Easy German Smear Fireplace Makeover

Hey there!  So sorry I missed posting last week, I was busy enjoying my time off!  *wink*

Today I have something that I recently completed just in time for Christmas decorating!  Yep, I'm already decorating for Christmas! Woohoo!

I German Schmeared my fireplace, well my best friend and I did and I LOVE IT!  I do not know why I didn't do it sooner!

It was so easy to do and there was very little mess to deal with.  Right or wrong, this is how I did my version of German Smear.

This was my fireplace before.  I thought it was kind of ok, but honestly, the first thing I said when I walked into this house while looking to purchase was that I would have to paint the fireplace.  It was just too dark for my liking.  Not anymore though!

Somewhere in the past someone had swiped that top row of bricks with white paint and it was really bugging me and I would notice it again and again.

Ok, let's get started:

I used blue painter's tape and taped off the entire outline of the work area because I didn't want anymore booboos to look at.

These were my supplies.  Very little needed to achieve such a big makeover.  I spent less than $30 for everything I needed too!

SUPPLY LIST:

All purpose joint Compound (This bucket was WAY too much for my small job, just so you know)

Plastic Wall Scraper, I got the 3 and 4 inch sizes

Chip brush, 3 inch size

Blue Painter's Tape

I started at the top and worked my way down to the bottom.  I used very little joint compound on my scraper and then dabbed and swiped it on lightly.  Every now and again I would make some bricks heavier than others.

There really is no right or wrong way to apply the compound because it is up to you on how you want the end results to look.

I highly suggest stepping back away from your project and making sure its all looking the way you want it to every now and again.  I would tweak the thickness of the compound as I saw needed.

After I had the entire fireplace covered like I wanted it, I went back in with the chip brush and added more compound to the grout lines.  I also use the brush to swipe over a few places that looked too thick.

I gave the mantle a fresh coat of white enamel paint to brighten it up and then waited until the next day to decorate.

Tah Dah!

Like I said, this may or may not be the correct way to do this treatment, but its how I did it and I love the end results and that's all that matters, right!

If you try this treatment or have tried it before, let me know what you think.

If you loved any of these ideas and want to save them for later, be sure to pin it to your favorite Pinterest board.  I have a Pinterest board set up for all kinds of Christmas Decor ideas and it's called Cool Yule.  I'm pinning something new on Pinterest every day. Won't you join me?

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Contact Paper Makeovers In the Tiny House

Hello there! Did you miss me? We sold our house and we closed on the sale on February 3rd! Yay!  I had to take off from blogging a few weeks to finish getting packed, then moved and then settled.  Our first day in the rental was January 23rd.  The first two days was strictly cleaning the house and getting it ready for us to move our stuff in.  With LOTS of help from our family and friends, we started moving on January 25th and slowly but surely (mostly weekends) finished up on February 2nd.  Now we are in the tiny house rental! It is 982 square feet!  It's small, yes, but we are getting settled in and getting  used to it already.

Since this is a rental and we can't make permanent changes, I wanted to share with you how I used good ole contact paper to makeover a few areas in this house.  Its an old house and its dated, so I tried to bring it up to date the best I could and being very frugal while doing so.  This is our coffee station.  The door to our bedroom is just to the left of it.

Here's the before and after of the coffee station area.  In my excitement to try this makeover, I almost forgot to snap before pictures.  My sweet cousin was there with me the day I made over these counter tops and without her, it would have taken me much longer than it did! Thank you so much Kim!

I apologize for not having pictures as we went, but at this point in the day we were both so tired of cleaning that I didn't even take time to snap pictures.  It's as easy as peel and stick and if you don't get it quite right, peel back and go again.

NOTE: Make sure your counter tops are spotlessly clean before you start or the contact paper will not stick well.

Here's the other side of the kitchen with the long counter.  This task took a bit longer, as you could imagine. I am so impressed with how well it all turned out.  Two $5 rolls of contact paper and I've got a brand new counter tops now! I actually got my contact paper at WalMart, but you can also find the granite look contact paper that I used right here.  

Here's the before and after of the long counter.  Big difference huh and it was all done with 4 hands, a box blade and a pair of scissors!

NOTE:  We started with the "backsplash" and worked our way down using long pieces of paper at a time.  If you are working alone, you may want to use shorter pieces that you can comfortably handle.  Yes, there are seams, but you can not tell unless you feel for them.

Next up was the laundry nook.  It needed a little something something so I added some brick peel and stick wallpaper.  I purchased it from Walmart as well, right here.

That counter top you see in the lower corner is the coffee station.  The door to the right is our bedroom.

This is me half way through forgetting to snap before pictures again! Oh my goodness, what kind of blogger am I anyway?

Here it is with the wallpaper finished. One $6 roll of paper isn't bad to make over a laundry nook!

One last project in the bathroom.  Again I purchased the contact paper at Walmart for $5 per roll.  Its a mostly white background with a gray design,  So fresh and clean looking.  It may be an in store purchase only because I am unable to find it for you on WalMart.com right now.  Here is one that is very similar on Amazon.

Before and after!

Here's just a cute little peek at how cute the tub is in this tiny bathroom.  I've never taken so many baths in all my life! Love it!

If you loved this idea and want to save it for later, be sure to pin it to your favorite Pinterest board.  I have a Pinterest board all set up just for Tiny House Dreams and all kinds of other fun stuff and I'm pinning something new every day. Won't you join me?

GREAT NEWS!  I now have an Amazon Storefront!  If you ever want to purchase anything I'm showing you here, you can pop over to my shop and see what I've picked out for you! Click right here to visit.

It doesn't have to be done all at once.  It is a slow process in the works! C-ya next time!

I'm Linking to:

These lovely and FUN parties!
Between Naps on the Porch
The Dedicated House  - (I was featured)
The Self Sufficient Home Acre

DIY Pallet Wall in the Man Cave

When the youngest child moved out, we decided to turn this room into a man cave/media room. Not gonna lie, we both hang out in there.....a lot! :)  As usual with most of our projects, we are on a tight spending budget, so we wanted something that would not only look good, but also be affordable!

The pallet wall I'm about to tell you about was totally FREE!  That's right within our budget, heck, that's right within anyone's budget!

NOTE:  You can find pallets on Craigslist, Marketplace, OfferUp, lots of places, you just have to look.

Reminder: We believe this room used to be a garage, but we're not certain.

This is what we started with.  The white speckles on everything are from the ceiling redo.  We knew all this was coming down, so we didn't protect against the splatter.  This is the same dark paneling that used to be in our living room.  Se that right here.

My honey got to work pulling all of the paneling off the walls.  It took him about 20 minutes to remove it all from the entire room.

Now we've got bare ugly walls to do something with.  This wall is at the very front of the house looking out into the front yard.  This is the wall we'll be covering with pallet wood.

Here are the pallets that we've collected.  I think there were about 10 of them. They sat in the yard getting weathered for about two months.

My honey took them apart board by board using a roofing hammer and a pry bar.  There were 1 million nails to remove.  Not going to lie, he used a circular saw at times to make the process go faster.  By that, I mean he would cut down both outer sides and then pry the nails out of the center to make the process go faster.  He only did this a few times because it causes you to loose your nail holes, which is a great look for a pallet wall.

NOTE: See this tool right here.  I'm told its the best for getting nails out of pallets!

This pry bar was the most helpful for getting the spiraled nails out of the wood.  This is not a job for the weak people, its hard work!

As we cleaned the boards of their staples and nails, we piled them "neatly" on the front porch so we could grab them quickly for the install.

We used gloves, a hammer, a chalk line, a pneumatic nail gun with 2" 18 gauge brads.

NOTE: We tried using 1-1/2" brads to start off with, but it did not hold the boards as secure as we liked so we moved up to the 2" brads.  Just make sure the brad length your using is long enough to hold your boards to the wall securely.

We also used our portable air compressor for the nail gun and our chop saw to cut the pieces of wood to length.  Not pictured is the jig saw that we needed to cut grooves for around the windows and outlets.

We used a chalk line to mark each stud in the wall for easy nail placement when nailing the boards to the wall.

Make sure you are wearing leather gloves, these boards are rough and you will get splinters in your hands if not.

We made sure to use the most "colorful" pieces in the middle most seen area of the room.  We would get a piece of wood and hold it up to see if it looked good before measuring for the cut and nailing it to the wall.

When we came to the window and the outlets, my honey used the jigsaw to cut out the area needed to make it fit perfectly.  In this picture he hasn't started yet because right after I snapped the photo, he said, where did I lay my safety glasses?  SAFETY FIRST!

Its kind of hard to see, but he cut out the section to go around the window and now it fits perfectly.

If we happened to have a large gap in the boards, I would run a bit of dark paint in that section so that the ugly wall wouldn't glow through in the future.  The boards will shrink and relax slightly over time of being indoors.

We would go from one side to the other and back again, staggering the lengths of wood for an interesting look.  Every now and again we came across a piece of warped wood that would require a 2" wood screw to hold it into place properly.  We DID NOT use any adhesive to hold these boards to the wall, just brads and an occasional screw.

We just kept moving along one board after the other.  We took our time fitting the right board in each space.  This is actually harder than it seems. 

It took us from 11am to 5pm (only breaking once to eat a bite) to create this entire wall.  Don't forget the occasional dance parties that would break out when that one song would come on the radio! :)  Since you're working with wood pieces that are not perfect, it does take some time to fit each one in the correct space.  Kind of like a giant puzzle.

We love how it turned out and we're very anxious to finish out the rest of the walls.  Stay tuned for that!

Its all coming along, its just a slow process when we only get to work on it on the weekends, but we will get there!

If you loved this idea and want to save it for later, be sure to pin it to your favorite Pinterest board.  I have a Pinterest board all set up just for Man Cave ideas and I'm pinning something new every day.


It doesn't have to be done all at once.  It is a slow process in the works! C-ya next time!

I'm Linking to:

These lovely and FUN parties!
Between Naps on the Porch
The Dedicated House  - (I was featured)
French Country Cottage

Vintage Bar Stool Gets Makeover

We've had this bar stool for so long. We found it at a yard sale for $2. The guy we bought it from had no idea why we'd even want it.  I guess some people don't see the potential for a makeover?  I love taking old beat up things and making them pretty again, its fun to me!

Of course some may say that by the looks of its makeover, I beat it up again, but now its fitting into my farmhouse decor a little better than in its former state.

Here's the poor old thing as we found it.  Well, it is cleaner than when we got it, but still, this is how she looked to begin with.

First thing I did was to remove the old seat cushion.  You will need a flat head screwdriver and a pair of pliers.  The staple gun is for when you recover the seat.

The stitching on this stool was so rotten that I was able to just rip off the vinyl with no tools needed.

The foam was not attached in any way so it just lifted out.  I saved it to the side for when I recovered the seat.

Its hard to see them here, but there were a million rusty staples to remove.  I just used my flat head screwdriver to lift them up.  Do you see that crack to the right?  That is NOT good!

Oh dear! This is a problem!  I was thinking to myself, "I sure hope I can fix this!"

Some of the staples didn't lift all the way out so I used my pliers to pull them out.

Meet my trusty friend Gorilla Glue!  If you follow me you know that my honey and I both love this glue, its awesome! :)

I applied a generous amount.....even to the floor obviously! I just swept and mopped prior to this project.  Who does that? ME, that's who! :(

I used our furniture clamps to hold the pieces together.  I was at least hopeful since this is particle board and its very porous and was probably going to accept the glue gladly!

I used the Dixie Belle Chalk Mineral Paint in Rebel Yellow and their Best Dang Wax in Brown for my project.

I won this giant prize of goodies on Hometalk's Instagram Stories a while back.  I got to choose $150 worth of Dixie Belle goodies.  I ordered myself a whole bunch of fun is what I did.  I've got so many projects to do, so stay tuned!  THANK YOU Hometalk and Dixie Belle! :)

Using my handy chip brush, I painted the entire bottom of the stool.  Since I was doing this project on my nice clean kitchen floor, I decided to put down my canvas paint tarp just in case I decided to drip paint (which I did, lots because I'm a messy painter).

This paint dries really fast, but make sure your paint is dry and then using a dry, lint free cloth (I used an old dish cloth) apply your wax.  In some spots I got a little wild and just used a damp cloth to evenly distribute it better.

I distressed the stool on the places that I thought would normally get worn if it were being used.  I used a piece of 220 grit sand paper to distress it.  Be sure to use wipe all the dust off before the next step.

I used the Dixie Belle Clear Coat in Flat to seal all my hard work in and keep it protected.  This stuff is great!  I used a foam brush to apply it.

Now for the seat, I wanted something neutral, so I went with a 1/2 yard of muslin fabric that I picked up at WalMart.  I'm still debating on making a ruffle out of this fabric to go around the bottom edge of the stool.  What do you think?

To make my seat a bit more cushy looking I added a little bit of quilt batting.  I used three pieces to make it extra fluffy.  I may have gone a bit overboard, but I like it.

I cut a piece of muslin big enough to fold up and staple and then the batting is cut to fit just to the edges.  In hindsight I should have trimmed off the corners and made it more round BEFORE I got started stapling it on the stool.  Next time!

I folded the edge over to make it look more finished when I started stapling it on to the stool.  I used our handy Stanley hand stapler to attach all the fabrics to the stool.

I added this vintage piece of crocheted trim to the bottom edge just using pins for now to see if I liked it.  I still think I'm going to make a big ruffle for it.  Who knows! :)

If you loved this project and want to save it for later, be sure to pin it to your favorite Pinterest board.

Here are a few more projects where I used chalk paint:
 
Easy to Make Fancy Hand Lettered Sign 
Chalk Painted Picture Frame with Free Print 
$5 Bedside Table Makeover
Corner Cabinet to Cat Condo

It doesn't have to be done all at once.  It is a slow process in the works! C-ya next time!

I'm Linking to:

These lovely and FUN parties!
Between Naps on the Porch
The Dedicated House  - (I was featured)