Category Archives: DIY

Little Room + A Little Announcement

November 10, 2014

As you may recall from last week, KC and I recently spent some time redoing the little room off of our downstairs family/laundry room. As a little refresher, here’s how the space started:

Green walls and ugly painted floors.

The walls got a fresh coat of paint and KC installed some plank flooring, and voila, brand new room!

I think it turned out pretty nice.

Now, what will we be using this little room for? Well…

We’ve got a little addition coming our way in May, so the little room will be just that: a room for the little one.

And, yes, I realize that I do sometimes look like that ↑ after eating a burrito or a large lunch, but there is, in fact, a baby in there. 🙂

DIY / weekend

Little Room Redo

November 5, 2014

We have a little room off our basement laundry/family room that we’ve used as an office, workout room, man cave… many things. Unfortunately, after we redid the laundry room, the little room became kind of a de-facto storage space — housing a lot of the things that used to be kept in the basement.

We decided to clean out the space, take the stuff off the walls, and add a fresh coat of paint. I liked the green walls ok, but they needed some patching and we didn’t have the original paint color to touch up, so we opted for a brand new color to reinvent things a little.

I chose Glidden Silver Birch with an eggshell finish– a super light gray with a beige undertone. (Which is now my most favorite color for interiors at the moment.)

A little note about choosing gray paint — there is no “true gray,” which makes choosing a gray paint color really difficult. All grays have an undertone to them — the most common undertones being blue, purple, green and beige. If you gather up a bunch of gray paint chips and hold them up in the space you’re planning to paint, you’ll see the undertone pretty clearly. A gray that you were sure was “the one” at the store can suddenly be OMGPURPLE in the space you’re planning to paint. Lesson: paint chips are your friend. Gather up a lot of them and look at them in multiple spots in the space you’re planning to paint before you go ahead and buy that gallon.

Anyhoo, here’s the space with the freshly painted gray walls:

Nice right? (It looks awesome in person, if I do say so myself.)

However, despite the amazingness of Glidden Silver Birch, it couldn’t really detract from the glaringly obvious problem of the space:

Oh hey, hideous painted floors.

Whoever had owned the space before us decided to paint the floor in here; and from the looks of it, they also decided to paint without a drop cloth and generally wreck the space while the floor was still wet.

Because, why not?

I approached KC about re-painting the floor, but he had a better idea: installing a floating laminate floor.

We found our flooring on sale at Costco. It was $25/box and we ended up buying 4 boxes to cover the 6′ x 12′ space (we have most of one box left over).

The flooring was awesome because it came with all the sound proofing already attached to the planks. (With a lot of laminate flooring, you generally have to buy sheets of soundproofing material that lays down first, then lay the boards over that.)

These are snap-together flooring pieces that you cut to fit with a circular saw. Word to the wise: make sure you buy the correct saw blade for cutting laminate. We bought a cheaper blade first and basically burned through it (literally) and had to go back and buy another one in order to finish the room.

KC was in charge of the flooring project, so I sadly don’t have a lot of real-world tips and advice for you. (Aside from get yourself an awesome husband. It really pays off.)

KC figured out how to lay the flooring by watching tutorials on YouTube (ah, the power of the internet).

KC installed the flooring over the course of a single day, and finished up the edges the next night by installing white quarter-rounds around the edges to match the white baseboards (since there’s a little gap between the boards and the edge of the wall):

Um, a bit of an improvement, no?

I’ll have more pictures of the finished space up next week!

DIY

DIY: Updating a Dresser (for a nursery!) Plus, a Tea Cart

September 22, 2014

Happy Monday, friends! I have a brand new DIY post for you (hooray!)

My sister Alexis recently bought a house AND had a baby, so while moving and decorating a nursery, she discovered that she had a couple pieces of furniture that she wanted to update.

Given that I like to paint things, I offered to help her refinish two of her pieces — an old wooden tea cart and painted wood dresser:

To start, we sanded the pieces down (a quick sanding, since y’all know how I really feel about sanding things…) Also, there’s little else that’s more amusing than seeing a 9-months pregnant woman wielding a power sander. (The fact that she kind of went into labor the next day may or may not have been a coincidence…)

After the beasts were sanded, we wiped them down with a clean cloth, and had our men step in to help me prime and paint (because really, they weren’t doing anything, and an almost-mama has no business being around paint fumes — so she got to hang out on the couch.)

The pieces got primed:

I used a new primer this time, hence why it’s gray. I picked up KILZ MAX®* at Home Depot and had the people working the paint counter tint the primer gray since we were going to be painting these pieces dark colors. (Awesome that you can tint the primer, right? Makes covering the piece with your desired paint color sooo much easier.) And you guys know how much I love primer. I mean, don’t even think about painting furniture without it!

We let the primer set for about an hour, then got to painting the pieces.

Alexis chose a woodsy sage green for the dresser (to go in le bébé’s nursery) and a dark navy for the cart, which now lives in their family room.

I didn’t actually get to photograph the finished pieces until the day Alexis was in labor at the hospital, so I may have been a little distracted — I apologize if these pictures aren’t my best work.

And how cute is that little wooden elephant? It was a present from me and KC (we got it while traveling through Scotland earlier this year).

I think the green is quite an improvement on the teal/white combo:

The dilapidated tea cart got new life with it’s new navy coat:

Let’s just ignore the painters tape on the wheels… Remember, my sister was in labor when I took these, so I really couldn’t focus on anything but that!

The how-to is down below!

How to Paint Painted Furniture

What you’ll need:

Piece you’re painting
Sandpaper (we used medium grit 100)
Optional: electric sander
Clean dry cloth(s)
Optional (but recommended): drop cloth
Primer (we used KILZ MAX* and had the paint counter tint it gray)
Paint (we used semi-gloss indoor paint)
Paint brushes
Optional: finisher like urethane to seal the surface

Sand all surfaces of the piece that you’ll be painting (a once-over is fine. You just want to rough up the surface a bit so the primer adheres to it.)
Wipe down the piece with a clean dry rag to remove all dust and debris.
Paint 1-2 thin coats of primer, allowing at least an hour between each coat to dry.
Once well-covered, paint 1-3 thin coats of your paint, until the piece is fully covered (allow an hour between each coat).
Allow the piece to cure for at least 72 hours, then you can finish the surfaces with urethane, if desired (helps defend against wear and tear for surfaces that get a lot of use).

*This post was sponsored by KILZ MAX, but all opinions are my own.

DIY / Going "Natural"

Get Rid of Fruit Flies (the natural way)

July 31, 2014

Well kiddos, sorry for the radio silence over here the past few weeks. Prior to the beginning of this week, I was soaking up every minute of my forced summer vacation, and relaxing like I’ve never relaxed before. I must say, it was pretty nice. But, alas, I got a new job and returned to work this week. So I’m back in the routine of being a real person now, which means that the blog may or may not be making a comeback onto your computer screens.

Let’s transition to what this post is actually about, shall we?

I don’t know about you guys, but this is the time of year when my countertops are generally overflowing with summer produce. Tomatoes, summer plums, peaches, melons… I hoard them and eat them by the dozen. All this fruit ripening away on the counter though generally means that at some point or another we get overrun with fruit flies. And it’s really not so appetizing to grab a nectarine from the fruit basket and immediately see a swarm of gnats start buzzing about.

I don’t like the idea of spraying a bunch of chemicals near the fruit I eat, (I mean, I try to avoid pesticides in my food before I buy it, so why would I want to add some after the fact?) so I did a little research on how to deal with the fruit fly problem naturally. After a bit of googling and a trial run, I found the perfect natural solution. Here’s what you’ll need:

small bowl or container (I used a small mason jar)
apple cider vinegar
dish soap
plastic wrap
rubber band
small sharp knife

Place a few tablespoons of apple cider vinegar into the bowl or container you’re using. Add a squirt of dish soap, then cover the top with plastic wrap.
Secure the plastic wrap around the edge with a rubber band, then take a small knife and cut a few slits in the top of the wrap.
Place your contraption near where the flies are congregating and let it sit for a few days, and that’s it!

The fruit flies will be attracted to the smell of the apple cider vinegar and will fly into the container through the slits in the top. Once in there, they will be trapped by the plastic wrap. Also, the dish soap changes the surface tension of the water, making it so that the flies drown if they land in it.

Easy right? Problem solved!

Budget-Friendly Weekend Fun / DIY / weekend

Recent Projects

July 9, 2014

KC and I have been working on some projects around the house recently, trying to finish up our basement space and make it a bit more livable. Honestly, we had just planned on painting the spare room and installing some plank flooring, but that turned into painting the basement stairs and hallway and a plan to paint the ceiling as well (we haven’t tackled that project quite yet).

I’ll start with the basement stairs, because I don’t have great pictures of the spare room yet to show you.

Here’s how the stairs started:

Hideous, super worn and covered with weird rubber mats. And please notice the wall color — ugly avocado green.

Not pretty.

I painted the walls first — Glidden Silver Birch — then started in on the stairs. Step one: remove the rubber mats.

Spackled the nail holes, then did a once-over with the electric sander and cleaned the stairs to ready them for paint.

One solid coat of Glidden Gripper primer.

Two coats of porch and floor paint in Valspar’s Gulf Coast.

I painted the bannister hardware gold (obviously), and painted the bannister with primer and some of my leftover white paint from this project (Behr Oyster Shell).

And voila, the finished stairs and hallway:

How to Paint Stairs (or a floor)

What you’ll need:

spackling paste
sander + medium-grit sandpaper (I used 100)
broom, dust pan, clean rags
painters tape
paint brushes and rollers
Glidden Gripper Primer
Enamel Porch and Floor Paint (there’s also oil-based porch and floor paint, but oil paint tends to be harder to work with and smells awful, so I opted to use the enamel-based porch and floor paint) — I got my paint at Ace Hardware where they do custom colors for porch and floor paint, but only with a satin finish, so that’s what I used.

How to do it:

Fill in any holes with spackling paste and let dry.
Sand all surfaces, then clean with a broom and clean rags to remove any debris.
Prep the space with painters tape.
Paint one solid coat of primer and let dry for at least one hour.
Paint as many coats of paint as needed to get the finish you want (I did two coats + a touch-up). Wear socks on stairs between coats, only after the paint has dried.
Let stairs cure for at least 72 hours before subjecting them to normal use.