As I mentioned in my previous post, Operation: No More Popcorn is an ongoing battle, hopefully to be resolved sometime next weekend. And I don’t know about you, but I don’t find scraping popcorn that interesting of a talking point. And if it’s not very interesting to me, it must be an absolute snooze-fest for you. It’s like when mommies find their babies much more intensely interesting than anyone else, except even I think my baby ceiling is old news at this point.
So after I certified the downstairs to be “popcorn-free”, I decided that I hadn’t over-committed myself to weekend DIY projects yet and needed to make my third trip to Home Depot in as many days.
You see, I had a vision.
A vision in which I came up with a cheap, easy (and did I mention cheap?) way to update the rather-dirty and boring ceiling lights in the downstairs and upstairs hallways.
An astute observer might notice that those are NOT the same glass shades – bingo! Give the girl a silver dollar! (Or a gold cigar? Which do you prefer?)
On my trip to Home Depot, I picked up three of these at a delightful $4.97 each, making this a $16 update (accounting for tax):
The paint is an old can of Martha Stewart’s Hosta (that I also used on these fan makeovers) – the best blue-green color ever. Plain old wall paint. I did not end up using the bristle-brush – the foam brush was fine.
I started off by using the Frog Tape to make a thin band around the top of the shade – basically a stencil:
Dabbed on the paint with my foam brush:
Finished all three and peeled off the tape (before the paint had time to dry, to avoid the tape peeling up the paint lines):
Ew. Look at that bleeding paint. Because I was taping both in a circle and around a slope (the sides of the lights taper in), I guess I didn’t get a perfect seal. But never fear because my humble thumb nail was able to perfectly scrape off any stray paint! In fact, if I decide that I don’t want the stripes at some point, they will come off very easily with a little scraping, since it was just plain old latex wall paint. In fact, it was at this point that I realized that attempting more than one stripe might not be the best idea… Any tape that overlapped the painted part would be liable to peel it up, and taping around the increasingly tapered shade was going to be pretty difficult.
So one stripe it is!
It really is a minor update, but I think they will make me smile every time I walk down our hallways! Can’t wait to see them up against the fresh, SMOOTH white ceiling paint!
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