I heart Chevron

We've had this coffee table for a while. For a long time we were using it as a TV stand, but then we mounted the TV on the wall and it became a coffee table. We got it for almost nothing when we first moved in and got the majority of our furniture off of craigslist. Because it was a piece of junk, so to speak, I felt comfortable experimenting on it. Muhahaha. 

Below is a picture of the table in its plain form before I got my creepy fingers on it. 

I ruminated on what I wanted to do to this table for quite some time. Spent time on pinterest looking at DIY coffee tables and googling images of painted coffee tables etc. I knew I wanted to paint it white then put some kind of pattern on top. My initial inclination was to do chevron because I love chevron and I have experience doing chevron. As seen below in another craft of mine:

But I hemmed and hawed and even considered doing a stencil. But finally I just bit the bullet and decided chevron was the way to go. 

First step was to take the coffee table in the back and sand it down!

I sanded it down so that the paint would have something to grip to. The table previously had a coat of shinny stuff on it which would have made the paint slip right off. 

The next step was to paint it in several coats of glossy white. 

Here is the table in it plain white form while I ruminated on what design to paint it. 

You can sort of see in this photo below how I went about doing the chevron pattern. I first taped off the borders so there would be a nice trim to it. Then I made a cross weave with the painters tape. To make sure the tape was spaced properly I used a piece of wood we had laying around that was the proper size. I should have taken more pictures of this process but I always forget while in the heat of doing these things! Below is the piece of wood I used and also the right angle tool that I used initially to make sure the cross hatch was on a right angle. 

You kind of get the idea, right? Once the cross hatch was done I had to, quite paint painstakingly I might add, go back and remove the tape in between in the right places to make the chevron pattern come out right. I had to use an exacto-knife and go over the boarders of where I wanted to remove the tape, then ever so carefully remove it. 

Here is what it looked like once I was done cutting the cross section parts off:

It looks like border got funky there but really I put a few more coats of white on top when the boarder was partially on and the white paint got on the border. If you look closely you will see that it is just white paint on top of the painters tape. 

So the next step was to color in between the lines! To accomplish this I used a foam roller and rolled the paint in one direction. Again, I wish I had photo to document this, but I did not. 

I decided to use the same paint that we had painted the walls with. Which was "Smokey Taupe" by Benjamin Moore. I didn't want to use the purple that we painted the chairs with because I wanted the chevron pattern to be subtle and not hit you in the face when you walked in the room. 

I had to paint the smokey taupe over the glossy paint several times to get it to adhere well. Once I painted several coats and I was satisfied with the uniformity of the finish, and the paint was dry, I pealed the tape off. There was some slight bleed through with I went back and cleaned up with the white paint with this flat edged foam brush:

Here is what it looked like after I did some edge work and prior to me putting the clear acrylic sealer on the table:

I snatched up a clear acrylic sealer from Michaels on clearance when I was there for god knows what reason. Here it is below:

I took the table in the back outside once again and put several coats of this bad boy on. The label says to let it dry for 15 minutes in between coats but I let probably an hour pass in between coats just to make sure it was good and dry. 

Here is the table once the acrylic dried:

And here is a montage of the process:

Gotta love montages!

Sexy Chocolate

It has been a whiles since I've updated but a lot of things have been happening around here!

We decided we should re-stain the first floor. We came to this conclusion for a few reasons. One reason was to protect the floor from damage. We've been here 4 years now and I don't really have any before pictures but I feel like the floor has taken a beating. We reasoned the best thing to do is add a coat of stain to it!

The most compelling reason was ever since we have taken down the wall there was a big stain disparity where the wall had been. Where the wall had formerly occupied space the floor was not stained. We tried to stain it to match the existing floor, but no dice :/ It just looked weird and half arsed. Which is not uncommon with us!

Weirdness seen (sort of) in the picture below:

So commenced Operation: Stain the Main Floor!

We decided that'd we stain the floor piece meal. It was not feasible to move all of the furniture out to stain the whole floor in one foul swoop. We decided to do the back section first then the front section. So we took on the highly advanced method of moving all our sh*t to front in as non messy a way as possible.

Our stuff in the front piled up:

Let us get into the nitty gritty details of how we stained the floor. We opted to not sand the floor down because we did not want to deal with the dust it would kick up. We also felt like we could skip the sanding step and it would be just fine because we were not staining it a different color than it already was. We were indeed correct!

We used the stain and poly in one below:

We decided that Chris would do the edge work and I would do the roller to get more area done. He is better with details and I am better with broad strokes so we divided the work up accordingly. So here are some of the photos of us, actually just him in action since I was taking the pics! We only commenced this work once we moved everything, vacuumed thoroughly and swiffer wet-mopped the floor a few times.

Here is Chris doing the edges:

       

It looks like I'm not doing anything right? Well I actually just stain rolled the whole right side of the floor there!

So here is the completed back side of the room. Looks like sexy chocolate, doesn't it?

And now for some front side pics:

We had to leave a small walking path to the front door so we could get in and out of the house (unfortunately we have to leave sometimes). Once the rest of the front floor dried we could stain the walking path and still be able to get to the door to leave without stepping on wet stain. It took some brain power but we did it! The walking path is pictured below in the first pic:

 

                                     


Now with the furniture back and Chris enjoying the sights:

                         



I also forgot to mention another reason for staining the floor. We recently upped our storage on the first floor with an Ikea Expidit 4x4 unit. We already had an Ikea Expedit 2x4 unit, so we came up with the space saving idea of putting the 2x4 on top of the 4x4. Essentially we "ikea-hacked" a 6x4 Expedit unit. Here is what it looks like:
                                        




Before letting it soak in I prematurely requested Crit to anchor it to the wall in the middle of the first floor. After we had lived with it in the middle of the room for a bit, I decided (much to Chris' dismay) that I wanted to move it! Having the huge 6x4 in the middle of the room cut the room off short, visually. We reasoned what was the point of knocking the wall down if you are going to visually make it a similar size to what it was with the wall up?

It is a bit of a hassle to un-anchor it from the wall and move it. We figured if we are going to take the effort to un-anchor it, it was an opportune time to re-stain the floor! Here is a pic of what is looked like before:

After we moved the Ikea Expedit and stained the floor:

The Ikea Expedit was right up against the light switch then we moved all the way to the left as far as we could. Oh and then we also moved this sweet free desk (someone had put it out to trash in our hood so we swooped in and picked it up) right next to it and put a collage of sorts above it. Pretty sweet looking if you ask me!