Freshening Up

The weather has been warm here lately. It has been almost 60 degrees over the past couple of days. I have to remind myself every winter that there are a lot of false springs in the south. It will be freezing cold next week again. Still, it's nice to feel like freshening up around the house. I took yesterday to do just that.

I updated our Welcome sign that hangs on our fence.

During our trip to the thrift store last weekend, we picked up a heavy gold lamp for $7. I really liked the texture on the base and felt it could look nice painted. It was in good working order so we figured we'd give it a try.

This paint is my favorite brand, by the way. It is thick and comes out strong. I really could have just used one coat, had I not missed a section around the base.

Here's a picture of the original lamp and with one coat of paint.

And here it is sitting in it's new spot on my counter. I found the lamp shade yesterday at Tarjay on clearance for $14! It is a linen like texture and exactly what I set out to find.

I painted an old bird cage, but I'm still not sure how to decorate with it. So maybe I'll talk about it later in another post if it lasts.

Then I painted an old picture frame that I was hoarding in our garage with chalkboard paint and some fresh gray paint. This is the paint that I picked up from Home Depot.

Here's what it looked like before.

I simply took apart the frame, sprayed the chalkboard paint directly onto the glass and sprayed the wood frame separately. It will work perfect in our kitchen for lists and notes!



This paint color is my absolute favorite that I bought yesterday. It is called greek stone. We had an old thrift store table that was just sitting in our garage. I had already primed it, but we just didn't have much to do with it after that. I painted the old table this color and now it's one of my favorites.

I color corrected this picture of the table, which kinda makes it look like there is blue in the paint. There really isn't any so the bottom picture below is without any color correction.

Isn't it a cool color? I love it! I think this table may end up in our family room, which is way better than stuffed in a back room somewhere (where I thought it would end up.) I turned upside down and painted another coat after this picture was taken to finish of the side bald spots and the bottom.

To paint these items, I set them all out in the yard at once. It wasn't particularly windy so it was a great day for this project. I painted the first coat with the respective different colors, came back and painted the second or third coats. It couldn't have been easier and took about 30 minutes of my time (not including the waiting time in between coats). So easy!

Finally, today was also perfect to clean up our front door accessories. We just had our house painted so I used the shutter paint, Sherwin Williams Weathershield Black on them.