Our Rancher: Before & After - The Hallway.

I'm sure some of you are thinking that a hallway does not deserve it's own "before and after" post...especially in our humble ranch.  In many homes, they are merely a walkway to get from point A to point B.  And while that is true, our view has changed quite a bit from when we signed on the dotted line.

Removing a few walls, adding some pot lights and a stencil (or two) has definitely improved our modest hall.  I still have manyyy picture frames to hang here before I can call this "complete", but it's getting there.

Not too bad, huh?  I can't wait to share our guest bedrooms and bath!

And catch up on the rest of the "then and now" series with these links...the intro, part one, two, three, four and five!

One Frame Down...

Those of you that have been around here a while (thank you, love you!!!), you know our hallway has gone through a bit of an evolution.  I tackled my first stencil project on those walls...

...and then I even hung a few frames. 

Not long after they went up, I realized I wanted something more.  I decided to hang a few mini-galleries on each wall. 

I liked it, but I wasn't satisfied.  I wanted something a little bold...something that made more of a statement.  So I did what any insane person would do...I removed all the frames (don’t worry, I only hang stuff with 3M picture hanging strips), rolled over the hours of stenciling I had originally done and started stenciling, again.

I’m 99.9% certain my hubby thought I was nuts, but I had a picture in my head I just couldn’t shake.  

After a veryyyyy long day, I had the results I wanted all along!  I was smitten.

...except for the fact that I had to re-hang. all. of. those. frames.

UGH.  I, legit, loathe hanging things.  I really don’t know why I hate it so much, but I do.  It’s one of my least favorite things to do...which is evident by the fact that our halls are still bare.  Yup, I re-stenciled well OVER a year ago, and have yet to hang a single frame back up.

Until now!  Thanks to UncommonGoods reaching out to review one of their products, I quickly found some motivation to hang at least one piece up in our hallway!

UncommonGoods is a super cool company, out of NYC, that supports artists and designers.  Half of what they sell is made by hand and most of it is created right here in the USA!

Their site is super easy to navigate, and allows you to shop by category.  I headed straight to their art page (here) and fell in love the minute I came across this piece, Balloons Over Brooklyn Bridge.

The print looked so good online, and was even better in person!!  It came matted and mounted on matboard. All I had to do was pop it into my frame and hang!

Like their name suggests, UG sells many interesting and unique gifts.  Mother's Day is just around the corner and they have a page dedicated to buying gifts for her that you can check out here. If you want to make sure you're mom's favorite, then click here to get her something good! ;)

_______________________________________________________________________

Thank you UncommonGoods for providing me with the art for this post.  All opinions are 100% honest and my own!

Accent Wall Sneak Peek!

Alternate post titles....1) a bunch of pictures that are so far from being Pinterest-worthy or 2) real-time, real-life makeover....

A few posts back I mentioned I was in the middle of making over our bedroom for the millionth time.  I showed off our TV gallery wall that was (ahem, I mean is) 99.9% complete and I'm here to share another project for that room that isn't quite finished...but it's oh-so-close!

This was a project that both scared and excited me.  It's been floating around in my head for a very long time (for real...this makeover has been underway, mostly in my head, for almost a year), but I kept going back-and-forth on it.  Going forward would mean painting over my beloved Balmy Seas and tackling a stencil project on top of that.  {You would think I'd be sick of stenciling after this, this and this...but nope, I'm still smitten with the results.}

I realize I was hemming and hawing over something that was just paint, and if it didn't work out, I could just get more beautiful blue-green paint, sand down the stencil and repaint my wall, AGAIN...but to be honest, the thought of putting all that work into something I could totally hate didn't sound like fun.  Time is so precious, and I have about one million other DIY projects to tackle! ;)

So I put the project off for months, but it never disappeared from my thoughts.  I took that as a sign to stop being scared and lazy.  I needed to get the idea out of my head and onto the wall to see if I would actually like it.

Spoiler alert, I didn't like it, I loooved it!  And thankfully, hubby did too.

We started here.

(Those super cool wall decals are from the amazing Julia!  You should check out her shop...she's on vacation now, but will be returning soon!)

The decals, mirror and DIY lucite curtain rod came down, and it was time to paint.

I used the same dark gray that I painted the rest of our room (Martha Stewart's Zinc matched to Glidden paint).  It took two solid coats to cover.  

I liked it when it was done, but I'm not going to lie, I was a little skeptic.  I think I was used to having a pop of something...and now there was just a whole lot of gray going on.  Gray walls, gray lamps, gray bed frame, gray bench, gray rug.  I semi-freaked, but then reminded myself to keep moving forward because I will be swapping a few of those gray items out of the room and I have grand DIY-makeover plans to add in the much needed "pop" that was now lacking in the space.

After the wall was dry I assembled the tools to get my stenciling done.  I dug out an amazing stencil I purchased from the very talented Sarah (ummmm, last July!!!), a small container of Minwax's Polycrylic in Gloss, some Krylon spray adhesive, a drop cloth, small paint tray and small foam roller.

In my head, I envisioned this stencil to have a gloss-on-matte, wallpaper-ish effect.  The paint I used on my walls was a flat finish and instead of buying another can in a gloss finish, I headed to our basement and grabbed a small container of gloss polycrylic I had on hand.   Yay for being cheap thrifty!

After the first pass, I was nervous.  Since I was using polycrylic and not paint, the pattern looked AWFUL when it went on.  Instead of panicking, I pretended it looked fantastic and continued my second pass with the stencil. Thankfully, by the time I finished the first two passes, things were dry, and the light was bouncing off the glossy design, just as I had hoped.  It was a success!!

And here's a peak at the whole wall covered.  

I just have a few tiny things to touch up, and then I'll be able to officially cross this project off the "master bedroom refresh" to-do list!!

Anyone else have a mid-way project freak-out?!  Did it turn out okay in the end??

Evolution of Our Hallway.

For just being a hallway, ours has undergone quite a few changes in the short time we've owned our home. First and most importantly, we knocked down quite a few walls to create our open floor plan.  

Then once that happened, I knew I needed to spice up the blank slate.

I added a stencil...quite a daunting task for a first time stenciler, but boy was it worth it!

Then I added some much needed frames.  I thought that was good, but quickly realized it was still lacking something.

So I decided to add a lot more frames to create four mini-gallery walls.  I now realize I only showed off the first gallery that went up...and after that I lost steam on the project.  The frames were up for quite some time, but I never got around to filling them with meaningful art, words and photos.  {Please tell me I'm not the only one who moves slower than molasses at that task!!}

After my gallery walls were up, I surely thought our hallway was almost done.  I just needed to fill the frames find the perfect mirror to hang where my current "place-holder" mirror is.  Ohhhh, if only that was the case. ;)

To be perfectly honest, I just wasn't feeling the pattern I put up in the hallway anymore.  Don't get me wrong...I really did love it when it first went up!  At that point in time, it felt like a big risk to put a pattern up over our entire hallway.  I loved the extra something it added, but as time passed, I realized it wasn't enough for me.  My style is constantly evolving, and along with that evolution, I seem to gain courage to take more risks and try new things.

I was craving more.  I wanted a bold statement in our hallway, and after seeing YHL paint their floor, I knew the exact pattern I was searching for...Royal Design Studio's Suzani Silk Road.  

I placed my order the same day YHL's post went live, and I couldn't wait to paint over our stenciled hallway to give me a fresh new canvas.  Who would have everrrr thought I'd say I was happy to paint over something that took me 9 hours to complete?!  Certainly not this girl!!!

Shockingly, I didn't cringe on bit as I covered up the pattern.  {FYI...if I wasn't putting such a busy pattern over my previous stencil, I would have sanded the walls down before painting over it to make sure everything was smooth and there was no trace of the stencil left.  I took a risk not doing this, but I figured my bold pattern would be forgiving...and it was, phew!!!}  It took two coats to cover {mostly because I used a semi-gloss white paint for my stencil the first time around, but soon I was ready for my new pattern to go up!

I stuck with Behr's Gentle Rain as the base coat color for the hallway.  It's the same color we have in our living/dining great room, and it reads as a "true" gray on the walls in our house.  I used Behr's off-the-shelf ultra white paint in a flat finish for the stencil.  This stencil was quite time consuming and took twice as long as the first stencil I used.  The main reason for the added time was that I could cover the entire wall {top to bottom} with two passes of the first stencil since I bought it in the "professional" size.  This stencil took 4.5 passes because of it's size, and that meant I needed to wash my stencil twice because of the paint build up. Grrrrrrrr.....

Yes, my stencil got a bubble bath {with hot-ish water and dish soap}...which was quite effective in removing the paint and keeping all of the tiny pieces from bending out of shape. :)

This hallway project was quite the task to take on {I completed it during two days off from work}, but just like my first experience...the results were SO worth it!!!  I cannot wait to get some frames back up and complete this hallway! :)

Happy Friday, friends!  I hope you all have a great weekend! :)

Adding Some Interest.

Our master bath is a place that I barely share with you guys.  I literally had to hunt down the last post I mentioned the space in {which happened to be here}, because I could not remember off the top of my head.  Don't worry, you haven't been missing much.  Since the shower doors went up, there wasn't really much else that happened in there.  I knew it needed some attention in order to feel finished, but other spaces...like our living area or our bedroom...took precedence.

Well a couple weeks ago...wait no, it was months...as in, I did this right before Christmas...I decided to pay some much-needed attention to our bathroom.  It definitely needed "something".  My brain was telling me the answer was a wall full of tile, but my bank account was telling me that a stencil would work just as well. ;)

After conquering my fear of stenciling in our hallway, I was pretty sure I could handle a single wall in our bathroom.  So I hopped online and searched for a pattern that felt right.  I came across Cutting Edge Stencil's Retro Flame all-over stencil and I was sold!  It would be the perfect accent in our bathroom.  And since our 1950's walls are never level, the irregular zig-zags would help to hide any flaws.

Around 10PM on a random Sunday night, I got busy stenciling {like most normal people do}.  I removed the large mirror above our vanity, and hubby's towel holder {after I took the picture}.  I had a blank slate to start with.

I figured that stenciling around the back of the toilet would be the hardest part of this whole process, but I was wrong.  Since I could not figure out how to remove our beautiful light fixture from the wall {I even went so far as to Google the installation manual, with no luck}, I had to work my way around it.  Not the easiest task, but I managed.

In the process, I may or may not have melted part of my stencil onto a light bulb because a piece of it was laying on the fixture as I was diligently working.  {High five to my forehead!}

I used the same method as I did with the hallway.  I sprayed the back of my stencil with some Easy Tack spray adhesive and let it tack up for a couple seconds.  Then I stuck it to the wall and secured the corners with painter's tape {sometimes I didn't even need the tape.}  Then I used a small foam roller to apply the paint to the stencil.  Remember, when you are stenciling, less is more.  The more paint you try to gob on, the more it will bleed under the stencil.  You can "off-load" some paint by rolling your roller onto a paper towel before you paint the wall.

The way I got around the light fixture was cutting my stencil.  Yup, I pretty much knew it'd be a one-time-use for me because of doing this, but I was okay with that.  I knew I needed to chop it up into a couple pieces so I could fit around the light, and it worked.  Unfortunately, it makes the stencil less rigid in certain areas of the pattern, so painters tape came in handy to hold things in place.

It adds a lot more interest, don't you think?  Hopefully I'll get around to giving you guys a full reveal of our {almost} completed master bath that you may have peaked at during our house tour feature last week! :)

Wild Weekend.

How is Christmas only a week away?!?!?  I feel like December flew by in a flash.  And because time is just slipping away, I knew I had to take on a few nagging projects this past weekend, otherwise they wouldn’t be done until at least mid-January {but probably February if I’m being honest ;)}.

So I put my productive pants on Saturday morning and got to work.  The first thing I tackled was painting a sign for a dear bloggy friend who kindly asked for one after I posted about my cheap art for our bedroom.

Then I was determined to get some frames hung up in our hallway.  From the get-go, our hallway lacked a bit of appeal.  It was just b-o-r-i-n-g, and due to our open floor plan, you could see quite a bit of it from many areas of the house.  I tried to amp it up a bit by adding a stencil, and while it worked, I felt like it still lacked a lil' something...especially since our thermostat stuck our like a sore thumb in that space.

My solution?  Add a couple frames to the walls...and since it's Christmas time, add some free, festive printables.  I found some cute ones online, uploaded them to CVS, sized them to fit my 5 x 7 frames and picked them up the very same day.  I even had them in their frames weeks ago, I just never got around to hanging all of them.

Some were quick and easy...because I was putting them in frames already on the walls.  They went up when the rest of our Christmas decor went up.

All of the others just sat in our living room for quite some time. 

What can I say…I absolutely DESPISE hanging things.  I’m actually surprised I hung them before Christmas passed us by.  Especially since it took me months just to hang this tiny gallery wall.

Using 3M command strips and my iPhone level definitely helped to make the process much easier...on both me and my walls.

I’m super pleased with the outcome!  Now you barely notice the camouflaged thermostat.

Okay, so that’s a complete lie…but I’m going to pretend that it helps to take away from how it was all in-yo’-face before.

So after all that fun, I decided to take my efforts to South Beach our master bedroom.  I have been dying to re-arrange our bedroom for a while.  We started out here, with old furniture and not the right paint color.  Then I brought in our Craigslisted makeovers, painted the walls for the 2^nd time and switched up the layout.  Well, it was time to change things again….because I was never 100% sold on how we set things up. 

Needless to say, this went down on Saturday night…

  

What?  Making over a room isn’t your idea of a wild Saturday night???  Well it is in this house! ;) {Kidding.  Sort of.}

Stay tuned for our bedroom changes, and even some master bath stenciling!  Woot woot!!