Oh hello! We’re launching a new video series today that I hope you’ll love! Tip Tuesday!!
Every Tuesday I’ll be posting a bitesize video with a tip to make your DIY lovin’ life easier! Up first, the secret to caulking. It seems easy enough, you squeeze out the caulk and then wipe off the excess. But its easy to screw up and make a gigantic mess…unless you use a cup of water.
This tip comes in handy like you wouldn’t believe, especially when you see tomorrow’s bathroom update. Stay tuned!
Do you have any questions that I could answer in a Tip Tuesday video? Email them to me at [email protected] or leave them in the comments below!!
Painting wall patterns is sort of something that I do frequently, and have I learned a slew of lessons along the way. All of them the hard way. Trial and error is my middle name…actually my middle name is Lyn, but I feel strongly about looking into getting it legally changed.
Anywho. Lets get started!
Lesson #1 You probably have to take into account the width of the tape. This is especially true when you are doing a pattern and not marking the walls first. To get evenly spaced sections (if your pattern is that type of pattern) you’ll have to put the tape on the outside of the section that you are painting.
Let me show you what I mean.
For my wall, I want the finished pattern to be consistent in size. To do this I have to line up the edge of my tape where I want the actual painted edge to be. See how in the below shot, it looks like there are big sections and small sections it looks totally weird and not symmetrical at all?
The spaces are actually the exact same size. Freaky right!
That is because the width of the tape is on the outside of the space that I am painting with color. It is 100% on the inside of the section that I’m leaving white. When the tape comes off it will be exactly the same on both sections.
Lesson #2 Mark the sections that you are NOT painting! When you are in the middle of a project and you’ve been taping off all day and your face is by the wall, and all you can see are lines and lines and lines, it can be really easy to start painting the wrong section by mistake (been there, done that. Twice.) One simple solution is to put a small piece of tape inside that section so that you know not to paint there.
Lesson #3 Start measuring your pattern from the center of your wall. There is nothing worse than taping off a pattern (or worse, finishing up painting a pattern) only to realize that it’s off centered because you started on one side of the wall. You don’t need to take into account the wall width (unless you want to ensure that you don’t have any partial pieces on the edges) you just need to start your pattern in the center.
It might make it a little awkward at first, but after the first row or 2 you’ll be fine, and get such a better result!
Lesson #4 Use a Putty Knife to get a straight outside corner. Making perfect outside corners has been a beast in my life. I’ve tried everything. Cutting the tape with scissors, trimming it with a razor blade, swearing at it profusely. You know, standard things that make sense in the given situation. Until I realized that I just needed to tear a straight line.
To maximize my efficiency because naptime doesn’t last forever, I taped off all of the sections in a row without worrying about the outside corners.
It doesn’t look so great at this point.
You get the general shape and pattern, but its not awesome.
Theeeen you go back with your putty knife and tear the extra off.
Line your knife up along the edge, matching it with the tape. Channel your inner esthetician and rip that sucker off like you’re waxing someone’s eyebrows. This part goes so fast and is massively satisfying. Speaking of estheticians, have you seen Dr. Pimple Popper? How can you hate and love something so deeply at the same time?!
Lesson #5 Preserve your pattern! For a pattern like this I made a cardboard template. I lined it up and traced it before I taped it off. But if you’ll notice in the above picture, along the edges of the wall. the shapes aren’t taped off yet. This is because the pattern wasn’t a complete shape and so I would have to fold or cut the template to finish the design. I didn’t want to have to remake my template 1/2 way through because it was falling apart or getting wonky because it had been folded. So I waited until the end and finished up the edges then.
Lesson #6 Seal your tape edges. Ok so this is the most critical lesson in this whole lesson giving post. I don’t care who you are, how perfect and precise and pretty your pattern looks in tape, you can jack the whole thing up in an instant if you get paint bleed. The reality of the situation is that if you have texture on your walls, you need to pre-bleed your pattern with your base wall color. All this means is that you take a little bit of the wall color (in my case white) and paint along the edge of the tape. This ensures that any groove in the wall texture, or section that maybe you forgot to seal down super well, will bleed the same color as the wall (meaning you wont see it at all) before you paint it a contrasting color (that you will see if it bleeds).
I hope that these lessons help you avoid the mistakes that I’ve made along the way! Cant wait to show you how this wall is turning out!! We’re pretty in love with it!
Hey!! If you’re just tuning in, you’re in for an adventure. We are completely overhauling our builder boring beige bathroom (say that 10x fast!) on a small budget using stuff that we already have. The Rock What Ya Got bathroom makeover! (Make sure to catch the past posts in this series at the end of this post!)
When it came time to really figure out what was happening in the bathroom design it was looking really white. I love white. But it was like white white. No contrast whatsoever. Which is a whole different kind of boring. Also, a reflector is a great way to visualize a mirror if you are in a bind.
We had just enough of the black matte penny tile leftover from the Laundry Room Makeover to cover a section of the wall.
So out came the toilet…again. And the new cabinet (we’ll talk about that in a bit).
In went the penny tile. You can see my post all about tile here. Penny tile is tricky tricky, you’ve got to stagger it because it is very easy to see the seams.
We didn’t have any Fusion Pro premixed grout left over from the Laundry Room, but we did have some grout left over from the kitchen tile. If you hear nothing else from this post today, hear this. Get the Fusion Pro. It is better in every imaginable way. The texture, the color, the wipe ability, the stain resistance, the color consistency. Every.living.thing.
I wasn’t sure about how I wanted to finish off the edge of the tile so we lived with it like that for a bit, I cant wait to show you what we did!! Stay tuned!
Poor Ivie’s bedroom. This thing has been a mishmash of incomplete projects for its entire lifespan. It’s never had a proper room makeover + reveal because its never been completely finished. Which is something that she reminds me about on the daily.
Before we get started, let me tell you about this series. I think you’re going to love it! Ivie’s room makeover is part of Frogtape’s Paintover Challenge. HGTV Rockstar Taniya Nayak handpicked 6 design trends for 2016 and 6 bloggers (myself included) were assigned a trend and challenged to do a room makeover with a $1000 budget based around that trend.
The best part is that in a month when the rooms are revealed you guys get to vote on your favorite and the winner gets to give $5000 to their favorite charity! I debated on which charity to choose, there are so many good ones! Ultimately I settled on The Children’s Miracle Network because it tied in with all of the ones that I loved. Who doesn’t want to help cute kids, am I right?!
Ok now on to the room.
You might remember her room looking like this from 2012:
Or if you are a true VR diehard you might remember this from the VERY early days circa 2010:
One of my favorite things about having a blog is that it gives me a reason to try different projects instead of just dreaming about them and pinning them. I mean, after all, it is just paint right?
This little corner was looking quite adorable about 9 months ago, but it was a band aid solution. When we really sat down and decided what we wanted in the new room (and took out everything we didn’t) we ended up with basically nothing.
I always tell people that the pictures that you see on the blog are not an accurate depiction of what you’d see if you showed up at my house. Especially when the pictures are years old. So for proof we are starting out with basically a white box. The painted concrete floor needs a recoat (the topcoat has started to yellow in places that I put it on too thick, and its looking a little sad) and man alive it needs something exciting on the walls. How’s that for real life?
The inspiration for the room is coming from all the corners of the universe.
The Frogtape trend that I ended up with was Digitally Defined. Picture geometrics, hard angles, and color. Also known as my happy place.
Around Christmas time I was visiting my grandma’s house. I was taking my girls on a childhood tour and showing them all the wonderful things that I remembered as a kid, when I saw this painting in one of the rooms. My great grandma (the same one that Brem was named after) was an amazing oil painter and I was so surprised to see this self portrait in a watercolor. I took it upstairs and asked my grandma about it. She said it was one of their first things that my grandma had painted when she started taking art classes and that it was the exact way she would stand while she painted. I loved it so much I asked if she would let me take it home and frame it and love it forever.
Which she did, because who can say no to that? 😉
There are a few things that Ivie REALLY wants. Shelves, a hammock chair, and an awesome bed. Oh and somewhere cool to put her headphones. She’s been eyeing my glass head so we’ll see.
Its SPRING!! Do you know what that means?! Besides cleaning (we’ll get to that in a second!) it means that there are a whole new slew of plants at Home Depot! I don’t know about you, but I’d adopt a cactus over an animal any day of the week. Though mind you, they decidedly aren’t as fun to cuddle with…
Today I’m teaming up with P&G and sharing a suuuuper simple boho hanging planter tutorial. We even made the most adorable stop motion video about it!
To make this planter you’ll need:
Start by cutting your 1” square wooden dowel into 4 pieces that measure 9” this will make a planter that holds an 8” terra cotta pot.
Drill a hole on either end large enough for you to fit your rope through.
Cut your rope so that you have 4 pieces that are 15” long and 2 pieces that are 80” long. (You can adjust this so that the length that your planter hangs down is longer or shorter!
Start by folding your rope over the brass ring.
Hot glue it in place and wrap a 8” piece of string around it tightly.
Do this will all 4 pieces.
Next take one of your longer 40” pieces and wrap each end around a ring securing it the same way. Repeat with the other piece of rope and rings.
Once that is done it’s time to assemble. Stack your wood like so:
Feed the end of your rope through both holes and secure it with a wooden bead and a knot.
Then you’re going to feed the other end through the opposite corner and secure it with a wooden bead and knot.
Do this with the other rope and TA DA! finished!!
Place your terra cotta planter inside and hang it somewhere amazing!
I don’t know about you guys but I sometimes feel like a little kid that needs the promise of dessert to be able to choke down my vegetables. I wish I loved cleaning (like my MIL, she LOVES cleaning) but I would much rather be in the garage knee deep in sawdust. Sometimes a little motivation…like the idea of a new project or a new plant buddy helps me get it done. Its stupid, because I love having a clean house, I just don’t want to be the one that has to do it. So now that we have this cute new planter, it needs a nice clean place to live!
We’ve talked about personality quizzes loads of times and my friends at P&G just launched one that determines your DIY project destiny!
How is that for motivation? So it was time to get cleaning. There are 3 cleaning supplies that I 100% cant live without. Mr. Clean Magic Erasers, Bounty Paper Towels, and anything Swiffer. I don’t know how or why Magic Erasers are so effective but man alive they can clean anything!! Especially grimy walls, I don’t know how they get so dirty. One of my favorite cleaning/paint prep hacks is to use a Swiffer on your walls to get rid of all of the dust that is too high to reach! #brilliant
While you are at Home Depot, don’t forget to pick up your cleaning gear too!
I’m giving away $75 gift card to Home Depot and a slew of P&G cleaning products (Bounty Paper Towels, Dawn, Tide Pods, Mr. Clean Magic Erasers)
To enter all you need to do is pop over and take the quiz and then come back and comment with your results! I’m excited to see where everyone lands on the spectrum! There are also LOADS of awesome coupons for you to get your products at a fantastic price!!
Ok so, you know when you’re just itching to do something but you don’t want to spend any money, and you walk around the house just looking for a victim?
Something that can be updated and makes a significant impact but doesn’t cost much? I’ve hated our bathrooms since we moved in. I feel like (especially the main one) stands out like a sore thumb with its glaring beigey-ness and sucky tile. But it sat, because I didn’t really know what direction to take it. I mean do we do a full on reno? Just paint the walls and maybe the cabinet? Back and forth, back and forth.
When I got serious about it about 2 months ago and started really looking at the logistics (instead of just thinking about it) I realized that we had a bunch of stuff already that would not only work beautifully, but tie it together with the rest of the house, I was EXCITED!
Enter the Rock What Ya Got Bathroom Makeover. This is like the budget of all budget makeovers. Speaking of budgets, ours is $750 for a complete bathroom remodel. Are we nuts?
After looking at what we could afford and what was still ok, we decided to keep the bathtub and surround (we would have spend our entire load on just that element) and the toilet. Everything else is getting the ax. Picture me doing the Alison “The Ax” Axelrod chop from Full House.
Project number 1 was tile. Court and I are convinced that the worst job in the ENTIRE HOUSE is taking out tile. It is so laborious and dusty. The kind of dust that stinks and sucks all the moisture out of the air.
The tile we used was left over from our kitchen. You can read all about why we chose it here. Plain and simple, its awesome.
Our kitchen tile was laid in a herringbone pattern, but we decided to lay the floor in a 1/2 step or offset pattern in the bathroom because the space is small and the tile is very not small.
After the tile was laid, it was time to paint over the beige beast. I had a moment of panic after we put the primer coat on (remember this post?) because it made the tub and surround look yellow. But instead of using my normal white (White base with 3oz of white added) I used Alabaster, the same warmish white that I used in Brem’s Nursery. It added just the right amount of warmth to the wall color without looking yellow against the tile.
If you’re new to the game #colddeadfingers is a instagram hashtag to show off your favorite thrifted finds. You know, the ones that can only be pried from your cold dead fingers?! It is PACKED with drool worthy, jealously inducing treasures and was previously a hashtag related to guns, so sometimes the occasional picture of George Washington with a Glock will show up.
Man I’m glad we brightened up that hashtag’s life.
Now that everyone is up to speed I have to tell you about my recent couch finds. You might want to sit down for this. I’ve been out of the thrifting game for the last 9 months. Pregnancy and a new babe will do that to a girl. But with the most recent scores I feel like the thrifting gods are luring me back in.
About a month ago I found this little lady. Her fabric is the perfect shade of peachy blush and is in pristine condition…until you flip it around. It’s been totally sunbleached on the back. DANG IT! But still. $30. You cant pass it up.
Then last friday I found the score of a lifetime! Check it out.
$25. Not a typo. TWENTY-FIVE FREAKING DOLLARS!
The seam on one of the cushions is split and the finish is worn off on parts of the couch (weird parts like the fronts and legs, while the arm rests are totally fine) which makes me think that maybe someone was trying to refinish it. It can easily be spruced up with some Danish Oil.
Luckily I’m not the only one thats scored a fab couch lately…
![Mid Century Thrifted Dresser[2]](https://vintagerevivals.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/MidCenturyThriftedDresser2.jpg "Mid Century Thrifted Dresser[2]")
