Doesn't match your decor? Paint it!

I recently bought these candlesticks at Big Lots and I loved the shape, but they didn't match any of my living room decor. So naturally, I decided to paint them. 

                      BEFORE

                     AFTER

I wanted to go for a mismatched, shabby chic look so I decided to use two of my favorite painting techniques: distressing and dry brushing. 

I made the white candlestick by distressing. First I coated the edges that I wanted to distress with candle wax. Then I spray painted it with two coats of Rust-Oleum Universal Satin Paint & Primer in One in White. 

After the paint was fully dry, I sanded the candlestick with an 80 grit sanding sponge to distress the edges. 

I used a dry-brushing technique to make the yellow candlestick. First I coated it with the same white primer as above. Then I painted it with a sample of Behr Premium Plus interior flat paint in the color Pineapple Soda. Once the yellow paint had dried, I added some dimension by brushing on some of my leftover Benjamin Moore Aura paint in the color White Dove. 

I used this 3/4" stencil brush for the dry brushing. I bought a set of these at the Home Depot in the paint section. 

Dry brushing is exactly what it sounds like. You put a small amount of paint on the brush, dab as much of the paint as you can off on a rag so that it is almost "dry" and then flick the brush back and forth over the surface of the object you're painting. This should give you a sheer coat of paint and should allow you to see the textured brush strokes.

I hope you enjoyed this post and that you'll try out one of these techniques!

From old dresser to TV cabinet

I am so excited to share my first furniture transformation on this blog!

I started with this dresser that I have had for years. It used to be part of my old bedroom set but I no longer have room for such a bulky horizontal piece in the bedroom and it doesn't match my bedroom decor anymore.

I no longer had any need for a dresser, but I was in desperate need of a tv cabinet. And so, the transformation began!

I started with this old dusty brown dresser....

And I created this beautiful grey antique-style tv cabinet. 

Keep reading to find out how I did it....

I refinished this dresser using an awesome all-in-one painting product: Rust-Oleum Furniture Transformations.

This is an all-in one kit that includes all of the products you need in one little box. The kit includes a deglosser and scrub pad, bond coat, optional decorative glaze and cheesecloth for application, and a protective top coat. This is especially great for a beginner because it saves you from having to make the investment to buy all of these products separately.

These kits come in a pretty good range of colors. And you're not just limited by the colors on the top of the box. There is a more extensive selection of colors that they can mix for you at the Home Depot from the Rust-Oleum cabinet transformations collection.
My store had a book of swatches of all of the available colors.





For this project, I wanted a medium grey so I chose the color Castle. I bought just one kit but I would not recommend doing a project any bigger than this with one kit because on the second bond coat I was literally scraping the bottom of the can to try finish the whole piece. I also cut it extremely close with the glaze.

All I had to do to repaint my dresser was to follow the instructions on the kit. Its that simple.
You can find a great instructional video here

My favorite product in this kit was the decorative glaze. Applying the glaze drastically changed the appearance of the painted furniture. After I painted it the flat color it looked ok, but once I applied the glaze over top it looked like a beautiful antique piece. I used the standard brush on and wipe off technique in the above video and I was really happy with the result.

Here's the flat light grey bond coat before I applied the decorative glaze. See the difference between the color here and the finished product?

Using the Rust-Oleum transformation kit definitely simplified this project, but this still was a very time consuming project. To do all of the different steps and wait for the dry times of all the separate coats, this took me about a week. But all of my hard work paid off in the end. I love the way it turned out and now it matches perfectly with my grey and yellow living room decor! 

Faux Chalkboard Label Spice Jars

Since I am always cooking different dishes in my kitchen I need a lot of spices. And I mean A LOT. I am kind of a spice collector.

When I got married last summer, I got a really nice spice rack from our registry with 20 different spices on it. This was the biggest spice rack that I could find, and yet it still had only the really basic cooking spices. Where were my staple mexican and indian spices? Luckily, I had my own stash of spices that I had accumulated from my college cooking days. My only dilemma was how to organize them all?
 

I don't want another spice rack on the countertop because I didn't want to add more clutter to that valuable prep space and I knew I wouldn't be able to find anything to match this one. I had also seen some hanging spice racks and spice shelves to go inside the kitchen cabinet but they all just looked messy to me. I finally decided that I would get a spice tray for the drawer to go under my countertop spice rack since the labels would be easy to read at a glance and they would be easily accessible. No need to peer up into a high cabinet, rotate a carousel to read all the labels, or search behind bottes that are stacked up in front of one another.

I am not a big fan of how the red plastic McCormick bottles look in the drawer and since they were round I know they would be rolling all around. So I decided to decant the spices in pretty square glass jars. I also wanted to mirror the style of my countertop spice rack with the black labels and white writing and since chalkboard labels are in style now, I decided to go with a round chalkboard label.

Here's what I came up with:

Excuse the really crappy beat up cabinets in our rental house.
Aren't the chalkboard labels cute? I love how you can see the beautiful spices on display in the clear glass jars.
Since I couldn't fit all of my extra spices on the rack, I just put my most frequently used spices in the glass jars and put the smaller bottles and less frequented spices on the side. They actually all fit in the drawer perfectly and they are all easy to see and read.

If you want to find out the details on where I bought all of the materials and how to make the spice rack keep reading....

First I bought this plastic tray from The Container Store:

http://www.containerstore.com/shop/kitchen/spiceStorage?productId=10024293&N=70879

The spice tray is actually pictured with square glass spice bottles, but they don't sell anything similar on the site so I went to good ol' amazon. I bought 12 to fill up the spice tray.

http://www.amazon.com/RSVP-Square-Glass-Spice-6-Pack/dp/B00BIPW2PW/ref=sr_1_45?ie=UTF8&qid=1365540934&sr=8-45&keywords=rsvp+spice+jars

To make the labels, I bought these large chalkboard label stickers since I could not find any small round chalkboard spice labels to fit my bottles.

You can find these in the Martha Stewart Collection at Staples











I then used a circle shape puncher to punch out round labels to fit the front of my jars.

You can find these shape punchers at any craft store. I think I bought this one at Michaels.






Once I had my round sticker label, I adhered it to the front of the glass spice jar and decanted the spices from their plastic McCormick bottles to the glass spice jars.

I had originally planned to use chalk to write the names of the spices on the front of the jars, but not only was it really difficult to write the tiny letters (even with a sharpened piece of chalk), but the labels rubbed off really easily and I was afraid I would accidentally erase the label and not recognize what kind of spice was in the jar.

So instead of using chalk, I decided to use an extra fine point white Sharpie paint pen to write all the names of the spices on the front of the jars. I got this one at Michaels.

This worked liked a charm. This way I got the look of the chalkboard labels without having to worry about the mess. And if I decide to change the label on one of the jars later on the package of sticker I bought was big enough that I can make extra labels.

And voila! That's it!
Easy project for a beautiful, organized spice drawer.