The Hutch Makeover

Or should I say ‘makeunder’ since I was going for a simpler look?  Or is it just weird that I’m writing a whole post about a hutch makeover in general?  Most DIY bloggers showcase entire room makeovers including hutches that they beautifully styled and primped.  Well, not me.  I’d show you our whole living room but the fact is it’s still a little bit of a smorgasbord of things and getting to a reveal is going to take a little bit longer for this tortoise.  But, you can see the mirror I painted here and the pillows hanging out here if you so wish.  :)

So, shall we move on?  Sure thing.

Here was the hutch a few weeks ago: 
 
Was.  It was filled with lots of hand-me-downs (that I truly love) like my grandmother’s milk glass, some frames with homemade art, some thrifted vases, and other random things.  Atop it was another jumble of things that gave the whole thing a little bit of a country vibe which is cool but which is also not my style.

Not on the agenda (or in the budget) though, was a change…until I got my very first issue of HGTV magazine a few months ago.  One page got me and got me good.
  
It was the after picture of a hutch they made over and it wasn’t really the hutch as much as the way they styled it.  As I was looking at all of the things inside it, I realized that I had a lot of similar items in my house.  So, that day during naptime, I took everything out of our hutch and refilled it with those similar items.

Here’s what it’s looking like today:


On top of the things I grabbed from amongst our own things to refill it, a bunch of little diy projects went into it, and also a few thrifted treasures.  Bear with me while I elaborate.  :)



Half of the hardcover books were recently thrifted; purchased based on the color of their spine and that’s it.  The large green and yellow vases were thrifted a long time ago as were the two gold candlesticks, the aqua vase, and the clear bubble candle pillar.
Some of the milk glass made the cut to go back in and the rest will be put elsewhere in the house.



The white storage box on the top shelf was the box my best friend sent last year holding inside it a request to be a bridesmaid in her wedding (this ‘gram).  I can’t part with it.


It used to be black.
 
You can see the rough section on the box where I ripped off the packing tape that held it closed on it’s journey here.  Off with the tape came the top layer of the paper the box is made out of.  I was hoping that, even though it wouldn’t make those spots smooth, a little paint would disguise that whole issue.

So, I gave it a quick coat of spray primer and then a coat of white spray paint.
 

Primed:


Unfortunately, the paint didn’t do the greatest job of sticking and not soaking into the paper where the tape had been ripped off.  So, after the spray paint dried, I painted the whole box with some white acrylic paint I had and that did the trick.


Then I grabbed my gold paint pen (purchased for this project but that failed) and added a little fun to the area where the tape was to further hide the roughness.


Now it fits right in.


The gray and white striped box on the right side of the hutch was a perfume box I’ve had pictures stored in forever.

 
It’s made of heavy duty cardboard.  I just spray painted it white and then laid some tape across it in strips.  Then I painted over the taped and un-taped stripes using some gray paint (leftover from this stenciled rug project), and then carefully removed the tape to reveal the new gray and white stripes.  The blue cut-out vase atop it was a Dirt Cheap find and the sea urchin was diy-ed (tutorial here).  The wood box on the bottom shelf is a bible box I’ve had since I was a wee girl.  I thought about sanding it down to get a more natural wood look but it has a few small latches and hinges to go around and just seemed a little too tedious of a project.

On top of the hutch I did some much needed restyling.  The mercury glass vase was diy-ed (tutorial here in yesterday’s post).  The orb-ish thing is just an embroidery hoop that I bought several months ago for a project that didn’t come to fruition.  The minty vase was a thrift find.  The large frame was an amazing thrift find a few weeks ago!  I got it for 50 cents!  It’s big and metal and it’s the same mint-green color as our sectional.  The print inside it was a thrift find from a few years ago but I just saw the same print on clearance at Hobby Lobby a few weeks ago for under $2.  I cut it to fit the frame.
 

You might’ve also noticed the gorgeous knobs this sweet thing’s sporting.


I am in la-la-love with them.
 
[And I also have yet to touch up the paint the old knob scratched up behind them.]
I saw these beauties at Hobby Lobby many moons ago and wished I could snatch them all up and replace every knob in this house with them.  Then, a few months ago, I went through a big closet purge and sold a bunch of my dresses and with some of that cash, I went and bought my knobs.  They were 50% off the week I bought them so I got eight of them for around $16.  You probably don’t remember because they didn’t make the greatest impression, but the original knobs on the hutch were plain, stocky wooden ones that I spray painted with some hammered brown spray paint…blah.  These make all the difference in the world.


And that’s it!

But, for more kicks, let’s do a whole history.  Here’s what the hutch looked like when we first got it from a friend (we traded a twin mattress for it):


Then after we moved to Alabama, I painted it:


Then the knobs made things a little happier:

And last, HGTV happened:


What a journey, no?
 

I think I am so passionate for decorating right now because it’s really a challenge.  We don’t have it in our budget to spend much, if anything on home decor right now, so finding ways to make things pretty while only spending a little bit is so fun!  Call me crazy but it’s the truth.  This hutch is the perfect example of that!  But then again, that challenge puts these crazy ideas in my head too which don’t always work out like I picture.  For example, I looked into getting the cranberry-colored clubs chairs in our living room reupholstered and the cost was way, way, way out of our budget.  So, this crazy person is going to try to do it herself.  I haven’t found the perfect, cheap but quality fabric yet to do so, but when I do, look out…and wish me luck.  Lots and lots of luck…and wine, and help, and maybe advice?  :)

TGIF

DIY Mercury Glass

Thanks to the sweet thoughts and therefore actions of friends and family, we’ve collected many a glass vase over the years that once held flowers.  Usually, I store them away under the hutch for a rainy day or a potential project.  To this day I think I’ve done zero things with all of them…until now.  I forgot to take a good before but you can see half of the vase this post is about atop the hutch in this ‘gram:
  
The plan?  To go all mercury glass with it.  Here’s how.

First, the supplies:

- clear glass vase
- Looking Glass spray paint (Krylon)
- spray bottle filled 1/4 of the way with a 50/50 mixture of water and white vinegar
- a few paper towels

There are a few tutorials online on how to do this but in the end I just winged (wung?) it with my own rendition to see what happened (hint: it turned out awesome!)  First, I gave the inside of the vase a few sprays with my water/vinegar mixture.  The mixture beaded when it hit the surface.  I probably spritzed about 3-4 times; not too much.  Just enough to wet the entire inside without forming a pool at the bottom of the vase.  (If you do spray too much, just dump it out and move along.  No big deal.  Mercury glass is very imperfect as it is so mistakes aren’t really mistakes in this project!)
  
[It’s hard to tell how much I actually sprayed in pictures but you can kind of see the foggy, vinegar/water covering on the inside of the vase.]

Then I grabbed the looking glass spray paint.  My Aunt gave me this spray paint three years ago for my b-day and I finally got around to using it!

You can find it here on Amazon (my affiliate link) but I know for a fact that, if you arm yourself with a coupon, it’s cheaper at craft stores (Michael’s and Hobby Lobby sell it).

Next, I sprayed three light coats of the looking glass spray paint inside my vase, waiting about two minutes in between each coat.  Note:  The spray paint started pooling at the bottom of the vase after the second coat so I just picked up the vase and swirled that paint around the inside.  What little still pooled I just left. 

After I had sprayed the three coats, I let the vase sit for 10 minutes and then I carefully dabbed the inside of the vase with the paper towels, removing the beads of water/vinegar.  I also rubbed a little harder in a few larger spots to get a more imperfect look.  (A lot of the tutorials I read called for a light coat of the looking glass spray paint on the outside of the vase after the inside was done but I didn’t do that.)  After dabbing away the vinegar/water, I let the vase sit to dry. 

Behold, our new mercury glass vase:

This would be such a fun project to do for a holiday tablescape – grab a bunch of clear glass vases at your local thrift store and mercury them.  Then line the middle of your table with them.  :)

Ours went back to the top of the hutch which I’ll be sharing in it’s fullness tomorrow (if all goes smoothly in this household today, otherwise it’ll be Monday for sure.) 

I’ve also been working on a super fun project that I was hoping to share before this week is over but it’s looking like it’ll be next week instead because nap times just aren’t long enough…which is totally okay.  :)  You can get a sneak peek here though.

What have you been working on?  Maybe you’re smart and have started spring cleaning instead of dabbling in silly projects like me.  ;)  Anthony told me a few weeks ago we should definitely wash all of our windows soon, inside and out, and guess who hasn’t even started.  I’ll just throw that one over to fall cleaning and blame the rain.

Hope to see you tomorrow!

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If you like it, you should put a pin in it:

(Not)Under the Sea

I’ve been crushing on all the sea urchins I’ve been seeing in home decor around the web.  I want one…or several.  Target has some (and they’re on sale this week) but I couldn’t bring myself to shell out $20 for them when Sebastian needs some new kicks.  So goes my checkbook.

So, I rummaged around the house in search for urchin material, found it, and made one.  Behold:

Not bad for free, eh?

It turned out pretty great even though there are a few things I’ll do differently next time.  I’ll get to those things in a sec but first, here’s how I made this one.

I grabbed a pack of bamboo skewers I had leftover from the girl’s mirror project.  And then I searched for the easiest play dough recipe I could find via the web that needed ingredients I already had on hand (I forgot to keep note of which recipe I actually used in the end, sorry!  But, the ingredients were flour, salt, water, and cream of tartar I think.  I didn’t have any food coloring to make things more fun so I tried some lemonade mix we had and it didn’t do a dang thing.)

First, I cut the skewers down with the blades on a needle-toe pliers so that they were each about four inches long.  
 
Then, while the kids were making faux breakfast/lunch/dinner with (and eating…*cough*Sebastian*cough*) the play dough, I stole one small dollop and formed it into a half-circle.  The diameter of the bottom was about an inch and a half.  I didn’t want a huge urchin since the space it was going to rest wasn’t the largest but I wanted it to be big enough to not be missed.

Then I simply stuck in skewer pieces until I felt it was dense enough. 
 
And then one of the girls started screaming at the other who then needed to go potty and Sebastian went for another mouthful so I quickly turned to them and knocked my new urchin right off the counter onto the hard tile below.  I don’t know what looked worse, my face or the urchin.  Either way, I had to start over but I waited until after bedtime because fool me once…  ;)

Round two went much better.  I actually assembled the urchin on a small piece of wax paper this time though so that it wouldn’t stick to the surface it was on; I noticed the first one was a tad.  A few days later, after I had given the play dough time to dry, I took the whole thing outside and gave it a nice coat of gold spray paint (Rustoleum – my fave!)
     

When that dried, I very carefully lifted my sea friend off her wax paper setting and into the hutch in the living room, where she serves as both decor and museum material behind that glass…”See the sea urchin kids? They live in the ocean, move really slowly, and feed on algae.”  (Thank you wikipedia!)  Form and function; function and form.

 

And speaking of the hutch, I completely redecorated the shelves on it a few weeks ago.  I’m still tweaking a few things so I’m not going to show the full monty yet, but here’s a sneak peek:
 
It’s been really fun tinkering with shelf decor in there, having anything I want at my design disposal because the kids can’t touch it hence it doesn’t matter if it’s breakable.  I used a bunch of things I already had plus some thrifted books…in case you were wondering where most of these went.  :)

As far as what I’ll do differently the next time I make a sea urchin (our master bath is calling for some), the bamboo sticks were great because I already had them, but next time I’ll grab something with a small base that will make smaller, therefore less noticeable holes in the dough.  Maybe some pointed toothpicks?  Also, the play dough seemed to shrink just a little when it dried, also making the holes larger and more noticeable and I didn’t try it, but I bet if I pulled on a skewer piece, it’d come right out.  Actual clay might’ve worked better.  Or, you could make the urchin like I did above, take all the skewers out when the dough dried but before painting, pour some glue into each hole to fill them in, and reassemble.  That would solve the big hole problem and hold those skewers in forever.  You can be sure I’ll give you the deets on our next urchin but if you try one before me, let me know how it turns out!

Happy Thursday folks!

 

Baby’s Own B&B

I consider myself a pretty punctual person.  Actually, I really hate being late and, until I had kids and time just slips away into the abyss when you’re getting them and yourself ready, I rarely ever was.  But, like I said, kids can throw a wrench into that agenda.  This doesn’t just go for getting from place to place but it goes for the blog as well.  We’re going to dig back a year for this little post.  Remember this Jenny Lind changing table we bought at a thrift store for $14?


Well we turned it into a co-sleeper in the week before Sebastian was born...Anthony’s dad was here and literally put in the last few screws the day before we came home with our first little guy.  It became his very own Bed & Breakfast – bed since, obviously, and breakfast because his food source, me, was right there next to him and at his beck and call.

We originally wanted to just buy a co-sleeper like this Arm’s Reach one (we borrowed a friend’s when we had the girls) but we didn’t want to spend the money to do so at the time and I couldn’t find a good used one anywhere.  It’s okay though because I love this one 10384 times more than the manufactured ones.

Unfortunately, since it was a last minute project and I was 40 weeks pregnant at the time we were building/refashioning it, I did a horrible job at documenting the process!  So sorry!  I’ll try to explain things as best I can in case you want to take on a Jenny Lind switcheroo yourself!  If you have any questions about the process that I don’t answer in the post, always feel free to email me (beaninlove@gmail.com)!  :)

The changing table itself was in pretty good condition.  It had been painted the periwinkle color and some of that paint was coming off in spots but it wasn’t a big deal since we were going to repaint it anyway.  The first thing we had to do though was get what would be the bed part level with the top of our mattress.  We figured out that if we just cut off the bottom legs completely, it’d be the exact height we needed it to be.  That meant that the bottom shelf would sit directly on the floor which made the whole contraption very stable.  The next thing we did was rebuild the top part of the table.  We removed the rails and spindles there and filled in all the holes left with wood filler.  Then Anthony built a three-sided frame with some narrow pieces of wood on the three sides that wouldn’t be up against our bed.  After all that was finished, he took it outside, sanded it down lightly, wiped it down, and gave it a coat of spray primer followed by a coat of white spray paint.  We let it sit outside in the unusually mild December weather to gas off for a couple of days.


We wanted to add a mesh layer around the top frame for extra security and so Sebastian could still use the co-sleeper when he learned to roll over.  I had a hard time finding mesh like the mesh they use on the top of actual co-sleepers so I just bought some strong white tulle from Walmart and Anthony stapled it around the top frame. 
Except when he was finished it looked really shoddy and was really rippled and so we ended up removing it.  It was tough to staple it on and make sure everything was straight and tight so we’ll figure out another way to either add some extra rails or mesh for the next kid.  For the time being, we used this co-sleeper up until the first sign of rolling over and then to the crib, Sebastian went.

To the two shelves below the sleeper, I added a gray and white geometric fabric I found at Hobby Lobby (here is the same fabric at fabric.com).  I made a simple template by taping together several sheets of computer paper I laid next to each other atop one shelf and used that large piece to trace and cut out the fabric shelf liner.  I attached the fabric with glue; several small dots of fabric glue placed every six or so inches around the shelf perimeter did the trick.
 

I also used the shelf template I made to cut out a mattress, made from some three-inch foam we bought at JoAnn Fabrics.

  

Last, I whipped up a little fitted sheet I made out of a queen-sized sheet I found at Dirt Cheap for $3 that matched my shelf liner fabric (tutorial here).  I laid a waterproof mattress cover (from Babies ‘R Us”) over the foam mattress and put the sheet over that so that if our spitter spit up on his bed, it wouldn’t soak down into the difficult-to-clean foam.

Here’s the co-sleeper in action (minus the now one-year-old baby):


When I posted the after picture at the beginning of this post on Instagram, there was a little confusion about how it worked and I even received some emails questioning how safe it was.  Yeah.  My bad for posting it away from the bed when in reality, that’s where it belongs.  Hopefully this clears up all that confusion and those who were concerned about Sebastian’s safety can rest in peace knowing we don’t intentionally endanger our kids.  :)

 
We actually moved my nightstand over and slid the co-sleeper all the way up to the wall when we used it.  That way, I was face-to-face with him and didn’t have to sit up and bend over to see what he was or wasn’t up to.  Also, everything that Sebastian owned was stowed in baskets underneath on the co-sleeper shelves which was awesome.  Since he didn’t yet have a room to call his own, it was great that he at least had one space where we could store all his stuff.
 
Since it was the dead of winter when he was born and I needed blankets, I also tucked the comforter and sheets that were in the way between the mattress and the co-sleeper so that they wouldn’t somehow end up over Sebastian.

I think for our next kid we’re going to do a little reworking with the top frame since the netting didn’t work out.  I’m not sure how that’ll all go down yet but we’ll add a few more rails in there probably.  I know it looks like there’s a good amount of space in between the two top horizontal rails but you’d be hard pressed to fit a newborn through that space and, like I mentioned above, we only used the co-sleeper until the first signs of rolling over happened, then it was to the crib he went.

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Update:  When our fourth kid, Gianna, came along, I whipped up some fabric straps that I tied along the top of the co-sleeper frame. 

But back to the original post…

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I borrowed a model for effect:


I hauled this thing from Sebastian’s room, where it’s been sitting for the past year, into our room for pictures and then hauled it back into his room and now it sits in his closet and serves as extra shelving which works perfectly!  In use even when it’s not being used for its intended purpose!  I like those kinds of things.  :)

One last before and after:

I’ve been seeing lots of Jenny Lind changing tables like this one all over second-hand sites so if you’re looking for a great co-sleeping option, you should take a stab at this one!  If and when we rework the top of our sleeper, I promise to write up a full tutorial!

Happy Monday!