DIY: Painted Kitchen Rug

When we got married, we got a kitchen rug similar to this:

Ours was an Italian chef theme. It was kind of cheesy, but Bed, Bath & Beyond didn't really have a lot of options.

I came across this painted rug on Pinterest and thought our cheesy chef rug was the perfect candidate to try this project on.

Inspiration:

source

Mine:

As you can see, I hand wrote mine instead of tracing an actual font because our printer doesn't have ink (ever.). The only things I bought for this project was a paint brush to write 'yum' and a can of clear spray coat a month later. 

This was my process:

1. Painted two coats of regular white wall paint to cover the chef design.

2. Painted two or three coats of gray wall paint (I bought a can of Martha Stewart paint in the Oops section at Home Depot for $7! It's regularly almost $40!) 

3. Wrote 'yum' in pencil on the rug, which didn't really show up, so I just started painting. 

4. Painted over 'yum' probably 6 times to get it the darkness I wanted. 

5. Traced 'yum' with a black Sharpie to make it stand out more. 

6. After a month or so, I sprayed a few coats of clear spray paint on top just to protect it from spills. 

We've had the rug in our kitchen for at least four months now and I'm happy to say that it looks great! The pictures above were just taken a few days ago, so you can see that it's held up. If we spill something on it, it comes off easily with a wet wash cloth. It sits in front of the sink and we hand wash a lot of our dishes, so it gets stepped on several times a day. 

Sometimes I wish I would have traced an actual font onto the rug because it's clearly hand painted. But, you live and you learn!

DIY: Painted Shutters

I love the outside of our house. I think the mix of brick and wood siding looks really nice and overall, I think we have good curb appeal. Ever since I painted our front door blue, I've wanted to paint the shutters, too. I figured it would tie everything together a little bit more. Plus, I still had a lot of leftover paint from painting the bathroom and the front door, so why not?

Here is a part of our house (yes, I am a weirdo and will only show half of our house because I don't want creeps on the internet finding out where I live. This is only part that matters for this post anyway.) This was before I painted the door or the shutters.

If you recall, this is what our door looks like now. 

And here it is with the shutters painted!

At first, I wasn't too sure about it. But I like it now. While I was painting the shutters, two neighbors commented that they had never even noticed we had shutters before. So now they are much more noticeable and I think it ties the outside of the house together. 

The only thing I would have done differently is primed the shutters first. They are plastic, so the paint probably would have gone on a little better if they'd been primed. But if we need to repaint them in a few years, it won't be a big deal. I only spent about 1 1/2 hours to do this! 

DIY: Chevron Painted Art

Chevron is huge these days and I saw this cool painting that I wanted to recreated with my own spin on it. We had a huge empty space above our bed and I thought this piece would work to cover the fact that we don't have a headboard.*

Inspiration.

I bought a pack of seven 12" x 12" canvases at Michael's and taped them together so the pattern would be consistent across all of them, but planned to space them about 1" apart on the wall so it would cover more space. 

Figuring out the chevron pattern and keeping it straight was the hardest thing about this project. The fact that you have to tape it twice doesn't help, either. 

As far as the paint colors, I just picked four or five bottles of craft paints. I didn't really have a color scheme in mind, other than I wanted it to be bright since our room tends to look a little like a dungeon sometimes. Our house has very few overhead lights, so we rely on lamps, which don't really brighten up the room much. There are a lot of things I want to change in the bedroom, but I've mostly focused on the more public rooms of the house since we moved in. 

Anyway, on to the results of my project. 

(I may or may not have just thrown the comforter on top of the rumpled sheet so I could take this picture.)

As you can see, it looks a little bit small above our California King bed. I probably could have spaced them out a bit more, but with the chevron pattern, I wanted it to look like one piece of art. I like the colors a lot, though, and the gray mutes it a little bit so it doesn't look too childish (in my opinion). 

* We are currently in the process of making a headboard and unfortunately, the chevron wall art will not work with the colors or the size of the headboard, so it's going to come down. I'm hoping to repurpose the artwork in one of the guest rooms or at least reuse the canvases for a kid's room in the future. A post about the headboard will be coming soon!