Spray painted planter

Over the holiday break I traveled a bunch— first to Alabama and then to Minnesota for Christmas with my family on the farm. One day involved making Christmas ornaments with my little niece. We sold our products at an ornament stand in the living room. She set the price at 2 pennies each and we split the profits. I took my nine cents and went thrift-store shopping when I got home. Fortunately I had a little extra cash in my bank account, which enabled me to buy a dresser on Craigslist which I plan to paint for the dining room, and a couple of vases for the parlor mantel.


I loved the shape of this mid-century planter (maybe McCoy?), and the green-gold color was kind of cool, but I decided it should be pink to match the parlor chairs. I spray painted it with Krylon ColorMaster Mambo Pink Gloss, and now it's quite happy looking.

I stuffed a plastic bag inside the pot to shield the interior and taped the opening to the rim with blue painter's tape to get a clean line. A cardboard box made a good spray booth in the basement; I painted near the outside door which was open for ventilation. The key when spray painting is to apply lots of thin, light coats, and you'll get a lovely result.

Cheap table makeover

Months ago we bought a $10 table via Craigslist to hold up a lamp in the guest bedroom. It was in sad shape:


So I decided to give it a quick paint job to make it look more fun. Sort of Jonathan Adler-esque, except for the curvy base that doesn't make much sense with the geometric design I put on it. But when a girl wants diamonds, she wants diamonds.

I'd heard about adding Floetrol to latex paint to level out the brush marks and asked my local Ace Hardware guy about it. He said it was an option, but instead recommended door and cabinet paint for my little job. It already has an additive similar to Floetrol in it to smooth out brushstrokes. It's latex, making cleanup easy, but it doesn't have the stickiness that latex sometimes does. (Which from experience, I've learned can be a pain. I painted latex on some wooden boxes to use as monitor stands, and our monitors stick to them, pulling off the paint when you lift them up.) The Ace fellow said oil paint is generally best for furniture, but since this table won't get much wear, latex is fine.

I had my choice of Ace brand cabinet paint or the higher-end brand they carry. I went with Ace since the table is cheap and I didn't want to invest much in it. Which is also why I didn't bother to buy primer.

The Ace guy opened the quart of white I bought, dumped out a little into a new can, and tinted that portion orange so I didn't have to purchase another entire tinted can for the tabletop design.


After painting three coats of white, the table looked decent. I loved the way the paint behaved. Brushstrokes really did disappear, and the coating is smooth and hard. Despite sanding, though, the table top's veneer was still damaged so the wood was a little bumpy. But it was a cheap table, so I didn't mind.

After the white was applied, I made a template for the shapes and taped around them. I started with Frog tape and realized it was too wide, so I switched to skinny tape. I applied a coat of orange paint and started pulling off the tape, which also pulled off flecks of white along with it. Awesome. Yeah, priming might have made the white paint adhere better; we'll never know. Heating the tape with a blowdryer seemed to help it come off better with minimal peeling.

The orange paint had squished under the tape in many places, so I touched up all the flaws with more white paint and they don't show.


I think it adds a little something to the guest room and looks better than a scuffed up brown table, for sure.

Step into my parlor

Guys, look, it's coming along! Here's the current state of our parlor.


The rug I've been waiting ages for finally came. I love it. It's the Momeni Delhi DL-51 Navy rug. I ordered it from Rug Super Center since they provide a free rug pad with your order (the pad is still in transit, so I'm not sure what kind it is.) We'll move the rug closer to the window so it's more centered in the room after the Christmas tree is gone.


We're still waiting for a non-broken chandelier to arrive; that will be in January. We also want to ditch the bathroom floor tile covering this non-working fireplace and probably paint the brick to hide some ugliness. Alex got out the roasting rack from his grill and put a couple logs in it, just to help the situation a little. We bought that firewood bundle circa 2004 for a campfire in Chicago that never happened. And then we moved it to Cincinnati this summer. Finally it has a purpose in life.

I guess interior designers would put lots of stuff on the mantle and style up the coffee table with deer antlers and art books that no one reads. I'll work on that.


In the meantime, I cashed in some Groupon credit and got this lovely watercolor print for free from art.com. Central Park West, 2011 by Peter Graham.


And I made a deal with Ms. Dana Gibson to get a discount on her awesome painted leopard pillows. They make me smile internally when I look at them. I was fixated on this funny tiger rug awhile ago with nowhere to put it, so now I have achieved my dream of owning flattened animals. (I don't count paper bookmarks. The comments on that post are hilarious, by the way.) Side note! Dana's great grandpa was the artist behind the Gibson Girl.


Also in here are the antique-mall lamps with shades I covered, the reupholstered Craigslist chairs, and the Abigail loveseat whose legs I intend to stain darker.


Yay! It's a room! I can hardly remember when it looked like this:

Now we can put on our shoes

Since we moved in months ago, I've been looking for a bench for the entryway. Preferably something that would match the style of the house and the dignified entry. Walking in the front door, you face a staircase and to the right are pillars. Pillars!


I love modern, but an antique church pew seemed like just the thing. I've been searching Craigslist and secondhand stores religiously (ha) for months, but couldn't find just the right piece of furniture. And then last weekend, I came across this beauty at an architectural salvage store. They'd had it a week.


According to the previous owner the bench is European and dates from the 1830's. A neighbor thinks it was a courtroom bench. It's six feet long, built using pegs, and very sturdy. The seat could use a little more cushioning and the faded red fabric should be replaced, but that's a fun project.


It's exactly what I was looking for. Happiness!

The fireplace tile

Here's a closer look at the Rookwood fireplace tile I'm debating, as seen in yesterday's photo. I thought about decorating the room to go with it, but couldn't bring myself to decorate around something I don't particularly like. Does anybody else see spinach dip here? It's also a bit cracked and chipped.


At first I hated it. Then it started growing on me, and now I just mildly dislike it. Maybe I'll leave it alone and add some green artwork or something to tie everything together.

DIY dining room drapes

The dining room needed drapes to soften things up, so I enlisted my mom (Grandma G in the comments around here) to pretty-please sew me some panels. I ordered home decor fabric online for $6 a yard on clearance at fabric.com (now sold out) and shipped it to her, sight unseen. Normally I'm not a huge paisley fan, but it seemed like it could work in this dining room. Mum has dubbed the room's style "grand hotel."

She cut four 3-yard panels for me and pressed, hemmed, and pressed again. Maybe that sounds easy, but I knew it would be a huge pain since that is A LOT of fabric to maneuver. I was too chicken to tackle it myself— I'm certain I would have created 3-yard-long seams that were puckered and crooked, and it would have taken me three days per panel. Despite reporting some highway hypnosis while driving along that paisley print, Mum's work is perfect. With matched patterns at the top, of course, because she's good like that. Get a behind-the-scenes look at the sewing on her blog here.

My work was just to put in grommets, which was the easiest part of the project. I bought these Dritz plastic curtain grommets. You trace around the supplied circle template to mark the fabric, cut out the hole, and snap the front and back grommet pieces together around the cut-out. No special tools are needed.


This dining room is coming along! Something is bugging me, though, and I think I've figured out that besides the table, the main visual offender for me is the fireplace tile. It's original Rookwood tile that people here get excited about, so I'm hesitant to change it. It's pretty cracked and beat up on the hearth, but the face of the fireplace is mostly okay.


Let's pretend the tile was pale gray or white. And the table was dark wood and the light fixture was swapped out. Better?


I need some art on the walls to tie things together, but we're making progress.


P.S. If you want a really nice tutorial for how to sew your own drapes with grommets, check out these instructions at Deuce Cities Henhouse.

Our new skill: putting up wallpaper

I heard through the grapevine that the previous owners of our 1899 house spent ages removing wallpaper (though they didn't get as far as this bathroom, it looks like). So what do I go and do? Put up more wallpaper. I can't help it. The house wants what it wants.

When Wallpaper Direct offered to send a few complimentary rolls of the design of my choice, I jumped at the chance. They have tons of beautiful options, so choosing was painful. Finally I picked Sophie Conran's Balustrade Claret. You guys know I love orange, but I can't put much of it with the dark woodwork or it looks like a 70s Halloween party. Yet I need bright colors in here to make me happy on gloomy days when the house is dark. So. Fuschia it is.


We've never put up wallpaper before, but we learned how by watching this terrific video by Chris Boylan. He makes it look so easy, doesn't he? Our paper is the modern "paste the wall" type, which means, you guessed it, you roll the paste onto the wall like you would paint, instead of applying the paste to the paper (or wetting the paper, like some pre-pasted types require.)

Now, I'm pretty sure that whoever lives here after us is not going to want fuschia wallpaper in their dining room unless they are crazy like we are. So to be helpful and kind to the future people, we primed the wall first with Shieldz Universal Wallcovering Primer. The can says it "assures easy removal," so we figured it couldn't hurt. The primer requires at least two hours of drying time before pasting paper on top, so we did this Friday night.


Saturday morning we cut the wallpaper into pieces for the wall (see the video for the how-to), and I mixed up a batch of Zinsser SureGrip All Purpose Adhesive. It's powder you add to water and stir to make glue. But somehow I overlooked the word "slowly" in the instructions, and in my great enthusiasm, I dumped the whole container of powder into my pail of water all at once. Instantly two huge SureGrip dumplings formed. Despite whisking and mashing until our arms almost fell off, the starchy blobs refused to dissolve. It seemed easier just to start over, so we bought another carton at Ace Hardware. Since I can't be trusted to add powder correctly, Alex mixed it up while I made lunch.

Then with full bellies and a lump-free pan of glue, we started on the wall. The beautiful thing we discovered is that the paste is quite forgiving. You can slide the paper around a little bit or peel it off and reposition it, so we ended up enormously pleased with how the seams matched up. Our wall is bowed and has some unevenness, but that didn't seem to make matching the seams any harder. Though it did take a few hours longer than we'd guessed. Friends told us that wallpapering would test our marriage, but we managed to finish up still liking each other. I would absolutely do it again.


I'm not good at indoor photography in dim rooms, but here it is! Ignore the $4 Goodwill lamp and the brassy chandelier we dislike and our IKEA furniture that we dream of replacing, and then mentally add some simple art in white frames to that wall, okay?


The sand-textured swirlies are outlined in metallic silver, so the sheen is really pretty. The color looks richer and less neon in person than in these photos, which don't do it justice, but you can kind of get the idea. A huge thank you to Wallpaper Direct! Next project for the room: curtains.

Experiment: mayonnaise to treat water stains

I bought a solid wood table with a little drawer at a flea market for $30. It does a fine job of holding up a lamp in the parlor, but it needs some work. The top has water stains and dried-out wood with fine cracks, and the sides have some sort of peeling varnish. But the size is perfect and it's very sturdy.

I'd heard that mayonnaise can remove water stains. Since this table was not a big investment and couldn't really look much worse, I had nothing to lose. Plus I was making coleslaw yesterday so the mayo was already out. Some for the cabbage, some for the table.

I smeared mayonnaise on the worst of the stained areas. Then I figured what the heck, and spread it all over the table stop.


I wiped it all off after 1 1/2 hours and the difference was pretty amazing. The table had turned a deep, rich red-brown, the cracks were less noticeable, and most of the shallow water spots were gone. A few of the deeper marks were left, so I applied more mayo to those and covered them with paper towels to keep the mayo from drying out, then let it sit overnight.


This morning I wiped it all off with paper towels. The table felt very slightly oily, like after you first put on hand lotion, so I wiped it with a water and vinegar mixture which removed the oily feel. Check out the pre-mayo and post-mayo pictures.


Pretty impressive. The deepest water marks still show a little, but it's a vast improvement!

How to cover lampshades with fabric

One of the things I did this weekend was dress up these lamps I got at an antique store. Check out their new outfits!

The lamps didn't come with shades, so I don't know what the original shape would have been. I searched high and low at Target, HomeGoods, and any stores I could think of that sell new shades, but couldn't find a size that wouldn't look silly on these slender bases.

So I Googled online places that will make custom-sized shades, and finally selected Fenchel Shades. You can choose the shape and exact dimensions of your new shades and they'll make them for you. Since I was kind of paranoid about getting it wrong, I had Alex hold a cylindrical wastebasket upside down over one of the lamps for reference while I walked across the room and eyed it from afar. I measured the trash can and then determined how much narrower and taller I would like the shade to be. Then I made a hasty paper replica with taped-together pieces of printer paper and Alex held it up for size. (Measure 68 times, cut once, as the saying goes.) The template was approved!

I ordered simple cylindrical shades with plain white linen since I loved the pretty pottery bases so much, I wasn't sure I wanted to overpower them with a crazy patterned shade. I figured as long as I had the shade itself, I could monkey with it later if I changed my mind.

Each new shade cost $29, but shipping and handling was a little steep, so the total for each custom shade ended up $38. It was worth it to me.


And then of course I decided the white was too boring against pale walls and wanted to crazy it up. I ordered a yard of this African diamond fabric from Etsy. The pink will go with the parlor chairs, and I can't resist a geometric print.


I've read tutorials where you sew a sleeve and slip it over your shade. Or sew bias tape to the top and bottom of the shade before you adhere the fabric. Unfortunately sewing usually makes me want to throw my machine through a window, so I went the no-sew route and used Krylon Easy Tack repositionable adhesive (purchased at Michaels) and Aleene's Tacky Glue (purchased I forget where, but it's easy to find).


First I pulled off the trim from the top and bottom of the shade so the new fabric would lie flat.


Then I cut a piece of fabric to fit the shade, with about 3/4" extra at the top and bottom and roughly 3" extra width, which I planned to trim later. My shades are perfect cylinders so I cut a rectangle, but if you're working with a cone-shaped lamp, you'll need to cut an arc shape. Make a pattern by rolling your lamp across a large piece of paper (the back side of wrapping paper works), tracing the top and bottom edges with a pencil. Then add the extra for overlap and cut your fabric using the paper pattern as a guide.

I folded over 1/4" of fabric and pressed it along one of the short edges of my rectangle. This hides the raw edge where the fabric ends meet on the shade.


I sprayed the back side of the fabric lightly with the repositionable spray adhesive and rolled the lamp shade on it, making sure to keep the fabric's print lined up straight. If it started to go crooked, I peeled the fabric off and tried again. (This adhesive is wonderfully forgiving— you can do this over and over until it's perfect.) I cut off some of the excess overlapping fabric and smoothed down the seam.


I figured out how much fabric I wanted to wrap over the frame at the top and bottom of the shade, then trimmed off the excess there, too.


This shade has a spider fitting with spokes that intersect the shade, so I cut a slit to help the fabric fit over it.


I applied Aleene's Tacky Glue along the exposed fabric edge and wrapped it over the shade's rim.


This particular fabric doesn't ravel easily, so I left the edge raw, secured by glue. A lot of folks cover the edges with bias tape, or cut the fabric even with the rim of the shade and hot glue decorative trim along the edge, but I liked the simple, clean look with no trim. I'm super happy with how these turned out!


If you're not into fabric, here's another idea. Cut silhouettes, lettering, or a pattern out of vinyl contact paper and stick it inside the lampshade. It will magically appear when you turn the lamp on. You could change the shapes for holidays, amuse your kids with different silhouettes, or cut beautiful lacy patterns. (How removable the shapes are depends on the surface of your lamp and how you adhere them, obviously. Flammability also will vary!)

The unfinished dining room

This weekend we painted the dining room white. It was yellow, which you can see on the one wall we left unpainted. We're waiting for wallpaper to arrive, and then that wall is going to be more exciting. And by exciting, I mean fuschia.


Drapes are in the works, too. Then this room will finally look like it has some clothes on.


There are two windows and five doorways (four with doors). Where they take you: the kitchen, the back stairway, a closet, the hallway to the living room, and outside. I keep picturing the genie from Aladdin saying "In case of emergency, the exits are here, here, here, here, here and here."

Check out that fireplace. It's a bad photo because a UFO was just landing outside, but hopefully you can make out the mottled green tile, which is original Rookwood. I hated it at first, but it's got a weird sort of antique charm and I'm trying to like it. Our IKEA table looks so wrong in this room. Or I should say, the table shape is okay but the finish is not good. It's in fine condition, but the matching sideboard is starting to sag in the middle. I have dreams (and of course, Photoshop mockups) of new light fixtures and pretty furniture... maybe someday.