Have You Met Chalk Paint Yet?

Don’t ya just love sprucing things up around your home after the winter months of cold weather, dirty slushy snow, brown twigs and bare trees and brown grass?

Yep, I have for sure been there.  

I lived in the Midwest and recognize all those things.

I love Spring… when the grass turned from beige to a lush green… and the sunny yellow daffodils and forsythia bushes would spring forth with their beautiful yellow flowers…..

 

and the purple lilacs would burst into little clusters of the most sweet-smelling, aromatic blossoms in the whole wide world!

 

I mean, those were the days that I waited for the blue birds of happiness to fly over my garden, sprouting with beautiful blooms, …..carrying pink ribbons in their little beaks for the cake I just baked

AS I, ….dressed in my cute little jumper dress with a prim, white, starched  apron tied around my tiny waist, a three cornered scarf on my perfectly coiffed hair, YES, as I used a straw broom to dust away all the winter doldrums from my front door stoop!

Oh, wait…that was Disney wasn’t it?

I’m sorry…I guess I will continue to live in a fairy tale world, no matter my age. 🙂

In the real world, there are times we have to use our ingenuity and what we have on hand to finish a project.

Enter Chalk Paint!

I love Chalk Paint….and I particularly love Annie Sloan Chalk Paint.

You have seen previous projects on this Blog where I have used chalk paint, such as a hutch, coffee table and a few other things for our flip houses.

Today, I want to catch you up on a few of the projects I have been working on and the oval mirror project using chalk paint in my own home. 

Behind the scenes here at Villa de la Luna (in other words our home)…there is a lot of sprucing up and painting and even a few make-overs happening.

For example:  You have seen pictures of our Hall/Guest Bath make-over…but I want to go a little bit further to show you how we got to the final make over.

 

I have always liked to “shop my house” when it comes to using items from another room.

The mirror in the hall bathroom (or water closet as the sign says on the door) came from my entry way in our previous home.

It is oval shaped…and black and it used to hang over a blackish table that I now use as a sofa table.

In this home, there was no room for the mirror, so it was relegated to the storage closet, where I can’t tell you how many times I have had to move the mirror to get at something behind it.  This caused the frame of the mirror to get a few dings….which I would look at fondly and say to myself…it is just showing the love and preparing itself for another place in our home. But I had no other place to hang it….or so I thought.

Fast forward to five years later.

When the Captain removed the large square, frame-less mirror from over the vanity in the hall bathroom, we knew we didn’t want to put the mirror back, at least not without a frame.  And then I remembered the oval mirror in the storage closet.  

With the light and bright neutral colors in the bathroom, the dark mirror would definitely not “work” in its current state.  But, chalk paint could fix that.

Ooops! Please excuse the pot light reflections on the mirror in the pic below.

So, I excitedly took some left over chalk paint from another project and painted the oval mirror an off-white. Old White to be exact.

The great news about chalk paint is there is no messy sanding, you can begin painting as is. Just clean your surface with something like Simple Green and get started.

 

I decided I wanted to leave the dings on the frame…and so I did a light sanding on just the dings….very light. Like two swipes with a fine grit sandpaper.

Literally really!

I told you this was easy.

Then I put two coats of chalk paint on the frame, lightly sanded a couple areas to look worn….and followed it with a clear wax (see below)…. which I then buffed with a soft cloth.  

And that was it…the Captain hung it in the bathroom under the existing light that I “touched” up with a bit of the same chalk paint.

Another good thing about using chalk paint is you don’t have to be exact in your painting. You can literally be uneven in the paint strokes.  It gives the piece you are painting character and a sense of history….which I like.

I just love how the mirror turned out and now it has a new place in our home.

While I was at it…..(once I get a painting spree going), I took the gold disposable hand towel holder that I use in each bathroom (protects the pretty towels on the towel racks) and grabbed a can of chrome spray paint and painted it. 

I love how it turned out!

I also did the same with a rusted chrome holder (it held a plastic soap and a lotion bottle) that I had bought from Avon about 15 years ago.  It set by my kitchen sink for awhile before I moved it under the sink.  

All I did was sand off the rust and spray painted it chrome, two coats of spray and then I bought two new dispensers, and filled them with soap and lotion and I love this little set now.

See? perhaps it is good to not toss everything out.  Besides our land fills are full enough.

Have a great beginning to your week.  If you have “shopped” your home or re-purposed something, please share.