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: 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

Guest Bedroom: Painted Headboard and Night Stands with DIY Chalk Paint

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!