Slowly but surely, we’ve been trying to add dark elements to the kitchen here and there to ground some of the “light and bright”-ness. We added artwork with dark frames to the wall of white subway tile, but the stove wall was looking kind of bare.

I’d had my eye on these zinc letters over at Anthropologie for a while. On the other hand, I’ve always been a fan of the colorful fabric “EAT” letters on in the kitchen on the set of Cougar Town. By the way, if you haven’t seen the show, it really has nothing to do with either kind of cougars. The only problem was that the zinc letters from Anthropologie were too light (we have enough light already!) and the fabric letters (also from Anthro) aren’t available anymore. Plus, I think the colors/patterns would be a little much with all of the subway tile. Not to mention, having fabric wall art over a stove seems like a bad idea. So I decided to combine the two concepts and get my DIY on! Here’s what I ended up with…

I picked up these paper mache letters from Hobby Lobby for $2.47 a piece and gathered some oil-rubbed bronze spray paint, acrylic craft paint (gold and black), a couple of brushes and some satin finish polyurethane – which I already had on hand.

I started out by spray painting the letters with Rust-Oleum Metallic Oil Rubbed Bronze Spray paint…

They actually looked really good after just this one step, but I wanted to distress them a bit to give them a weathered metal look. I added a few small dabs of black and gold paint here and there. I fully intended on using brushes, but for the most part, I just used my fingers. While the paint was still a bit tacky, I used some fine grit sandpaper to dull down the finish. By sanding the letters while they were still tacky, the finish ended up looking a lot less intentional.

You really can’t mess this up… just go with what you think looks good. If you mess up, just spray paint them again and start over. Come to think of it, giving them a light second coat of spray paint might make them look even more layered/weathered.

Since these were going in the kitchen right over the stove, I wanted to make sure they would be well-protected from possible food splatters. So I sprayed them with a light coat of Rust-Oleum satin polyurethane. This stuff dried super fast, and the letters were ready to hang within minutes…

We hung them on the wall using handy dandy 3M picture hanging strips (just like we hung the art on the other side of the kitchen).

You might not be able to tell in the photos, but the finish is really cool. It looks different at every angle (and in every photo) and you wouldn’t guess they were paper mache. Greg and I both really like the way they turned out! It adds some much needed darkness to the stove wall and keeps with the whole “clean lines with a few semi-rustic accents” thing we’ve got going on.

Speaking of the kitchen, we’ve got even more kitchen-related goodies coming your way tomorrow. We’re getting closer and closer to that big “Kitchen reveal” post. Ahhh, that will be a happy day for us!

Btw, have you entered the DENY Designs giveaway? They’re giving one lucky reader a custom duvet cover (a $183 value!). Click here to enter!

Greg and I had a doozy of a weekend. We set out to tackle our major to-do list which consisted of boring stuff like filing, blog maintenance, getting the oil changed, clearing off the patio, etc. Just when we were about done… it’s Monday. Ugh.

Nevertheless, over the course of our ultra busy weekend, I managed to finally finish unpacking my office stuff and load the final pieces into the new storage furniture (more on those here). One of the things I wanted to keep in the tall storage cabinet is a set of my favorite and most referenced books. The only problem was that I needed a bookend. Rather than going out and buying a set of bookends, when I only needed one, I put on my thinking cap and decided to make one.

I grabbed one of the extra bricks we have stacked up next to the carport and wrapped it with a piece of scrapbook paper. Yes, so simple it’s stupid. Since it looked like a plain gray box, I thought it needed something a little extra. I ordered a vinyl number 7 (for $5) from the go-to queen of vinyl, Shelley, over at The House of Smiths.

I followed her easy instructions and instantly had a one-of-a-kind, personalized bookend. Yes, a ridiculously simple solution. My favorite kind.

A full “Storage Cabinets: Cribs Style” post is coming your way on Wednesday, but until then, here’s a sneak peak – and what the new bookend looks like in the newly organized cabinet:

Since a post is always 100% better with a cute photo of a furry animal, here’s a shot of Bentley basking in the sunlight on the patio this weekend…

He thinks he’s hot stuff.

One thing we don’t have much of around the house (yet) is wall art. Actually, come to think of it, there are only TWO pieces of art hanging on the walls in the entire house (the Rare Prints sign in the living room and the Richmond Destination print in the hall bathroom). That’s it. I think it’s because our “vision” is just starting to come together. In my head, art is kind of like the “icing on the cake” to a room. So, it will all come together in due time.

A while back, we mentioned that we moved the antique green dresser from the foyer to the laundry room. Right now, it’s pretty much empty and the drawers don’t slide out very well (we’ve got a solution to that though). But once it’s organized and functional, it’s going to be our “central hub” for outgoing mail, keys, Bentley’s leash, etc. We’re planning on using the lower drawers for things like extra batteries, light bulbs, small tools, etc. Organization = awesome, so I’m pretty excited about it.

Over the “hub”, we want to do a small gallery wall made up of things that are special to us and tell the story of our little family. Things like our marriage certificate, a few wedding and honeymoon photos, Bentley (of course!) and maybe a baby photo or two. After reading this, my cousin texted me asking if she needed to start planning a baby shower. Um, noooo! To clarify, I meant baby photos of me and Greg, haha! Whoa. Okay, moving on… I used Photoshop to show Greg was I was envisioning, and this is what I came up with…

We’ve mentioned it a few times, but the very first thing we did once the house was ours (besides gutting the hall and master bathrooms) was paint every single nook and cranny. The other day, I came across my and Greg’s paint shirts. Now that the house is completely painted, they’ve just been sitting in the closet. Even if we were to do some major painting again soon, these shirts are worn out and and ready to retire.

Over our many weekends of painting, we had a lot of fun, and the shirts kind of tell the story…. Like when we painted the front door, for some reason the song, “My Heart Will Go On” from Titanic was going through my head and I couldn’t stop singing it. So Greg drew a heart on my shirt with the red door paint. And when we spilled oil-based primer all over the floor in the foyer, I was trying to clean it up and had it all over my hands. So naturally, I planted a handprint right in the middle of Greg’s stomach. The back of my shirt has my little brother’s initials as well as handprint on it – and a huge roller mark that he thought was hilarious. The stories go on and on… like Rose’s heart… on the Titanic.

I actually got a little teary because I felt like they were a big piece of “us” and our first steps into the world of home-ownership. Is that weird? I wasn’t about to get rid of them, but I didn’t want to have them stashed in the closet forever either. So, I decided to get a little crafty.

I cut out a section of each shirt and taped the pieces taught into a 2-opening Pottery Barn fame (that we originally had on our photo ledge in the bedroom of our first place). A few minutes later, we had the first piece for our gallery wall…

Cute, right? I really like the way it turned out, and it makes me happy every time I walk by it. It looks almost like abstract art!

Oh, yeah… the little owl. I’m constantly fishing change out of the washing machine because Greg leaves it (and guitar picks) in his pockets. So I got this little owl bank (here from ZGallerie) to have a place for Greg to put his loose change when he comes in the door. The next things on the list are a dish for keys, a hook for Bentley’s leash, and, of course, more frames and fun things to put in them.