Stairway to Heaven

February 27, 2013 By 13 Comments

It’s Pinterest Challenge time again over at Young House Love and oh was I excited about this one!  I FINALLY pulled the trigger on one of the first things I ever pinned, a chevron stair case -

Ahh…love this more every time I look at it.  Not to mention the wainscoting and decor in the picture are perfect.  But alas, carpet just isn’t in the budget right now so I figured I had two choices, paint or wallpaper.  Wallpaper seemed like way too much effort for such a small space so paint it was.  I started by giving the stairs a good cleaning (projects seem to be the only time something get’s a good cleaning in our house lately…) and a fresh coat of cream paint.  To make the chevron pattern, I created a template using some cardboard.  Then I traced the pattern onto the steps before using my beloved Frog Tape to tape the lines.  Along the way, I ended up creating a couple other template pieces to fit into the smaller spaces around the edge of each step.

This was seriously one of the most tedious, time consuming processes I ever used and ranks right up there on the fun scale with painting the ceiling on our sun porch.  Ugg.  But after the pattern was traced and taped off, I gave the steps two coats of a dark gray paint and I was done!

I haven’t had much time to take it in, but so far I’m pretty happy.  If I could do it over I’d use a slightly darker gray, but it’s soooo not worth taping and painting again.  I also like that our staircase isn’t the focal point in our house, so the pattern doesn’t overwhelm you.  It’s a nice little surprise that you catch on accident.

Some day I’m hoping we can upgrade to a carpet runner, especially when kiddos start running up and down the stairs, but for now I’m diggin’ our new steps.

To check out more of my pins, visit me on Pinterest.  Any suggestions on what I should do for the next Pinterest Challenge?

Filed Under: Decor, DIY, House, Paint

Shades of Purple

February 9, 2013 By Leave a Comment

Folks, we have veered off the neutral path and landed on purple.  Okay, maybe more of a light violet, but this was still a huge step for me on the color scale.  But it was all for a good cause because Juice’s big girl room is officially underway with a fresh coat of paint.  After trying a record low four paint samples, we went with Tic Tac Toe by Olympic.  I gave the room a good taping and then passed the paint brush to Brian.  Relinquishing paint duties went against every OCD fiber in my body, but after carefully inspecting his work, Brian may become the official painter of the Hawkins household.

The color get’s  a little washed out on camera, but I love how the color works with the trim and the blinds.

We also picked up the first piece of furniture for her room when we found this bed frame on Craigslist -

I’m usually not a big fan of a cherry finish, but I think it’ll look good with the color scheme of the room.  If not, I’ll just paint it!

Filed Under: House, Paint

Another Day, Another Door

October 25, 2012 By Leave a Comment

I’m beginning to think I have a thing for doors.  First, we painted the interior of our back door.  Then we added a peg board to the inside of our linen closet.  Now we’ve moved on to a door in our 2nd floor loft, making it a magnetic chalk board.  We’re hoping to make the loft a family room/play room down the road and thought this project would be fun for Juice (and any future Juice’s).  Here’s a before shot, including the growth chart we made last year -

I started with the magnetic paint, putting on two coats.  Thankfully I tested the door before I used the chalkboard paint because the magnet slid right down the door.  Apparently it’s really important to mix the paint and I left all the important stuff on the bottom of the can.  Two more coats later (of the thickest, heaviest paint ever) the door was magnetic!  The next night I put on two coats of chalkboard paint and it was done.

For Livie, I bought a couple animals at Michael’s and put magnets on the back -

She’s still a little young for the chalk, but she got a couple swipes in -

Sitting back and admiring her work -

Really, she’s more interested in eating it than drawing with it -

After Livie was done playing I made a Halloween themed door…and let’s just say I won’t be selling art any time soon -

 Embarrassing…I wish Olivia was old enough for me to blame this on her.

Filed Under: Decor, DIY, Kids, Paint

Fab 5: Year One

September 21, 2012 By Leave a Comment

After my accidental discovery of Off Boulevard’s one year anniversary earlier this week, I started thinking about all the projects we’ve completed over the past year.  Some I’ve loved, some have been a complete bust, and others we’ll enjoy for years to come.  Here’s a rundown of my five favorite projects.

1. Favorite Paint Project

I’d been seeing painted interior doors all over Pinterest and decided to jump on the bandwagon.  So glad I did!  I used my paint crush, Antiguan Sky by Benjamin Moore, and gave our kitchen/laundry room some life.

2. Best Memory

This wasn’t really a project, but it’s hands down my favorite post.  Being able to capture a time line of Juice growing up over the past year is so fun to see.  We might not be able to keep her little, but we’ll have a great way to remember year one.

 3. Favorite Kids Project

 Continuing with the kid theme, I’ve done a couple special projects for Juice this year, including fabric blocks (and a second upgraded version), capturing some year one pics, and my favorite, a DIY growth chart.  I love it because (a) it was easy to make and (b) it’s another great memory maker.   Every year we can capture a moment in time and have something to look back on.

4. Biggest Overhaul

This project required the assistance of professionals, with a touch of landscaping by us (and my dad!).  And wow what a difference!  We still have some finishing touches to make (furniture, lattice work, planters), but this space served us well this summer.  Now if only mosquitoes didn’t exist and it wasn’t a thousand degrees all summer…

5. Best Upcycle

Baby-proofing the house proved to be more of a challenge than we thought, especially when it came to installing a baby gate to the second floor stairs.  When we couldn’t find anything that would work, we took matters into our own hands and made a baby gate.  Using a door from the Habitat ReStore and adding a couple hinges and a latch, Juice was officially quarantined to the 1st floor!

So there you have it,  my fab five posts and projects from year one of Off Boulevard.  Now off to work on year two!

Filed Under: DIY, House, Kids, Life, Paint

Indecision Killed the Closet

September 15, 2012 By Leave a Comment

The last couple weeks, I’ve spent a stupid amount of time working on our hall closet makeover.  For such a small room, it’s sucking up a lot of time!  But I don’t blame the room, I blame my utter lack of skill at picking paint colors and my flair for indecision.  To arrive at my latest paint nightmare, I was working on what was suppose to be a quick project based off this pic I found when looking for inspiration for our hall closet makeover -

I loved the peg board idea as a way to create extra storage space.  Our closet door has two indentations in the middle so it was a perfect place to inset the pegboard.  So my first indecisive moment came when trying to decide what to do with the pegboard – paint it white or paint it a shade that would pop against the gray we already painted the inside of the closet.  In the end, I decided to spray paint the pegboard white and paint the inside of the closet door.  The best of both worlds.  We have a ridiculous number of paint samples around the house so I picked one of 8,000 mint colors that I tried for the patio ceiling -

Strike one.  It was neon mint and didn’t look very good with the yellow color in the hallway.  And I conveniently forgot to take a picture so sadly I don’t have a picture to share with you!  For the next round I picked a darker mint sample.  Strike two.  Again, no picture to document the ugliness.  Then I decided that I’d start from scratch and buy a new sample of a green shade.  Tried a test swipe, strike three.  At this point I had no desire to purchase any more samples so I turned to two of the colors I sampled for the back door we painted, Antiguan Sky and Robins Egg.  The test swatches looked pretty good and they probably both would have worked, but after spending way too much time on the door already, I threw in the towel and decided to just paint the door the same gray I used for the inside of the closet.  Done.

So after that was settled, it was time to attach the pegboard.  We cut the boards to the exact dimensions of the indentations and to attach them to the door, Brian cut little blocks to fill the space between the pegboard and the door.

We glued them to the back of the pegboard, can’t you just feel Riley’s excitement?

And finally, we drilled the pegboard through the wood blocks and into the door.

It wasn’t exactly the pop of color I was planning on, but hopefully the function will make up for that.  I’ll have to figure out another way to add a little punch to the closet, which I think I may have found in this little pattern -

Filed Under: DIY, House, Organization, Paint

Back Door Blues

August 30, 2012 By Leave a Comment

I’ve been loving all the painted interior doors popping up on Pinterest, and after a small amount of begging I finally convinced Brian to give it a try.  He ixnayed our front door so we decided to paint the door that leads from our “laundry room” to the back deck.  It’s not so much a room but a hallway with a washer, dryer, and some shelves shoved in it.  The room is so small you can’t really take a picture that captures the whole thing, but here was my best attempt at a before picture, minus the door -

Once I got Brian on board with painting the door, it was time to go on a paint hunt.  I really wanted to go for a robin’s egg-ish color so I got online to see what recommendations were out there.  Over and over people mentioned Antiguan Sky and Bird’s Egg from Benjamin Moore.  Considering the local Benjamin Moore store is one of my favorite (and completely overwhelming) places to visit, I was all over it.  I snatched samples of those two colors, and a couple others just to be safe, and headed to Lowe’s to get samples.  I started with just Bird’s Egg, but when I put the sample on the wall, Brian wasn’t convinced.  He said it was too close to Carolina Blue, which is a big no-no in our house.  So off I went to get a couple more samples, including Antiquan Sky and Robin’s Egg by Glidden.  And so another one of our walls was covered in paint samples…

{from left to right: Antiguan Sky by Benjamin Moore, Bird’s Egg by Benjamin Moore, Robin’s Egg by Glidden}

The good news was that Brian and I both agreed on Antiguan Sky, so the only thing left to do was wait for a cool weekend so we could take off the door to paint it and not sweat to death in our house.  In the meantime, I prepped the door for its transformation.  I started with a good cleaning, using Klean-Strip Easy Liquid Sander Deglosser.   It’s meant to help paint adhere to surfaces, but it also took stubborn marks right off.  Then I cleaned the windows and put painters tape around the window frames (and fyi – it’s not a good idea to clean a window right before taping something to it, doesn’t stick too well…).  After patiently waiting for a couple weeks, the weather finally cooperated and we took down the door and removed all of the hardware.

Using an angle brush around the window frame and door details, and a small roller brush on the rest of the door, I gave the door three quick coats of paint.  While I did that, Brian gave the hardware a face-lift with a couple coats of spray paint.  We didn’t do much to prep the hardware except give it a quick cleaning.  We used Rust-Oleum Paint & Primer in Oil Rubbed Bronze for the spray paint.

We stuck a key in the lock to make sure we didn’t gum it up when spray painting -

And don’t forget to spray the screws!

By the end of the day, the door was back in and it looked great!  The blue looks good in any light and wasn’t overwhelming for the room.

And the dark hardware made a world of difference.

Olivia and Riley apparently approved of the changes, it became their hangout of choice while I was taking pictures.

And coincidentally the door matches my toenails!

And so begins the transformation of yet another room.

Filed Under: Decor, House, Paint

Closet Love

August 8, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Do you ever feel like you spend all of your time putting things away?  I swear I spend hours of my life each week organizing our house.  And by organizing I mean moving stuff from space to space, avoiding any actual de-cluttering or taking care of something that needs to be done (like paying that bill that’s been sitting on the kitchen table for weeks).  One of my favorite spots to stash all of our crap is the 1st floor hall closet.  It’s centrally located between the bathroom, the bedrooms, and the kitchen, which means I throw everything in there…for the bathroom, the bedrooms, and the kitchen.  Here’s what it looked like at the beginning of this weekend -

 

Oh yes, in the same closet we have bath towels, a bike helmet, pots and pans, air filters, paint supplies, and a picnic blanket.  And this is after I emptied half of its contents and transferred them to another closet for no good reason.  So after viewing some pretty closet pictures on Pinterest, I got inspired enough to finally give this closet the love and organization it deserves.  Step 1 - A good cleaning and a fresh coat of paint.

After removing the shelves, vacuuming a good amount of dog hair, and finding a couple mice poops (um, disgusting…), I painted the shelf ledges and then taped before I painted the walls.  Let me just tell you how fun it was to tape all the ledges…

After a couple quick coats of Filtered Shade by Valspar, I was done!

It’s pretty subtle, but compliments the light yellow paint in the hallway.  Check back soon for Step 2…after looking at these pictures maybe it should involve installing a light in the closet!

Filed Under: House, Paint

Creme de Fail

July 4, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Despite crazy storms, power outages, and 100 degree weather, Brian and I managed to finish a quick painting project on our screened in porch this weekend.  It’s a great little space off of our living room, but it’s been sadly forgotten since we moved in.  It’s not a space we want to put a lot of money into, but it needed something to entice us out there.  This doesn’t exactly say “come, hang out” -

So to spice things up a little, we decided to paint the ceiling.  I was super excited about this project, not only because I thought it would look great, but it would be large impact with little effort.  Then we starting painting.  First, painting a ceiling is not fun.  If my neck had hands it would smack me.  Second, it took extra long due the fact that the ceiling is tongue and groove. So many more nooks and crannies to smush paint into.  Thankfully I convinced Brian to help me while Juice was taking a nap so the process went a little quicker.  Third, and note to self, never EVER paint outside when it’s over 100 degrees!  And the icing on the cake - the paint color was a big fat flop.  I was going for a mint green and thought I nailed it with the first paint sample, Benjamin Moore’s Creme de Mint (of course, the OCD in me still made me go buy three more samples just to be sure).  But after about an hour of painting and loosing 80% of our body weight in sweat, we both came to the same conclusion – the color was all wrong for the space.  Here are some before shots -

And the after -

Not much difference.  Unfortunately, the color gets completely washed out in the natural lighting.

I think this color would be fantastic inside, but it just didn’t work on our porch.  So come a cool day in the fall, our porch ceiling will be getting another coat of paint.

Filed Under: House, Outdoor Projects, Paint

Let There Be Light

May 21, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Apparently the thing to do in the 1950′s, when our house was built, was to stick a random lamp post in your front yard.  House lights weren’t enough, you needed another light to lead the way.  Well our lovely lamp post has sat dormant ever since we moved in two years ago, patiently waiting for a little attention.  Poor little guy was left unlit, cross-arm-less and all exposed from it’s peeling paint.

We finally showed it the love it deserves and gave it a makeover this weekend.  To be honest, this project made me nervous.  It was one of those projects that in theory is sounds really easy and you think it will only take a couple hours, but then you get knee deep in the thing and realize you completely underestimated the work that needs to be done.  In this case, we had no idea if the light would, or even could, work and I was not in the mood to do any electrical work or dig up our lawn to make that happen.  So with fingers crossed we took out the old light bulb and popped in a new one and…LIGHT!  Nice.  Now that we knew the lamp post actually worked, we dismantled all it’s bits and pieces, gave it a thorough cleaning, a quick sanding, and a couple coats of spray paint.

The last step was to highlight our new pride and joy with a little landscaping and voila, we were done in only a couple hours!

Filed Under: DIY, House, Landscaping, Outdoor Projects, Paint

Gray or Gray?

December 21, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Gray paint has been my arch nemesis for the past several months as I relentlessly search for the perfect shade.  I’ve wanted to paint one room in our house gray for a long time, and finally decided to take the plunge in our master bedroom.  I’ve always been a bit indecisive when it comes to picking paint colors, but the search for gray has taken it to a whole other level.  Literally, I’ve probably tried 15 different shades and our whole room is covered in patches of gray.

          

For the sake of my sanity, and probably Brian’s too, I’ve finally narrowed it down to three shades: Coventry Gray by Benjamin Moore, Stonington Gray by Benjamin Moore and Filtered Shade by Valspar.  Here are the three colors side by side, with Coventry Gray on the top.  I wanted to test them close to the white trim so I’d have an idea of how it would break up the color in the room.

Stonington Gray and Filtered Shade were pretty similar, but I thought Stonington Gray had a slightly blue undertone in the room’s light so I crossed that one off the list.  To get a better idea of the final product, I painted a big test patch on either side of the window.

I have a clear favorite, stay tuned for the final product!

Filed Under: Decor, House, Paint