Earlier this summer I scored a beautiful, grand mirror on Blair Swap (thanks, Niki!) for my photography business - bonus that it gets to hang out on my wall when I'm not using it as a prop! - but it was very...antiqued. Now don't get me wrong, I adore antiques, but I don't like when a new thing has been made to look weathered and old. While it was pretty, I knew it could look a whole lot better and decided to give it a fresh coat of white - my decorating answer to just about everything.
My inspiration? This beauty:
via myparadissi.com
I couldn't disassemble the mirror, so I had to cover it with paper in order to keep it clean.
I thought I'd be brilliant and spray paint all of those nooks and crannies (that's a spray paint gun - a must-have if you go through more than one can at a time) but for whatever reason, this can was absolute garbage. I shook it up - like the dozens of cans I've shaken before - but when I pushed the nozzle down it sprayed out like silly string. Terrible! Definitely should have sprayed the grass or something else first instead of coating the top of it with spackled confetti, but I've always learned things the hard way. (Although, in my defense, it's Krylon and should have been awesome.) Almost the whole can was a waste and I ended up taking it and the other one I had bought back to the store.
I wasn't going to chance it again, so I busted out my trusty bucket of Benjamin Moore's ADVANCE Waterborne Interior Alkyd Paint (pricey, but worth it). I have used this single gallon for loads of projects this past year and it still hasn't run out! I also love that it hardens like shellac and smooths out when drying to erase brush marks. So after a few hours of brushing in all of those crevices, I finished.
(We're getting a new deck soon so I didn't have to worry about making a mess on it.)
aperture!
Fellow photogs will get this.
before & after
Aaaaaahhh. So crisp! So fresh!
It still looks grand and exquisite, but now it's got more of a contemporary air.
(I might be plotting to paint the dining room this color, too...but don't tell JD. I just painted this room last year and he's a paint-once-every-10-years kind of guy.)
Cheers to making things new!