Craft Projects, Quick and Easy Crafts

White and Mint Metal Candle Holder

I really try to like colors that aren’t a shade of blue or green. Honest, I do. I bought a coral/pink candle holder from Target a few weeks ago on clearance that I thought would add a nice pop of color to my living room.

Console In the room

You can see it on the table, pulling the same color from my poppy pillow on the couch.

Console2And again on my console table pulling out the color in the maraca I brought back from our honeymoon.

I like the coral color on both of those pieces, but I hate it on the calendar. Seriously, it is awful. Every time I walk by our living room it jumps out at me. “Ha ha, there’s ugly pink in your rooooooom.”

Well, ugly pink no more.

Pink candle holder

I didn’t want to return the piece since I paid $5. It was a good price and I liked the overall look, just not the hideous color. I taped off the wooden based and, for good measure, a stripe to remain coral.

Then I rushed outside to spray paint the whole thing.

taped off top

Ahhhh, so much better already.

Once the white dried, I pulled off the tape… and still hated the coral. So I sanded down the line left from the paint and did the entire thing in white. I liked it, but thought it needed something special. Something extra.

candle holder sprayed white

So of course I added mint to it. I can’t help it… I just love mint green. And aqua and teal and blue and green.

I then slapped a light stain on the wood base!Finished candle holder

It looks so much better (to me anyway). And now it looks right at home on my new console table.

White and mint candle holder2

No more ugly pink staring at me in the room. I can breathe a sign of relief.

White and mint candle holder

So what do you think? Better before or after? If you are pink people, then you probably think I’m nutso. It was a cool piece to begin with. But if you are like me and coral pink makes you want to tear at your eyes, the after is much better.

Tomato Tally: 120

Holiday, Home Improvement

Happy Mother’s Day — and the start of a new project!

Happy Mother’s Day to all of the moms out there! My Mother’s Day was fantastic — I got to see all three of my moms and hopefully made each of their days special. Oddly enough, you will see no photos of my moms in this post because during the time I got to spend with them yesterday I completely forgot to take pictures! Oops.

We started out our morning in Annapolis with my mom (who did remember to take pictures, phew!). It was a beautiful day for brunch on the Chesapeake Bay and we had a wonderful time.

It was also a beautiful day for a duck selfie. Sorry ladies. This goofball is taken 🙂

Duck Selfie

After brunch, the hubby and started on our new project: replacing our outdated brass closet doors in our living room. You might think it is odd that we chose to replace these doors in the five hours between brunch and when our guests would arrive for dinner. Well, we actually started this project on Saturday. … or, I started the project. I wanted to move our more modern (if you can call them that) sliding mirror doors from our guest bedroom to our living room to replace the brass doors from the ’80s.

The only picture I could find of the doors is here, from when I was painting the living room gray. It’s crazy how much in this one photo has changed! (The TV lived in that spot for maybe 2 weeks, we have a new front door, curtains, paint. That’s a lot for the front area of the house…)
Brass Doors

Anyway, you can probably see where this is going. The brass doors were a bitch huge pain to remove and we ended up breaking the mirrors in both during the process. There was no turning back, which ended up being unfortunate because the replacement doors didn’t fit… which of course we learned after I spent 20 minutes hacksawing the frame down so it would fit in the opening. Grrrrr. Oh well!

Hacksaw

So we took everything to the dump and planned on putting up new doors in between our Sunday engagements.

Here’s how the closet looks without the doors. Honestly, it looks way better without than it did with haha. You can see at the foot of the closet the strip of missing carpet and our hardwoods underneath! Someday I would love to rip up the carpet and refinish the floors 🙂 Call me a dreamer because it will probably never happen.

NO DOORS

We want our doors to eventually look like the closet in our office:

Closet Doors Painted

We got the doors hung up, but there is currently no hardware, no paint, no reinforcing the bottom of the doors from the parts we cut off…. we have a little bit more to do! But I’ll save that for later.

Brian’s mom and my step mom came over for dinner as we wrapped up our door project. Thankfully I spent the majority of Saturday cleaning the house, setting up for dinner and prepping food because it was all ready to go when they arrived.

Check out my fancy table 🙂

Place Setting

I got to use my pretty teal napkins for the fist time and a lot of our wedding stemware! So fun. I even set up a “gift station” because I had to move our table from our dining room into our living room so the eight of us could eat comfortably. This chair and table were the only things in our dining room haha. Temporary solution!

Rem and the presents

Even though there are no moms pictured in this post, we had a wonderful day celebrating with our three leading ladies. Brian and I are fortunate to have been raised by wonderful women.

Happy Mother’s Day!

 

Craft Projects, Thrift Store Finds

Glammed-up circle tray

I found this ugly tray at a thrift store in New York and kind of fell in love with it. It’s old, sorta rusty, kinda ugly, and the perfect tray for filling with epoxy and fun things.

Circle tray ugly

I was combing through my craft room for things I could use to beautify this tray and I came across a jar of seed bids that I pretty much never use.

So I filled my tray with beads, covered the beads in epoxy, and three days later my ugly tray turned beautiful!

Check this out:

Circle tray pretty

I made an ever cooler tray that I’ll share with you later this week. I feel a little ingenious with the item I combined with the epoxy. It’s rather fabulous.