Guest Bedroom: Before and After

And finally! Here are the pictures of the whole guest bedroom... 

Pretty sad that it took me over 2 months to get all this posted... :)

We still need to get curtains up and I am eventually going to change out some of the bedding, but what we had worked with the time frame and the budget I was working with.

I also painted the closet the same coral color as the dresser. It looks a little more pink than the dresser does in this picture, but I promise it's the same!

Dresser: From my mom's house. Painted with DIY Chalk Paint

Night Stands: From Thrift Store. Painted with DIY Chalk Paint

Head Board: From Nebraska Furniture Mart, June 2010. Painted with DIY Chalk Paint

Pictures: Frames from Michael's. Pictures from Etsy shop, Antinoro Pixel Prints

Lamps: From Goodwill. Spray Painted with Glossy Rustoleum Spray Paint in Navy

Guest Bedroom: Glossy Spray Painted Lamps

My last project for the guest bedroom was painting some lamps. The ones that I had in there were small and skinny, so I knew that I wanted two matching lamps that were bigger than what I had. I didn't want to spend a bunch on them, though.

Luckily, I found some lamps that matched at Goodwill for only $10 a piece. They didn't have any lamp shades on them, but I figured that I'd probably want to replace the shades that came on them anyway, so that was fine with me.

They really weren't much to look at the way they were, but if I've learned anything from the blogs I read, it's that if you find two matching lamps that work, buy them! So I did!

After committing to buy them and starting to walk from the back of the store to the front where the checkout was, I had three different people tell me that I had found some beautiful lamps! After the third person said that, I started to feel kind of guilty for wanting to paint them ... but that only lasted a second or two... I found them first :)

I decided to paint them with a navy blue, glossy spray paint, and after I realized that I could separate the bases from the body of the lamps, I decided that I would paint the bases a brushed nickle color.

I started by taping off the part of the cord that was showing and the part where the light bulb goes in with a grocery sack and blue painters tape. I then primed the lamp and base with a gray primer. I figured this would help the glossy paint stick to the glass on the body of the lamp better.

I think I did two or three coats of the primer and then, after letting it dry for a while, I painted the base with the brushed nickel color a few times. When I was sure that was dry, I covered the bases with a plastic sack and started painting the body of the lamps. It needed a few coats, and it was during this process that I really messed up. 

I did one or two coats on a Saturday night and then, after church on Sunday, I decided that I would do one final coat and be done with it. Turns out that it was a super windy day and it was a bad idea to leave lamps with wet paint out in the driveway! They ended up with flecks of dirt and gray paint flakes that had come off my tarps in the wind... Major fail!

So, the next night, I had to sand them down and try it again! This resulted in some far from perfect lamps (as it goes with many of my projects) but I just tried to turn them so the imperfect parts were facing the wall in the bedroom. Problem solved :)

I had found some lamp shades at Target that I thought worked well, so that's what I used to finish them up.

Here's what they look like now!

Other Guest Bedroom Projects:

DIY Chalk Paint - Headboard and Night Stands

DIY Chalk Paint - Coral Dresser
DIY Drawer Liners from Wrapping Paper

Guest Bedroom: DIY Drawer Liner Using Wrapping Paper

My next project for the guest bedroom was to put some drawer liners into the dresser and the night stands. I knew that if I was going to expect Jocelyn to actually put clothes in that dresser, the drawers were going to need to be lined since the dresser really isn't the greatest quality and no one wants to find little splinters in their clothes or have the wood pull at the clothes at all.

So, being the person that I am and not really liking to spend money, I searched Pinterest for some DIY ideas to make my own drawer liners. I found a couple ideas and the one I ended up going with used wrapping paper and clear contact paper. I got the contact paper from Wal Mart and the wrapping paper at Party City (It was the only store I could find wrapping paper that fit my color scheme).

To get the sizes I needed, I used an Observer to measure out the drawer sizes (The Observer can be used for SO many more things than just for reading!) and then used that to mark out the dimensions on the wrapping paper before cutting the wrapping paper down to size. It was easier to get the newspaper into the drawers than it was mark it out on the roll of wrapping paper.

I then cut the contact paper down to the length that I needed it to be, leaving some extra at the end so I would be sure that I had enough to wrap around the ends, and then attempted to get it started as straight as possible and rolled it over the wrapping paper (that wasn't always successful). 

After I had them all done, I trimmed them down where needed to so they would fit into the drawers and put all the drawer back in. Since both the wrapping paper and the contact paper were rolled up, the edges of the liners stuck up in a few places, so I ended up using some painter's tape to keep the corners down. I probably could have put them under some books or something for a while and gotten them to flatten out, but I'm impatient, so I went the tape route.

I think it cost me less about $8 for the supplies and I have wrapping paper and contact paper left over for other things as well.

Here's the finished product!

Other guest bedroom projects:

DIY Chalk Paint - Headboard and Night Stands

DIY Chalk Paint - Coral Dresser

Guest Bedroom: Coral Painted Dresser with DIY Chalk Paint

After I got done painting the headboard and night stands in the guest bedroom, I moved on to repainting this dresser:

The dresser came from my mom's house. It was in the basement of her house when she moved in last December. It wasn't pretty or even that functional, but I knew that I could make it work somewhere in our house. 

Again, I used the same recipe for chalk paint that I had used on the headboard and night stands but this time I used a coral color called Blaze Orange by Valspar. This worked out well so I didn't have to worry about sanding or stripping the dresser first. I just wiped it down to get rid of the dust and other gunk that was on it and then started painting.

Here is what the dressers after a coat or two of paint. 

This dresser took me quite a few coats as well. I think it ended up being 5+ coats (followed by 2-3 coats of polly). I think it took more coats with this dresser since the brown underneath was so dark color as the base and since the paint wasn't white this time around, the Plaster of Paris lightened the paint, so it took a few more coats to make it as dark and bright as I wanted it to be.

For the pulls, I just used the same flat black spray paint that I had used for the night stands to change their color. I thought about getting new ones all together, but I decided that I'd rather save the money and just used the ones I already had.

I put them in a box on nails to be able to paint them better.

In the end, here's what it looked like all put back together.

Stay tuned for more projects to come!

Other guest bedroom projects:

DIY Chalk Paint - Headboard and Night Stands