Yay! I am excited to be posting my first DIY post of the year.

One of my goals for 2013, is too work on more DIY projects.

As you may already know, I love experimenting with these around the house and I love painting almost everything I can find. I drive my hubby crazy sometimes by bringing up a new-possible project; when we are watching TV, having supper or getting ready to go to bed. His reaction is always the same; looks interested, looks uninterested or just gives me a look that just screams “AGAIN?”.

Well, what do you expect; I spend all day at home with a 19 month old and two dogs, I become obsessed with everything that’s wrong and needs fixing in our house. Believe me, when you spend all day inside, you want your house to feel like a home and love every inch of it  I can’t afford big renovations, so I just move things around and try to fix a couple of them too.

My hubby, often asks me “when are you going to stop asking me to move this chair? I know you will make me move it again”

I will never stop, I can’t. I love rearranging existing vignettes or a complete room (one of our rooms is in progress of being completely rearranged, will post about this later).

I remember my parents buying me a new bunk bed when I was 9 years old, I kept changing it every week from one spot to another in my bedroom. Sometimes, my parents would laugh about it and sometimes they would get mad at me because they thought I could injure myself by moving the bed around. Years later, I haven’t changed and don’t think I ever will. 

So, this is a post of a couple of small DIY projects that I promised I would share with you back in December

This post is long because it contains a couple of pictures of the DIY steps, so for those who don’t want to read everything about it and how long it took for me to paint these, feel free to only scroll down and look at the pictures, as I know this is a long post. I promise, I won’t mind  ;-)

As you can see, I am not a professional photographer and this is the best picture I could find about this mini kitchen island I found at HomeSense Winners  a few years ago. We can’t see the color clearly in the picture, but it was a “puke” green with the ugliest black hardware you can find. However, it served its purpose for many years in our house and has now found a new place in our tiny entrance. This piece of furniture might look familiar to you, it is, because it was in a previous post where I showed pictures of my entrance decorated for the Holidays.

In the picture below, you can see the contrast of the new color vs. old color of paint. At first, I kept questioning myself about the color I choose, but quickly realized any color would look better than the “puke” green.

These are 2 big mistakes I did, so if you ever attempt this you won’t feel intimidated about trying to do this yourself and think you are the only one doing it wrong:

Mistake #1 = I DIDN’T USE PAINTERS TAPE TO PROTECT THE AREAS THAT I DIDN’T WANT TO PAINT

Mistake #2 = I DIDN’T SAND BEFORE PAINTING, SO SEVERAL COATS OF PAINT WERE NEEDED

It took 3 coats of paint to get achieve the wanted result, because I painted over the existing green paint, as I mentioned before; big mistake on my part, I should’ve sand it before or at least used a primer prior to the paint. I don’t know why I didn’t sand it for this project, I usually do but I guess I was too excited to see the result of my project ;-( I was lucky the wood of the mini island wasn’t too dry and it didn’t soak up all the paint.

This is the ugly black hardware I mentioned before. Of course, I wasn’t going to keep it. So, before painting the 2 drawers, you need to remove the hardware (perfect opportunity to upgrade)

 

The day, we went to buy our hardware at Homedepot, I had already envisioned what I was going for, but once there, and faced with all the choices available in front of us, I was overwhelmed and kept changing my mind. I could only rely on my hubby’s taste at that moment, something I would not usually do, but I listened to him and today I’m happy with the hardware we choose

This is a picture of the mini-island left to dry in our kitchen for a night and day, before putting the drawers back on and buying the hardware

 

In this picture, you can see the final-result:

Tips:

•  when you are painting with a brush, make sure it’s dry and clean and if you see some lumps (I had a few), continue brushing over them and then you will see them smooth out.
•  before you add your first coat of paint, you should lightly sand the piece of furniture you are working with.

 

Note:  I thought about painting or dipping them in paint; the two original baskets that came with the mini kitchen island in white but decided to leave them as is, to keep this “old fashioned look”

These are close up pictures of the other projects I did; these were so easy to do, only some paint and a paint brush were needed:

This is a picture of how the mirror used to look in glossy black:

This mirror became the focal point of our tiny entrance, the turquoise/mint color  brightens up the room, perfect for our Canadian winters

I bought a sample of paint from BEHR at Homedepot, in this minty Turquoise color ; (Mint-Majesty 480A-3)

This is how it looked once I applied the first coat of paint

The frame of the mirror has these small details that had to be painted over with a small makeup brush

 

The brown box you see in the picture below, belonged to my hubby for several years but was his dumping ground for loose change when coming to the house, and was in a very bad state, I decided to use it in our entrance by painting it.

Here is the same box; transformed with two coats of paint and I glued these 3 letters “FAM” for family to personalize it. You might be wandering where I got these tiny letters from; I bought a sign at the dollar store with the word “FAMILY” on it and broke it and took them from there.

 

Below, is an ugly green bowl, I found at HomeSense Winners on liquidation last spring for only $2.50, I knew this was a good deal and that I could work with it and make it pretty:

this is how our $2.50 bowl looks like today

Love how everything turned out, what I love the most about these DIY projects is using objects you find around the house, give them a new life with a coat paint and then display them in a room where you can appreciate them again! If you follow my blog, you may have already noticed that I do these small projects very often around our house.

Thanks again for stopping by!