Back to the Draw... Painting Board

In my last post I made the point that reupholstering the chairs appealed to me because it involved no use of paint. That was fun and all, but I started missing the paint. The colors! The amazing ability to completely change something with a little paint.... I can't ignore it. For my next project, I wanted to get rid of this:

No, that heinous lamp is not mine. This photo is from the day we saw the house for the first time. I'm not sure if it's obvious, but thats a rust-brown wire-y looking thing that some people would venture to call "rustic." Well, I like rustic. Our wedding was probably the definition of rustic (more on that later). However, this thing missed. I'm assuming there is some version of this chandelier out there somewhere that was really cool, and the designers at hampton bay or whatever home-depot style company made it tried to failed at making a knockoff. Anyway, I decided to get out the spray paint. 

Spray paint and I DO. NOT. GET. ALONG. I know, I'm the only 10+ year old that can't use it. I blame my impatience. I spray too close, I spray too much, I hate waiting between coats to spray again, and I try to handle whatever I am spray painting in what I think is 10-15 min, but is probably 10-15 seconds. The result is awful: runs, drips, scrapes, chunks that come off... etc. An example is the picture frames I tried to paint for our wedding. I wish I had a picture, but I was stressed, freaking, and trying to get the job done. here goes the story:

My Mom and I take a trip to the wonderful IKEA somewhere outside Ann Arbor, Michigan while attending my brother's graduation. I wanted to use some family photos around the tables at the wedding, so I go picture frame searching and find these:

Bonus!!! They are $0.99!! AND they are double sided. Two pictures displayed for 99 cents? I'll take 100. OK, I got 8. 

Since we are using family photos from both sides, my mom and I decide that it might be nice to use black frames for Bobby's side and white for mine. Sounds simple. I go buy black spray paint. 

FAIL:

1. A little short can is NOT enough spray paint. 

2. I did every single one of the No-nos mentioned above: 

"I spray too close, I spray too much, I hate waiting between coats to spray again, and I try to handle whatever I am spray painting in what I think is 10-15 min, but is probably 10-15 seconds."

I got buy more spray paint. I sand down the frames. I'm "careful" to not do the above.

IT HAPPENS AGAIN!!!!!!

I sand them down again. And then I find this "hammered finish" spray paint. SCORE. This is supposed to look messed up. Somehow I get them made:

Those are my beautiful grandparents right after they got married and my beautiful husband in high school.

Back to the project: I am less than excited about spray painting this chandelier. Of course, with electrical engineers in my family, I assume I can get this thing down and not blow anything up, so I blow of that part of the problem.

I get the thing down, and I plan on spray painting it green to go with my new orange chairs and soon-to-be-blue walls. However, after priming it I decide I really like the white. I put on about 3 coats about 9 minutes apart (because you're supposed to wait 10 and again, I dont do waiting). I also shortened the chain, because whoever built our house was 5'1'' and doesn't understand tall people. In doing so, I shortened the wire. I soon realized that I shortened to much!!! AHHHHHH!!!

With help from the hubs (at 2 am because the paint was "dry to handle" 1 hour after the last coat, which I did at 1 am, nevermind he had the opening shift the next day), we got the thing back up and I used my crazy mad skills at working in close quarters (i.e., two fingers barely fitting into the ceiling above the fixture thanks to my shortening skills). It even turned on in the first try, which is good because I may not still be married if that wasn't the case. I like the result:

And I think it will look super-sweet with blue walls. You can see our sample paint in the background, to get an idea. And anyway, that chandelier is not coming back down, so it better look sweet.


And while I was happy spray painting... and since I had an unused can of green, I decided to update the mantle decoration:

Those pinecones once smelled like cinnamon and that made me happy, but now they look drab, smell drab, and are essintially placeholders until I think of something else to put in there.

But SPRAY PAINTED pinecones....

I'm happy for now.

4 New Chairs, 49 dollars!!

So the hubs and I (still so weird and so awesome to call him that!) are settling into our new abode. While we have already painted the kitchen and living room (I'm telling you, if you took the color of peanut butter, threw it up, and then smeared it on the walls, that was the color the previous owners seemed to think was appropriate for nearly every room in the house. Don't even get me started on the fuchsia NEON pink room). While painting is the quintessential way to spruce up a space, it was getting boring. Unchallenging. OK, my A.D.D. set in, whatever. I'd been planning planning planning this wedding. At the time, all I could think about was how awesome it would be when we were home from our honeymoon and I could come home after work and WATCH TV. DO NOTHING. This lasted for about a day 5 minutes before I was scouring the internet for a project. I took a page out of the BFF's book and decided to get on this home improvement without painting thing (Wanna know how long the no painting lasted? Stay tuned for tomorrow). Where do I start? Well, I cant scour theknot.com anymore, so I move to thenest.com and find this page. Lo and Behold, there are 4 upholstered chairs in Mom's storage that she's tried several times to give me. Why haven't I taken them? Well, I was the one that moved them from her attic to said storage unit, and I know that they are faded, filthy, and well..... filthy. They are, however, very good chairs, and I swore to her I would take them when I found money to have them reupholstered. Little did I know, this is quite an easy DIY project. In theory. So I go get the chairs. It takes me a good 30 minutes to figure out how to get all 4 of these things in my Acura. I find that I often go somewhere to pick up large, bulky items without thinking about their ability to fit in this tiny white car. This has to come from driving a truck for 10 years. After moving the chairs around in several different configurations (way more brain-working than sudoku, mind you), I closed the doors and got the chairs home:

 I bought fabric at Hob Lob, and found a (working) staple gun at the barn. This might have been the most impressive task of the day.

At some point, I had also come across a web page talking about reupholstering and in their case, they just put the new fabric over the old. This sounds easy, so I decide to copy. I use a plethora of fabric cleaner to clean the  newly acquired chairs, only to remove the seats to find that they are still downright disgusting:

No big deal, I think to myself... It's still a free chair. I'll just remove the fabric and use the same foam. No biggie. No biggie? there are 155 staples in every single one of these chairs. I know, because I counted. That's 620 staples. And these are old chairs. The wood has shrunk. They are not easy to get out. FML. But I do it. and then I find that not only is the fabric disgusting, but the padding is too!

Gross. Back to Hobby Lobby for foam:

Now that I have new (clean) foam and new (clean) fabric, I think I'm set. Wrong. Remember those pesky staples and how hard they were to get out? Well, they are also that hard to get in. They just won't go all the way in (that's what she said):

I resort to hammering them in the rest of the way, which doesn't make them go in any farther, but rather makes the bend and buckle. Whatever. I want to be done. At some point, this stops happening. I am still not sure if my skills go better or the wood got softer (not what she said), but I'm gonna decide to believe the first. Finally:

And a before and after:

I am pretty proud of myself, yes. And I think the orange will go great with the deep, dark blue we are painting the dining room agains pretty much everyone's advice. It's not like I can't paint it again, guys!!!