The Outside Also Counts

My husband is a truly amazing man.
Why?  Because he will endure rain, cold and serious muscle fatigue to build an entire fence - by himself - before the winter ... and so that we can let our dogs out without chaining them or watching them do their business with extra minutes we don't have in our day.

I must have forgotten to take a picture of our backyard sans fence, so this one is the best I have.  It's facing the back of the house, not facing the backyard, but you can get an idea of the fence-less terrain and rickety deck.

And now, the result of my husband's multi-day Do It Yourself effort ...

This was the last piece, and you can't tell, but he is E.x.h.a.u.s.t.e.d!

He put a gate on BOTH sides of the house, which is an improvement from our last house.  It used to drive me crazy that I could not get to the front or the back from both sides of our house!  

Gate 1:

Gate 2:

My favorite is the creative use of existing ... infrastructure ... to make sure that there are no ... vulnerabilities ... in the perimeter!  We took this tree down a few weeks ago because it is beyond dead, but rather than remove the stump, he just recycled it into part of our fence.  

No sooner did the fence go up then we hired a contractor to power wash, caulk, repair and paint the exterior of the house.  They did a wonderful job!

The house had not been painted since it was built, as you can kinda see below.  Very dingy and dirty.  In fact, the background image of my blog is this same photo:

And, post-facelift:

It's so bright and cheerful!  Especially with our pumpkins from The Great Pumpkin Patch in Arthur, IL.

Cabinet Chic

What you are about to see is one of the easiest, cheapest, customizable, modifiable, and stylish ways to turn a boring cabinet interior into a flawless extension of the hard work you have done and fabulous design choices that you have made to the outside of your cabinet and its surrounding space.  This experiment turned out so well that my husband (yes, my husband) keeps suggesting different things around the house that we could use the same technique on!

Here is the newly-stained Black Cherry exterior of our cabinet with the original oak-colored interior.  (Yes, we know that the outside base of the cabinet is also still oak-colored.  I haven't decided what to do about that yet.)  The interior is uninspiring and unattractive, yes?

Using only inspiration from a picture that I saw float by on my Pinterest feed one day, the cabinet now looks like this:

(Okay, and there's a sink installed now too, but ignore that for a minute!)

Here's what I did:

I walked into the fabric store with the measurements of my cabinet interior (side, back and bottom dimensions) and my color palette for the guest bathroom, and I found a coordinating fabric that would play nicely with both the wall color (Relaxed Navy blue), the cabinet exterior color (Black Cherry) and of course the desired feel of the space in mind.  I chose a 100% Cotton, lightweight fabric that is typically used for quilting projects and that has a continuous pattern.  This way, I could spend less money on yardage and use the full 43" width of the fabric, turning the fabric any way that I needed to during installation.  I needed less than 3 yards; one for the back, one for the bottom, and another for both sides.  The total cost was about $12 because the fabric was 30% off of $4.99/yard.  

(Teaser: I have plans for the remnants of this fabric.  Perhaps I will cover the light switch and outlet plates with it??)

Then I went to the Aisle of Adhesives and found a lot of different spray adhesive brands and types.  I went with Elmer's brand because I am familiar with it and don't know a lot about spray adhesives.  It cost $4, and I would probably have some left over for another project.

Back at home, I happen to have sewing tools and skills, so I knew to wash my fabric first and allow it to shrink up and bleed color as it pleased before working with it.  I ironed the wrinkles out, then measured and cut the four pieces I needed with a rotary cutter using the cabinet measurements.  I chose to leave about a 1/4" extra for each edge just in case I measured incorrectly or something ... Better to cut off the excess later than try to patch up any gaps later.  Also, I had to measure the placement of the pipes and cut holes in the back piece of fabric so that it would slip over and fit around the pipes.

Time to install!  

In order to get the sink and new counter top installed and make the bathroom functional again, I needed to get at least the back piece of fabric installed.  It would be easier for me to maneuver inside of the cabinet without the sink hanging down in my face.  We had to get the sink and counter top installed for our guests that were coming over later that evening!  

Following the instructions on the can of spray adhesive and employing the extra hands of my always-helpful husband, I sprayed adhesive on the entire right side of the back cabinet wall.  Then, starting in the upper right corner, I began sticking the wrong side of the fabric to the sticky cabinet, lining up the right edge of the fabric with the right edge of the cabinet back, smoothing wrinkles as I went down.  With the right side glued, I kept holding the loose fabric in my left hand and kept pressing the fabric to be glued with my right hand, moving from right to left, smoothing wrinkles as I went.  When I got to the pipes, I slipped the holes over them and carefully fit the fabric around them.  Once the entire right half was glued, I sprayed adhesive on the rest of the back wall and continued pressing the fabric, right to left, until the entire back side was lined.  

This was so easy and was accomplished so quickly that I just sat there for a few minutes, envying how nice it looked.  I had expected something to go wrong ... fabric to peel off after pressing it because the glue wasn't good enough, or fabric getting stuck in the wrong place because the glue was too good, etc.  But none of that happened and nothing else got in our way.  It.was.that.simple.

And pretty!  Look at the difference...

And then, just as I was about to do my little dance for yet another successful DIY effort, my husband pushed me aside and began installing the sink and counter top for our incoming guests.

We stumbled upon our new counter top in the Lowe's Reduced Price section for almost 50% less than retail.  It's a small, 36" marble counter top that came with a busted marble backsplash.  We didn't want the backsplash anyway because we intend to install a glass and stone backsplash by hand.  Score!  That allowed us to increase our budget for fixtures, so I got the Venetian Bronze faucet that I really wanted!

Old counter top with standard fixtures and its own backsplash:

New counter top, sink, faucet, drain stopper:

The next day, I finished the cabinet interior by applying the same fabric to the sides and bottom.  Have I mentioned how ridiculously easy it is to do this??  I was done in about 15 minutes.  

Lesson #8:  Wear latex gloves to protect your fingers from spray adhesive.

I was scraping adhesive off of my fingernails for hours afterward.  It was annoying.  That's really the only thing that I would have done differently with this project.

And now, the moment I am sure you have been waiting tirelessly for ...

My husband finished up the cabinet doors that I sanded and stained in a previous post, added the new knobs I picked out, and re-attached them to the cabinet.

Venetian Bronze cabinet knobs and shiny Black Cherry finish on the cabinet:

This concludes the big reveal on our cabinet, sink and counter top!  Next, I'll be showing you how we created a custom frame for the mirror at a very affordable cost.  

But just in case you missed the awesomeness of my fabric-interior cabinet, here it is again:

YAY!

Watching Paint Dry

The Guest Bathroom Makeover continues!

As the title of this post suggests, it is NOT the most exciting thing you will ever read on my blog, but I did learn some important lessons that I want to pass on to my fellow DIY-ers.  As of this writing, we are much further along with the Guest Bathroom than these pictures will show, but I am finally finding the time to sit down and write about recent progress.

A few weeks ago (gosh, has it been that long??), my husband gutted the guest bathroom: old light fixture, mirror, counter top, sink, TP holder, outlet covers ... All gone.  (I will show you pictures of them in a later post, side-by-side with their replacements.)  It then took another 5 days to get around to painting the first coat of Relaxed Navy blue onto the walls, which taught me a very important lesson:

Lesson #5: It's probably not a good idea to take the most heavily used bathroom out of commission for several days when your 2-year-old is selectively potty-trained and still afraid to go anywhere in the new house alone - even in daylight.

Every time we heard the words, "I need to go potty," a high-speed tornado would sweep through the house as one of us would grab her and run to the master bedroom where our bathroom was available and still had working lights!

Finally, 5 days after it had become non-functional, I walked past the unpainted, taped-off guest bathroom for the last time and was determined to make progress!  I carefully taped down plastic (knowing that rollers produce paint splatter and whether you see it happen or not, you will eventually see that spatter once it's already dried to your floor and furniture), turned on the Black & Decker flashlight, put on my husband's forehead flashlight (quite sexy - take my word for it), and got busy painting!

I was debating whether or not to tape the cabinet so I could safely trim the walls around it, when I realized that I forgot to spray the poly on the cabinet to protect it!

Lesson #6: Finish one job before you move to the next.
And so I detoured slightly, setting down my paintbrush to go grab the polyurethane spray.  It only took a couple of minutes to cover the front frame, and I barely glossed the exposed side of the cabinet.  During the staining process a couple of weeks ago, we had determined that the side of the cabinet was totally laminate, and so I 'stained' it knowing that I was really just 'painting' it with a stain product.  I ended up with the desired black cherry color, very smooth, and that's all that matters!

Now, back to painting!  Time for the roller.

Wait ... where are all of our rollers?

Lesson #7: Make sure you haven't loaned a good portion of your painting supplies to a relative BEFORE you start painting.

The best roller that I could find in the garage was janky and covered in at least seven different colors of paint that reminded me of the walls in our previous house!  In fact, calling it a "roller" is generous; a better name would be "slider" because that's what it did with the paint on my walls.  It SLID the paint in streaky, uneven blotches!  My husband tried to muscle it into submission ("ROLL, DAMMIT!"), which got it rolling downward - but not upward.  Slide up, Roll down.  Ugh.  And so, the first coat of paint was streaky in places, showing some of the white wall underneath.

The husband purchased a new roller for me a few days later, and then I applied the second coat and trimmed the baseboards white.  No more streaks.

Ta da! Relaxed Navy blue walls.

Ok, so painting is boring, and reading about painting is boring - I know this.  I don't even have great pictures of the blue at this phase because the room was so dark.  However, I am setting the stage for more exciting posts to come... such as, what I did to make the inside of this cabinet super chic...

You can kinda see the wall color in this photo without revealing the new light fixture yet:

Stay tuned for Cabinet Chic!