The Great Spray Paint Spruce Up

Last week I went to Louisiana to stay with one of my best friends. It was my fourth visit to New Orleans, and I was already madly in love with the city. But on this trip, I fell madly in love with her new house.  She did such an amazing job adding little pops of color everywhere, that when I got home I was instantly on a mission to brighten up my house in the same way.  After a trip to the awesome new consignment shop that just opened in my neighborhood, and armed with a few cans of spray paint the sprucing up began…

Click images to enlarge

I started by spray painting this lamp… instructions below…

I added a few bright (and awesome) prints that I picked up in the French Market in New Orleans…

I picked up this old brass vase in the consignment shop for $6, added a few bright pink flowers from the clearance bin at Michael’s, and voila!

This ceramic pitcher was also from the consignment shop, only $3.50! Continue reading below to learn how I created the stripped effect…

This set of trivets ran me a whopping $6.50 at the consignment shop… think outside of the box: they’re trivets no longer, I hung them on the wall!

The Materials…

As you can imagine, spray painting is pretty damn easy.  And just like everything else I think is super-easy, I find a way to mess it up. So here are some tips…

Start by taping off anything that you don’t want to get paint on. In the case of the lamp, I put the cord in a plastic bag and just taped around the base.  Then, apply a coat of primer to cover the original color and any pattern.

Then apply your color.  Remember how I said I can mess up even the simplest of projects? That occurred during this step. I got spray-paint-happy, and ended up causing the paint to drip down the side of the lamp and dry like that.  To fix this, wait until it’s completely dry, then sand down the drip marks with a very fine piece of sandpaper.  It may take off some of the paint, but that’s okay, you’re going to have to do 1-2 more coats of spray paint to cover up the marks you made.  I think I ended up doing 3-4 coats on the lamp, but only 2 coats of color on all the other items.

I finished the lamp up by spraying it with a glossy top coat.  For the green vase, however, I decided to go for this criss-crossed stripped effect.  To do this, wrap rubber bands around the object. Make sure they’re mostly flat so the lines are all the same width.  Then, spray the object with frosted glass spray paint. Wait until it’s completely dry, and then remove the rubber bands.  I ended up with some light residue lines where the spray paint had dripped and settled on the rubber bands; you can buff them out gently with the fine sandpaper.

I still have a long way to go in trying to mimic my friends’ beautiful southern home, but this was an easy start! What do you think of my pops of color?