Today, in the third and final installment of the Our Week Out West series, I’m sharing a pretty unique “diy” that I got to take part in during our trip!
Let me start off by saying that my cousin is one of the coolest cousins ever. No, really. She is. Unless your cousin is also a glass and sculpture artist…
I bet you thought with all this post-Haven excitement, inspiration and head-swirling, that I’d forgotten about our projects around the house? Nope! Not at all!
A few weeks ago, I shared the beginnings of our custom crown moulding project in the dining room:
And I’m very happy to report that ALL of the moulding is now up!
I think I forgot to post an update on the crown moulding progress. And progress we do have.
You may have noticed this photo appear on Instagram a few weeks ago. After weeks (months?) of “acclimating” to our home, the crown we purchased was moved back into the garage to be painted. Huzzah!
Then, with the help of our awesome new pneumatic brad nailer and air compressor, we actually affixed pieces of moulding to our dining room walls.
Seriously. See, I have photo evidence!
It’s a beautiful sight, isn’t it? At this point, I will explain why it looks like we nailed a baseboard to our wall. Because we did. We’re getting all fancy up in here with our moulding project. I should clarify that for once, this wasn’t (100%) my idea. Tom & I were admiring multi-piece moulding examples at Home Depot a while back, and then I could see the wheels turning in his head: one piece would no longer fit the bill; we were going to create our own crown concoction.
The original vision included three separate pieces of wood. To be nailed to the wall by a man who has never attempted this before.
Well, reason came into a play, reality set in (because we want to do most of our first floor rooms this same way) and the final crown product will have two pieces put together, and should look something like this:
The bottom piece is the baseboard; the top is a crown piece.
There is a bit of reason behind this madness. After doing some research on crown types, room sizes, etc, I discovered that there are recommended moulding widths based on the height of your ceiling. So, a standard 8ft ceiling would take a smaller piece of moulding, where higher ceilings can take larger pieces. We have 9ft ceilings in most of our first floor; our family room has a 10ft ceiling. The same goes for your baseboards. We upgraded to 5″ baseboards throughout our first floor; and the bottom piece that we’re using for the crown matches our baseboards.
I can’t wait to see and share how the finished product looks in our dining room. And then it’s on to the rest of the house! Or maybe just a few other rooms, hahaha!
I’ve been wanting to try my own hand at painting lately, i.e. without the instruction and guidance of local paint-your-own establishments.
<gulp>
I finally got up the courage a couple of weeks ago.
My intent was to create a series (if two can really constitute a series) of paintings to hang in our first floor half-bath. I already had the first completed from a Cheers to Art trip earlier this year.
Here’s how my solo attempt turned out:
Not too bad! It looks like a dress, so I’d call it a win! The only thing I’m not super-pleased with is the background. It doesn’t match the background of the shoe painting:
But I have no idea how I could have gotten them to match, seeing as they were painted months apart with different brands and shades of paint. So, I guess I’ll just go with it, right? My Laziness overcomes my OCD-like desire to re-do it until a perfect match is met. Plus, how crazy would I look if I had a bunch of discarded dress paintings hanging around my house? Answer: pretty crazy.
Does your Lazy battle your OCD? Which one usually wins?
Back in April, Tom’s best friend Kevin got married. His bride Katie has made a few appearances around here, for craft nights, painting sessions, and sunflower-field frolicking.
They are our best friends. And I wanted to make a gift for them. Something that would be special and meaningful.
I landed on painting a canvas with lyrics from their first-dance song.
I sketched it out a bunch of times, debated over canvas sizes (I went with a 20″x24″), horizontal versus vertical, and what sorts of colors to use (purple was their wedding color; and can be found in several rooms in their home).
The how: I painted the purple background first, and let it dry for several days (ahem) weeks. Then I got up the courage to add the letters. I measured four evenly-spaced lines horizontally across the canvas, lightly wrote out some of the words in pencil, and then busted out a super small paintbrush and some white acrylic paint. So really, I free-handed the whole thing. I actually find this easier than trying to trace out letters or stencils. I don’t have that kind of patience 😉
Once all of the words were up, I selected some special words to “highlight” and added the extra lines and accents. I also added the date of their wedding at the bottom.
I’m really happy with how it turned out. I want to do one for our bedroom some day.
And Kevin and Katie loved it 🙂 Yay! (cue huge sigh of relief!)
Have you hand-made wedding gifts before? How did they turn out?