can pull out the hot air the dryer makes during the summer and keep the whole house cooler.

5. Install new, clean shelving, stretching across the whole room.

6. Put the room back together and enjoy!

Things that didn't get completed this go around:

1. Baseboard. We measured for baseboard and will probably buy and paint soon.

2. Flooring. We haven't settled on a new floor, yet, but we will definitely peel up the laminate. At that time we'll also install the new baseboard.

3. Paint the doors and frames with fresh, white, alkyd paint. A must.

4. Replace the door to the garage with something less frightening.


5. Paint the curtain rod. We decided to keep the curtain rod in this room, since I hang so much of my clothing to dry. But, to make it fresh, I'm spray painting it purple. It should be done by early next week.

Home Office Update

Our mission this weekend was to fix our office area. We repainted the room back in March or April, sometime last spring. It's a soft sage-y green with a bit of grey in it to match the living room. The problem wasn't the walls, though, it was the furniture and overall layout of the room.

This room has exactly one wall of any uninterrupted length. So that's were we put our desks. But it looked like a mess.

Admittedly, the chair on the ground is part of a refinishing project of mine, and it will have legs again, soon. But the desks were two different designs, neither of which really worked. Neither desk had any drawers, so we had to stick everything in plastic drawer units that will never look pretty. It worked, but it also didn't work - it was ugly and everything was cramped and there really wasn't any desk space to work in. How a desk can lack work space and drawers and still be a desk and not just a table is beyond me.

I will add that one member of our family liked the desks--Jill love the two little caves she could crawl into, right where our desks chairs would go. She spent a lot of her time asleep under there:

So, we went were all young people with a little money, a willingness to do a little work, and a hunger for Swedish meatballs go - IKEA. We picked out stuff from the AMON desk collection - for $51 we could get a desk top 116 inches long. One long, uninterrupted work surface. And then for lots more money we could get some of those desperately needed drawers.

We ate a quick lunch at IKEA and then brought our purchases home.

We did the drawers first.

Jill immediately went to her old spot on the carpet once we moved the old desks away.

Then we put the legs on the tables and set the desks up.

The last phase was putting together the shelves with drawers to go above.

Everything's up and in place now.

Maybe 5 hours of work, with a little more time spent moving the old things to their new places, but we're very happy with the result. Thanks, IKEA!

Project 6: Redo the Orange Bedroom Closet

This is our surprise project! We decided to add something fun to the bedroom upstairs and continue our exploration of color.

The shelf in this closet was pulling away from the wall - the nail holding the rod and shelf in place had been more than half-way yanked from the wall. My guess would be that someone placed too much weight on the shelf/rod for many years.

So we pulled out the shelving unit, which went fairly smoothly. I used a crowbar on one side, and accidentally poked a hole in the wall. So we used our new patching drywall skills to fix my mess!



N was much more methodical on the other side of the wall, where he first exposed the nails, dug around them, and then carefully removed them leaving no damage except nail holes.

Then we moved on to texturing the newly exposed areas.





After the texture was done, we painted the ceiling white, and the majority of the walls yellow. We marked out how the stripes would be placed in the closet, and where the yellow would be exposed we painted a second coat of yellow paint.







Then it was time to tape the walls. This part of the process was very time consuming. The pattern we decided on was to have tweleve inch stripes of yellow and red (the yellow from the bathroom downstairs, the red a new color). N and I were concerned that it might look a little too much like a circus tent, so we decided to include a two-inch orange stripe in the center of the yellow stripes.

The taped closet:







Close up detail of the tape:



Although we taped the closet, we weren't sure if the paint would bleed through the tape or how neat our lines would turn out. We decided to paint the small orange stripes first:





With the tape off:





We were actually really happy with the orange! The lines were fairly straight, and where the lines isn't straight, it's a natural bleed out onto texture. The stripes aren't too fussy. Now it was time for the red:

I had bought a quart of this red paint (COLOR NAME) at Lowe's, and when N opened it up the paint was much thinner than we were used to with the Valspar paint. This was both good and bad; the good: the paint was thin enough that one quart could completely cover the red sections of the closet (but only just). The bad: the paint was very thin and spotty.

Red paint with tape up:







Even after a second coat (with a new full gallon of paint that was the usual consistency), the tops and corners of the red were uneven. Also, the thin red paint had leaked under the tape quite a bit in some areas, so I went back with a small brush and covered some of the red spots with yellow, and with another brush went over the weak spots in the red:





The last of the can of red paint: