Dreaming of…Simple DIYs

While you are reading this I am enjoying the glorious sunshine / torrential rain / standard mild grey British summer weather (delete as appropriate) of the lake district. I have turned off my wifi so I can’t actually tell you what the weather is like as I am writing this from the past / to the future. Needless to say – none of that actually matters.

After showing you my new gallery wall last week, I thought you might like to see some other simple transformations I’ve been able to tick off my list.

This one involved more Annie Sloan chalk paint and some furniture that was bland and boring.

Namely this TV stand. We had it in our flat, where it fitted in quite nicely, but have been wanting to replace it to blend in with our current living room decor. We’ve never gotten around to actually replacing it though, so when I discovered the chalk paint on my frames, I had a flash of inspiration. How easy would it be to just paint over the whole thing to make it look more stylish?! The answer…very easy.

before

We looked for a dark grey paint, but couldn’t find one we liked so settled for this blue.

After unscrewing the cupboard doors, all it took was 1 layer of paint (seriously no sanding or priming), a layer of wax, some distressing with sandpaper and a final layer of wax. The whole thing took about 3 hours including drying time – be warned, it dries VERY quickly!

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Nothing is ever that simple though and in the process of putting it all back in the living room, we managed to snap the glass TV stand. This meant that we had to wall mount the TV and left the unit looking rather bare.

broken tv stand

The trickiest bit then was deciding how to style it up.

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We settled on styling 3 in the end – just the right amount of colour and balance.

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Finally I painted a little mahogany side table to match. This took about half an hour to do the whole thing and now makes it fit our living room beautifully!

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Have you had much luck with chalk paint?

I have loads left … just need some more things to paint now!

Branching out…

…from canvas paintings to paper paintings.

A couple of weekends ago I picked up 2 big photo frames for 50p (!!!) at a carboot sale. Who can turn down a bargain like that? So obviously they had to be filled.

At first I was thrown by the fact that it wasn’t a canvas (my go to medium at the moment), but then I found some lovely, large cartridge paper in Paperchase (and lost a few hours of my life rapturously stroking all the notebooks and stationery). I ordered some inks on ebay, but when they arrived I realised they were marbling rather than drawing inks.

The basic tools

The basic tools

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I painted the backing card to match our bedroom colours

I painted the backing card to match our bedroom colours

I tried dripping the ink straight onto the paper, but it was too oily and they all just looked black, so I adapted my method (sorry – I’ve been assessing science and the lingo is on the brain) and decided to use the inks as they were intended. i.e. I mixed them into water and then pretty much just threw the inks at the paper.

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I stopped at the point where it felt like the paper was fully saturated and about to disintegrate. And then I let it dry.

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And that was it really. Some of the ink is still wet, but once it was tucked behind the glass, my walls and fingers were safe from further marking.

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This was such a fun and simple (albeit very messy) project and it looks lovely filling up the wall in our bathroom. You’ve just gotta love paintings that fill the wall.

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P.S. it’s really hard to take photos of glass without any reflections!!