The One Where She Spray Tanned Some Owls

OK so not quite a spray tan as such- I have already used the spray paint which i bought from my local German bargain supermarket to make this frame turn from cream to glossy white...

Since then I have also used it to spray this papermache 8 which i bought a few weeks ago

And nailed it here...

(The other thing i want to add to the gallery wall is this bunch of cast iron keys, but i want to hang them on a white hook - so one is in the booth waiting for its treatment...)

Then we get round to these two beauties who in all honesty were feeling a bit sorry for themselves!
Something i saw on Pinterest was buying old ornaments from charity shops/car boots/eBay and giving them a white glossy spray tan. So that's what I did. I bought this sorry pair from eBay for £2

After a few coats of paint they were transformed into these

Don't get me wrong in their au-natural state they would have fitted in just fine with the current decor of our living room (please see below for proof) but what the heck its any excuse in this house to whip the spray can out!

Second Bedroom/Office Make Over

Well this post ISN'T about the airing cupboard being updated; turns out the back of the door needed quite a few coats of paint and i still haven't finished painting it yet (or cleaning the pain off the carpet- oops!)

Instead its a little re-cap of our second bedroom makeover. We actually finished it quite a while ago but since its always messy I haven't had a chance to take photos of the finished article..until now! (I just moved the mess round the room as i photographed the different sides ha ha)

So here is what the room looked like on the day we moved in:

All of the walls and ceiling (of course!) were covered in woodchip paper painted magnolia. Lovely!
 Like the rest of the house the furniture was left from the previous owner. So we dismantled the wardrobe, took it to the tip with the mattress off the bed, ebayed the rest of the furniture (I was surprised how much you can get for old furniture!) except for the bed frame which Max's mum took for his old bedroom at home. She sprayed the frame cream and it looked amazing when she had done it- i only wish i had thought of that myself!

So we lived with the room like this for quite a while- we used it as a dumping ground for all the boxes of stuff we hadn't unpacked yet as you can see in the next pic where we had started stripping the wallpaper

 Of course underneath the woodchip lay 3 other layers of paper, the blue 1970's design you can see here, a pink and grey checkered wallpaper and last but not least this 1950's children's bedroom paper with slightly scary animals

After all the paper was stripped (the wood chip on the ceiling came down in one big sheet!) the walls were in good order so I painted the ceiling- i chose a good quality 1 coat white paint because painting the ceiling is too much like hard work to paint 2 coats!

Once the ceiling was painted we painted the back wall of the room a raspberry pink colour called Euphoria by Crown. The other walls we painted in Dulux Classics Scent Bottle, which is a very very light pink/purple/grey colour. Although we went a bit crazy with the accent wall, we have tried to keep the palette in the house quite similar so it flows better. 

 As you can see we added some furniture- 

Expedit Bookcase from..you guessed it Ikea! -i wanted the bigger one but this one fitted in the car and the delivery costs were more than we paid for the actual item!

New desk also from Ikea- which we bought when we first moved in the house and it sat in a box for a bit. 
The chair is from a vintage shop-called De Ja Vu

The drawers and mirror are old pine ones we already had which we painted white. 

The bed is a double divan - the cushions are from Ikea and Primark- the teddy is one which I've had since a child.

Accessories include the white lamps which are from Ikea, the gold alarm clock is from a carboot, the big pink heart box is our wedding box with all bits and pieces in, the notice board and clock behind the desk are from Ikea (we are keeping the Warrington branch open!) and the antique gold picture stand/ipad stand is from a carboot!

This noticeboard is a basic cork board covered in world map wrapping paper from John Lewis, which has all the ticket stubs pinned on from our travels. The blue and gold mask is from Mexico.

We sold the curtains which are the windows- both pairs sold on eBay for £30! At a local fabric shop i bought some floral pattered cotton for £2 per meter- working out at £11 for enough to make roman blinds for both windows which Max's mum very kindly made for us

The other side of the room...

The rocking chair we bought on eBay about a year a go for £10, a throw which we bought in Mexico and some unmatching cushions :)

I use this room the most in the house- working from home, and doing all my crafty bits and pieces. I am getting a sewing machine at the end of the month for my birthday so i need to make some room for it! 

Things still to do in the room:

1. Get/Make a headboard for the bed
2. Get a rug 
3. Make some new cushions for the rocking chair which actually match the room!
4. Take some of the books off the shelves and put them in storage until we get the new bookcases we are planning for the living room. Then i can put more of my crafty stuff on there as it rapidly expands and my new sewing machine!

Some New Kitchen Artwork

Well in my last post i mentioned i wanted to do a collage of pictures on the kitchen wall with some white picture frames I have been hoarding for sometime.

This included this cream picture frame which i bought in the sale for £1 and after cracking open my new white spray paint and giving the frame a few thin coats - it was white to match the 1000 frames i own!

The sheet and box are to catch the spray- although ideally you should do this outdoors

The 8 is the papermache one i bought last week from Country Baskets- I just started spraying it out of interest really to see what it would look like white!

Anyway back to the collage wall- it was this space between the kitchen window and the french doors on the back wall

There was a clock on this wall when we moved in but since i moved across the kitchen i think this wall seems really bare. So this morning I tried to arrange a collage of the frames. I always start by taping the paper inserts from the frames on the wall to get an idea of what they'll look like before I start randomly hammering nails!

Except after we after we agreed this layout and started hammering in the picture hooks i decided I didn't like the picture collage idea anymore...Yes i can be slightly fickle!

Anyway then it was time to go to Ikea! Whilst we were there I honestly thought Max was going to kill someone me when i picked up some more white picture frames. When he said- why don't we just have 1 big picture there instead? So that's what we did

We bought this large frame (which is the same as the one above our sink) and this black and white print of New York. 

All in all very happy with it- so glad not to have a bare wall anymore! We wanted to get a new clock whilst we were there but we didn't see anything we liked enough, so for now we are stuck with the old wooden hexagon clock which was here when we moved in.

The frames which were going to go on the wall i have added to our hallway gallery- which actually looks really good and a bit more "beefed up" with the additions!

So thats one thing ticked of the list! The next thing is to sort out that airing cupboard, so we bought a few bits and pieces from Ikea so we will be doing that over the next few days...

Easter Weekend

Yay its the weekend! Well it is for me anyway as I have some holidays to use up I've been on holiday since 1pm. So obviously i have got lots of things planned for around the house (including a trip to Ikea- since meatballs are back on the menu again!!)

Projects planned for this weekend are:
1. Sort out the airing cupboard.
Something i have been meaning to do for a while,especially since we finished renovating the cupboard under the stairs (more on that here).

Yes-it's very messy- with the (overflowing) ironing basket and toilet rolls on the bottom and then the shelf filled with towels, toiletries and cleaning stuff. To make matters worse yesterday at work was a toiletries sale - 12 items for £10; so I need somewhere to put these!

So the plan this weekend is to sort the cupboard out and make it organised- I have recently become addicted to Pinterest and there are some great organisation tips on there so I will have a look through and come up with something! Our trip to Ikea is bound to bring something to fruition- i am thinking of something like this on the back of the door...

2. Kitchen Wall Collage

Ok for some time now i have been hoarding white photo frames, i have finally got them all together so they can go on the kitchen wall as a collage and i have done some sorting to work out what will go in them! Except one of the frames is actually cream (i bought it in the sale for £1 here) so I need to crack open my white spray paint at last and make it match the others before I can arrange them on the wall...

3. Some crafty-ness

In general really. Last week we went to a warehouse sort of shop which supplies florists to get some artificial flowers to decrate our wedding cake and ended coming back with a bit more than artificial flowers (well it was really cheap!)

So i need to do something with my purchases which include a book of paper (all differnt prints- actually from TK Maxx) a papermache M and 8 a set of cast iron keys and some corkboard.

Also i have ordered some little owl figurines from ebay which i need to collect from the Post Office and spray white just like i saw on Pinterest!

Oh this afternoon i have already done one little project- some artwork switcheroo above the kitchen sink. We had this print of a london bus we bought from B&Q when we fIrst moved in to fill the space which we have temporarily moved to the living room (well everything is a mess and un-matching in there anyway!)

 

I bought a large white frame from Ikea a few months back and have bee looking for somewhere to put it and something to put in it. So when i found this Eat Seasonably calender on Pinterst, printed out in A3 it was actually Max's idea to hang it above the sink

Excuse the horrid kitchen and washing up- next year will be a new kitchen including a dishwasher!!

So here's to many more posts this weekend :)

The Hallway Renovation- Part 2

My favourite part of any renovation project has to be the finishing touches; although it always seems to take such a long time to get there!

So after the walls were stripped of the wood chip paper, the walls were filled, smoothed and had 2 coats of white undercoat we finally got round to painting the walls in the top coat:

We then ripped up the patch of carpet in the hallway (which our lovely cats had also been using as a urinal) and replaced it with a very cheap pack of wooden flooring from B&Q- next year we will replace all the downstairs flooring so it's more of a temporary measure:

Next we wallpapered the wall behind the radiator- this wall used to be a doorway but was boarded over as a (very small and strange) door way was opened in the dining area instead. The wallpaper was a better option to try and smooth the wall out a bit. 

A bit more stripey than I imagined- but its better than before! The radiator cover serves 2 purposes- covers the horrible small yellow radiator, covers the premature wallpaper trimming i did around said radiator- oops! We also replaced the old light switch with the chrome toggle one, got some owl tea light holders in the M&S boxing day sale and of course a plant from Ikea - I love plants because they purify our air!

Then we ripped up the old carpet - re-painted the skirting boards and had a new carpet installed by the same people who did our bedroom. We got a good discount- about 35% through a) bargaining b) agreeing to dispose of the old carpet our selves and keeping the old gripper rods we already had

Then time to put the old dresser which was in the house when we moved in back into position at the top of the stairs- we also installed a new dark wood venetian blind

Another Ikea plant purifying our air!

In the frame is a silk picture of an Elephant which we bought in Jaipur, India. We also have a bigger one we need to find a spot for!

Last finishing touches- a new curtain pole across the front door which was much harder to put up than we Max imagined, as there is a concrete lintel above the door:

 

We added a large mirror onto the wall at the bottom of the stairs- i bought it a few years ago when it was half price and a bargain! Then a photo gallery of a mixture of white frames up the wall- there are a few more i want to add soon

W

 We replaced the old light fixtures with two new ones which we bought for half price in the boxing day sales; we fitted them ourselves (i held the torch) and it took about 2 hours thanks to a wave of problems to do with wiring (you should probably get a professional to do it to be honest if you're not sure). Max grandad used to work in electrics so we were ok - after switching off the mains!

Oh and at some point we painted the door frame to the kitchen white- it was originally dark wood stain and it took over 10 coats of eggshell white and a new door handle

 

Eventually we would like to replace the bedroom and bathroom doors upstairs as they are the original doors to the house and are a bit "hollow" and cheap. The door to the airing cupboard though is quite cute and has got the original little handle which is the same one as the hatch in our bedroom so that will be staying

The 8 is from Posh Graffiti- we like the number 8!

 So that's it- this year we need to paint the banister and replace the doors but aside from that we are quite happy with the whole job!