A new winter hobby

[PhotoLady]

As the weather is a bit hit and miss, I've not been out quite as much with my camera.... but we've got some rail journeys planned for the not too distant future and also a first time visit to the island of Jersey in a few weeks time, so I won't have itchy feet for too long.

So meanwhile, I seem to have found myself a neat little hobby and have been having a dabble in the arty, crafty type stuff that I've always poo pooed being a female born with very little patience.
However, I found it quite therapeutic and it got me away from the pc for a few hours too!

Both me and my other half were so fed up not being able to find exactly the right bathroom cabinet during the refit, I had one of those "eureka" moments that tend to appear in the middle of the night and next morning went and dug out my old pine bedside cabinet.

Watered down Rock Salt white paint on the frame and drawers.

15732244_10154942063767431_168.jpg (235.53 KiB) Viewed 1615 times

I put some watered down emulsion paint we've used in the bathroom over the frame and the inside of the drawers.

Next, some lining paper for the drawers and the inside shelf.

french-wine-labels.jpg (220.01 KiB) Viewed 1615 times

I then used the other Coastal Grey (blue tinge) paint on the drawer fronts - but these, I kept as a solid cover rather than a thinner version.

It all came together quite nicely to create the look I was after - a sort of vintage / French shabby chic:

First Project

cypruspictures_wp_20170104_12_.jpg (214.29 KiB) Viewed 1615 times

I started it on New Years' Day and finished on Tuesday after buying the lining paper on the Monday.

I've now got my eye on the country pine table which started out life in our old house in UK, travelled to Cyprus and came back with us 2yrs later. As well as a rather fetching cabinet in our living room which houses all our Egyptian artifacts we've collected over our many visits there but hubby won't let me get my hands on the cabinet.... yet

Next time, I'm going down the route of Chalk Paint but I've sussed out how to make my own..... however, I think I will have to bite the bullet and buy the wax though

[PhotoLady]

So, I now have the "bug" to create new things out of old stuff....

We recently purchased another cabinet for the bathroom (sort of a Tallboy unit) and added the backing decorative French wine labels wallpaper to the part of the unit where it had a glass door. That worked out very well, which turned us to another item....

This square mirror is one we picked up whilst living in Cyprus and it has lived for many years in our guest bedroom sitting on top of a pine chest of drawers.

We kept the vintage cream colour so no painting was necessary - all we did was measure and cut the wallpaper to size and stick it to the outside part of the frame around the mirror. The most difficult part was deciding where to make the cuts to get the best effect from the wallpaper.

We're doing well out of that £6 roll of wallpaper from Wilkos

You can see the new unit we purchased reflected here where it's set against the wall on the opposite side of the bathroom.


We also had the original window removed (it had a crack in the inside pane of the double glazed unit when we purchased the house) and replaced with a slightly smaller one, which gave us more depth to the side wall to put the tallboy against:

How it started out:


We're very pleased with the new bathroom and the overall effect now we've had a bigger shower unit and tray installed by pushing the outer wall back, new floor and shower wall tiles plus a replacement sink.