My cousin, Jocelyn, has moved in with us for eight weeks while she is on her final rotation for PT School. When she's done in Omaha she will be DONE with school and will be Dr. Jocelyn! How awesome!
Well, knowing that she was going to be moving in with us inspired me to actually do something with our guest bedroom and bathroom finally. Those two rooms have stayed the same ol' blah rooms that they were when we moved in for the past year and a half so I'm excited to change them up a little finally.
Here's what the bedroom looked like before I started making all the changes:
Not bad, but definitely nothing special -- that's for sure.
I'm not going to show the finished quite yet, but I'm going to share a few projects that I've done for the room for now and then I can share what it looks like all put together!
First off, we painted the whole room. It changed from the "builder beige" it was to a gray color "Rope" by Behr.
Right after we were done painting the room, I got to work on painting some of the furniture.
First up was the headboard. Trent had bought me the headboard for my 23rd birthday, my first birthday after moving to Omaha and living in an apartment that wasn't a dorm room. I felt kind of bad for wanting to paint it, but I'm glad that he gave me the go-ahead to do what I wanted to it.
After I was done with the headboard, I also painted the two nightstands that were in the room the same color. I had bought the nightstands shortly after we moved into the house from some thrift store. They had gotten a bunch of the nightstands from an old hotel that was closing or remodeling or something like that. I was just happy to get two matching night stands for a pretty decent price.
I used a recipe from Pinterest and made my own chalk paint to paint these pieces (not to be confused with chalkboard paint). The most famous of chalk paints is Annie Sloan's Chalk Paint. This paint was a little too expensive to me, so I made my own using regular Valspar paint in Flat finish, Plaster of Paris, and water. I used my go-to white paint color, "Honeymilk"
The benefit of using chalk paint is that it rarely requires any preparation of the surface such as sanding or priming and can be used on pretty much any surface including furniture that already has some type of varnish or something on it. It ends up with a very nice silky finish as well (I used poly to cover it, though, so it didn't stay that way). I also like it because, when it dries, all the brush stroke lines that are on it from the brush dry flat, so it definitely gets better as it dries.
I used the recipe of about 3 cups paint to 1 cup Plaster of Paris to 1/4 cup water. I mixed the Plaster of Paris and the water first to ensure there weren't any lumps and then mixed in the paint.
The paint is a lot more watered down with this mixture, so it took me about 4 coats to cover everything good enough, but it dried fast so I could pretty much just paint continuously without having to wait for it to dry and it was better than having to sand or strip the furniture before I painted.
After I got the number of layers on that I wanted, I topped it off with two coats of Polycrylic.
For the night stands, I just spray painted the hardware with a flat black paint and put them back on.
Here's what both of those pieces look like before and after:
You can kind of see in this picture below what it looked like after a few coats. You can still see the wood through the paint and you can see the brush strokes as well. I just needed to keep going until that was all gone. I got quite a few episodes of Damages watched on Netflix in the evenings while I was painting 4+ coats on 3 different pieces of furniture!
Now I know that this wasn't a very exciting post, but there will be better before and afters after I get through all the little projects. :)
Stay tuned for more projects I did for the guest bedroom!
No comments:
Post a Comment