Feeling Stripey

One of the walls in our kitchen got a small makeover last week. I have envisioned painting stripes somewhere in this little house of ours for awhile now and I finally made my vision a reality. Of course, I had my dear husband do all of the math. Thank goodness he has a brain that works well with numbers because this little lady's brain doesn't. Poo.

Anyhoo, I knew I wanted the stripes to be on the bigger side and I also knew that I wanted a gray stripe flanking the ceiling and floor trim, thus not to compete with those whites.

David offered me up some sizes and I picked one I liked. He went along with my cooky plan to start taping and painting at 5 p.m. on a Sunday. Bless his heart for putting up with me.

After he measured a line, I used that green frog tape to tape it off.

Finally I was the designated painter and our paint of choice was Behr's primer + paint color matched to Sherwin Williams' Alabaster. We used that color on our cabinets so I figured keeping the stripes the same color would be beneficial for everything involved. We chose the primer + paint because the white paint was going over the gray paint and I knew that it may be tough to cover. I'm happy to report that it only took two coats.

It took about an hour to paint and the next day I touched up any seepage due to my clumsy painting.

Next up, was a new vignette. I was a lucky duck and scored a campaign dresser via craigslist earlier in the week! I had been searching for months and was elated to find it!

I knew exactly where I wanted it to go and spent hours cleaning the brass hardware to get it shiny again. That was quite the undertaking.

The picture below shows the hardware after I cleaned it {on the left}, and the hardware like I bought it {on the right}.

My trick? Bar keepers friend and a fair amount of good old fashioned elbow grease.

My bare hands did the work and I am paying for it now. They were peeling like they'd been sunburned--whoops. I've been lotioning them like crazy to bring them back to some resemblance of their mere 28 years of age.

I've got more to share with you about the lamp and artwork you see on the dresser but that's for another day and post. It's coming soon--promise.

xoxo