Stain Art Table

Hello everyone! Happy Saturday! 

This past week I was browsing the swap pages on facebook and I found a woman who was GIVING AWAY her old table for FREE. Yes. FREE!!! So I promptly begged Jordan who eventually said OK fine.. 

This baby was in rough shape.. It had apparently been stored in a garage for a long time and had really been HEAVILY used. It was just screaming for a bit of love.. So I obliged ;) I'm so nice like that! 

I've had quite a few friends point me in the direction of a blog called "Sawdust & Embryos". The woman who writes it does wonderful stuff with stain to make art pieces so I thought I's give it a whirl...

I started by sanding the dickens out of the top until I was super duper sure that it was down to raw bare wood. I used pretty much every grit possible up to 220. It took forever... 

Of course I just had to do it at night so I was nice to my neighbors and left my garage door closed which necessitated some sort of respirator lol. I'm so cool!! haha. Ikea napkins are the shit.. Just sayin! 

So once that was done I had the big idea to try out a bit of stain art and I needed a concept drawing before I sketched it onto the table. This was the best I could do in pencil. I liked it well enough to move forward with it.

I LIGHTLY sketched the drawing onto the table and said a little prayer.. 

I literally almost had a panic attack when I was doing the first layer of stain. I kinda stepped back, freaked out hardcore and decided to go to bed. The next day I decided that it was a free table and I really couldn't mess up so bad that no body would like it lol. Art is art.. No matter what you do SOMEONE will love it. 

When I got this far I felt much better. I first stained it in Minwax English Chestnut then followed it up with some shading in Jacobean. It still didn't really feel done so I did some more shading in Rustoleum's Dark Cherry. 

Here I have the bottom half shaded with the dark cherry. You can really tell the difference. I liked how it looked but I thought the "petals" just kinda were a bit lacking so I thought maybe some highlights would do the trick. 

So I used some Rustolem stain in mineral green to highlight the petals. Then I took a water color brush from my stash and watered down some white acryllic paint. I went around the petals in places where I thought maybe actual light would hit a real flower. I finally felt finished so I painted the rim and gave it 3 coats of gloss poly! 

I painted the base in Chalk Paint and gave it a good waxing to seal it up nicely. 

There you have it. I love it. It looks so interesting.. Now if I can only sell it :) 

****UPDATE: November 9, 2015. Still haven't sold the table...

Here's a few things I have done since this table and I have to say I am really getting the hang of this technique!  

 This was a prototype I did for a big table. 

 

 This is our new bench for our table. 

 This is probably my favorite so far. 

A round table I did for a lady. I was a bit nervous at first to do such a light colored table but I think it turned out great!

Bathroom Bathroom

My Big Fat Bathroom Makeover

So as is my way I get a wild hair and I decide that today is the day we start to remodel the bathroom. My poor poor husband... 

I looked into everything it would take to just give it a good overhaul. I mean we had already updated it quite a bit but it just felt lacking. We had a perfectly sized piece of butcher block left over from the kitchen remodel (that's still not done....) so I thought YES we're getting this done and checked off! 

My Plan:

New counter top with undermount sink

new bronze faucet (not painted myself) 

backsplash tile

vinyl tile the floor

baseboards and door casings

So we went ahead and bought a new sink, faucet, door casing set, baseboards, shoe molding and vinyl tiles. We had EVERYTHING else left over from other projects lol. Yep. We're that awesome! 

I started out by painting the cabinet with Annie Sloan chalk paint in duck egg. It's a great color!  I also test fitted the floor.I wanted an herringbone pattern for a little more wow factor. This picture has the tile already up and counter on lol. I'm awesome at pictures..

Heres the flooring I used. I got it at lowes and it was 1.08 sq ft  at my local store.  I took each tile and cut it in 3 pieces with a razor knife.

This was probably the most important part. MAKE SURE EVERYTHING IS SQUARE!!!!! Seriously though. I'm a total free spirit so precision is really not my forte but it will look so ridiculous if your triangles are curved.. TRUST ME! I used 1/8 in spacers for this too. That's a huge help in keeping everything square.

 

It went down really fast.. Just took a good deal of patience! 

 

 Jordan cut the sink hole out per the template provided. We bought a rectangle undermount sink that was interesting to install. The first one we installed was cracked and I didn't notice until I went to do the final clean up on it so we had to rip it off and exchange it. Yay. 

We didn't like the chippy oak side panel so we slapped a left over piece of beadboard from our paneled entry ceiling (that post is coming!) on there and BAM instant upgrade! lol. We used 5.5 inch MDF as the trim around the bottom and we achieved this by screwing 4 pieced of 2x4 to the toe kick to give us something to nail the mdf to. Worked out well... 

I really think it looks nice and custom. Like we bought it and just set it there! My handy little helper there was trying to eat the cotton balls ;) 

Counter top on and waiting on faucet placement! Our sink ended up being really big so we had to put the faucet closer to the wall than was desirable but what can ya do?

I had to fill some holes and I (a big ole idiot) filled them with LIGHT colored wood filler.. Ugh.. It's barely noticeable until you throw some tung oil on there and HOLY WOW IS IT NOTICEABLE!! I sanded it back down as much as I could and it's barely there now..

My main man installing the faucet. We used a spade bit to drill the holes. 

There she is. All gorgeous and stuff.. Awww.. 

So there you have it.. Minus 1 drawer that someone (shh me) stripped a screw on...  

Now to decorate!

 My daughter actually took this photo :) :) 

I got all of these letters in the clearance section at Michael's whooo hooo! 

 

My shelves needed a bit of love too.. 

You guys ready for some before?

This is what it looked like when we bought it... Oh boy... 

Cedar shutters DIY

 "House Eyeliner"

 Cedar shutters DIY

Do you have a window in the front of your house that you pass by like "no big deal" everyday? I have one of those. The best part is its the window to my daughters' room and they have broken their awesome mini blinds into like 5 pieces. It's just ugly. No dancing around it or trying to cover it up. It's UGLY!

Well Jordan brought  home a shipping pallet a few weeks ago from work that was made of cedar!!! FREAKING CEDAR!!!! I. Was. Ecstatic. The very first thing that came to mind was shutters. We took down the old shutters we had up there to paint the siding and SURPRISE they broke :(. So I needed some new ones. It was time.... my heart longed for new shutters. I was sick with anticipation. There wad a hole inside me that I just couldn't fill..... Just kidding... but I really wanted to build some. So I sent the older kids to my mom's and while the baby slept I sat my butt in the driveway building shutters. Just me, my hammer and a box of nails. 

So here's where we started..

.

Notice the overgrown shrubbery and the awful "graige" siding color. Yuck. I really can't tell you how much I hated this house when we bought it. It just said BLAH. I am the complete opposite of BLAH. I rock pink hair most of the time. Ya know?!?! 

Getting all of the gigantic staples out of the planks was the hardest part. 

There were lots of these short pieces that I really had to sort through.I tried to get all of the good stuff out first. 

You can see them in there.. Just waiting to jab someone in the eye like some midevil torture tool. We had to take a hammer and bang out each one. No bueno but what can you do when you get free wood? Nothing. 

I used these long pieces for the base of the shutter. It helped it stay much stronger than our previous ones. 

All I did really was measure my window and cut the long boards to size. Then I laid them on my driveway and measure the width of the boards and cut 3 pieces to put on the top, bottom and the middle and secured them with 1.5 inch finish nails. 

My super technical method of measuring for the angled pieces is pictured above. I just laid it on there and marked the underside with a pencil so I knew where to cut my 45 degree angle. Easy peasy! 

Once everything was nailed on there I flipped it over and used  1.5 inch outdoor wood screws to screw through the back of everything.

Voila! I'll just leave you with this!

Choices Choices...

Flooring... UGH. 

Pouring over everything I can possibly find on laminate flooring is just not my idea of a good time. It has basically consumed my life entirely. I feel like I'm being sucked into this never ending black hole of flooring possibility... It's calling out to me like "HEY OVER HERE LOOK AT ME I'M SO PREEEEEETY". However I am on a budget. Like a teeny tiny ity bity I've thought about painting the subfloor and calling it good kind of budget... 

In a perfect world I would be buying these pretties! 

Drool... 

 SO MUCH DROOL!

OH MY HEAVENS BETSY! 

However those are all over 2 dollars a square foot and that doesn't include underlayment. SAD. So so sad... lol!!! 

I'm thinking I'm leaning more towards these... 

SO I took this picture from a review... I hope that is acceptable. We'll see. If I disappear for a while it's because I'm in internet jail. No biggie ;) 

This is called "Lake shore pecan" and it is pretty. It's not spectacular but it has the right colors and the price is only 

****DRUM ROLL PLEASE****

.79 cents. That we can do. 

Anyway it's not for sure yet and I have no idea what we'll end up buying but I am pretty sure that .79 beats 2.65 any day. Especially when your budget is pretty close to zero. ;) 

Check back later and see what we go with!