Posts Tagged "diy"

diy dinosaur bookends

Posted by Sharon Pakir on Jan 8, 2012 in Home & Decor | 2 comments

Last week, Anita and I decided to take a little day off to do some crafty fun. She’d seen this nifty little tutorial online on how to make bookends out of some dollar store plastic animals and plastic photoframes, and once she showed it to me, I got a wee bit excited as well.

Surprisingly, it was pretty hard to find plastic animals that were suitable – we hit up the Reject Shop, as well as several asian variety stores, and settled on some dinosaur toys from Kmart. Instead of photoframes, we got point of sale signage plastic holders, so that there was no slant in them.

We tried several methods of cutting them up in half. They didn’t cut well at all with sharp scissors, so we went for the next option in our arsenal:

A little bit of overkill? Perhaps. But it was fun.

In hindsight, doing that with shorts and no protective shoes on was probably not a good idea.

Moving on!

We soon realised that a sharp box cutter worked MUCH better to slice through the animals cleanly.

You will have to ignore the “bloodstain” on my hand. It was actually some 24 hr lipstick I’d tried on 2 days before. Yes, I bought it because its staying power is evidently impressive! (You can buy it too!)

Whilst I worked hard on the slicing and dicing, Anita busied herself with completely useful exercises, such as making a mutant managerie.

After cutting them all up, we stuck them onto their plastic frames. It was hard to get them to stick, even superglue was pretty useless. The hot glue gun didn’t work at ALL, though we did have a fun time playing with it. In the end though, Gorilla glue did the trick.

To be fair, Anita’s skillset is the fiddly stuff (like gluing these animals on delicately). I have no such claims to such skills. Once they’d dried, we took them to the very official spray-painting station in my backyard to get made over.

Anita went for silver, and I went for (surprise surprise!) GOLD.

And yes, S did come home and ask why the garden rocks were metallic. He wasn’t impressed.

We used plastic spray paint primer, let it dry for 40 minutes, and then 2 light and thin coats of our colour of choice.

Annnnnnnd, TA-DA!

And yes. I am aware that my bookend bodies don’t match. And that has everything to do with the fact that I LIKE mutant animals and NOTHING to do with the fact that we may have botched a few of the first specimens, OKAY?

Good.

Now that’s sorted, one last gorgeous photo of our wonderfully productive day!

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horse love

Posted by Sharon Pakir on Aug 19, 2011 in Home & Decor | 4 comments

I’ve written before about how terrified I am of horses, and yet I have now been on horseback, and enjoyed it!

A few months ago I found this horrific excuse of a ceramic animal in a thrift store.

WHAT IS IT?

It’s a unicorn. With a broken horn (see the forlorn hole in its forehead?). AND you can’t tell in this photo, but it’s not only white, it’s covered in glitter. Subtle glitter. You know, to make it extra classy.

Something about it thrilled me though (maybe its bubblegum pink and sparkly mane and tale?) and I bought it for the whole princely sum of $8.

I took it home, and placed it on a brick in the back garden, for…

Now I KNOW this is the wrong kind of primer, BUT you have to hear me out. The entire THING was covered in a plasticky like substance (I think to make it shimmer a bit more) and I didn’t feel like sanding it down. So, plastic primer it was.

I gave it a nice even coat and let it dry overnight, and voila, the finish became roughed up like it had been sanded. YAY!

Then out came the bling. Why the bling? Well I’ve had a recent obsession with brass/gold things. From jewellery, to belts, to homewares, and even lamps. YES, entire gold lamps. Behold just one of the items of magnificence I made my long suffering man cart home from Egypt.

 Umm, yeah. S doesn’t entirely approve of my obsession with gold animals, but I’M ON A ROLL HERE and beware anyone who steps into the path of the ROLL.

ANYWAYS.

To cut a long story short, I spray painted the damn unicorn horse morph GOLD.

And here it is. Ain’t she purdy?

And, she looks magnificent on our dining room sideboard, with our newly framed Egyptian papyrus art!

(Excuse the crappy reflection of the light in the glass. I err, didn’t plan on that.)

So, I’m officially addicted to spray painting, and I may or may not have run around the house looking for more things I could spray paint gold (cue diabolical laughter) but yes, how good is that $8 investment in my home decor?!

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have thy tools ready.

Posted by Sharon Pakir on Apr 6, 2011 in Home & Decor | 0 comments

Even though S and I moved into this house 5 months ago, there are still, embarrassingly, whole areas (which is my euphemism for “rooms”), that are cluttered and not really well put away. Whilst we had unpacked our thousands of boxes within the first week of moving in, we didn’t always unpack them well, telling ourselves we would slowly work through the house and sort it all out.

Famous last words.

Somehow, life just got the better of us – Christmas and New Years wiped us out, then there was the Sydney Salsa Congress in January, then my trip to Singapore. There’s been plenty of dance events to keep us busy, as well as all the work we’ve been doing outdoors with every spare weekend moment we get. Then finally, there’s the bit where I’m a horrendous homemaker and truly bad at understanding how a house is meant to run.

Ok fine, the above are all excuses. Except the last bit – that is all true.

Last weekend, I finally got some time to do some tidying of some problem areas. Problem area number 1: tools. S and I had lots of tools between us, but we weren’t quite sure of WHAT we had, and no system to storing them. For the last few months, our tools had been scattered all around the laundry counters, stashed in a couple of containers, and lingering in odd places around the deck (where we’d used them). I decided to do a bit of an audit on what we had, and oh my…

People.

For 2 lovely humans who have previously had little to no experience in DIY, man, we had a lotta tools.

 

I mean, does anybody really need 3 hammers, 3 pairs of pliers, 4 measuring tapes, and a thousand spanners? Oh and don’t even get me started on the screwdrivers – that collection above is IN ADDITION to the brief-case sized black case enclosed Stanley set (I think it’s what is known as a COMPENDIUM) that Stephen has. Or the variety and range of drill bits we own (when both of us learnt to use a drill for the first time less than a fortnight ago).

Plus, we had an assortment of nails, screws, bolts and all kinds of little metal whizoos – it was like we had become a family of carpenters overnight. Half the things in there, we didn’t even know what to do with.

I was in a “sorting” mood, so I divided everything up into categories, then put them all neatly away:

And then I got started on the tidy up of the laundry room, which was a bit of a mammoth task that left me lying in bed and moaning and groaning for hours after. But that’s for another post. Really, I kid you not, that laundry room was pretty chaotic.

With the tools though, is anyone else like this? Are we the only household with an array of tools so magnificent we could host DIY workshops? Re-assure me here, and let me know we’re not the only crazies who seem to have a collecting hobby we didn’t know about! Or should we be getting rid of some of it?

Ps, when I had laid all the tools out on the carpet, I made S come and look at the ridiculous scale of it. He didn’t think it was ridiculous at all. His eyes lit up with pride, and he gave me the biggest grin, and declared, “IT’S AWESOME ISN’T IT!” – I think I see where the problem lies…

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horse sense

Posted by Sharon Pakir on Jan 23, 2011 in Home & Decor | 0 comments

So. I do love horses – I think when they canter, it’s poetry in motion, they have beautiful form, and they seem like they would be such lovely animals. Everytime I’ve gone near a horse though, I’ve felt inexplicable terror – I don’t know if it’s their huge larger than life size, or their massive chomping teeth, or just my insanity. It could well be the latter.

I tried to get over the fear last year, I really did. We were in India, and I actually touched a horse – not a well bred, trained, locked in a stable horse that couldn’t hurt me, but a wild (albeit skinny) horse that was just roaming a field. I didn’t want to touch it. Sonia made me.

I didn’t cope very well.

SO ANYWAY, I’ve decided I must stop being scared of horses this year, so I’m going to make Lys take me to see Murphy, and when back is better, I may even ask for a riding lesson. But to start with I thought I’d surround myself with some reminders of this resolution.

I picked these babies up at the antique store the other day. Ugly as sin, yes, cheap as chips, also. In fact so ugly that S saw them sitting on the sideboard and recoiled. But I loved their shape, and remembered this post by the lovely Young House Love people, and got inspired.

Now, there’s a lot of purists out there who say you shouldn’t spray paint things willy-nilly because they could be secretly valuable, etc etc etc. But I’m of the opinion that if I can make something un-ugly, then it’s probably worth it. And whilst we’re at it, can we just have a moment about how fabulous the phrase “willy-nilly” is?

So, whilst S was out in the garden doing manly things like painting, wielding a pick-axe, chainsawing and more, I took a damp cloth and gave them a bit of a clean. I didn’t use any cleaning product because I wanted a clean surface with no residue. Then I got out my can of black gloss spray paint, and off I went. It needed 2 coats (the first coat didn’t cover all the little nooks and crannies), and the finished result is quite gorgeous indeed!

MUCH better! And I’ve decided to pop these black beauties into the office. They look magnificent in front of their backdrop of floral paper.

What do you think? Vast improvement, I say, and cost almost nothing. The spray painting took about 10 minutes per coat, and I let them dry for 2 hours each time. After the 2nd coat dried, I handled them gently, and let them sit inside (it’s cooler so I figured they’d dry better) overnight. And ta-da! This wasn’t a weekend job, it was a breakfast job. Quick and dirty awesomeness.

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extreme makeover: the outdoor setting

Posted by Sharon Pakir on Jan 9, 2011 in Home & Decor | 1 comment

I’m actually so proud of this project, I don’t really know how to describe it. The number of hours that has gone into this, and the spectacular result, as been overwhelming – I’ve never been handy, or thought I would be able to do anything this fiddly.

When S and I moved in, I was delighted at his outdoor furniture – he’d bought it in Turkey years ago, and it was gorgeous, heavy-set, great quality. The only problem? It was years old, and showing signs of wear. Rusty wrought iron, split wood with small holes in it, and worn down over years of use. We didn’t want to throw it out, so I started researching how I could rejuvenate it. Lots of research and advice from handy friends later, here’s what I did!

I don’t really have a good “before” shot (mental note – must take “before” shots before jumping into projects!), so this dark fuzzy one will have to do. You can see the dullness of the wood, and the cracks in it. Kind of.

We started by sanding it down – S’s friend Brian helped us with this (I was still pretty injured at this stage so couldn’t use the electric sander). He got it beautifully sanded down, as you can see:

Then, we poly-filled all the cracks in the wood as well. You can see in the pic below – all the lighter bits are polyfilled. Kind of scary, the extent of how crackly the wood was.

After polyfilling (ps, this is so much fun!), we sanded it all down again. Oh yeah, sawdust EVERYWHERE. We also sanded down all the rusted iron, and got down to bare metal in most areas. We used a wire brush to get into nooks and crannies that were difficult to reach.

We also tightened any loose screws and planks that seemed a bit rickety.

Then I started painting. And oh man, was this a long process. I got anti-rust black paint (gloss), and a little teeny weeny paintbrush, and off I went.

Let me tell you, it feels like weeks went past where I just kept sitting out on that deck and whittling away at it with my tiny paintbrush, a steady hand, music playing, and getting into every nook and cranny of those damn chairs.

About 2/3 of the way through, my back flared up REALLY badly, and then Brian bribed his sons to come finish it off. They were not pleased, but did a GREAT job! Yay to child labour!

Then it was time to stain the wood. I was TERRIFIED of doing this – online tales and tutorials seemed too easy, like staining was this walk-in-the-park type activity that any fool could do. There HAD to be a catch, and as we all know, I’m a magnet for “UH OH” moments. I started with trepidation, just painted it on, and wiped it off with a towel.

And OH MY GAWDNESS people, it totally IS easy and idiot proof, and unbelievably, Sharon-proof as well! You just brush it on liberally, wait for the wood to soak it up a bit, then towel it off, and there you have it, you have STAINED. OFFICIALLY.

I finished the first (small) panel so quickly I couldn’t believe it, especially juxtaposed with the hours and days I’d taken to paint the black wrought iron.

The table was the most fun – just slapped it on, basically! At first I was worried about how even the stain was going to be, but I stopped worrying when I realised the wood was going to be as absorbent as it damn well wished, and there was nothing I could do about it. Besides we were going for the uneven/quirky look (yes, I kept chanting  that to myself).

I was even happier when I realised how GREAT the stained wood looked next to the freshly painted gloss black:

Here’s what they looked like after the first coat of stain:

(Yes, I alternated between painting the black and staining!)

And then I slapped on a second coat of stain, and it started looking a really nice deep colour:

I let all of that dry for about 2 days, and then went into the next phase of this project, namely, PRETTIFY and PROTECT. See, I’m a glamour girl and all this wood furniture was a teeny weeny bit too rustic for my tastes. Sooooooo, I thought about what kind of wood I liked that was outdoors – and genius me, it’s WOOD ON SHIPS. You know, high gloss timber on yachts. Ahh, yes. Let me recreate my perfect yacht in my own backyard.

Off I went to Bunnings, and the nice men there recommended me MARINE VARNISH. Admittedly, they couldn’t believe I wanted high gloss outdoor furniture, but I think they’re starting to recognise me at the local Bunnings as “strange lady”. Anyway, Marine Varnish idea was GENIUS! It’s hardy, protects the wood, and is super tough against the elements.

I was only slightly terrified (after all, I’d conquered the STAINING!), bought myself a good varnishing brush to guarantee a good finish (DESPITE me), and off I went.

And it was surprisingly easy.

Here’s how 1 coat of varnish looked:

What delighted me most was how the varnish seemed to meld the stain into the wood even more, and gave depth to the colours. It also dried ROCK HARD, which  made me believe in its protective powers against dents and elements. SO I went with a second coat.

And you will not BELIEVE the  squeals of delight that ensued, people, it was MIRROR finish perfect. Well ok, maybe not, but it was VASTLY improved lemme tell you.

Before moving it all back onto our freshly painted deck, we wanted to put some protecters on the bottoms of the chairs. But apparently, it is impossible to buy the right sized furniture protectors unless you’re willing to spend the equivalent of a gold brick, or a handful of diamonds. And paying lots for crap like this really ruffles my feathers.

So instead we just bought 1/4 metre of felt-like carpet, and cut it to size using a 50cent coin as a guide.

Then we stuck them onto the bottoms of the chairs and table with contact glue (suitable for bonding metal). TADA! All up, it probably cost something like $4, instead of the $80 we were going to have to pay for the commercially sold ones. The cheapskate in me was VERY pleased, and now the very heavy chairs no longer scrape along the deck or make me nervous.

We gave everything a good wipe down with a damp cloth, and then positioned everything onto our deck. AND TA-DA!

So there you have it folks, here’s how ME (aka, can’t be handy, very clumsy princess chick) managed to turn this:

with the help of these:

into this!!!

I know I can’t fully express how excited I am, but I AM. First of all, I have embarked upon the learning of a wonderful new skill. Also, you have no idea what an accomplishment this is, both personally, and in light of having had almost 5 months be written off by an injury. This is almost the only thing I have to show for it!

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