Hello Everyone!  I just have a quick post today to show a little tweak I did.  In case you missed my post about my stencilled wall you can read about it here.  After looking at it in different lighting, I decided to make a small change.  Here it was before:

And here it is now:

Do you see the difference?  It’s subtle….I painted the tile surround in the fireplace black.

Before:

And after:

I never have liked the color of that tile.  I had rubbed some silver rub-in-buff on it awhile back because the tile almost has a pink hue.  I wanted a contrast and didn’t feel brave enough to paint the entire mantle black.  What do you think?  Do you like it better.  I’m pretty sure I do.  And yes, you can paint right onto tile.  That is just regular ol’ latex paint.  One thing to keep in mind though, this is not tile we walk on, and it isn’t exposed to any water like in a bathroom.

I have one other trick to share with you.  My Mother-In-Love shared this with me shortly after we bought the house.  If you have a gas fireplace similar to mine, this may work for you too.  Here’s what I’m talking about:

See the two brass strips?  Ya, they’re removable.  Who’d a thunk?!  They are stuck to the fireplace with magnets.  They pull right off like this

I’m just not a fan of brass, so I ripped those suckers off right away.  Pretty crazy huh?  One last picture:

Thanks for stopping by!  Have a great day!

Hello everyone!  I’m excited to share my latest project with you!  Yesterday my wall went from this:

To this:

Isn’t that fun?!  (Please ignore the cute kiddos on the couch with bed head and the dog who is giving herself a thorough cleaning).  So let me tell you how I did it.  First I drew myself a stencil.  There was a bit of trial and error in this, I just found a shape I liked and drew it onto a piece of cardstock using a ruler and the edge of a bowl.   Next I folded the paper in half so that both sides were even and cut it out.  This is what the stencil looked like:

Next, starting in the very center of the wall at the top, I traced around my stencil using a pencil.  At this point my daughter began projectile vomiting on the couch, so I turned it over to my lovely assistant, Kash.

We had a few concerns with making sure that everything was level.  Each stencil builds on the last one, so if you were to start going crooked you’d have an entire crooked wall, so we whipped out my handy dandy laser lever  (LOVE that thing) and started lining up the stencils that way, working vertically down the wall.

I would love to be able to say that this went really quick, but the truth is, it was time-consuming and tedious.  After about four hours of this we had the whole wall covered.

You can see from the pictures that this was not exact.  No matter how perfect we tried to make it, there were some that overlapped, and some that didn’t touch at all.  In the end, it really didn’t matter.  We stopped at this point and the next day I went to TruValue and picked up this:

It cost about $6.75.  I started tracing over the shapes we had pencilled on the wall.

This part actually went really fast.  I think I had the entire wall done in about an hour.

When the entire wall was covered I took a damp cloth and wiped it all down to remove any pencil smudges.  Here is the before one more time:

 And After:

 I love how the silver looks different from different angles and lighting.  Sometimes it is very noticeable, and sometimes it is really subtle.  I love how it glimmers in the sunlight.

The entire project cost me $6.75 for the paint pen.  I LOVE it!  Thanks for coming by!

Oh ya, my lovely assistant, Kash, is still single.  And….he works out.

 Love that kid!