Tag: primer

Home Improvement, Life, Paint

Green paint and a little sinfonia

Jessica Smith

“Hello? What are you guys doing right now?”

That’s the call we got from my sister on Friday night before she impulsively decided to come home for the weekend so she could go get soft pretzels with the hubby.

Turns out Friday was National Pretzel Day and Emily and Brian LOVE pretzels. Their love of pretzels couldn’t be denied, so Em came home (2 + hour drive), pulled into our driveway, and hopped into our car. We drove to the mall, which is thankfully super close by, with only 3o minutes until closing so this dynamic pretzel-loving duo could get them some Auntie Anne’s. Now that is dedication to National Pretzel Day.

By the way, the got five pretzels. Yes, five.

pretzels

My weekend was off to an amazing start, obviously. On Saturday we got busy helping my MIL paint her living room. She’s been working so hard to redo this room and the transformation is almost complete!

Green paint

She chose “Sage Tint” for her walls, and they look beautiful. They especially pop off the bright white ceiling we painted a month ago.

Green Paint

All that is left is to paint the trim, then she can move her furniture back into her beautiful room.

Now don’t hate me Robin, but I had to share this picture of you and Brian. You both look adorable and so happy, even though we were all covered in paint.

Robin and the hubby

Although… maybe I was just covered in paint. You both look remarkably clean!

Once the room was painted, we scurried home so I could clean up and run out the door again. This time, to my little brother’s final elementary school concert.

Elliott plays the violin and has done so since he was 4 years old. I can’t believe how talented he is.

IMG_3387

I was super impressed by the entire strings ensemble (not sure if that is what they are actually called…). We celebrated afterward by having a delicious dinner at the Melting Pot!

I’ll save my Sunday project for tomorrow, but as you can tell… our weekend was packed! I am still super tired. Good thing next weekend will be super relaxing…. oh wait. No it won’t! Who am I kidding though, relaxing weekends aren’t my style 🙂

Hope you all had a fantastic weekend.

 

 

 

Craft Projects

Smith sign project

Jessica Smith

Hey blog world, heyyyyy.

The hubster and I had a lovely weekend at the beach hanging out with some of our best friends, but today it’s back to work and back to crafting 🙂 Oh darn.

I’ve been slowly working on a project, revamping a Smith sign my mother-in-law gave us that she had hanging out around her house. It was pretty ugly — the font is just horrifying — but I figured I’d give it a go.

 

Um yeah, talk about not matching much that we own. So, I primed the whole thing with white paint, which took a few coats. I then stopped my project altogether because I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do next.

When I was finally inspired to take the next step on this project, I started taping off stripes horizontally on the sign. I then painted every other section Behr’s Contemplation, the same color we have in our family room. I had to be really careful around the edges of the word, which I left white.

When I started this part of the project, I figured this would also be where I left it. But sometime was definitely missing. So again, I let my project sit until I had more inspiration.

Finally I figured out what I wanted to do. I’ve been playing around with EnviroTex Lite, which is a gloss that hardens on whatever surface you pour it on. I really like the way this stuff looks (wait until you see the other project I’ve been working on!), so I decided to fill the letters of our last name. So, I mod podged a single line of beads in every letter, then poured on the EnviroTex and waited for it to dry.

In the meantime, I ran over to Super Hobby Lobby World Land (that’s Brian name for it) and picked up some sweet ribbon with a silver accent in it. I pulled out my glue gun and started striping the ribbon in between each green and white stripe.

 

 

 

Once it was all on my sign, I let everything dry overnight. Here’s the finished product:

 

I hung it right by our front door. It looks really nice against our gray walls.

 

Quite the improvement over the ugly brown sign I started with, wouldn’t you say?

 

 

Home Improvement

Family Room Bathroom Renovation Reveal

Jessica Smith

Our bathroom is finally finished! I say “finally” like it took ages, but it really only took us about a week to do — not too bad!

I decided to tear down our bathroom about a month ago when I just couldn’t take it anymore. The rest of our house looks pretty nice, but the bathroom was just yucky. Not to mention it was especially gross compared to our beautiful new family room. So I tore down the ugly brass fixtures and the old mirror.

Then my step dad came over to help us remove the vanity and the toilet since we had no experience with plumbing at all.

Afterwards, the hubby and I went shopping for a new vanity, toilet and light fixture. After shopping around, we found what we wanted for a decent price and scooped them up. Then I got to painting.

I stayed up until 1 a.m. painting our bathroom a light purple, Behr’s Silent Ripple to be exact.

Then the boys got to installing our new stuff! So exciting.

Doesn’t he look so hot with his headlamp on?

It felt so great to have our new stuff installed, but the bathroom still wasn’t complete. I needed a vanity mirror, but the hubby didn’t want to buy one. We also needed a new towel bar and shower curtain. I got those at Wal-Mart.

For the mirror, I had two options: First, I could redo a mirror my best friend gave me for Christmas. It was big and bulky and kinda ugly, but it could work. Or, I could use the builder-grade mirror that we took out of our master bathroom when we installed our medicine cabinet.

I figured to give the bulky mirror a try before resorting to an ugly, frameless mirror. So I taped it and took it out back to spray paint it with primer. I broke the top part off so it would actually fit in between the vanity and the light fixture. Then I taped off the mirror and sprayed with Krylon Primer. I barely beat the thunder storm before pulling the mirror inside to paint it white.

Three coats of white paint later…

I loved it! Bye-bye, builder-grade mirror!

All of the pieces were ready to go, so I installed the towel bars, hung up my new shower curtain, popped some curtains into the window, hung some artwork and placed our new mirror. I’m in love.

And for the final reveal… **drum roll, please**

Now if that’s not a cute bathroom, I don’t know what is! I love the dark espresso of the vanity against the light purple walls. I love that the curve of the white mirror meets up perfectly with the faucet. I love the bright white accents and the subtle bird theme in the bathroom. Love. I love love love it. It is SO much better than before!