Lately I've Been Trippin'

The past couple weeks we've been tripping with my family. We stopped in Utah (where I got to celebrate my birthday!) on our way to California for Reece's graduation from Marine Corps boot camp. We had a lot of fun seeing friends and family who were able to make time to see us. and we are so proud of our Marine!

[caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="400"] After the graduation ceremony[/caption]

Here are a few pics from our short stop at Mission Beach.

Anyway, before we left, we painted our kitchen and dining room floors. Yes! We did! I looooooove them!

[caption id="attachment_1204" align="aligncenter" width="731"] See that awful cement pad? We have no idea why it's there. It goes all the way down through the floor to the ground outside. Now it blends![/caption]

We used a porch and floor polyurethane tint-able oil-based paint by Glidden.  So awesome! Because the polyurethane is already in the paint, your paint doesn't yellow! I might have to re-do Caeden's room because his turquoise floor (we used a latex paint) got a yellow tint as soon as I put a poly coat on it. Boo!

I also chalked my fridge! With colored chalkboard paint! I had some leftover from a project and was all, hey! Paint the fridge!

It's currently the only Christmas "decoration" we have up right now...we haven't had time to put up a Christmas tree yet! Stay tuned for more kitchen awesome-ness happening soon!

My Dresser Got The Blues

Blue, blue, blue, blue! My go-to color. Also the main color in our room. Since we are keeping this dresser, it became blue to match the bed in our room.

We got this dresser from a neighbor who was moving out of state. It was missing one of the plastic deco things, so we just got rid of all of them and put on some wood trim. 

I primed the dresser with Zinsser's oil-based paint because it's all the rage with DIY furniture makeovers, so I thought I would give it a try. In all honesty, I don't see what the hype was all about. Zinsser's water-based primer is just as good, and I don't have to use mineral spirit to clean my brush/self up, or throw the brush away. and omgosh, oil-based primer smells SO BAD. So bad. The oil-based primer also takes about 1,490,099 years to dry.

While I was waiting for the primer to dry I spray painted the hardware gold with Rust-Oleum Metallic spray paint.

We have been working on our house for over a year. It’s a work in progress. We officially moved into our house in April earlier this year, and have slowly been furnishing it. So excited to have this baby in there!

Simple and Simply Blue

I love colored dressers and the color blue. If a piece doesn't "speak to me" like the pink and white chevron dresser, I usually opt to paint the silent piece blue. It's my fave; soothing, sincere, comfortable, constant, playful, and fresh. Fresh like water, not fresh like, "are you getting fresh with me?" 

The only thing I would do differently is maybe stencil a design on the drawers to give it more character and texture. 

This is what the dresser looked like before (thanks, Rebecca!):

First, I primed it with Zinnser water-based primer which is a huge step up from the leftover drywall primer I have been using. (Zinnser primer has an oil based primer too, but I wanted water based...I'll get adventurous and try oil-based one of these days. I heard it's great!)

Second, I painted 3-4 coats of Color Place (the Wal-Mart brand) Timeout Turquoise in semi-gloss using a mini foam roller brush (also from Wal-Mart) and that was it! No sanding or anything. 

Color Place True Turquoise

Mini foam roller from Wal-Mart

One last look:

This baby will be at the Fall Festival in Cameron, Missouri on Saturday (October 20th, 2012). I'm so totally excited for it! 

Thanks for looking!

Inspire: Blue

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Traditional Dressers Chests And Bedroom Armoires design by Furniture And Accessories Horchow

Modern Buffets And Sideboards design by Room Service

Asian Side Tables And Accent Tables design by Dc Metro Media And Blogs Beth Connolly

Contemporary Chairs design by Fossil

A Blue Side Table

Turns out, I'm not very good at "creative" titles for my blog posts. I'm okay with it. Lately, people have been giving me their reject furniture out of the goodness of their hearts. That's how I got this little side table: 

It was in great shape except for the bottom piece. It was breaking and falling off, so My Honeypie just removed it. I used some of my left over paints and mixed them together to get the color and do-do-doo-blue!

I plan on taking her to the Cameron Fall Festival. One last quick look:

Thanks for looking!

Inspire: Boho Chic

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A Tufted Seat

Last week I tried tufting for the first time. I took a bench that looked like this:

And with a button kit, upholstery needle, duck cloth, and love made it look like this:

Hooray for first tries! I want to try diamond tufting next. You know, the really incredible stuff that looks like this:

via here

Blue and Lime

A chair, a chair! 

Hold on. Look to the right. There is a little, tiny poll. Not pole. Go ahead and vote! 

Now.

Here I have a wicker back chair from part of the Sunday Sneak Peek this week...and it turns out I only have one before picture from my phone. So here it goes: 

Now:

The best part is that I got the green vinyl for 50% off as a remnant! Yay! The worst part is that I have somehow misplaced the screws for the seat...which means I have to make a trip to get some. Ugh. 

Also, check out this awesome preview which was not on the sneak peek this week:

I'm so excited about it I can't hold still!

Oh, Hey

We are still here! We just don't have much to say in the way of our house--it's a little bit slow! but I did finally finish my bar stools that I bought a year ago. They were fiddy cents each so I swooped them. This is what they looked like before:

Ew. This is what they look like now!

WOOP!

Anyway, don't worry, I'll let you all know when we start being awesome again :)

With a Blue Little Window

and a blue corvette... I think my favorite color is blue, but this is only a recent discovery. I think. I'm not really sure. For the past couple of years when people are all like, "What's your favorite color?" I say, "blue...and yellow...and some greens...and Pink! and..." basically, I love a rainbow.

But I also love white. I actually knew a guy whose favorite color really was (Is?) white. huh.

Anyway. You already know I'm a paint snob, so we got some white that I like for our room.

We broke the Sabbath and painted it yesterday:

and today I painted the bathrooms:

upstairs 

downstairs 

Just so you know, I didn't forget to paint half the bathroom--we will be putting up bead board! and let me explain our sink situation: We got two pedestal sinks for free, but neither of them had the pedestals. We wanted storage, but pedestals don't allow for storage, so we improvised and bought this vanity for five bucks, and stuck the sink on top of it. Yes! Personally, I love it--I'm going to paint the vanity tomorrow. BLUE!