Projects in the Works

I’ve had too many projects going at once to find the energy to sit down and write a post lately. I do enjoy this blog and have missed posting and reading your comments, so I am going to try to get back on track here.

This is what I’m up to at the moment. I spent about 3 weeks redoing my back hall. I thought I took some before pictures, but cannot find them now. Anyway, you will have to take my word for it, but my back hall/mudroom was just sad, sad, sad. I had done a crackle finish on the woodwork years ago, and to add to that ugliness, the walls were in bad shape and naturally cracked! I had stuck down some vinyl tiles on the floor.

Now since this is MY main entrance (friends and guests typically use my front door), and I know it is very bad Feng Shui to have an uninviting entrance to your home, I had to give it a little makeover. Like most, I am on a shoestring budget this year, which meant I would have to utilize a lot of what I already had to work a little magic.

I used a Texture for my base on the walls first. This helped to disguise the poor condition of these sad walls. I then rolled on one coat of Ben Moore’s Aura in this great green shade, Agave. All woodwork was painted with the Aura’s Silhouette. I think you will be able to see the texture of the walls in another photo.

Storage is key for me in this small mudroom. I painted this once blah white cabinet with another Aura color called Buttered Yam and changed out the knobs for wooden ones which I stained a dark brown.

For more storage, I purchased these 2 plastic containers made by Itso, on sale at Target last week.

I also bought this Itso storage configuration at Target. The base unit comes flat packed in a box and assembles in seconds without any tools at all. It is very sturdy and you can add on additional components such as doors and bins, or stack more units. The canvas bin on the top of this unit is large enough to hold 2 pair of skates and a bike helmet.

The floor posed my biggest challenge. After ripping up the vinyl tiles, scraping and sanding off the glue, I gave it a coat of primer, followed by a grey floor and porch paint. I was painting on the plywood sub-floor. The grey door is steel and was poorly installed by Home Depot years ago. When the door opens, there is only about a 1/4" clearance between the bottom of the door and the floor. This makes it impossible to put down a real rug, or even floor tiles. So, my solution was to try out using a yoga mat. It’s very thin, sticks nicely to the painted floor and now these yoga mats come in some great colors with designs printed on them. The door opens easily over the mat and the mat is very wipe-able when my wet/muddy boots and shoes enter from the outside elements. I’ll just have to see how it holds up over time, but the mat was only $15.

I’ve been experimenting with glass etching, so continued my experimentation with my window panes. To achieve this look, I stuck round dots (from a stationery store) onto the window pane and applied some EtchAll. After 15 minutes, the EtchAll is wiped off and voilà… an etched pane! Of course, I ran out of the EtchAll because I was using up the end of a jar, so have to put in an order for more to finish this project. I am going to etch ever other pane like this and may do the reverse of this design on the remaining panes. Will post when done.

The wall space is very limited, and I have just this small strip of wall to be able to add a graphic design. I am thinking of painting something tall, like a thin, bare tree w/o leaves as a silhouette, using the same color as the woodwork.

There was this odd little space to the right of this cabinet, due to a gas pipe that runs from floor to ceiling. This turned out to be the perfect home for my hockey sticks!

I will add a few hooks to the horizontal woodwork here and need to put my key holder back up on the wall below the switch plate/outlet. It seemed like it took forever to complete (well almost complete) this project, but that was because I’ve been working on 2 bathrooms and a restaurant job at the same time. I will be posting those jobs shortly.