From garage shelves to kitchen pantry.

I recently moved so I am still in the process of unpacking and organizing.  In the midst of unpacking all of my belongings, I had this realization that there simply wasn’t enough storage in the kitchen,  Just take a look.

I had enough space for all of the dishes, pots and pans, spices, etc. but literally had no room for food storage.  So, Austin and I embarked on an adventure, in search of a reasonably priced hutch/pantry.  I checked everywhere.  I checked Walmart, Target, furniture stores, thrift stores, and garage sales.  I couldn’t find anything.  Frustrated, I called my mom and she immediately responded with, “Oh, come over, you can use our garage shelves.”

Uh…Sure, mom.  Garage shelves?

So I was a little skeptical.  But as it turns out, mom’s do know best…

We picked up the shelves and took them home. 

The BEFORE

As you can see, the unit is very tall.  It stands about 7”.

The shelves pull out and up (very similar to a garage door).  There are 6 shelf compartments.

The first step was to paint it.  I had lots of different color ideas (purple, teal, blue, grey, white, and so on…).  I decided to go for a neutral color, so grey was the winner. 

The next step was to decide on a pattern, design or embellishment for the shelves.  So I spent a lot of time on google image searches, and found inspiration from a calendar I own.

I love poppies, so this was the winner.  And then I spent a decent amount of time trying to draw up a plan.

First, I chalked on the outline of the plan onto the shelving unit.

Then painted!

After applying a second coat of paint, I washed off the chalk and…done!

And now, my kitchen is definitely more organized…and a little happier, too.

Some places to find some incredible people and projects…Click here.

Inspiration arrives from all sources.

I have this extremely talented friend, Natalie.  Ironically, I met Natalie the same way I met Katelyn.  Fictionpress.net.  Natalie is an incredible author and you can find her work here and here.  She’s wonderfully creative and I’m lucky to have her as a friend because she inspired this post. 
Friday afternoon, she sent me a text that read: I challenge you.  I saw this at a store.  It is rolled up pages of a magazine on a pencil cup.  It could be a mixed media piece.  Pun intended :-).

So I was immediately up for the challenge.  And it was perfect timing because prior to Friday I wasn’t sure of what I would be posting today, so I am lucky to have you, Gnat. 
What you will need:

• Some sort of cup (You could use a can.  But I was already using a big coffee container to hold some of my various pens/pencils/scissors/etc)
• Old magazines
• Hot glue gun
• Scissors

First decide if you want to stick to a color scheme.  I considered only using warm colors, but then I decided to incorporate all colors.  Sift through old magazines and pick out suitable pages. 

It looks a little chaotic, but if you look closely, you will see some color piles (green purple, blue, red, grey, etc).  From there, the boyfriend helped roll up the individual pages and hot glued the edge so little roll would stay in place.

I enlisted the boyfriend to help with these, which helped quite a lot.  It’s an easy task but semi time consuming, so a buddy would be useful. 
Again, I used the hot glue gun to glue them to the side of the coffee container.  I tried to line them up as closely as possible and made sure that the seams did not show. 

The pages are taller than the sides of the coffee container, so after I glued on about four, I would trim off the tops. And, done!




 And now it has found a home on my desk where it adds some much needed color The best part about this craft?  It was FREE.  Entirely composed of items that I previously owned.  I would like to try this craft again, maybe using old book pages.  




Sharing with other crafters here!

In the Beginning

If anyone has read the 'About Us' page of this blog, they would know that I had posted some craft pictures on my Facebook, which Maggie had seen and liked enough to ask me to join her in a blogging partnership. It wasn't a lot of pictures-- I was a novice (still am) but I had tackled my first big project and was so proud of it, I posted it up. And believe me, this was a big deal for me. I had NEVER been considered handy or creative, and for good reason.

But I loved to be a little off kilter (not too much) once in a while. I started to get more into design and palettes (thanks to internet) and was extremely jealous of all the DIYers out there who could make beautiful, functional things for less.

I thought I would try it out.

I have a blue/white/gold theme going on in my room (for the most part) and I was sort of cheaping out on getting a new desk chair. My parents collect stuff because they are also on the cheap side and we had a bunch of ugly dining chairs from way back in the 1980's or early 1990's that weren't really going away. I have to say, I'm the opposite. I periodically purge what I don't use or don't like.

But as we had a whole bunch of chairs, I thought it would be okay if I took just one and changed it up. And if something went horribly wrong, I had another 8 chairs of the same thing to start over. And it's not like we actually used these chairs anymore anyway.

Evenings like this are right for the crafting on the balcony. Also, my Dad would be really mad if I was sanding indoors.

 It was the summer/fall and it was still warm enough to sit outside in the evenings with a jacket, so I purchased a pack of sandpaper from the dollar store and got to work. The chair, as you can see, was a strange pine-looking wood with an awful orangey shellack. After unscrewing the blue seat from the frame (new skill #1!), I sanded every inch of that darn shellacky mess (new skill #2!)

Before: I don't know of a wood that is naturally orange

The sanding took a couple evenings to finish up. I wanted to make sure that darn shellack was gone. And.. this may not come as a surprise to you and may even be common sense (which doesn't come naturally to me), but you should wear gloves or something when you're using sandpaper.. I didn't have any fingerprints for about a week.

After the sanding came the painting (new skill #3!). I went into Home Depot (by myself, for the first time. I know, sad right?) and got plain white house paint (Um... new skill #4?). After a couple coats, I sanded it a little (to look distressed) and then put some spray varnish. After, the chair looked like this:

I decided not to do anything to the seat before I screwed it back on (I didn't want to get carried away, of course). But I am totally happy with the result. I use the back of the chair to hang all of my scarves, so it has two functions!

The mantra here at the Golden Means is "Form, Function and Creativity" and it's something that I think really holds true in everything we do. Success for an easy first project and I was hooked, absolutely, 100%.

All the scarves, on display!

Illuminating Before & After

This craft was made possible by my lovely friend, Katie.  We’ve known each other for almost 7 years now, and we’ve been talking about this lamp of hers for quite sometime.  Katie’s great aunt recently gave her a ton of antique furniture.  Some pieces are truly beautiful in the way that only antique pieces can be.  Some pieces, on the other hand, are in desperate need of some TLC, like this lovely lamp. 

As you can see, we forgot to take a “before” picture with the lamp in it’s original location.  And we also forgot to take a picture before we removed the top, which was really complicated.  So, you get the idea.  Here is the before.

As you have probably noticed, this lamp is a beast.  The base is huge, the shade is huge, the colors are intense and bold and not necessarily in a good way. 

We decided to paint the base.  We considered using painters tape for a two-toned effect, but after we found a very bold pattern for the shade, we decided the base should be a simple and black.  We used a regular black spray paint. 

Above, Katie displays how sad it is when you run out of a material mid-craft.  Luckily, we have men in our life who are more than happy to make Home Depot runs for us. 

While the boys were out buying another can of spray paint, we started on the shade.  We found this fabric at Hobby Lobby and it was honestly the perfect fabric for a novice lamp redo.  The linear pattern made it really simple for us to cut and measure straight lines, and make sure that our pattern was level around the shade.  Additionally, it helps that the lamp shade is completely cylindrical.  The fabric fit nice and snug and it was really a no fuss process. 

The finished lamp shade!! First, we measured the fabric to fit the shade, cut our fabric out, and used binder clips to hold the fabric in place while we used a hot glue gun to fix the material onto the shade (I am no expert here, I’m not sure if hot gluing is the most appropriate fix here, but it seems to have worked just fine!)

We finished spray painting the base, and let it dry.  The lamp found a temporary home in their basement for the Christmas holiday, because the lamp sits right where their Christmas tree went in their front room. 

Now the lamp is at home in their front room.  Later, we might tackle that blue chair (it could use a nice new print, to fit their front room’s white, black and red color scheme).  Unfortunately, I have no experience whatsoever in re-upholstering, but I’m open to learn.  If anyone knows of any great resources, please let me know! 
                                

                                     Before            &             After

And that’s all.  I love turning something old and blah into something new and lovely. 

Some places where we find inspiration.