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painting the bookcases
harlequin isn't just a romance novel
After the carpet episode,
we decided to tackle something a little more familiar and a little less
likely to blow up in our faces. There are only a few pieces of furniture
we own that hasn't seen our creative touch over the years so we've got
some genuine experience under our belts in this department. And since our
home's illustrious previous owner hasn't ever touched our bookcases, we
were confident.
The project was fairly
straightforward: turn a couple of boring bookcases that look as cheap as
they actually were into something extra-special.
The
Bookcases Before
Our weapon of choice:
paint. We love paint. Paint solves so many problems easily, it covers up
any manner of sins, it's versatile, it's easy to clean-up.... Frankly, if
we thought we could justify doing it, we'd use green paint to make our
yard look verdant and lush until we have the money to landscape.
After doing all the
preliminary work, we painted them both with two coats of black paint.
Using a ruler to mark off the points, we penciled in a harlequin diamond
pattern on the sides of each bookcase, using smaller diamonds on the
shorter bookcase and large diamonds on the taller one. I started off
masking the lines but since the paint bled along the edges anyway and the
masking part takes awhile, I hand painted the lines after the first few to
save time.
It took two coats of the
the lighter tan paint to make all the diamonds opaque. You can use a small
roller if you've got one that will work, but it doesn't take nearly as
long as you'd think to hand paint all of those diamonds. Then I just used
a yardstick as a guide and a broad-edged gold paint pen to outline the
diamonds and make them really crisp and clean. We let them dry for a
couple of days to give the paint time to really set; we've found that if
you set books on painted surfaces without giving them extra time to cure,
the edges of the books will leave imprints and sometimes the paint will
come off. Then we coated everything with a spray acrylic to give it some
protection, which also helped to keep the books from sticking once we
loaded up the shelves.
Pretty much everyone who
comes to the house now remarks how neat they are and presumably, they're
not putting us on.
The
Bookcases After
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