Another Ugly Art Re-Do and "It Doesn't have to be Perfect to be Beautiful" Challenge ala Nester

So I have been redoing my room. I painted and re-did the "Mis-Treatments" this weekend. I ordered a print for over my bed ( for all of you that guessed in my last post you were all SO WRONG!! hehe! I went with the black and white tulip) so I needed to unify the rest of the art in the room. I'm all about re purposing, sure I love to shop and could have gone out and bought new art, but there is something so much more satisfying about a can of black spray paint 3 dollars worth of scrapbook paper from my stash, imperfect frames and a little elbow grease. Call me weird.

Check out Nesters imperfectly perfect challenge and play along you even get a free blinky out of the deal.

If you don't have a weird thing about having brown paper backing all of your art you can do this too! Heck, if you do have a weird thing about brown paper backing just buy yourself a roll of brown paper and hot glue it to the back of the frames. For me it just takes to long (the extra 5 minutes). If I catch anyone peeking behind the art in my house they are officially no longer my friend. Harsh I know.

So take down your art and rip off the brown paper . It feels like Christmas morning. Promise.



Now lift up all the staples holding the cardboard into place and pop out the glass and all. Take them out to the garage and shoot the empty frames with a couple of coats of your favorite black spray paint. Or brush them if you are a brush girl/guy.



Pop your paper and glass back in and you're in business! For some reason this is incredibly exciting to me. Possibly because I am actually using up some of my horrendously large scrapbook stash. I also like that you can't buy these in the store and that they are far from perfect. The brown paper is no more...






***Click here for info/where to buy the paper I used***

What do you think of the green paint? I love the way it turned out it really warmed up the room. I'll post lots of pictures when I get it all back together.

Ugly Art ReDo Part 2
I got everything hung, recovered the canvases that hide my ugly doorbell and thermostat. The canvas recover idea came from the wonderful Nester Queen of "Mistreatments" She is cool, wicked funny AND creative. You simply must visit her blog.

The chalkboard paint worked better on the ugly art than the ugly plaques. I figure with using everything I already had around the house this project only cost about $5.oo for the paint and the little bit of fabric. How cool is that! I really fills up the entry wall and has big impact.


We will be filling the boards up with sayings and stuff in coming few days. I need to find some cute sayings and keep the boys from drawing butts or worse on them. Sadly at 15, and 13 they do stuff like that. *Sigh*

Ugly Art ReDO Part 1

When we moved into our new home I kinda went willy nilly with my art choices trying to get stuff on the walls and make it feel homey. Now as I look around I am like "what was I thinking?"

Lately I have been brainstorming about how to reuse some of this "ugly art."



I love the look of the big ole' chalk boards I see in the Pottery Barn and Ballard catalogs. And I really like the idea of having a message center where my crazy funny boys can write silly fun stuff to each other, and where I can scrawl ( with my less than stellar handwriting) random quotes, shopping lists, weekly menu, to do stuff. You get the idea.






So I thought maybe just maybe I could redo my ugly art with a can of chalkboard paint and a couple of cans of spray paint. I did two coats of chalk board paint, it dried really fast and didn't smell up the house at all. This stuff is really neat!




The project went well last night. I actually made a killer pan of Lasagna in between coats of chalkboard paint and spray painting the frames. I love multitasking.


I will post pictures of the finished message center later on today. It's snowy and blustery here today. A perfect day for some decorating projects!


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