Tag: frame

Bed: a mini project (stage two)

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Stage one of overhauling our bed was hacking the top off, opening up the lines of our bedroom again and giving me less things to bang my head on in the middle of the night.

Stage two involved sanding as long as I could be bothered (not long), inhaling yellow dust (I know because when I sneezed, it came out of my nose), wiping the sanding dust with a teatowel which really shouldn’t have been used for that purpose, all to get it ready for the paint (which I got on the carpet).  There’s a reason I usually let Barry do all this. Continue reading →

Not so picture perfect

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Picture & mirror - beforeI’ve been hard at work turning a couple of old pictures and mirrors into pieces that will match our shiny new nursery.  I don’t want too many different colours going on, so with the pink and grey walls and white furniture, I wanted white frames for anything we put up on the walls.

These two have been hanging around for a while – visitors to our houses from the last 10 years may recognise these; I’m pretty sure they’re both Ikea’s finest.  I already have a white frame for a cross-stitch I’m working on, and I wanted a group of frames like in my inspiration photo that I keep referring to for the nursery.

White mirrorI sanded them both down, stuck masking tape around the edges, and just painted them with the white emulsion we used for our ceilings.  After 3 coats each, they looked quite good, so I started pulling off the masking tape.  The mirror was ok, just needed the edges touching up a little, but the picture had some frosting around the images which came off with the masking tape, leaving an awful edge that I couldn’t do anything about.

problem frame

We tried putting up the mirror in the nursery, but it turned out it looked a bit big and overpowering, especially as we want to put more up around it, so we’ve put that up in the spare room (where it was originally).  I then had a go at painting little pink flowers all around the edge of the picture frame with the tester pot of pink paint to hide the edges.  I’m still not convinced, but it’s up in the room anyway.  I’ll see if it grows on me – Barry likes it, anyway!

photo 4photo 5

 

 

Photo wall… tick!

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Hallelujah, the photo wall is done!  I think it was one of those jobs where the thought of actually doing it was more taxing than the actual action of doing it.  As I mentioned, I have some family coming over today for the bank holiday weekend, so we’ve bitten the bullet and just done it.    I keep walking into the living room and they take me by surprise, as I’m so used to that wall being empty now!

In my humble opinion, I think it looks great!  I sat down on Friday and updated the mock up I’d done in Illustrator, and we used that as a rough guide.  There’s still a few spaces for more photos, so we can add to it if we want to.

So… here it is!  All 24 photos (for now).

It’s a frame up

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Sorry, sorry, I know, I’m a terrible person.  You would think I would be eager to write my 100th post, but we’ve been doing so little house-wise (read: nothing) that I’ve not been able to admit it.

We seem to have negated this inaction by spending £120 on white frames in Ikea.  Now I know this sounds like a lot of money, but we had almost three quarters of this already from the bits and bobs we put on eBay in the last few months, and the living room is looking so bland without these finishing touches that we thought we’d just bite the bullet.  Plus, it’s near TGI Fridays and we deserve Jack Daniels chicken.  I digress.

We also picked up some white boxes for the units, but decided that £120 was enough for one day and put them back.

For this princely sum, we purchased 24 frames – 4 x A4, 11 x A5 (ish), and 5 x smaller ones (5 x 7″) and 4 x even smaller ones (4 x 6″).  We ended up going for two different styles, Sondrum and Ribba.  24 is less than we were going to have originally, but when we looked at my mock up from March it seemed a bit crowded.

With it being payday next week, we’re going to wait to buy the prints, but they should be around £30 from photobox.co.uk.  As I mentioned way back in January, I’ve turned them all black and white and they should look amazing!  Not sure how we’re going to arrange them yet – looks like it may be a difficult thing to measure.  Watch this space…

Procrastination

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As you may have suspected from my recent posts, not much DIY/decorating’s being done at the homestead at the moment.  We’re obviously very busy people, and now the bulk of it’s been done, it’s so easy to take our foot off the accelerator and be a little bit lazy.

I’m going to make a concerted effort to keep going this weekend and get a bit more done in the kitchen, like painting the skirting boards.  If we can do some sanding of the kitchen ceiling and get the beading done in the living room, all the better.

I’ve noticed that the living room looks really quite empty with nothing on the walls, so come payday, we’ll hopefully be able to sort that out.  Given time, I’ve completely changed my mind about having the plain frames, and am now looking at mixing them up, like these from Ikea, which is where we’ll probably end up.

I had a look at the cheapie ones from Wilkinson’s and they were all imperfect and the joins had big gaps in them, so if we’re spending so much, and putting so much time into sorting the photos, it’s worth spending a bit more to get it right.  We will have to go to Ikea and see them before we buy them though.  These are from Ikea’s website…

Depressing visual representation of all the jobs left to do: the living room

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In the second of this two-part mini-series, I take a closer look at the living room, and all the things we still need to do.  Click here for yesterday’s gripping instalment.

1. Sand and repaint wall and paint skirting boards

2. Paint these skirting boards and cut and fit the beading

3. Paint this door (both sides) and the doorframe on the other side

4. Paint this radiator

5. And this one

6. Fit the strip thing between the kitchen and living room

7. Create the photo wall – finalise photos and buy frames and prints

8. Buy white drawers and baskets for the units

Shades of grey

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It’s difficult when we haven’t finished the living room, but are trying to get cracking with the kitchen as we’re under a bit of pressure as they’ve delivered the oven yesterday and are trying to deliver the units in two weeks.  We still have ideas that we’re working on in the meantime for the living room, but they’re having to go on the back burner for a little while.

One idea we had was of having lots of photos across the green wall in the living room, under the spotlights.  We liked the thought of having loads of images of friends and family, although I initially thought more order would be better.  I’ve since been convinced that orientation and size doesn’t matter.  I will put my foot down and say I want all the same frames though, to stop it looking too unruly.  White wooden ones!

This idea then developed into a black and white theme. As white wood complements our new décor, I started thinking about how the photos would look inside the frames.  I’ve spent my lunchtimes at work using Illustrator to turn colour images greyscale and I now have 37 to print!  The selection may require some editing down and we’d need to decide which ones we wanted larger than others.

I didn’t want to put someone’s image up without asking, so this is one of me taken in the Maldives on our honeymoon five years ago.  Not all of them are quite as artsy, but it gives you a feel for how it will look.

If anyone has any suggestions where one may procure dozens of reasonable wall frames, ranging from A4 down to standard photo sizes, please let me know!  I’m willing to paint them, but I would like them all to look the same style.