DIY Martha Stewart Paint Deck!

I know we were all super excited when we found out that Martha Stewart's paint line was coming to Home Depot!

I had been checking on it’s impending arrival once a week at Home Depot and was super excited the day that I went in and saw the paint samples and cans all lined up!

I immediately emailed my friend Jules, (we were hoping some of her paint colors would work in her living room re-vamp I’m helping her with) Jules then told her friend Nicole and by the end of the day I’m pretty sure we were all home with stacks of paint swatches.

 

You see while Martha is the greatest and super crafty her people didn’t think of making a fan deck for her paint line. So you are left with 6 inch stack of loose swatches.

 

Not only that, but you also get looks from everyone as you stand at HD and grab one of each.

 

So what’s a girl to do? This girl tells her super sweet, good looking, smart, amazing, renaissance man of a husband her problem and voila we have a solution.

 

You just need a couple of supplies.

 

From your local home improvement store you need to get :

- 2 sheets of Acrylic sheet ($1.58 each) I had them cut it to size at the store. You need 4 ( 3” x 6”) pieces.

 

-Moving a couple of rows over you need to find Receiver Hitch/Wire Lock Pins. They were $3.40 each and you will need 2.

 

Back at home you need the following supplies:

- A drill gun with a metal drill bit

- 3 clamps

- small pieces of wood. We had some laying around, but if you don’t then you need to pick up a piece of 1/4” thick plywood at the store.

-Because the paint deck is so large you need to break it up into 5 separate stacks.

 

STEP 1: Take small piece of wood and drill where you would like your hole. Place in front of stack.

STEP 2:  Take a second piece of wood and place it on the back of the stack. No hole needed on this side.

 

STEP 3: Make sure wood pieces are angled properly on the swatches and attach clamps around hole.

STEP 4: Attach to vice. This step isn’t necessary, but we had one and Jon didn’t want to drill into the table by accident so we used it.

STEP 5: Drill away.

Go slow and then keep on going till you make a hole on the remaining piece of wood in the back.

STEP 6: Remove clamps and voila you have a stack of nicely hole punched swatches.

The wood pieces are used as cushioning for the impact that the drill makes going through the paper. If you don’t use them this will happen:

STEP 7: Since our acrylic sheets were cut at the store all we need to do now is make a hole in them. Use the same piece of wood with the guide for your opening, attach clamps, place in vice and drill.

 

STEP 8: Remove protective coating off acrylic sheet, open up packages of wire lock pins and add swatches. You are DONE!

 

Because they are so many swatches you need to split the set in two.  I have an acrylic cover and backing for each set and the wire lock pins are perfection. It’s super easy to open then up and take out what I need or just leave it closed. They fan out like any other fan deck and I printed out a MS image to use as my cover, but if you are Photoshop savvy get creative and make up a cover.

All of my supplies came in for around $12 bucks and took about 45 minutes to do it! It would have gone faster, but we were doing it between TV commercials!

 

I hope you enjoy this DIY project and if you make your own version you must share pictures!

 

* Martha if you are reading this have your people call my people and I can go on your show and do my little project for all! :) Ah a girl can dream, right?

 

Images 1- 2 via Google, Image 3 via Pink loves Brown, Images 4 –16 via moi!

Tramp stamps for Tiles!

Ha ha ok I think I went a bit nutty with my post title, but it was the first thing that came to mind when I spotted these:

 

They are tile tattoos that come in set of 6 and range from $16 -$18 bucks.

 

They are impervious to water and moisture.

 

 

They are completely opaque so they will cover your not so perfect tiles.

 

 

They are available for  4”, 6” and subway tiles.

 

So what are your thoughts? Do you love them or hate them?

 

I don’t hate the idea, but I’m really not loving any of the patterns they produced.

 

* Thank you all for your advice on how to remove the smoke smell from the kitchen. I still can’t believe what happened. I should have taken video footage to show all of you. It was laughable. Jon came home for lunch and proceeded to poke fun at me and asked what me what I planned on burning this afternoon.

Camila vs the Oven!

This year I decided I wanted to  host Easter. Hence the mad dash to get the dining room in some sort of state so that it will not only look pretty, but we’ll actually have chairs to sit in.

 

This meant that yesterday I called in reinforcements aka Mom to help me clean up the house for guests.

{ What? Don’t you always look so glamorous when you clean?}

 

Our first business of order was cleaning the oven. I had never used a self-cleaning oven before. I think our old oven had that feature, but I just never did it.

So now over 2 years into using my new oven we decided to give it a try.

Oh my what a  huge disaster. First it was loads of smoke, then burning eyes, more smoke, then the carbon monoxide alarm went off and that was only 2 hours into the clean! Once the alarm went off I turned off the oven totally freaking out that I was slowly killing, me, my mom and the dogs.

 

In checking the internet (thank god for google) I found out that it’s common to have levels of carbon monoxide when you have a gas oven.

 

I thought the worst of everything was over. I went back to painting in the dining room and my helper (aka mom) went home. Well a couple of hours later I went back into the kitchen and noticed some black dust in the sink, then it was on the countertops, on the phone, etc .  All that smoke had left soot all over my mainly white kitchen. Oh and P.S. Jon was going to be home any minute.

 

I quickly started to clean off the surfaces only to realize then that it was also on the all of walls, in the half bathroom and oh yea once you opened the cabinets they were also full of dust along with everything inside of them.

 

I made a desperate call to Mom and Dad and they were over in minutes to help me get the kitchen clean before I broke down in tears.

 

What makes this sort of funny and prevented said tears from being shed is that this is just typical me! Things like this happen to me all the time and normally it then leads to me calling Jon and saying the words, “ Don’t be mad, but….”

 

It always makes me feel like I’m Lucy and he is my very forgiven husband, Ricky.

Poor Jon came home at 9pm from a long day at the office and found me standing in the sink trying to get the soot off the windows, my mom perched on stool cleaning the top of refrigerator and my dad swiffering all of the walls.

 

So while everyone else was watching Dancing with the stars.

You now know what I was up to! So dear readers if I still have your attention after this massive post with very little images I need help.

 

My house smells a massive fire! Any tricks for how to get rid of the smell before Easter Sunday?

Look for less: Fretwork Fabric

I noticed this a couple of days ago and I needed to share!

Check out one of my favorite prints from Schumacher:

Glacier Fret which retails for around $85 a yard:

My look for less retails for $10.98 a yard!

Blue:

Brown:

Orange:

They have a couple more color options you can check out here.

Weekend Recap: This & That

We had a gloomy sort of weekend so I thought it was the perfect setting for some home projects to get done.

 

Number one project that needed to be handled was the dining room. My dining room has been in a state of nothingness for quite some time now. It’s the last room in my house to get tackled. We are on our third dining room table and I’m hoping this one sticks!

 

For the last couple of months I’ve finally known the direction I wanted to go in. But due to other projects this stayed on the back burner, but within the last couple of weeks fabric has been ordered:

The dining room chairs have been painted:

 

We found and purchased a new rug!

And this weekend we started to wallpaper the dining room!

 

I had originally painted the room a gray shade, but this needed to be covered up in order to prep for wallpaper.

 

*Don’t ya love my brass chandelier! Ah it was in the house when we bought it and it drives me nuts that I haven’t replaced it yet.

 

Now in order to wallpaper properly I needed to paint the room again in a shade similar to the wallpaper only to have it covered it with paper once it was dry. It is best to repaint in case any seams show the slightest bit of wall. It’s easier to fool the eye if the paint is the same shade as the paper.

 

So Saturday I painted the room a shade that was practically identical to the grass cloth wallpaper I picked it. Then Sunday we got to work in papering the walls. No final pictures yet. A girl’s gotta keep some secrets!

 

I get to paint from the chair rail down white today and then we are one step further to a finished room.

 

Another project that got started was some gardening. Even though it was raining outside I knew I could get some things done inside.

 

Last year we spent hundreds of dollars on flowers for the yard. They were pretty for a couple of weeks and then bam they started to die.

 

So this year I decided to produce all the blooms myself.

 

I picked up a couple of Jiffy Greenhouses at Walmart for $5.50 (this is the cheapest I’ve seen them) along with  packs of flowers seeds for .20 cents each.

 

First step was to pour 2 and half liters of warm water onto the pellets:

 

Then you had to wait a couple of seconds for them to poof up:

 

Next I took a chop-stick from our junk drawer and used to make a small hole. (There is already a hole to begin with I just wanted it a bit deeper.)

Two-Three seeds are then placed in each pellet:

 

Last step cover them up and place labels so that you know what’s what. They then have to stay covered in a warm place without direct sunlight.

There are a couple more steps before they can go in the ground outside so I’ll make sure to take pictures when those steps happen, but for the time being I’ve already started my little garden.

 

Jon has two cases full of veggies already growing! We did the same thing last year and had great success with peppers!

 

So loves, what did you do this weekend? Anything fun or was it filled with projects or perhaps a little of both?

 

I finished up a couple more projects that I’ll be sharing this week as well.

Block print beauties

I found an amazing deal on hand blocked printed pillow covers and I needed to share. The following beauties are printed by hand in Jaipur, India. They are made with the use of hand carved wooden blocks that are hand stamped and then laid in the hot sun to dry.

 

 

 

 

 

These babies are:

18” squares

100% cotton

Solid color back panel

Concealed zipper

 

Plus the most amazing part they are only $10!!!!! The price goes down to $8 a piece if you buy 2+ pillows.

 

Ah what a deal! Check out all the color options here!

Now hurry up and snatch up as many as you need and then head out to your local JoAnn’s or Walmart and stock up some cheap pillow forms!

 

Don’t they give off a great John Robshaw vibe?

Shop Girl: Arch Gate

While I was in the city this week I made a trip to Arch Gate.

This store is only a couple of blocks away from my sister’s apt and I drive/walk past it all the time, but had never gone in before.

 

Walking past it yet again this week I knew it was finally time to step inside and check it out. So happy that I did! I wanted one of everything and I’m certain you will too.

 

Let me take you on a little virtual trip:

 

I was in love with that round table! I could see it going in a million different rooms and who doesn’t love those blue/white ginger jars on top of it.

 

I’m probably going to type LOVE about a million times in this post, but I can’t help it I was in heaven. How amazing is that teal blue armoire and that minty green storage number!

 

More cool storage units. Love the colors and that hardware!

 

More armoires:

Love the high-gloss lacquered finish on this piece. It has so many uses, desk, vanity, console table.  I wanted to walk it with this one!

It was a bit hard to get good pictures, because not only was I using my iphone camera, but there was so much furniture in every nook and cranny that it was hard to angle shots, but  I needed to share this piece with grass cloth on the fronts of the drawers and lacquer everywhere else!

 

Me and my mom both loved this punch of blue color and thought it would be a good piece to stash in a small space and get some storage.

 

The black and blue piece from above got my attention right away. Love the color combo and that it is all lacquered! High gloss all the way!

 

Again wanted to bring home every thing in this nook. Especially that red chair.

 

More red chairs that I was dying over! They were around $250-$300 and I was in love. They also came in brown.

 

Take a closer peek at the piece below and you can see the greek key pattern done with the shelving.

I spy some blue foo's.

 

A section dedicated to the color red:

Hope you enjoyed the tour. If you are ever in Manhattan you must go! The prices ranged from $200- $3,000, which didn’t seem too horrible to me. Especially since many of the pieces reminded me of Bungalow 5, which is even pricier.