My activist

As you may have heard, tonight is the big "cover the night" night for the KONY 2012 campaign. If you're not familiar, you can take a look at this video. It'll take you 30 minutes to watch it, but you won't realize it while you're watching it. It's very well done and compelling.

I'm not sure what all they've discussed at my son's school, but he came home yesterday saying he needed a red shirt to wear on Friday. And not only that, he wanted his shirt to have the KONY 2012 logo on it. I asked him if he knew what KONY 2012 was all about and he said they had watched the video and he thought it was a cool thing they were doing. So we went to Goodwill for a red shirt (hooray for $2 t-shirts), printed out the logo, made a stencil and painted the logo on the shirt. 

 
They ended up using black spray paint because it was the easiest and fastest way to do it. I made them go outside for that part.

My little activist. I'm so proud. Actually, there's nothing little about him.  ;)

William Morris Thursday - repainting furniture

I don't have much to report this week as I've taken a little bit of a break from the purging and organizing. I have a whole car load of stuff that needs to go to either goodwill, the consignment store or the recycling center, but we're conserving gas right now so I'm not making many trips into town.

This past weekend, I repainted a chest of drawers for my son's room and another one for the girls' room.

The chest from my son's room was a garage sale find from when we moved into our house. It was painted some other color and I covered it in a thick coat of glossy black paint to go in his camouflage-themed room. It probably wasn't the best choice, but I was just trying to get everyone moved in and it was the easiest thing to do at the moment. My son wanted me to paint it red so I took the leftover red from his walls and whipped up a batch of chalk paint. After painting two coats, I didn't like the way it was looking. You could still see the black underneath the red and it kind of reminded me of the glazing phase of the 60's that you see on lots of thrift store furniture. So I just added another coat and that did it.

When it came time to put the drawers in, I realized that it was kind of plain and since this was a piece for my son's room and not many people would see it, I decided to experiment. I'll blame Pinterest for that.

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So I took the two grays that I had painted on the walls and mixed in a little black until I got 4 shades of gray for the drawers. They aren't a perfect progression from light to dark, but I wasn't going to mess with perfection on this one. I think it turned out nice and my boy likes it, too.

My next project was to paint the girls' dresser a color that would finally match their room. It went from this...

to this

I made some chalk paint out of the leftover paint from the nightstands in there and sealed it with a dark furniture paste. I just need to find some old mismatched pulls for the drawers and it'll be done.

And that's what I did this week.

Linking to Jules' William Morris project. You can join in here.

William Morris Thursday - my boy's room

While reading through my blogroll this morning, I noticed Jules did a post on cleaning out her bottom freezer drawer. That's interesting, I thought. She usually saves that kind of stuff for Thursday. And then it hit me that today is Thursday. Whoops. Totally forgot about my William Morris project post and I actually have something to share.

For weeks I've been telling my 13 year old son that I'd repaint his bedroom. I painted it an army green to go with all of his military stuff when we built the house 7 years ago. Since then, my boy has really given the room a work out. There were scuff marks, nail holes and lots of places where the paint has peeled off from all the rough playing he's done in there. ;) Since he's moved out of the rough playing phase of his life (sniff, sniff) he's wanted a more mature color palette and clean lines to match his neat freak personality. It's taken every ounce of self control for him to not just grab a brush and some paint and take care of the problem for himself. So, with a four day Easter weekend to take advantage of, I finally stepped up and did what I promised. 

My pictures this week leave a lot to be desired, but you'll get the gist.

The comforter set I got him has a red, black and gray design on it. I took his pillow sham to Lowe's and bought two different shades of gray and a quart of red that matched his bedding. I don't have any full shots of the room because his window doesn't have any blinds on it so they're always blown out.

When I asked my son what color he wanted his room to be, he requested red. I told him red was out of the question, but suggested painting the lower portion dark gray and the upper portion light gray with a red stripe around the middle. He shrugged his shoulders which, I think, means 'whatever' in teen speak.

I borrowed my friends laser level to paint a wide red stripe around the room and then I used it to tape over the red stripe. Then all I had to do was paint the bottom part up to the tape and paint the upper part down to the tape. When I removed the tape, I had a red stripe around the room!

He likes it and is in the process of reorganizing the whole thing. I still have to paint his dresser and nightstand and find a cool table for his tv and game system. He also requested a couch and coffee table so he can relax and a mini fridge, washer and dryer for his closet. I told him it was his bedroom, not a bachelor pad.

On an emotional note, I will admit that I started crying no less than 3 times while doing this project at the thought of my little boy growing up. So if someone who has an older than 13 year old boy will go ahead and tell me that it gets easier, I'd appreciate it. So far, he's turned down our offers of large amounts of cash money to stop growing. Can't say we didn't try.

My next project will be to paint the girls room. I've started by removing a full trash bag full of trash and 2 trash bags full of stuff out of there and moving their dresser onto the porch to paint this weekend. I did find time to redo the bulletin board I got for their room. It was a freebie in the last hour of the last day of a garage sale I went to. I painted the edge a color that matches their room and adhered a vintage sheet to the surface with spray mount. No pictures of that process. I'm getting a little tired of tutorials. My own, that is.

That's it. I'm finding that since starting this project with all the other folks participating, I always have a project in the works. The only thing keeping me from doing more is the time constraint. I'm sure when summer starts, I'll be able to step it up.

I'm linking up to Jules' William Morris project.

William Morris Thursday - the spice cabinet

From the looks of this blog over the last few months, you'd think it was dedicated exclusively to William Morris. But I haven't had the energy to do much else lately. I did spend 2 hours on a really great blog post last Sunday and set it to post the following morning, only to find that Blogger had deleted everything but the title and the labels. I didn't have the energy to redo it.

Yesterday, I reached into my spice cabinet and it hit me. I realized I hadn't cleaned the thing out in all the 7 years I've lived in this house. I also realized that while lots of space can be a great blessing, it can also become a curse. When you have enough space in a cabinet to chuck things into it for 7 years with very little being removed, that's a curse.

I didn't waste any time deciding if I had the time to do this project, I just started. And after successfully cleaning and organizing my pantry, I knew this was the next natural step.

This is my great blessing of a spice cabinet, complete with lazy Susan. However, this setup, over the years, has created one seriously lazy Pam. I didn't include pictures of all the things that have fallen over the edge and into unreachable spaces back there.

When I got it all out onto my counter top, I was amazed that it all came from one cabinet.

My next move was to divide the keep from the toss. I know it looks like I was liberal with the keep pile, but there were several repeated items that needed consolidating.

After the consolidation process, I decided that I wanted to transfer a lot of the spices I use frequently to glass jars. Luckily, the hoarder voice in me has been telling me to save jars for the past year so I had a good stash of all shapes and sizes and nearly everything ended up in one.

What was left was a bunch of empty glass and plastic bottles ready to be recycled. But what about all those lids? I hated to throw them all away, but after reading this article, I realized my only choice was to toss them.

Next, I sprayed everything in the cabinet down and loaded up my newly labeled spice containers in a loosely organized-by-category fashion.

There. That's much better.

I'm linking up with Jules' William Morris project,