DIY Headboard

Around here we've been busy making all sorts of interesting furniture pieces for our house. Some of the most noticeable being our new headboards. Ryan made his out of an old pallet, honestly I didn't even know that they made pallets this big!

 

For a while he left it just raw wood, which looked good, just not quite finished. Last weekend he stained it, and built a new wooden frame to go around his metal bed frame. He also managed to find some old hinges while working in his parents old barn. They go so well with the "industrial rustic" look he has going in his room. 

 

 

Meanwhile over in our room I decided to make a headboard using more of the old aged fence boards we had. I cleaned them up, then traced the shape I wanted. I only had to trace one side, then Evan could use the cut pieces to trace the other side so it would be symmetrical. Originally, I was going to paint the headboard a distressed white, but I fell in love with the color of the aged wood.

 It has made such a difference to the look of our room. I love that it has a more feminine shape, but then the coloring of the wood brings in the masculine.

That's all for now. Ill try and share more of the projects were working on soon!

I was featured at Perfectly Imperfect

Our New Addition

Before you get too excited, no were not having a baby... but almost as exciting. We've made our own coffee table! What? That's not as exciting? Well anyway, we were getting tired of our furniture store table with its shiny wood and "one of a million" look. So we decided to make our own. I looked through my ever growing inspiration folder and remembered this little beauty...

source

We were so excited to see a stack of old fence boards on the side of our house when we bought it. And they have contributed to quite a few projects now. I knew we wanted to personalize the table a little bit, and fit it to our needs. We have always liked the idea of a storage ottoman, but knew it would be hard to keep one clean. So often our coffee table is used more as a foot rest than anything else, so it needed to be durable and something that could hide dirt. Well it doesn't get much better than old wood.

The BIL started by building the interior frame, then nailed the fence boards to the outside. He constructed a lid and used two big black door hinges. He drilled two holes on each side, and looped through and knotted big rope. It ended up looking something like this...

There is so much room inside to store games, blankets, pillows, magazines or anything else I fancy!

It really fits in with the rest of the decor. It has some of the brown from the couches, and even has a little blueish grey like the walls.

Were really happy with the way it turned out. Eventually we would like to get some bigger hinges that go on the outside, but no biggie.

p.s. I am aware that the shelf is off centered, we recently rearranged our furniture and haven't gotten around the moving it yet. We would like to put something different on that wall altogether. Any ideas?


I am linked up at Perfectly Imperfect and Home Stories A 2 Z

Dreamy Dining Room Chairs

For a few weeks I have been thinking about reupholstering our dining room chairs. They have been through some rough times, and are showing there years. I remember the day I helped pick out this table and chair set for my mom a good 10+ years ago. Since then they have made it through a house full of pets, and more recently my nannying job. Needless to say, there are a few juice stains as well as mac n cheese smears. (It was totally worth it, to get to spend everyday with the little cutie). But today I decided, I don't want to look at our ugly, old, stained dining room seats any longer! Just look at these things...

They look like they were owned by a diesel mechanic who never changed before he ate dinner. Anyway, I just so happened to have a coupon for Joann's Fabric screaming my name from my email inbox, for a whopping 50% off one whole purchase. So off I went to buy some dreamy linen. While I was there this little picture popped into my mind. This chair I found on pinterest was love at first sight!

I have a feeling it will be a while until I ever own a chair as beautiful as this one. But I can definitely try and make my own version with what I have! So linen and lace it was.

On a more serious note, I'm thinking I may have a disorder called fearofbuyingfabric-itis. As soon as I pull that number and wait in line to get my fabric cut I start to get the butterflies, and I keep changing how many yards of fabric I want to buy. I suppose it would help to be more prepared before I actually buy the fabric. Like perhaps knowing the measurements of my chairs so I could make a more educated guess. :)

But I didn't so I just guessed and said ,"Give me 4 yards please" with the biggest smile I could muster. I figure I can always go back and get more if I need it. So with my coupon the fabric only came to $13! After I bought that I went back and had them cut me 4 yards (again, totally guessing) of lace. I made separate orders so they wouldn't use my coupon on the lace instead of the fabric. Is that cheating? At the register, the wonderful lady had another 50% off coupon so my lace only came to $9. I could have kissed her! So altogether this has only cost me $22! That is if I don't have to go back and get more fabric. 

I'm a little nervous having never done something like this before, but I think it should be fairly easy. Ill let you all know how they turn out!

DIY Sunburst Mirror

Not too long ago I found a wonderful tutorial here on Centsational Girl's blog showing how she made a DIY Sunburst mirror out of paint sticks! So I just had to give it a go. When I bought paint for our bedroom and guest room, I sheepishly asked the lady who was helping me if I could have about 50 paint sticks. She was more than happy to give them to me and just kept handing me handfuls and handfuls of the things.

Stuff you will need:

• Around 45-50 paint sticks
• A 7" round mirror (I got my at Michael's for around $3)
• A 7" wood or plastic embroidery hoop
• Craft paint (2 different colors of your choice)
• A paint brush
• Caulking
• A square piece of wood about 9"x 9"
• A picture hanger
I chose for mine to do a grey and a lighter grey. So I ended up just using the bottled grey and then for my top layer mixing the grey with the white to make it a little lighter. I also happened to have on hand this metallic paint that I mixed in to make it have a little bit of a shimmer. It didn't make a huge difference, but I liked it that way.

So the first step is to cut off the curved part of the paint stick. Then you want to take your mirror and lay your sticks around it to see how many you will need for each layer. For the top layer we chose to cut off a few inches so it would give the mirror more texture. The sticks that would be for the top layer I painted the lighter grey.

You will want to paint your embroidery hoop to whichever color you want. Then glue it to your mirror. While that is drying screw your picture hanger on to the back of your 9"x 9" piece of wood. Then glue your mirror centered in your 9"x 9" board.

Start with your back layer and hot glue (or gorilla glue) to the board. Now the end of your stick is square and your gluing to a circle, so just try to put the center of your stick against the circle with the corners touching each other. I used  some of the extra paint sticks to hold up the ends of my sticks so they would sit flush on the board.

Next start adding the second layer. Just center the sticks over the joints of the lower layer. When your finished you can caulk any gaps that show, then paint over the caulking. And your done!!

I love that this project is so cheap, and can be made in any color you need to fit your decor.

It also worked out perfect for this wall in our master bedroom. To the left of the mirror are french doors that I love to have open. So I knew I needed something that would sit flush against the wall so it wouldn't hit the door.

Yes I know that my curtains are too short, they were all we had on hand. So that will have to be one of my next projects ;)

Ive linked this project up to The Shabby Nest.

Master Bedroom Update

Its amazing to me how fast that feeling of "I never want to mask and paint another wall again" goes away. After painting our living room, guest bathroom and kitchen I never wanted to see another paint tray again. It wasnt too long, however, until those feelings were replaced by that desire to drastically change our room, and add our own personality to it. 

I knew I wanted it to be a bright yet soft blue. I loved the look I had seen in so many magazines, with the dusty blue walls and contrasting white furniture. So I started looking at paint colors and even bought a few samples. I painted the samples on cardboard like they told me and put it up against the white trim in the bedroom to see how it would look with the lighting we have etc.  

My camera doesn't take the best pictures so you may not even be able to see much of a difference. So ill try and explain (with my limited color lingo) what they looked like. The top color was called Ice Flower and was a really pretty blue but it definitely had shades of aqua in it which wasn't what I was wanting for our room. The bottom color was Lovely Blue. It ended up being a little more "washed out" I guess than what I wanted. So I ended up choosing the middle color called "Serene Sky." (You would think that I would have learned by now, that blue paint can be very deceiving. It can look very subtle and calm in a sample, but when you paint a whole room blue, it can very easily become overwhelming. But we will get to that later.)

So the BIL and I decided we would split up, he would paint the guest room, and I would paint my room. So off to Home Depot we went. We had decided weeks ago that we would paint the guest room the same grey as our kitchen so that was a piece of cake. And I, now sweating profusely, sick to my stomach and breathing out of what felt like a straw, asked the helpful lady to give my two gallons of a paint I wasn't totally confident in. That should have been my red flag right there. But I chalked it up to the fact that I would have a mini heart attack buying that much paint of even my favorite color.

So we got home and I started pushing everything to the center of the room. My wonderful BIL came in and masked everything, without me even asking! So I got to work.

Again another awful quality picture, but you get the gist of the progress. Oh, and I promise that is clean laundry in those baskets, but come on people, priorities! :) The whole time I was painting the room I had this internal struggle going on. Part of me was totally freaked out that it wasn't turning out the color I had pictured in my mind, the other part of me was determined to like it because I wasn't about to go out and buy two new gallons of paint. Even now, I still have that struggle. But I'm hoping that once I finish decorating it how I want it, Ill learn to love it even more. Don't get me wrong I still think it looks better than it was, its just not as "dusty" as I had planned it to be. Looking back now I see that I should have gotten a blue that had more grey undertones, but hindsight is always 20/20 right?!

So here it is today, nothing on the walls yet but that is my next project. And I'm still on the search for the perfect nightstand, but until then I'm using an old table we had sitting in the garage. So that's all for now, Ill be back soon to share with you the Sunburst mirror I made for our bedroom.