Before and After: The outside of the house

Finally some sunshine today, which meant I could take a couple of outside pictures for these next before and afters.

The front door:

Semi-prepped for painting – painted house but unpainted door and light – new screen door and painted light (door painted too but it’s open in this picture so you can’t see it.)

And the back and side of the house:

You can see the dodgy weatherboards marked for replacement, the old air-conditioner, and we were still testing paint colours in the first photo. Much sleeker in the second!

And I’ll finish with a bonus hall shot which shows the painted front fence through the door seeing as it didn’t make it into the hallway before and after collage.

Before and After – The Foreign Correspondent’s Desk

(Credit to Dave for the name.)

Finally, the second finished piece from our second hand furniture haul of March.

The desk before and after:

Once again I changed my mind a million times about how to paint it but I’m pretty happy with the end result. The blue paint is Dulux Shampoo, the same as I used on the outside of the Sunny Day Cupboard. The white is leftover Dulux Antique White USA from the paint we used on the wall trims.

For the drawers I cut up a world map poster and glued it on with mod podge, finished off with a couple of coats of clear varnish. I also varnished the top of the desk and the drawer handles to protect the paint a little more seeing as it will get lots of use.

So the playroom makeover and reorganisation plan is plodding along. The furniture is now in place and just needs to be filled in an organised manner!

Next up on the makeover list is Lillian’s little desk. I’m thinking all blue to match the big desk with blackboard paint under the lid. We’ll see how it ends up.

Before and After – The Sunny Day Cupboard

Back at the end of March we bought a heap of second hand furniture to fit into our grand playroom makeover plan. The first piece is now complete! This cupboard (along with the new desk drawers – desk makeover is next) is going to hold all the stuff that is currently on the open bookshelf in the playroom. Stuff that we (mostly) use but that really doesn’t need to be displayed. The room will be better with this stuff behind closed doors.

Here’s how the cupboard looked before:

And the outside now:

The blue paint is Dulux Shampoo. I painted the outside first and changed my mind multiple times about how to do the inside. Then I saw this post by BabyMac and fell in love with the yellow, Haymes Blazing Sun. At about the same time I found this wallpaper on ebay and snapped it up. Dave installed the shelves on the right hand side and only drilled through to the other side once. Here’s the inside now:

I’m calling it the Sunny Day cupboard and think it will be perfect to add a bit of brightness to the playroom which gets limited natural light. There are a couple more pictures in my furniture makeover set on flickr.

Window before & after

Before – the blue window frame was rotten all the way through. There were holes in it and gaps around the window panes where the rain used to come in.

During – the builders removed the rotted window. That’s next door’s bathroom. We are very close but not as close as some of the places around here – at least there is room to walk between the two houses.

After – new window installed!

Now we just need to paint the back room which still has ‘Happy Birthday Lillian’ painted on the wall from June. We figure if it’s still there by her birthday next year we can just paint another candle on the cake.