We showed you a lot of really fun projects over the last several weeks as we were a part of Creating With the Stars. I had an absolute blast coming up with everything and Corey and I adore all of the projects we did.

BUT.

When we showed you photos of them, they were the photos we used for the competition. Which means they were staged like crazy and had to be anonymous, so you basically just saw the project and nothing else.

And that’s no fun, is it?

So today, we’re taking a quick little tour of the four projects we did for Creating With the Stars and checking out what they look like in a real-life setting. Because I like to keep it real around here and some of the projects look pretty different in use in our home than they did in the competition (let’s face it – if I kept all of those cute accessories in the bookcases, I’d have NO accessories anywhere else in my house!).

Let’s kick it off with our week one project. Here’s what it looked like in the competition…

…and here’s what it looks like now.

It’s pretty much the same, with just a few changes in the styling. We hung a pink mirror over it for the competition, but in reality the pink looked absolutely crazy up against our curtains, so we switched it up for something a little more suited to the room. I’d like to add some more cute accessories to this guy (so it’s not quite so bare), but I absolutely love how it works in the living room.

Corey and I had been going back and forth on what to put in that spot for a while – it was pretty awkwardly empty beforehand, but we weren’t quite sure what would work best there. Now that we have this here, I can’t imagine anything else. It’s right in-between the dining and living rooms, which makes it perfectly suited to making both drinks to go with dinner and drinks to go with, you know, sitting on the couch and watching television. Love it.

Week two was shot in our bedroom (as I’m sure many of you guessed), but we actually had a different plan in mind for it while we were making it. Here it is in the competition…

…and here’s what it looks like now.

It fits perfectly into our guest room and I love how it goes with everything else (though, it’s pretty clear I need to learn how to take better photos of this pink room!). Once again, the styling is very lacking, but we’ll get there. I have quite a bit of work to do in this room – as you can see, I switched around the furniture arrangement from the last time you saw it, but I haven’t changed the art yet, so it all looks a bit funny. 

I have plans for it, though, so be on the lookout for an update to this room soon!

Our third project was shot in our garage. Remember this one?

I’ve mentioned before that Corey and I have plans to turn our garage into an extra living space, and this is a bit of a preview of what it’ll look like. Of course, we haven’t actually begun the process yet (hopefully within the next couple of months!) so it’s looking kind of…crazy right now.

Yeeeah definitely a disappointment compared to the original, right? This room is in a transition phase as we start prepping it for the big renovation, so it isn’t cute right now. But, I have high hopes that as we get started on actually converting the room, we’ll be able to live up to the awesomeness of our competition project.

And finally, week four. The big one.

This room looks mostly the same as it did during the competition…

…except the bookcases have been re-arranged and our elliptical and dog kennels have been added back in. It’s a bit, um, crowded.

Once we get the garage done, the dog kennels and elliptical will be moving down there, so hopefully in a very short time this room will be looking quite a bit better. The rug we used in the competition photograph was actually my sister’s (as were many of the accessories from the other weeks), so once it was all over we brought up the rug from week three and put it in here.

I love how it looks, and I’m pretty obsessed with this room. It’s the perfect place to relax and read, and we’ve gotten quite a bit of use out of it already. 

As you can see here, we haven’t quite finished all of the trim yet – we didn’t need to complete the whole room for the competition, so we figured we’d save ourselves a bit of stress and do the rest later. We plan to trim out the entire window at some point soon, and then obviously finish all of the picture molding around the bottom. It’ll probably happen once the garage is all finished and we have a little room to actually work in here again.

And with that, you’ve officially seen all of our projects in their natural habitats. Not quite as stylish and photo-worthy as they were for the competition, but that’s real life, isn’t it? We’re head over heels in love with all of the projects we did, and I think it was a really awesome way for us to push ourselves and see exactly how creative we could get. I’ll admit, there were a few times where we thought we weren’t going to manage to come up with a good idea, but we always managed to pull through and come up with something we were proud of – I love that we got the chance to see how much we could really do!

Does anything in your house look different in real-life than you make it look for photos? Anyone else have some crazy looking in-transition rooms in their house right now?

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You like how I just tell you exactly what’s coming in that title? No cutesy puns or creative post titles for me. Just jumping right to the point.

But really, there’s no cutesy post title that can even come close to the awesomeness (yes, that’s a word) of this project. So I didn’t even try it.

Yup. I did that. I’m absurdly proud of this guy because I’m so, so, so in love with it.

Let’s start at the beginning, though.

We actually bought this globe from Goodwill a while back when we were looking for a project for round one of Creating With the Stars. We saw it almost immediately upon walking in the store and knew that we had to have it. It was $25, which was a bit on the steep side for our normal Goodwill purchases, but you don’t walk away from a globe with that much potential.

My mind immediately began racing with all of the possibilities for what we could do with this guy, but Corey had his mind made up from the start – a black background with gold-leaf continents. I love a man who knows what he wants.

This was an absurdly simple project – I started off with some black craft paint and painted all of the oceans black. I didn’t let myself get too fussy with this part – no one really has the entire globe memorized and won’t realize if a tiny little island in the middle of the ocean is missing. And, really, I wasn’t going for geographical accuracy so some of the smaller islands were sacrificed for the sake of my sanity (sorry, Hawaii).

It took two coats of paint for it to look good – it took maybe two episodes of Vampire Diaries. Or, for those of you who measure time like normal people, about two hours. But I’m slow…and maybe a little lot distracted by Ian Somerhalder’s jawline.

Mmm.

Uh, yeah. Moving on. Once the black paint was done, it was time for the gold leaf. I was a little terrified of this before I got started because it seems so intimidating. But this stuff is seriously foolproof. It looks amazing no matter how much you screw it up, and it’s really impossible to make it look bad. That’s my kind of crafting.

I just painted on the adhesive and waited a few minutes for it to become tacky – the directions say wait at least 20 minutes before applying the gold leaf, but I found that it didn’t take more than 5 or 10 for it to get tacky and if I waited much longer it started to lose the stick. So, I’d just paint it on and test it every few minutes until it felt nice and sticky, then I’d plop the gold leaf on and press it down until it all stuck.

From there, I just removed the excess gold leaf and we were good to go! It took a few applications in some spots to really get the whole thing covered, but when all was said and done it was a really simple process that was only slightly annoying. It did make a big mess though. Fair warning.

And just like that, it was done! We considered painting the base a fun color, but I kinda dig the wood look and we couldn’t agree on a good color so we decided to leave it as-is for now. The globe is hanging out in the living room for now, but who knows where it’ll end up long-term. We’ve talked about putting it up in the guest room or even our bedroom, so it may just migrate around the house so every room gets to enjoy it!

I’m pretty obsessed with how this turned out. The black and gold combination makes me weak in the knees, and I always love a more modern take on such a classic piece. Between our map wall and the two globes we now have in our house, I think we might have the beginnings of a collection on our hands!

Do you have a globe in your house? Anyone else drooling over Ian Somerhalder globes lately?

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It’s finally time to reveal my project for week one of Creating With the Stars! I’m pretty proud of the job Corey and I did on upcycling this old, outdated television stand, and I’m excited to share how we made it happen!

We started off with this beauty awful old 80′s style television stand we found at Goodwill for $30.

We knew we wanted it to be a bar, so we sat down, formulated a quick plan of attack, and got to work.

First up, we had to get painting. We gave the whole thing a quick coat of primer – we didn’t worry too much about making it a perfect coat, because we were going to be using oil-based paint, which is way thicker than latex and we knew coverage wouldn’t be a problem.

It was looking much better already! We also bought a new board for the back piece, because the old one was very flimsy looking and had a big hole in it for various television components – not what we wanted!

Buying a new board also helped make the stenciling process a lot easier, but we’ll get to that in a minute.

Once we had a good coat of primer on everything, it was time to attach the stand that we built for it. The whole thing was a bit too small to make a good bar, and it needed a little something to make it look less like the 80′s style television stand that it is was. Luckily, my husband is pretty handy and he whipped up this quick box and attached some legs so we could give the whole thing some height. Although you can’t see it in this photo, he cut the boards for the front at a 45 degree angle so that you can’t see the end of the board (you can see what I’m talking about a little better if you look at the finished photos).

Once our primer was all dry on the main piece, we decided to test everything out and make sure it was all the right size before we started painting it for real. Luckily, it fit perfectly!

And, since that big ol’ seam in the middle was slightly less than attractive, we planned to add some cute trim to hide it, and add some detail to the front of the bar.

But before we could do any of that, we had to get it all painted. I wanted to at least get the first coat on when the pieces were still separate, because those short little legs are almost impossible to paint already, but they’d be much more accessible without the giant main piece on top of them.

Once the first coat was on – and we waited a day or so to make sure it was all completely dry – and it was time to put it all together!

It was finally starting to actually look less like a $30 piece of Goodwill furniture and more like a bar! At this point, all that was left to do was do some paint touch-ups, stencil the inside, and then take care of those old VHS drawers on the sides. Let’s start with the stencil.

I had a hard time figuring out exactly how I wanted to tackle stenciling the back and sides of the bar – I knew using paint would probably be pretty awkward on the sides, so I grabbed a gold metallic Sharpie to try instead. My first couple of attempts had awful bleed-through, so what I ended up doing was stenciling everything in pencil first…

And then going over it with the Sharpie. It probably took a bit longer than it would have with other methods, but I liked that I felt like I had more control than I would have with a paintbrush, and I think the end result looks pretty good.

To make sure that the back and sides lined up at least somewhat, I had Corey hold the back board up and taped where each of the edges were…

And then I laid the stencil on top of it, lined everything up, and taped on top of the stencil so I could see where the corner of the stencil should be. Then, I just taped the stencil onto the side of the bar, being sure to line the tape up with the corner, and got to tracing! It didn’t work out perfectly (I think that’s almost impossible) but it got close enough that it looks good, and that’s all I care about!

And, finally, now that the legs were added, the bar was painted, and the stencil was completed, it was time to turn our attention to the VHS drawers. As soon as we saw them in the store we knew they would be perfect for holding bottles, but we didn’t want them clanking around too much. So, we removed the top shelf and added a board to the bottom shelf with holes cut in it that fit the bottles we had picked up at Hobby Lobby. It means that we have to transfer our alcohol over to the other bottles, but it’s a pretty easy extra step that makes everything look a whole lot better, so I’m not complaining!

Once that was all completed, it was time to put the whole thing back together and start adding our stuff! We ended up etching the bottles that we bought with the names of the alcohol, so we don’t have to try to remember which is which, and we got a custom-cut piece of glass from Lowe’s for the top so we don’t have to stress about spills.

For a final little touch, we grabbed some gold craft paint and dipped the bottom of our stemmed glasses – they play off the stenciled sides nicely and add a bit of fun to the whole thing.

I love how it turned out and I have to admit I have a hard time believing that it used to look like this.

And that’s how we turned a $30 thrift store television stand into a custom bar! This whole project was a ton of fun and a great reminder to Corey and I to think outside the box when it comes to pieces we find at the thrift shop! We almost passed this guy up because it looked so awful, but then the idea for a bar clicked and from there it turned into a piece that we absolutely adore and think we will get a whole lot of use out of!

Have you up-cycled anything lately?

 

 

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You guys have heard me complain over and over (and over and over) about how awkward and poorly-scaled our entryway is. The mirror is all wrong for the space, the console is too low (though much better sized than the last piece we had!) and the whole area just drives me insane.

Well, all of that has changed my friends. The area still isn’t perfect, but thanks to a random trip to HomeGoods this weekend, we are one (huge) step closer to a properly-proportioned entryway.

Let me set the scene for you – we were wandering around in HomeGoods on Friday night hoping to be inspired and come up with a brilliant idea for our first Creating With the Stars project. We were in the wall art section when we turned the corner and saw the most giant, rustic, amazing clock I’ve ever laid eyes on. I stopped in my tracks, jaw dropped, and told myself there was no way it would fit in our budget. With how huge it was (and how expensive this sort of thing is, even at HomeGoods), I was expecting it to cost at least $250, if not more.

And then I saw the price tag. And it said $99. And we just happened to have an extra hundred-ish dollars in Corey’s wallet thanks to some furniture we recently sold on good ol’ Craigslist. So, we snatched it up and headed home with it…and I’m pretty in love with how it looks.

It’s gorgeous, right? I have always had a huge thing for oversized clocks, but they’re typically very traditional in style and I’ve had a really hard time finding one that I really truly loved. But this one? Right up my alley. I’m obsessed.

The giant scale definitely helps this whole area feel a bit more cohesive, and the console doesn’t look quite as awkwardly short as it did before! The console still probably won’t be a “forever” piece here as we’re still hunting for that perfect antique sideboard to go in that spot, but I think that with this new clock I can live with this console for a bit longer!

What’s your stance on oversized clocks? Love ‘em or hate ‘em? Ever been surprised by the price of something at HomeGoods?

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Have you ever noticed that the whole plank wall trend is a bit…all over the place? Like, people are obsessed with plank walls. They’re probably a bit overdone, and everywhere you turn there’s a new take on the idea.

And you know what?

I LOVE IT.

I have a complete and total obsession with plank walls and have been dying to find a way to do one in my house. I’m totally a bandwagoner when the bandwagon consists of things I love like wood and rustic accents, so I was completely and totally excited to jump right onto this particular bandwagon. I’m not ashamed to be a follower.

Especially when the results look like this.

Okay, just ignore the horribly ugly peach tile around our fireplace and focus on the pretty wood plank wall, please.

Way back when I first talked about getting that gorgeous resin deer head, I mentioned that we wanted to do something to this wall to make the deer pop a bit more. We played around with several different ideas, including a stencil and painting the inside of the wall a different color. But it wasn’t until one day when we were sitting around watching television and I suddenly shouted out “WOOD PLANKS” that we knew we had landed on a good idea.

It’s almost silly how easy this process was. Corey grabbed several 2x4s from Lowe’s (for about $25) and cut them to size for the little nook in the fireplace. Then, I used my favorite stain – Minwax’s dark walnut – to get the wood to a nice, rich color, and we used some nails to toss ‘em up on the wall.

We wanted it to look a bit like a wood floor would, with differing seams, so Corey cut down the pieces at random intervals before putting them up – that way it wasn’t just perfectly sized planks all the way across, and it looked a bit more random.

The result? It’s just enough of a pop to make the deer head stand out nicely, but it’s nothing too crazy that would compete with our stenciled wall and bright curtains.

I’m pretty thrilled with how it turned out, and it’s definitely going to make our fireplace a lot more tolerable until we’re able to give it a complete overhaul (and get rid of that terrible tile).

What are your thoughts on the wood plank trend? Do you think it’s overdone or are you as obsessed with it as I am?

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