Spray-painting and wallpaper.
Entry posted by rbytsdy
1,145 views
But first, I'm always tickled with what a difference a layer of grout makes; from this (here I have dry-brushed onto the original barn red some peach and soot highlights)--
to this:
The "grout" is spackle mixed with a little water, some gray and soot paint (and then some white paint when I got it too dark 
). I sprayed the bricks well with matte sealer and let it dry overnight before I started the grouting. At first I tried some little bottles with very fine tip applicators, but I couldn't get the grout mixture into the bottle! 
So then I just spread it over a section of bricks with a plastic knife, and wiped it off with a damp towel; rinsed off the towel, and went on to the next section. The sealer had done its job so it was very easy to wipe off the excess grout; in fact, in some areas I had to apply more grout because I had wiped off too much. It was by far the best grouting experience I have had so far, in fact. I am very pleased with how the bricks turned out. I bricked the fireplace interior too:
Now here I am dry-fitting the porch roof; so far it looks to fit well:
About the concrete: I was trying out what otterine had written here http://www.otterine.com/blog/blog1.php/walnut-bay-light-turning-wood about making a concrete finish; she applied gel medium, spackle, and gray paints. Well so far I have gotten as far as applying the base gray paint; I think that the gel medium thing probably works better on larger pieces rather than the porch post toppers and little side porch, but it will probably look better after a few more coats of paint and touchups.
Finally, I have been working on the interior, with wallpapers and the Chysnbon bathroom set.
The wallpaper has been fighting me; it is a mixture of scrapbook papers and printies from http://www.jennifersprintables.com/, except for the kitchen paper which is from a clip from http://www.rosiesvintagewallpaper.com that I resized and laid out in photoshop. For some reason I am not doing a good job of laying it out and gluing it; I have gaps and bubbles that I will have to cover. 
I am not entirely satisfied with the paper in the lower right, the living room. I may print out some blue stripes and re-cover it.
I am not the best spray-painter, still struggling with drips and over-spraying, but my first foray into assembling a plastic Chrysnbon kit hasn't turned out too badly; here are the pieces dry-fit into the tiny bathroom space:
This color scheme may look familiar; I basically copied otterine's color palette http://www.otterine.com/blog/blog1.php/vintage-farmhouse-bathroom since I liked it so much! Here, it's just easier to show a picture than to list the paints:
The glue doesn't tack right away, so it was more than a bit fiddly for me to figure out how to hold the pieces while it set; it really needs overnight drying to tack up well despite the 1-hour listed on the label. As you can see, I had to truncate the toilet pipe a fair amount to fit it in the space because of that angled ceiling!
I have hit a bit of a wall because I need to figure out the lights before I go any further. I have this battery-operated set of lights that I want to use, but I need to house each bulb in some sort of fixture. I will have to figure out and make something. I also need to figure out the staircase; I think that it will need to be a bit winding to fit the space.
3 Comments
Recommended Comments