Beautiful Beans

Every year, when it comes time for school pictures, I fork out way too much mula for the bland, blah, ordinary pictures because I've always wanted my kids to have school pictures to look back on.  Knowing that I could do much better myself, for practically pennies on the dollar, I always cringed when I'd write that check and send it to school with them.  Not this year.  NOPE!  I FINALLY boycotted those crappy Lifetounch pictures and did my own.  Without further ado, here are my 4 beautiful babies in the fall of 2011.

Words just cannot describe how much I love these not so little beans, the squeedunks, the doofenshmurts, the knucklheads.

I AM SO BLESSED!

Pantry Makeover

I am trying really hard to change one of my most annoying character flaws.  I tend to have this out-of-sight, out-of-mind mentality.  If I can close the door on a mess, I can pretend for a moment that it doesn't exist.  Well, my pantry was no different.  I have never really tried to make rhyme or reason with it.  Up until last Friday, it was simply a closet that holds our food.  It's still just a closet that holds our food, but it was so out of control that I could never find anything.  I had finally had enough.  I'd be in the middle of cooking dinner and I'd go to get a certain ingredient that I was positive I had bought at the store, but couldn't find.  UGH.  I frustrated myself so bad sometimes.  In my defense though, it wasn't because I was just thoughtlessly threw stuff in the pantry.  It was more like someone else stuffing the bread or the cereal in the most convenient space available or someone moving things around to create room for something else.  Most of the time things would end up falling off the shelf and on to the floor.  So, Friday morning, after finally getting disgusted to the point of being embarrassed with myself for letting it get so gross, I decided it was time to clean the pantry.  I didn't originally set out to give the pantry a makeover, but once it was empty, I said, "Self, why not redo the pantry while it's empty?  You've been admiring Shelley's TOTALLY AWESOME pantry for a loooong time now.  You've even been collecting baskets from DI in hopes of someday organizing things in there."  So I went for it! 

I knew I had some red paint left over from the beadboard backsplash that we did several years ago, and of course it needed to match, so that was a cinch.  I knew I wanted something on the back wall, but wasn't really sure what.  My knee jerk reaction was to think beadboard, but I wasn't really excited about cutting it and making a yucky mess.  I remembered that I had seen someone use some paintable beadboard wallpaper on their island, so I went to Lowe's to check it out.  I wasn't really liking it.  I realized I didn't really want to do the beadboard look again.  All of my problems were solved when I saw the paintable ceiling tile wallpaper!  I've always loved the look of the tin ceiling tiles, so this was really a no brainer!  I grabbed a roll and was on my way.

Ya wanna see it?  Huh?  Do ya?  I am TOTALLY and COMPLETELY humiliating myself by showing you the before picture, but you need an idea of how bad it was.  Don't say I didn't warn ya!  And PUUUH-LEASE.....don't judge.

This is everything I took of those two top shelves.  There was stuff buried in there that I had forgotten all about.  See the dust?  Yea.....I'm so embarrassed!  By the time I was done gutting the entire pantry, every counter top, the stove top and the entire table top was FULL of CRAP just like this picture.

I'll jump to the final result and then break everything down.  Drum roll please........

Whattaya think?  I'll tell ya what I think.  I LOVE it!!!!  Meister thinks I'm NUTS for spending so much time on something that will never be seen by anyone.  He must not know me very well.  ;)  I'm showing it to EVERYONE!!!  But even if no one else ever saw it, I do.  Therefore, it's worth every single minute of hard work that went into it!

OK, let me show you what I did.

Because I was painting red, I knew I needed a good coat of primer first.  It's an extra step, but it's a MUST.  You get better paint coverage and color if you take the time to prime.  When you do dark, bold colors, gray works best.  After the gray, I did a coat of white primer on the back, as per instruction for the wallpaper.  Then I taped it off, like you see in this picture, so I could do the red.

LOVE this paint.  It's the perfect red, but it's name escapes me at the moment.

I'm sure you can imagine my extreme frustration when I peeled the tape off and everything, down to the drywall came off with the tape.  UGH!  I didn't fix it.  I figured the wallpaper would cover it up.  But I was still livid.  Painter's tape isn't supposed to do that!

Next came the wallpaper.  It wasn't too bad to work with, but I would NEVER use it on a bigger scale that this!  I couldn't take a picture while I was putting it on because the back was all pasty and I didn't want to drop it and have it fold over on itself.  This next picture is after I masked off the red so that I could spray paint the wallpaper with my metallic tin color.  That plastic was a pain in the boo-tay and didn't go on very good at all.  It was way too hard to work with.  If you look real close, you can see that I have the wallpaper on there.

So I took my trusty can of Valspar metallic and went to town.

Viola!  Now you can see the cute detail of the wallpaper.

On to the next shelf.  The newspaper was so much easier to mask with.  The straight edges were a dream!  And the best part was that I could just move it from one shelf to the next with ease.

Once all of the wallpaper was spray painted, it was time to glaze it and make that awesome texture pop!  I took Americana's Lamp Black and their Antiquing medium and mixed them together at a 1:1 ratio.  I glaze a lot of stuff, but I've always used Behr glaze, so this was a first for me. 

When I put that first stroke of paint on, I almost panicked because it went on pretty thick.  I found that dipping the tip of the foam brush into water first helped it go on much easier.  Glaze is very forgiving and isn't meant to look perfect.

At first, I just tried wiping it with a damp cloth, but it wasn't filling in the low spots like I wanted it to, so I took a dry toothbrush to it to spread the glaze all over the texture.  This was a lot of work, but it was necessary to achieve the look I was after.  The foam brush just wasn't getting down into the grooves.  Can you see the difference of where I've brushed it with the toothbrush?

After that, I took the damp cloth to it and wiped away until I had the look I wanted.  There were a few times I took too much off, so I simply added more.  I love that you have a good amount of time to work with the glaze and don't have to worry about it being precise and uniform. 

This wallpaper is super impressive! I was afraid that I'd ruin the texture by brushing and wiping it so much, but it wasn't damaged at all.  It comes prepasted, so all you have to do is get it wet, wait 5 minutes and put it on.  The price was right, too.  I paid $18 for a roll and I only used about half the roll on this project.  I could have done maybe 2 shelves if I had bought actual tin tiles.

Glazing the wallpaper was pretty messy, so rather than tape it all off again, I decided to glaze part of the shelves to give it a distressed look.  I love how the glaze fills in all of the pits and imperfections that I purposely didn't fix.

Now I just need to do something with the door, but that's for another day.