Okay, onward and upward! So I'm back and ready to share some before & after photos of the letters I scored at the Country Living Magazine fair last month. Need a reminder of what they looked like before? Of course you don't, you saw them last week. But what's a before & after post without seeing the before pics again, right?
These plastic letters were $12 each. I wish I could recall the name of the booth where they came from, but I was too busy sweating & fighting off fair folk to pay any attention. I can tell you, however, the man running the booth was wearing really tight cowboy jeans. How that's relevant to this story, I'll never know. But I thought it was worth mentioning. Now there's a visual for you!
Anyhoo! After rummaging through a few baskets I was able to find the letters I was looking for. They were all pretty scuffed & scratched but I wasn't worried about that since the intention was to paint them anyway (you know me, right?). Aside from a small hairline crack--not to mention the warped, wonky nature--in the "a", the letters were looking pretty good. So after a quick wipe down & 2 coats of Valspar Cherry Red....we were in business! The letters looked amazing, if I should say so myself.
Then I got down to business removing the existing pictures from the wall, hanging the letters & rearranging the pictures into a modified gallery around said letters. Okay, that sentence made no sense, but you'll understand that nonsense when you see the after pictures. Here's the before...
About 2 hours, a whole lotta breaks for wine & the latest episode of Teen Mom later, I was finished! And then I made the single worst mistake of the entire process. Tooting my own horn. After turning out the lights & heading to bed, I heard a loud crash in the kitchen. Make no mistake what that was. The wonky letter "a" came crashing down, taking 3 pictures with it. Remember that "small hairline crack"? Well, the "a" had officially split into 3 pieces.
I was devastated. And I know that sounds really dramatic, but after 2 glasses of wine & all that work, you'd be devastated too, right? I figured the best thing to do was to walk away and figure things out in the morning. But I just couldn't. So I spent the better part of 45 minutes (and a little Chelsea Lately to lighten the mood) super gluing and taping the thing together. Here's the classy outcome...
The following day I went over things with another coat of spray paint (not my best effort, but eh...it will do). Things still weren't back to the way they originally looked, but I feared that doing too much beyond that point would only make things worse. So I gave up...for now.
After all of the drama was said and done, I give to you the final (I think?) results!
Given everything that happened to get to this point (my emotions are somewhat settled by now), I'm quite pleased with the outcome (as is the husband...bonus points)! The pictures are crappy, I get that. But after living with things for the last couple of weeks now, I'm loving the totally unexpected look of this wall. Betcha didn't see that coming when you round the corner into our tiny kitchen! I think I'll add a few more frames to the montage at some point, but for now things are staying just as they are. I wouldn't want something else crashing down on me!
Happy Friday my friends!
No comments :
Post a Comment