Keeping it Real: How I Ruined (and Restored) a Lampshade

Unfortunately, not all of my little projects turn out to be masterpieces the first time.  Or even the fourth time. And I think its only fair to show my failures along with my success.

Cause I'm keeping it real!

And since none of you got my little 'keeping it real' reference the last time I made it (you really disappoint me, people!).....



 So anyway, there are plenty of times that my little 'tranformations' go a little south.  Case in point, the butt-ugly lampshade on our floor lamp in the living room.

So why would I buy a lamp with a lampshade that I'd describe as butt-ugly in the first place? Because the lamp base is awesome and it was on clearance at Pier 1.  Obviously.

I just don't know what they were thinking with that shade on this lamp.

When I bought the lamp, I told myself that I would simply buy another lamp shade.  Wrong.  You probably can't tell in the picture, but this lamp shade is huge.  Finding another drum lampshade in a similar size, style I liked, at a price I was willing to pay turned out to be impossible.  Believe me, I looked.  For like a year and a half.

In fact, lampshades have sort of been my nemesis lately.  I have two lamp bases that bought without shades and flipped over the summer that I have also been unable to find suitable shades for.  I guess I should have learned my lesson with this shiny silver, feathered beauty.  

Nope.  I rarely learn lessons the first time around.  

Anyway, I saw some blogger inspiration of painted lampshades and decided that I should give it a shot.  The lampshade is made of non-porous, thick, paper-like material, so painting it seemed like a good option.  I decided to spray-paint it a new base color and attempt to free-hand a chevron pattern.  I was kind of going for an imperfect look, so free-handing it seemed to be a good idea.

Spray painting the shade was easy enough. The color felt too bright to me, but I anticipated the silver chevron toning that down a little bit.....

....which it did.  I achieved this look by dipping the top of a pointed, foam craft brush in silver paint and dotting it along the shade in a chevron pattern.

While not perfect, this turned out OK. Plus, I had kind of been shooting for imperfect.

So, I should have stopped here.  But no...

....after a few days, the imperfections in pattern just seemed to be glaring at me.  They were all I could see. So I decided to thicken up the chevron stripes, thinking that would somehow make the imperfections less glaring.  

So I used Silver Leaf Rub N' Buff and my finger to color in alternating chevrons.  Big mistake.  Big.  Huge. (can someone PLEASE get this movie reference?!).

It looked like a kindergartner finger-painted it.  No lie.

And, crappy blogger that I am, I forgot to photograph it!!  I think I was so grossed out by it and in such a hurry to get rid of the atrocity that I jumped into changing it without thinking to take pics.  Sorry :(

At that point I decided to cover it with fabric.  I spent a few weeks looking for fabric that woudl be thick enough in a color or print that I liked.  As luck would have it, I found a brand-new Threshold white cotton tab-top curtain for $3 at my local Goodwill.  The fabric was nice and thick, and there was no way that I could have bought that much fabric for less than $3.

So I cut a length of fabric that was two inches wider than my shade (one inch overlap on both the top and the bottom), and wrapped it around my lampshade.  I hot glued the top and the bottom to the inside of the shade, just inside the rim.

And once I got to the end of my fabric I folded about an inch of it over on itself and hot glued it in order to create a 'finished' end.  

This helped create a more finished looking seam.  Which of course I hid at the back of the shade, against the wall!

I'm pretty pleased with the result!  It seems to bring more of a light feeling into the room. 

Notice that Giselle has joined the gallery wall!


Now if only I hadn't taken me two failed projects to get there...

Sigh.  At least I'm keeping the hardware stores in business :)

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Making of a Gallery Wall

Gallery walls are all the rage right now (maybe they always have been?), and I love them! So I knew that I wanted to create one when putting our living room together, especially since we have the most perfect blank wall in there that is visible from the entire other end of the house. Here's how I made my gallery wall, so hopefully you can be inspired to try one of your own!

But before we get started, a little gallery wall Pinspiration!

Personally, I prefer gallery walls that display photographs, but I DO love this wall with square frames, large mats, and white color scheme. Especially the square frames!!


I'm not sure what it is about it, but I'm in kind of in love with the white deer head and touch of yellow on this one.  It just looks so bold and cool.


I love how they incorporated aqua into the pictures and accessories surrounding this gallery wall. I also love how their framed wall thermostat becomes almost invisible. Another great reason to make a gallery wall--to disguise an unsightly or poorly placed thermostat.


This one is so gorgeous. The mixture of black and white mats keeps your eye moving and makes for a really interesting display.


What a fabulous idea to use picture ledges! This allows you to layer the frames and incorporate other objects into your gallery wall.


And finally, for my favorite gallery wall OF THEM ALL....


(Lovestruck sigh). The black and white photography. The frameless canvas prints. The sheer size of those pictures! I have huge plans for something like this....some day, once we have kids. Because to blow up pictures of anyone else to that size would just be creepy.

How to Create a Gallery Wall

1. Develop YOUR Vision

Browsing all of the inspiration photos really helped me develop a vision of what I was looking for in our gallery wall:
-Black and white photography
-Mix between hanging frames and frames/objects perched on shelves
-A unifying color for all of the frames (although wouldn't an ombre gallery wall be AMAZING?!)
-Asymmetrical pattern on the wall, yet one that keeps the eye moving
-Fill the space without looking cluttered

2. Search For Materials

Once I had an idea of what I wanted, I began the search for frames.  Ultimately I decided that I wanted all of our frames to have a consistent shape, but I think a gallery wall created with mismatched frames painted one unifying color could be great!  I think I just wanted some consistency in the shape of our frames, because I didn't necessarily want consistency or symmetry in the way we hung them (if that makes any sense?)  It made sense to me!

I ended up buying all of our frames and floating shelves at Kohl's.  I bought a set of seven black frame/white mat frames in assorted sizes (no longer available), two black 8x8 frames that were also matted in white (available here), and a set of three floating shelves in assorted sizes (available here).  While I can't remember exactly what I paid for my materials, I CAN assure you that I took advantage of Kohl's amazing sales to get them for heavily reduced prices.  I'm pretty sure there was also some Kohl's Cash involved, so my supplies were super affordable!

3. Design an Arrangement

Once I had my materials, I was FINALLY ready to get started.  Similar to my plate wall, the first thing I did was use some paper to cut out templates of all of my frames and shelves.  Butcher paper would have been an excellent choice of material, however I didn't have any, so I ended up taping together several pieces of printer paper to achieve exact-sized templates of my frames and shelves (I wouldn't recommend this method, it took forever and used every last piece of printer paper we owned). I also made sure to label each template, so I knew what it was once it was up on the wall.

See how I had to tape pieces together in order to make them long enough?  It sucked.

Next, I used painter's tape to secure my templates to the wall, and began to play with the arrangement of items on the wall.  Since I was going for an asymmetrical display, I opted not to measure the space between frames or shelves.  If you were looking for a symmetrical arrangement, I would certainly recommend doing so.  For me, though, eyeballing it just worked out better.

I don't mean to brag, but this is the first and last arrangement I came up with. I couldn't believe it.  I loved it right away, and aside from some small spacing tweaks, it was perfect from the get-go.  Don't get used to it, that never happens to me.  Normally I need to arrange, rearrange, and rearrange again before I'm able to artfully display anything. 

But of course we had to 'live with it' for a few weeks, just to make sure that the arrangement was what we wanted before we started drilling screws in the walls.

4. Select Photographs, Art, or Objects to Display

While we were 'living with it', I got to work selecting pictures for the frames.  This was actually the most difficult part of the process for me.  It took me days to go through our pictures to find ones that were meaningful, sufficient quality to be blown up, and were the appropriate size and orientation for the frames I had purchased.  Once I had narrowed down my choices, I edited and ordered black and white prints from Shutterfly. They were delivered within a few days, and I was very pleased with the quality of the prints.

5. Hang Frames, Art, Objects

Hanging the frames and shelves actually turned out to be really easy.  Mr. M. just left the paper templates on the wall to help guide him when placing the screw, and then drilled right through the template, removing it after the screw was in place. We also used a level to ensure that the shelves were hanging parallel to the floor. It worked like a charm for us, but if you are looking for a little more guidance, here is a brilliant idea that uses sheets of transparent wax paper to mark the exact places to drill the holes. 

6. Arrange, Edit, Repeat

From there it was a matter of selecting objects to add to the shelves, and finding the right places for them within the gallery wall.  For now, I have used the items that were the inspiration for the living room: a trio of black, silver, and eggplant bud vases and a single ceramic ball in colors of purple, green, and blue.  These were items that I purchased long before the living room was painted or furnished and both really influenced my color and design choices in the room.  To be perfectly honest, I'm not completely satisfied with these items on the gallery wall shelves, but this is a good resting point for now.  Over time, I'm confident that I will eventually find items to replace these or be added to the gallery wall.  But as I've found time and time again, I'm unable to find those 'perfect pieces' when I'm looking for them, and have much more luck if I collect them over time as I stumble upon them. 

So that's where the gallery wall stands for now.  One last, beautiful look.

Would you try a gallery wall in your home?  What would be 'must haves' in YOUR vision of a great gallery wall?

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Evolution of Our Home: Living Room Edition

The living room is one of my favorite spaces in our home.  It is my quiet sanctuary where I can read, drink coffee, or watch a storm as it rolls through (often all at the same time).  It was one of the last rooms we turned our attention to, so this room sat empty for the first few years that we lived here.  Here's the journey to this point (because, like every other room in this place, it's a continuing work in progress)!!

While we were unpacking from the move, the living room was our dumping ground for everything we had yet to put away.

But we hate having a bunch of random stuff sitting around, so pretty soon, it became a ghost town. We had no furniture in here for the first three years that we lived here!! We had moved out of an apartment, so we didn't have a ton of furniture. Our living room furniture ended up in the family room, so we had a large, empty room for years.  And since it has a whole wall of windows, our neighbors probably thought we were minimalists or something.

That's Mo sitting in the doorway on the right side of the picture.  We lost him suddenly to saddle thrombus on the day before Thanksgiving 2010.  We still miss him.

During The Time of No Furniture, we did manage to remove the yellow window valance and vertical blinds, as well as the flowered wallpaper.  This wallpaper was crazy easy to remove.  I literally peeled it off with my hands.  No scraper, no fabric softener, nothing.  If only all wallpaper were so easy.....

And once the wallpaper was off, we got right down to painting.  I had a vision for this room: an eggplant accent wall with a bright white sofa popping right off that purple wall.  Well, buying furniture was nowhere in sight, but I could (and did) paint that accent wall.  To this day, I can't believe that I convinced Mr. M. to let me paint this room purple.  I mean, he usually leaves the decorating ideas up to me, but this OUR home.  So he likes to have some input on the big decisions, and anything remotely feminine usually gets the kibosh.  But he said OK, so I ran with it.  Only.....

While I loved the eggplant accent wall, I HATED the beige color I painted the other three walls.  I used the same color that we had in the hallway, but in here it was just.....gross.  So, I re-painted those walls a pale gray.  And somewhere along the line, we decided to extend the Pergo that we had used in the living room, dining room, and hallway in here.  BEST DECISION EVER.  It makes the house seem so much bigger.

Which got me thinking about furniture.  I still had dreams of that gorgeous white sofa (preferably with nailhead trim), but I had done some thinking about what it would take to keep that sofa clean with two pets (and kids down the line), and was starting to re-consider it.  We weren't ready to buy furniture just yet, but my husband and I did some window shopping and found this beauty.  It was love at first sight.

I have always had a thing for sectionals, and the fabric was this gorgeous, gray tweed.  I envisioned some fun, bright pillows, and a patterned throw.  Love.  It was expensive, way more than we had planned to spend on a couch.  But I vowed to save up and buy that baby ASAP.  But as often happens, life just got in the way.  There were things we needed more immediately than a second set of living room furniture, and life threw us some curveballs that made it harder and harder to justify dropping a few G's on a couch.  Especially since we already had a fully furnished family room. 

So when a family member bought new furniture and offered us their well-taken-care-of living room furniture, we jumped on it!  Remember, a large part of our style is Castoff Chic, and I'm all about using what is available to us to make our home stylish without pouring out tons of cash.  I've ended up really loving this furniture for its comfort and neutrality.

The rest of the room is a study in bargain shopping.  The rug is from RugsUSA (it's 50% off right now), the floor lamp was a clearance find from Pier One.  I actually really hate the lampshade, and plan to replace it, but the price was amazing AND I had a coupon so I bought it anyway. The occasional chair is from Homegoods, and the silver stool-turned-side-table was a clearance find at Target. 





Putting this room (the whole house, in fact) together has also been a study in patience. This is the reason that sometimes my tables and shelves are not styled the way I would ultimately like them to be. I'm waiting until I find the perfect items, because I tend to buy things slowly and over a long period of time, usually waiting until I find items that fit my vision and my budget.   For example, the purple and turquoise pillows that look as if they have petals are from Costco(!) and were a birthday gift WAY back when this room was in the vision stage.  I knew they fit where I wanted to go, so I stored them for a few years until I had furniture to put them on.  I do that a lot, in fact I have a whole cabinet of home décor items stashed away that I have big plans for!

As always, I have a whole list of things I'm planning to "finish" this room.  Here's the list, as it stands now:

• Replace or recover the lampshade
• Get some artwork on that purple wall, and possibly above the TV
• Style the entertainment center
• Hang some sort of pendant lighting over the chair/ottoman
• Consider window treatments (or maybe not, sometimes I kind of like the simplicity of naked windows)
• Move the big feathers on the console table to the bedroom, and replace with something large. Possibly a white ceramic elephant, if I can find one in my budget. (I'm not kidding, I've fallen in love with TWO, but couldn't bring myself to pay for them).

But for now, I'll just enjoy the luxury of having furniture and a space to watch the world pass by while I enjoy my coffee and books.

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