The little details

I have been working on a lot of "small" projects for the house. I say "small" because some of them were not as easy as I thought they would be. The first project (and the hardest) was my railing. I also made some shelving and storage for my guest bathroom as well as some artwork for the guest room. Here's how..

Railing 

I wish I had taken a picture of the railing on the wall BEFORE. Let's just say boring white railing against boring white wall. 

Step one was to apply paint stripper. Now I will be frank here, I had never used paint stripped before and I don't think a rounded railing was the best place to start. This was not easy. Here's about what it looked like after scraping the crap out of it once. 

It was pretty rough. I think I applied paint stripper and scraped off paint about 3 times spending around 4 hours on this. Once I had done that I decided to sand off the remaining paint. 

Here's what I ended up with. A disclaimer: when doing this it starts becoming very hard to tell if the paint is completely off because it starts to blend with the wood. Sand as much as possible. 

After the sanding came the stain. I used the same mohagany gel stain as I used on my dining room table so that it would flow. 

Then lastly I applied polyurethane to seal it and sanded and applied more polyurethane. And here is the final product 

Much better against that boring wall.

Pictures

My new gray guest room needed some yellow decorations. I purchased some small canvass and decided to make some paintings. I first painted them gray and placed some plants on top of them.

I then sprayed over these with yellow paint. I did find it was very hard to keep the plants in place to keep their shape in gray.

Lastly I pulled of the plants and touched up some of the outlines. 

They did not turn out perfect but look great against my gray wall.

Shelves

For this project I bought some wood shelves at micheals. This was actually a very easy project. I just stained the boxes with General Finishes Java Gel Stain and coated with a furniture wax for protection. I then found the stud in my wall and drilled them directly into the wall. If you were to put heavy items on your shelves then I would suggest you get some shelf brackets instead.

These look so perfect in my bathroom.

Mason jar storage

This project was also pretty easy. I used a spare 2x4 I had laying around. I stained it and attached metal pipe tightners with a screw and washer in each one. I then screwed this directly into a stud in the wall and attached the mason jars. 

I love the look and just need to add some things to the jars.