Shelf styling with holiday finds

I have realized often that shelves need a lot of STUFF on them to look like they do in magazines. Over the holidays I found a few extras to put on my shelves in the guest room and I think it's starting to get where I want it to be.

One of my new favourite items has to be this bookend from HomeSense:

I just love how masculine it is. I couldn't find a good combination of book spines so I just turned the books around to have the neutral pages showing.

To balance the Ox, I picked up a more feminine bookend from Winner's:

Also from Homesense, I found this treasure box (they had 3 or 4 in various sizes, and I loved them). I added the "object" that I found at Chapters on boxing day:

Here is the bookshelf as it stands now...I'm sure it will get switched up many times in the coming months, but I'm happy "enough" with it right now.

DIY painted curtains + tutorial

Thank you all for your lovely comments on my post yesterday! We went to Nota Bene (if anyone in Toronto wants to try somewhere new, for a special occasion, I highly recommend it!).

Today I am finally featuring a project that we completed in our uber productive weekend a couple of weeks ago! I thought I could post about it the day we finished, but the rod we had was wooden, and it really didn't look good dark, so I had to paint it white. Anyhoo...without further ado...

I started seeing these curtains a while ago, and posted about my search for bedroom curtains here. I couldn't find fabric in the scale of stripe that I wanted, so I decided to go the painting route! Recently some of my fave bloggers have shared their projects - check out The Design Pages and View Along the Way for a couple of examples.  Here's how mine turned out:

What do you think? I am loving them!

You can find tutorials around the web, but I was diligent in taking photos of the project this time so I am sharing my steps below:

1. Buy curtains - I went with Ikea Lenda tab top curtains. Iron them before you start your project so the paint will go on smoothly.

2. Choose a paint colour - I kept it simple by using leftover wall paint. We have a few patterns in the room so I wanted to keep the drapes pretty neutral. I bought a fabric medium that I added to the paint - it makes it slightly softer and less likely to crack. I didn't use the 1:1 ratio it recommended (solely because I didn't want to spend a lot of money on fabric medium). Here's the one I used - it was about $13 at DeSerres (art store):

3. Plan plan plan! Choose a pattern - I went with stripes. I was initially liking the large chevron patterns, but I decided to keep this easy.

Quite honestly, it took me MANY tries to figure out the measurements to get the coloured stripes where I wanted them! I wanted to keep it white close to the top (so I didn't have to paint the tabs), but didn't want a full stripe measurement up there...and I wanted white on the bottom to ensure they hung nicely.

4. Once that is done, measure your stripes / pattern and start taping. Note - I used a pen for measurements...as I was doing it Sarah Richardson popped in my head saying "You always use pencil when painting, pen shows through"...I thought that was only for walls - but no, it applies to fabric too! Use pencil.

Remember when you're taping to be consistent with inside / outside taping for your measurements. For mine, I taped on the "inside" of the white stripe lines (that's why they look narrower in the pic). I also put a piece of tape on the stripes that were to remain white - such a simple trick but it saved me a LOT of headaches and potential mistakes! It's probably my favourite new trick from this project.

5. Get painting! I mixed the fabric medium with the paint and used a small foam roller to paint, did two coats of colour:



6. Say some choice words for being careless with the paint when going from rolling pan to drape...argh!



7. Remove tape (I used frog tape and removed it after the paint was dry and it was a nice sharp line)

8. "Heat seal" the paint...this is what the fabric medium said to do - it's simple enough, you iron the painted sections once very dry with a cloth on top and underneath. To be honest, I'm not sure if it made a difference.

9. Hang your curtains and admire!















Roomspiration: Guest room

I hope you all had a wonderful weekend! I sure did (oh, and I finally joined Twitter - follow me @interiorgroupie)...more on that later this week, because today I am joining the Roomspiration Link Up party! This couldn't have come at a better time - last week while I was looking through my blog for a photo of my guest room to put into my post on Style at Home's trend of new neutrals (sage), I realized I hadn't shared anything about my guest room. Shortly after, I came across the Roomspiration Link Up party via View Along the Way (by the way - if you haven't checked out Kelly's blog you definitely should) and discovered Sept 19 was Guest Room day.

My guest room was actually one of the first rooms done in our house. I'm not sure what the motivation was - maybe we had most of the pieces so it was easy to throw it together?  Some people consider guest rooms as the rooms where unwanted furniture / decor goes to die, but ours came together naturally with all new stuff.

To show you what we were working with, here's what it looked like before we moved in:

And after...

The room is painted in Benjamin Moore Saybrook Sage (I got my colour inspiration from the lovely Mrs. Limestone)  The lamps and duvet cover are from Homesense (great score there!). You can read about the rad covers are DIY's, which you can read about in my previous posts here and here.

This photo shows the shelf / armoire that I still need to style (woops) and some basic "for now" tables which are essentially places for guests to put their luggage or toiletries.

The nightstands were I think the first furniture refinishing DIY I took on at our new house. Here they were before:

And after...

A little sanding, a bunch of paint, and some glass knobs from Target, and voila. I couldn't pass these beauties up, they were the perfect height and size for nightstands in the room.

The "art" in the room is a super simple DIY - blow up a couple of your favourite pictures, cut a mat to size (ok so that wasn't so simple without a mat-cutting kit), paint Ikea frames black (I forget what frame this was...but it was only $5 and only available in natural wood), and there you have it - some large scale frames. You could easily do this with pre-matted frames, but I liked the size of these so I had to do it custom.



Anyone want to come for a visit?

If you want to see more:



Bedroom drapery

Who else is melting?? It is extremely hot and humid here in Toronto - 38 C (100.4 F) BEFORE humidity, feels like 49 C (120 F).  I love summer and all, but this is hot hot hot. My Vegas friend compared the heat in Vegas to the feeling you get when you stand beside a bus...I'm pretty sure that Toronto is all beside a bus right now. It's obsene...onto nicer thoughts...

Our master bedroom is getting closer to being "done" (are rooms ever actually done??). Now it's time to look for draperies. This week in particular a couple of my favourite bloggers have posted some inspiration pics I love - like these over at Calmly Chaotic:



And these from aDESIGNdock:



As a reminder, here is our master:



It is obviously already "busy" with pattern, but I think it could handle a bit more on the drapery. I am envisioning oatmeal-coloured fabric, with a gray-ey-green-ey thick chevron.  Something a little like this:



via Pinterest (Follow me at - InteriorGroupie (Heather) )

Now, only to find this imagined fabric....while searching for inspiration pics, I came across a painted-drape DIY that turned out beautifully:



What are your thoughts on painted fabric? The drapes look great in the picture, but will they hang well? I'm a bit doubtful...there is a full tutorial on the KFD Design site here.

Here are some fabric ideas:



Tonic Living Flatiron Gray - I think this is too narrow given the pattern we already have going on on the bench and pillows.

Tonic Living Joy - this could be another option, but again I think the scale is too small.

Designer Fabrics online Tessuto Jolies/4239 - closer to the colours, but a bit bland...

I hope to hit up Designer Fabrics on Queen St. W on Friday afternoon - does anyone have any suggestions for fabric stores (or a store that might have linen-y drapes with a bit of added interest?). In the meantime, here are some of my favourite inspiration pics:



via Pinterest - love all the gold accents

via Pinterest - I like the wide spacing on these ones

via Pinterest - interesting take, I never thought of chevron sheers! Not the look for my room, but interesting nonetheless.





Night Tables - complete!

I finished our night table project last week and am really happy with how they turned out! As a reminder, this is what they started out as:

We found the tables on Craigslist. They were originally from Cornerstone (shop in Toronto), and were finished in a red/black "crackle" finish. Not really the tones I wanted for the master bedroom :)  But, that being said, they FIT - which was harder than I thought. We could only have tables that were about 24" square and a lot of night tables are quite a bit wider than that. Aside from the fit issue, I found night tables to be way more expensive than I thought they would be ($400 each? ouch), so these were a comparative bargain.

I tried stripping the paint / finish but it didn't work out very well, so out came the trusty sander!

NIght tables sanded

Primed

I wanted to do a design on the top, and wanted something relatively simple to tape out and paint. I ended up doing a very simplified greek key design. I taped it out after painting the tables gray:

I used Frogtape after many positive reviews online. While it definitely makes crisp lines, I had some bubbles in the tape due to humidity on taping day. Nonetheless, the areas where paint seeped into the bubbles were easy to touch-up with gray paint.  Here is the final product (drum roll please!):

And in our room....

The tables still need to be styled (I wish our ipod alarm clock wasn't so big! but it's so useful I don't want to get rid of it). Will likely put some books horizontally on the shelf for visual interst, and then hide anything else (phone charger, kleenex, etc.) in the closed portion at the bottom. I am really happy with how they turnd out, specifically the gray paint colour. We bought a quart of paint from Habitat Restore for $3 and the colour worked out perfectly!







Oops

Everyone makes mistakes, right? Right. RIGHT. This is a little story about how we are not exempt from that rule...

Remember our early success with the rad covers? Well, we were so pumped about the results on the main floor we decided to waste no time getting some rad covers built for our bedrooms upstairs.

We went about the measurements, did all the cuts, assembled, painted, and poof - rad covers!  We didn't test things as much this time around -- followed the "measure twice, cut once" rule and that was that.

Well. Maybe a better rule for us would be measure twice, get it checked by a second set of eyes, measure again, compare, build a test unit, measure again, and cut.  Because THIS is the result of working while our new-found-wood-working-confidence was at an all-time high:



Do you see how small that top is for the cover?? The cover is perfect for the rad, but we must have measured the size of the rad for the top, not the size of the cover. UGH how annoying. Not only do we have to re-do the top, but the material is basically wasted (anyone need a rad top??). ugh.  To top it all off, that wasn't the only mistake:

Same issue as the first one. What's worse than making a stupid mistake? Doing it twice!

What's worse than doing the same mistake twice? Well...the one rad cover we thought was safe, the one that had a top that would fit over the rad cover, turned out like this:

Are you kidding me!??! We messed up the actual cover on this one - which led to us buying more metal screen for the inside, and led to this gargantuan rad cover that comes out over the window sill. We're hoping for this one we can pry the pieces apart, cut off the execss and put it back together. Cross your fingers ladies and gents!

Can you believe this comedy of errors?? The Mr.and I were in shock when we discovered just how much we did wrong, and the fact that it wasn't just one cover that was messed up, it was all three!!  That being said, we had a good laugh - what else can you do? We have a busy few weekends coming up so these won't be able to be fixed immediately, much to our shagrin...but we will get to it, and make it right!





DIY painted lamps

A little while ago, I posted some inspiration pics for turquoise lamps.  Turns out I had great directions from my commenters over to a DIY step by step at Isabella and Max from Barbara at HodgePodge, and a perfect example to follow from Emily at Name 5 Things.

It all started with a trip to Home Depot (since we're there all the time I have to occupy myself by looking for something exciting, beyond the wood or nails or whatever functional thing we are buying). On this trip I found a PAIR of lamps for $13 (I didn't put them together for the before picture, but you get the idea):

When I bought them I knew immediately I wanted to paint them turquoise - and figured the worse thing that can happen is that I don't like them, and turn around and sell them on Craigslist (and probably for more than the $13 I paid for them!).

So I went through the tutorial and prepped and primed them with spraypaint. I tried to get even coverage and made sure to do light coats. I did 2 coats of primer:

Then it was time for the fun part - the colour!! I did 2 coats of "aqua" spray paint and 2 coats of gloss spray - easy add on for this project since I could only find the colour of spray paint I wanted in a "satin" finish, but I was going for a lacquered finish. I lightly sanded a couple of rough spots between the primer coat and the colour, but other than that it was pretty smooth:

Nice and glossy!

Here is the full finished product:



Cost for this project:

Lamps (2):  $13

Spray paint (primer, turquoise, and gloss - $6 each): $18

Total Cost: $31. Considering it is next to impossible for me to find a lamp that I like under $50 I think that's a success!

Watch for full bedside photos to come once I finish painting our bedside tables.