My "new" old hutch

Please try to ignore the fact that my picture is extremely crooked.  I couldn't get the best angle on it since my dinning room table (which got a pretty nice makeover too) was wet and in the way.  Here it is, a whole month worth of work, finally finished!!  And I have to say that I am pretty happy with the outcome and I might just keep it after all.  That is if my sister-in-law forgets that I have it. Hehehe! (She wants it really bad now that it looks so pretty!) 

I completely forgot to take ANY pictures of this while I went along, and didn't even take one of it before I started. Luckily I had a screen shot of it from a Facebook site when I tried to sell it.  Here are those pictures:

That's a pretty cute kid right there, if I do say so myself! hehe.

We purchase this hutch, along with a dinning table, when my fiance and I moved into our first rental together.  We bought it from the land lord mainly because she was leaving the set behind and we needed the table.

I didn't care much at first because we had plenty of room for it at the time.  Once we bought our current home and started having children space became limited and I was tired of having this 7 foot long gigantic, dark piece of furniture taking up much needed space.  ( My dinning room is not all that big, but one day I hope to change that. :-) )   After trying to sell it for a very long time, I decided  that I would turn it into something that I would not mind looking at and using every day.

Here is how I did it:

              First thing I did was remove the doors, and the drop down door right there in the middle.  I did this because I felt like whenever I put something in there I just forgot about it or didn't use it because it became "hidden."  As the old saying goes "out of sight, out of mind." 

              Next I removed all the wooden "flowers" that were on the bottom cabinet doors.  I did this only because I never liked them.  

               The next thing that had to go was the old, broken, record player and what I thought were speakers and only ended up being the front of the speaker box.  Doing this gave me soooo much more storage space!  That in itself made me a happy girl! 

                 Next was taking the mirror out.  It was old and had odd brow spots that wouldn't some off no matter what I used to clean it.  I have to say I like it better without it anyway. 

                After removing all of that stuff it came time to rough sand the whole. entire. thing.  Wow, how tiring that job was!  If only I had known then what I know now; that you can use oil based primer on finished wood to avoid sanding!  Oy! 

                 I did a lot of cleaning after that, and then some more cleaning, and some more, to get all the dust off it from sanding.  Not fun at all!

             My favorite part was painting it.  As you could tell from this picture my son had fun painting it to when I left the room to let the dog out:

I sure learned my lesson after that! 

 I used Behr premium paint and primer in Navajo White.  I absolutely LOVE this color and picked it at the VERY last possible minute.  The best snap color decision I ever made.  I took me about 2 coats, and I think I could do another.  The back board is a custom color that I had matched at Home Depot.  It was supposed to match my couch pillow, but it ended up much darker and kind of green.  Overall I really like it a lot.  

           Oooooo, how could I forget to mention the new hardware!? I was super duper excited to add drawer pulls to the plain old drawers!  I picked up the knobs and drawer pulls at my local Walmart. I had my eye on some at Home Depot, but then I seen these at Walmart and they looked almost exactly like the ones from Home Depot, but half the price!  There was no way I wasn't going to grab them up.  I do think that perhaps the knobs should be a bit bigger though.... 

 And that's that.  My "New" old hutch.  After I decide if I want to add another coat of paint to it, I have to give it a final coat of a water based finish, like Minwax Polycrylic, to protect all of my hard work.  

I have another piece of furniture that I have lined up to refinish and I hope it comes out as good as this did.  

Soooo, what do you all think??  Do you have an awesome before and after of a piece of furniture you just couldn't stand to look at anymore?  If so, I would love to see it! 

   

Painted Wall Paper!!!!!

Yes, I said painted wall paper.  For those of you that are not so sure about what I'm talking about you can check it out here http://jonesdesigncompany.com/decorate/painted-wallpaper-a-tutorial/  .  It is so pretty.  I immediately fell in love with the idea, and I wanted to start immediately as well.  I am the type of person that will take any paint I have left over and paint something just because I'm tired of looking at a white wall and then HATE it later.  So, to avoid this once again, I took a step back, breathed in and out and came back to reality.  First things first, I have to decide on my colors.  For me that is the most difficult part because I am sooooo indecisive.  For now I'm thinking about practicing on my stair case wall, since I have plans on painting it eventually anyway. 

            This is the wall I plan on painting after I decide what colors to use and get some practice on the other wall.  I didn't have a picture handy of the whole wall, but this wall goes all the way to the other end of the house.  That is one reason why I chose to do this wall, it will be the perfect accent wall.  

There have been many people that have taken on this project and they have said that it took them FOREVER.  I am hoping that a solid weekend will get most of it done. I will post updated pictures as I go. I can't wait to start!!

I hope you all had a Merry Christmas and I hope you all have a very safe, healthy, happy New Year!! 

My new found love for spray paint!

So here we go.  I will take you through the process of one of my first "projects" no matter how small it may be.
   First let me start by saying that during the summer of 2011 I painted my front door red.  My house is white and so was the door, so I thought that a nice bright red would be the perfect touch.  I can't remember what the brand or color was, but it was fantastic to work with.  I will have to dig it out of my basement and let you know what it was called.
 Anyway, back to my project that made me fall in love with spray paint,

I had these two, old, white plastic lawn chairs on my itty bitty front porch.  One day I got tired of looking at them, so I decided to paint them.   I knew immediately that I did not want to paint them with a paint brush or roller, I was too busy for all that clean up.  So I opted for spray paint.  I took a trip to my local +Home Depot and I bought a few cans Rust-oleum Painter's Touch 2x Paint and Primer that sticks to plastic.  The color I used was Colonial Red.  To get the paint to stick to the chair better I took an old grill brush and scrubbed the chair down, then washed it with a bleach and water mixture.  Once dried I spray painted away!

Here is a before and after, side by side: (The red chair only has one coat of paint, I did two coats on both of them.)

Keep in mind that when I took this picture I did not know that I would be featuring them on this blog, I took it to send it to my mom so she could see my genius.

After this little project I decided to do one more, using spray paint of course!  You can view that project under Spray Painted Box Fan

Introduction

Hello to you all!!  I'm very excited to start a blog and share all of my projects and yummy recipes with you.  

 I want to start by saying a little about me (don't worry, I wont go on and on with a lot of boring details)  I'm 28 years young and a stay-at-home mom to two wonderful, beautiful, energetic children, Madelyne and Patrick.  Madelyne is 3 and Patrick is 2 and I'm lucky to have the time to sit here right now and write this. Seeing as how I stay home with my children I started to find that my days kind of run into each other, the good old "same thing, different day" routine.  Well to break up my days I decided to start "little" projects that would keep me happy.  What better projects are there than beautifying ones! 

I'm a novice DIY'er, but I find great satisfaction in everything I do.  When I fail, (it has happened a lot) I buff it out, sand it off and try again!   

  We bought this old house about 3 years ago.  I was about 8 months pregnant with  Madelyne so I didn't do much to it at all.  All the walls were white, flat paint, that wiped away with a wet rag.  Some of the rooms in my house are still like that.  I have really only [seriously] painted the kids rooms.  I say seriously because the rest of what I have painted wasn't very thought out and wasn't done very well. Now that my youngest is old enough to play nice with his sister I have decided it's time to right all my decorating wrongs.  This is my journey to making this old house a beautiful home.  Inside and out.