On the Cover of the ASID Orange County Chapter Magazine!

I got a pleasant little surprise in the mail last week.  Our nursery designed for the Noah's ARC Design Challenge was on the cover of the ASID CA Orange County Chapter Magazine!  Hooray!

Here's the spread...

Heres a few more close ups of our work as well as the other schools feature in the magazine.

And here we are! (Sorry about the poor picture quality. They were taken with my iPhone.)

You can also check it out on the ASID Orange County website. The pdf is here.

Chevron Painted Clover Table

Sorry for the lack of posts recently. School has started up again, so I'll probably be posting less for the next 11 weeks while I'm studying lighting and AutoCADing away.  But I do have a couple more projects from the Noah's ARC nursery to share with you.  So up next is my chevron painted clover table...

Ok... so its not exactly chevron, but I wanted to create a pattern that mimicked the chevron stenciled wall, so it sort-of is... and that's what I'm gonna call it! So there!

Although I really love every project we did for the Noah's ARC nursery, this little clover side table was basically my baby.  I even bid on it myself, but I guess someone wanted it even more because they outbid me in the last 30 minutes of the silent auction.  So new clover table owner, whoever you are, I really hope you're loving her as much as I do. :)  Here's a little tale for you of how she came to be...

I took it to my home, gave it a good cleaning, taped off all the brass, and primed it.  As you can see, I didn't do a very good just sanding (really it needed stripper) which bit me in the ass later.  But until I knew that, I continued along my merry way and we spray painted it green and let it dry with all the rest of the painted furniture.

Then I went to tape off my design and as I was adjusting the tape, much to my dismay, the paint started peeling off!

So I had to start over.  This time I stripped the table with Citristrip first.  When it was all stripped and sanded, we noticed this really pretty burled wood edge so we decided to tape it off keep the wood trim.

Then I mixed my paint colors...

I used the Sherwin Williams "Colonial Revival Sea Green" as the mid tone and mixed some white in for a lighter tone and added a darker paint (a sample of Benjamin More from Ace Hardware) for another dimension.

I also used caulking, which is a little painters trick I learned to make sure you get crisp lines.  You simply run a light bead of caulking over your tape edge and then wipe it off with a damp cloth so its barely there. That seals your tape line down so paint doesn't seep underneath.

I taped off my design with frog tape using the tape width as a spacer and labeling "L," "M," and "D" to keep track of what color each line would be.  Then I started painting...

Judging by the poor picture quality this was obviously a late night project. I spent a few evenings working on it, letting each coat dry for a day before painting the next.  The left photo shows the first two coats (the medium base and dark coat) while the right shows all three coats before I took the border tape off.

To finish her off, I touched it up by hand and gave it a coat of wipe on poly/  Then, cleaned the brass legs with Brasso...

...stepped back and oooooed and awwwed...

Here she is in her final spot in the nursery...

And now she's in a new home for someone else to enjoy.  Hope you're lovin' her out there!

 

We Won!

Yesterday the gracious staff of the Salvation Army hosted a beautiful little awards ceremony for the Noah's ARC Design Challenge.  We had amazing competition who created beautiful designs in three Salvation Army stores in Orange County (four including ours).  I'm so excited to tell ya'll... we won!

Thanks so much to all who participated!  And thanks to all of the readers who have provided support and encouragement along the way.  I feel so blessed to have been a part of this awesome design event and honored to contribute to an amazing organization that helps save lives every day.

Two DIY Lamp Redos

Baby's gotta have a little light in their room right?  We reinvented two lamps for our Noah's ARC nursery.  I don't have many pictures of the process, but I thought I'd share the before and afters anyway.

First up is this little table lamp.  Coincidentally, the pattern of the metal shade happened to be the same as one of the fabrics used for the suitcases.

It basically has two shades: a metal cut-out one that matches the finish of the base, and a white fabric shade inside that. So in order to refinish and recover it, we had to disassemble.  I'd say this was a simple effort of man and screwdriver, I mean... there were only three screws holding the shades one, but MAN were they in there like a teenager on Facebook! Pavitra got one out, but had to have someone at Home Depot help with the other two.  I'm not sure how they got them off, but they did!

Then all it needed was a few coats of white spray paint and some new fabric over the shade.  Guess which fabric we used... Yep! the green one that was the same pattern.  It's always effective to echo patterns throughout a design. This is a simple way to make things look cohesive.  Here's the final product...

Second, we have this floor lamp with its interesting base.  We thought the lines were whimsical and fun, and knew we could transform it with a little paint and a new shade.

We gave it a coat of primer...

... and a coat of "Colonial Revival Sea Green."  Then Pavitra followed this tutorial to create the burlap lampshade over an inexpensive plastic shade from Ikea (I bought it before Christmas for about $5).

Because of its location in the space, I couldn't get a good picture of it in situ.  In the photo below you can see why.  It was impossible to get a full-length photo of it without showing you all of the lovely Salvation Army store.

We put it in the corner by the toy chest to create a sense of height on that side of the space and to carry the green color over to the other side of the room.

Lighting really dresses up a space and I think these lamps add the perfect finishing touch of whimsy.

Noah's ARC Nursery Photos

Happy Friday! This weekend is the last weekend that the Noah's ARC Design Challenge vignettes will be up in Orange County Salvation Army stores and the last few days for you to bid on these awesome upcycled donations made fabulous by design students from Westwood College, Art Institute, Saddleback College, and Interior Designers Institute (including moi!). So even though I still have a few more projects from the Noah's ARC Nursery to show you, but I wanted to share my photos of the final space.  In addition to these, Ruel of R-2 Visual Studios in Orange County photographed the spaces, so feel free to check out his website for more photos of us and our competitors.  You can also read more about the competition on the Salvation Army's blog as well.

Get ready for picture overload...

If you want more details about how this space came together check out my posts labeled "Noah's ARC Design Challenge."