Hallway Makeover - Our Hand Painted House

We have this small squarish hallway leading to Jarrod’s Office, my Art Studio and the main floor bathroom. Oh, also a linen closet. I really wanted to do the entire hallway in googly eyes (shhh …. it’s okay) and started it. However, it proved to be incredibly time consuming to do each set of eyes differently and I quickly abandoned the project and fretted about how I should move forward. It sat like this for about a year:

Here’s Googly and I posing for an instagram post (showing off a t-shirt I designed) , before I betrayed and destroyed him.

While I took my time deciding if I should really spend hours upon hours painting each individual set of eyes, I turned around to the opposite wall on an ADHD whim and started this lightning/cloud pattern:

Here it is, unfinished, much like most of the projects in my life. I actually really liked where this was going and considered just taking it all the way around. In the end, I decided to just start over. (I will probably use this pattern elsewhere in the house.)

So I painted over everything with the same deep plum color and this time covered the baseboards and door frame. While I was painting I was trying to figure out what I wanted to paint on the walls. I thought about doing the googly eye thing (my family is apparently sad that I painted over it) in a simpler pattern, or actually giving them faces.

I got my iPad out to do some rough sketches:

I really just felt like this was not the place for the googly eye wall. Images of Tigers kept coming to me, so after about 18 attempts at drawing a tiger (It’s so funny, as an artist you get really good at drawing/painting certain things/people/places etc, so when I tried to draw a tiger, which I never draw, it was so….bad.) I finally got a reference photo and did a quick outline then filled in the rest myself. ( OOF! I’m definitely going to start branching out on my skills here. )

Anyways, I know, shut up already, right?

So I ended up with this:

This is the first time I’ll be making my own stencil, and I’m nervous. Also, will I regret this? I think I’ll make them really big so I’m not spending 6 months doing that much detail on each tiger. Also, the colors will be more muted than what’s on the digital version. Also, stay tuned!

Hey Melissa Mae / Funky Master Bathroom / One Room Challenge Week 5

This week for the One Room Challenge:

Painted the countertop with Rust-Oleum Countertop Coating in Pewter. This is my first experience using this product, and it was a bit tricky. I did a few layers and used a paint brush in quick short strokes to create a texture. Once that was dried, I added a strokes of white, black and orange.

Before. Sometimes I make it into the shot looking like a weirdo.

After

When that was complete and dry, I taped off the first sink and painted it 2 layers of black, sanded it down, added water drops, then painted another layer of black around those. Jarrod took the handle off of the faucet, which has been spray painted blue.

Next step is to add more water drops with shading and then move onto the next sink.

Jarrod started working on the mirror frame:

Four boards stained teal will be cut down to size and mounted around the mirror above gray backsplash tile.

Not pictured: Shower metal frame painted black, closet and bathroom doors painted black, and inside the separate toilet space, the molding, door frame, and ceiling have been painted orange, pink and blue. I’ll post photos of those once I have better photos.

This week:

• Paint the floor

• Mount hand towel bars

• Hang art and plants

• Touch ups

I’m really excited for this final week! I love the entire process of creating a space, but the best part is standing back and taking it all in when it’s done.

To end this post, I’d like to share how I found my glove the other day:

Well, I never!

See ya next week!!!

One Room Challenge - A "Hands On" Project

Oh boy, I’m excited. This is my first time doing the One Room Challenge!

A quick intro from me to you: I’m an artist and a production designer/set decorator in the film industry. We moved into our house of June 2017, and I’ve been looking forward to owning a house my entire life, so I could do whatever the hell I wanted when it came to design and decor. The problem is, I’ve been so busy designing spaces and art for movies and tv, that I’ve hardly had any time to work on my own home. So thank you, to the One Room Challenge, for being a great reason to finally start my creative blog.

So that’s a little bit about me! Thanks for coming and checking out my blog, by the way. I’m excited to see what everyone else is doing with the challenge!

Originally I was going to do the Living Room, but my husband, Jarrod, got so tired of our towel bar falling off of the wall, he finally designed his own, and it’s pretty freakin rad. We decided together to finish our master bathroom, him taking care of the custom hardware, and me on the design and painting.

Prior to starting the challenge, I had already painted one of our walls a lime green but hadn’t gone any further with it. I knew I wanted to keep the color, but ended up picking one with a bit more yellow in it.

Here are the before pictures: (click to scroll through for more photo’s)

Below is a concept sketch I came up with (I use Procreate on the iPad Pro.)

Obviously I love color….

Some of this design is subject to change, as I’m a half plan, half fly-by-the-seat-of-my-inspirational-pants kind of creator.

I mulled in my head off and on about what pattern or design I wanted to paint on the walls and finally came up with the idea of Jarrod and I tracing our hands and then I would paint them black and add detail in brighter colors. Time consuming? Yes, but so worth it. (My goal with my house is to have all hand-painted walls, so it’s going to be really fun coming up with something unique for each room.)

The first step was to tape and plastic the bathroom so I wouldn’t drip paint everywhere. (I still did, and still managed to get it in spots it’s not supposed to be. Classic Melissa!)

Next I painted 4 layers of Citronette by Home Decorators Collection on all of the walls:

Then I stole Jarrod away from script writing and we traced our hands on cardboard for stencils. It was so romantical.

I traced the cardboard cutouts in a random pattern then filled them in using Behr Ultra paint in “Totally Black” then added detail with Behr Ultra in Pacific Coast Blue and Watermelon Smoothie.

(click to scroll through for more photo’s)

I’m really loving the hand design, and am planning on doing it on every wall.

That’s all I got for now, thanks for stopping by!