Easy Design Changes with Just a Can of Paint
Every year I find myself looking around the house and knowing an old familiar feeling. It is time for a change. No, I don’t mean it is time for me to move. I simply know that every spring I can see how old and tired this house can look and feel it is time to change things up. If you have just spent the last six months looking at the same four walls, you know the feeling. Luckily it is easy to make the kind of changes I am talking about with little more than a few cans of paint and maybe a few choice purchases.
Nothing expensive, nothing fancy and certainly nothing beyond the ability of someone who may love to pound a few nails but couldn’t draw a straight line even with a ruler! So, let’s take a look at a few rooms that could use some brightening up this year and see what we have in store for them. Feel free to steal these ideas, that is after all why I am posting them here.
Bathroom Changeup
I think that the bathroom is one room that always needs a bit of something done for it. I like the one we have now, it has one big wall on it that I tend to change the focus of each year. Last year I filled it with charming little pictures of vintage posters of plants from old garden shows. I loved it and will probably keep the posters around. But that wall needs something new. We always store a couple of our old propane tanks for the barbeque here in the winter and I found myself wondering about painted propane tanks.
Turns out it is quite safe to paint them and they would look nicer if I could stencil them as well, so I did. Now they sit on a shelf, ferns twining around their bases, and fit right in with the vines and ferns I have stencilled on the walls behind the shelf. You just can’t beat stencils for adding a whole new dimension to a small room like a bathroom.
Kitchen Mix and Match
Did you know that the latest thing in kitchen design is to mix and match your kitchen cabinet doors? I saw this on a Pinterest page and it got me thinking. A visit to our local Habitat for Humanity ReStore revealed a great selection of old cabinets local builders have pulled out of renovated old houses.
A quick look around and I had four new cabinet doors, each one beautiful in its own way. I painted each one a different shade of yellow, our color for the kitchen right now, and hung them in our kitchen. This left half of our cabinets the old bright 50s yellow and the other half a variety of shades and finishes. It was a crazy quilt look and I loved it instantly!
Accent Walls
Of course, anyone who has picked up a paint brush in the last few years has heard of creating that one accent wall in a room. Our living room has the west facing wall in a brick red, striking against the dark brown wooden floor.
If you want to do more, try adding a contrasting trim-line across it, just below the ceiling. It will make the whole room pop and still look like it belongs. Keeping the colors in the same side of the color wheel will help them to compliment each other. Got more painting ideas? Share them here in the comments.
