{Before & After} Hot out of the Garage and available for sale!

March 7, 2014 Chelsea | StyleMutt Home

Hi All! So happy to have at least one refinished piece to show you this week! Like so many of you, I am just itchin' for warmer days under the sun. It's been quite a long winter and I feel like Chelsea's Garage has been in a hibernation of sorts as far as furniture refinishing goes. Aside from the issues of frozen, crystallizing and crackling paint which have made refinishing chilly pieces a challenge, the majority of my attention has been called indoors with my babes. Coming up with new indoor activities to occupy my brood of energetic little ones has been a challenge I tell ya! But, Lord willing, soon are the days when we can all be outside together again, playing and painting.

So the piece I've got today, (and now available for sale), is one of my new favorites. If you're relatively new to my blog you should know that I'm always looking for versatile pieces to refinish. I love those pieces which can float around a home, moving from dining room buffet to bedroom dresser to living room media center. Versatility is what I look for to use in my own home, so that's what I typically feel compelled to offer to others. When I find a beautiful piece that is multi-functional, I feel like I'm getting that much more bang for my buck. And who doesn't want that?!

I refinished this beauty in Old White by Annie Sloan chalk Paint, and then gave the three drawers, (which open easily by a lower lip), two solid coats of Duck Egg Blue, (also by ASCP). I finished the drawers with a thin. dry-brushed coat of Old White and distressed along the edges with a medium grit sanding sponge. With previous pieces that I've painted this winter I've fixed and smoothed out the crackling before sealing. This piece, however, just became all the more beautiful in my eyes with the crackling, so I decided to let it be. The piece has been sealed in Minwax Polyurethane clear semi-gloss, so the crackling won't continue and chip away onto the floor.

I'm completely enamored with chippy pieces and love what's going on with the sides of this one. It's so charming!

Before

After

48"L x 29.5"H x 19"D
SOLD

Thank you so much for reading and have a wonderful weekend!

~Chelsea

This post was originally published on Chelsea's Garage, now affectionately known as StyleMutt.

Master bedroom Before & After

March 6, 2014 Chelsea | StyleMutt Home

Hi guys! I've been so excited to show you this room in our home for a while now. I started adding some color to our light and airy white bedroom a few months ago, and little by little, it's had a nice transformation! By a handful of DIY projects and a World Market gift card I got for Christmas, the room went from this...

To this:

The wall color, the duvet and a couple other pieces remain the same, but it's astounding how different the room feels with a few snaps of color here and there! So what exactly changed?

1) I painted our leaning wall shelves, (the thin, cheap, assemble-yourself kind we found on Amazon several years ago), in Chateau Grey by Annie Sloan Chalk Paint. Then I heavily distressed them for a charming aged feel.

2) I bought a 1/2" sheet of pdf board and had it cut at Home Depot to fit over our floating bedside tables. I stained them before fitting them on and am loving the touch of natural wood flanking the bed.

3) The pillow shams and curtains came from World Market, (thank you for the gift card, Casey)!

4) The decorative pillows are from Home Goods, (both were in under $10 clearance)

5) I spray painted a few small accents on the leaning wall shelves gold. Love the warmth of a few hits of gold around a room!

6) The homemade headboard, (tutorial here)

7) The lampshades! Our lamps came from Crate and Barrel as wedding gifts 7.5 years ago. I wanted to give them a slightly industrial feel, so I covered them in chicken wire.

Here they are before:

I measured and cut a length of chicken wire

Folded the top and bottom of the chicken wire over the edge of the shade.

Love, love, love how this turned out!

Thank you so much for coming by! Up tomorrow is a new piece available for sale. Production has been slow during this severe winter but it certainly hasn't stopped!

~Chelsea

This post was originally published on Chelsea's Garage, now affectionately known as StyleMutt.

Want a daring DIY? Paint a rug!

March 3, 2014 Chelsea | StyleMutt Home

Hi all! So, here's a fun fact; boys are weird! If you married one, grew up with one, and/or are raising one of your own, this is no shock. If you are a man, this should also be no shock. Your kind is downright crazy.

Ridiculous.

We've bunked our boys, (ages 4 and almost 3), in one room together for the past year and a half, (not literally; they're in my husband's old bunk beds but for now they're not stacked). For the most part I've kept their room pretty simple for the obvious reason that putting two boys of this age together in one space is like cornering wild animals. Their sudden, desperate impulses to start wrestling are baffling. We'll say good night to them and they'll seem really tired, snuggling into their pillows, and then 5 minutes later it literally sounds like a zoo. I'll see one on top of the other rolling around, fighting for position and laughing. See? So weird!

But I digress. The point is, for their own protection I haven't decorated the room much. I made some paper airplanes to hang from the ceiling, painted stripes on the curtains, hung a couple pieces of art and called it a day. I love their room; I love seeing them play in and enjoy it, but sometimes it felt a bit sterile. Because I didn't want to put more up on the walls I figured an area rug would be a great way to add a bit of warmth. But let's be honest. They're little boys and I didn't want to invest in a nice rug for their room just to worry about it getting ruined. So, I found a simple navy rug on sale at Home Depot, (brand is Heavy Traffic, so perfect), and painted my own design on it!

For a 6' x 8' rug that cost $19.40 I felt pretty comfortable slapping on some paint. I started by taping off three stripes on the ends.

I used watered down white latex paint and a regular bristle brush, (2"), to paint the rug. After I painted between my blue taped stripes, I started free-handing the diamonds. I really didn't want it looking too perfect, so I let the paint go on unevenly and didn't worry about making exactly straight lines. I did, however, measure off where I wanted the points of the diamonds to be, (every 12"), and marked those off with a piece of blue tape to use as a reference.

Here is the whole rug before, (before I vacuumed, too)

And after!

Another little look around their room

I painted the stripes on their white curtains using Country Grey by Annie Sloan Chalk Paint, (I used the same color for the stripes on their lampshade).

I used a black paint marker to write this verse on canvas. Don't use a black paint marker on canvas. Use a thick Sharpie. It won't smudge every time sweaty little fingers touch it and will save $!