Sooooooo…I totally messed up. Yup, TOTALLY UTTERLY FAILED while working on our living room makeover but it’s okay. 🙂
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If you have been following along on Instagram or saw the blog last week, I shared the design plans for our living room. Truth be told, the night before that post went live, I had to change the design board to include our new media cabinet. The original board had our existing media cabinet with plans for a DIY makeover. Which was totally my plan from the very beginning, but as we all know plans don’t always work out the way we expect and well sh*t happens.
Excuse the horrible quality, unperfected, iPhone photos in this post but I was sending them to my friend Shannon at Coffee Paint Repeat (the queen of painting furniture) throughout the whole process with texts reading “what am I doing?” and “what have I done?” and “okay tell me the truth”. Ya know those texts. The ones where Shannon eventually replies back with “who are you trying to convince, me or yourself?” Haha. I knew then I completely messed up.
Our existing media cabinet was lost in the 90’s. Ya know that orange wood similar to the dresser in our bedroom before its makeover. I strategically hid it in photos of our living room because it was just an orange blob. But it was a great solid piece of furniture that fit well with the space and was the perfect size for our TV. I cannot find any true before pictures, but you can see in the photo below a little of it’s orange-ness.
A few months ago, I rubbed it down with an antique glaze trying to darken it and it just made it a red orange. Go figure. Anyways, I busted out some left over paint (gray of course) and got to work. At this point, I kind of knew I already messed up.
Alas, I continued on with painting the front and tried to convince Shannon of my vision. I’ve had these oversized pulls from Antique Farmhouse for almost two years now and have been dying to use them on a project. They would have been perfect for these drawers. 😉
At this point I thought “okay this is going to work” and continued pulling out all of our junk and painting while catching up on Girlfriend’s Guide to Divorce of course. Side note: because I’m sure you might be asking why I didn’t just sand and stain it – as I mentioned, this is a heavy duty piece of furniture. Like so heavy the cable guy could barely move it when he installed our new box. So it wasn’t going anywhere and painting it right where it sit was my only option.
It was also at this point I realized the color wasn’t going to work, it was too light for our space. The gray looked like a light blue instead. Sure, I could of went to the store and purchased some darker paint and everything probably would of turned out just fine. But where is the fun in that?
Remember step one, when I first realized I messed up? Right after I took that photo, I remembered a little photo I had saved on Instagram of a chevron media console I had fell in love with a few months ago. I looked at it. BIG MISTAKE. BIG. HUGE. (as Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman would say). As I continued painting, it was all I could think about.
Our media cabinet was doomed. Joe was at work, so I sent this picture with a text that said “I painted this and I don’t like it so I’m getting a new one instead. Yes? K. Ok.” He even agreed I messed up on this one. So I called my local World Market and luckily they had the chevron console in stock. By the time Joe got home from work, I had already looked at some new TVs (he had been complaining about ours for months now) and a new surround system to sweeten the deal. I got a new media console, he got a new TV. It’s all about compromise right? 🙂
My failure just goes to show that no matter how far ahead you plan or how fancy you think your design is, it doesn’t always work out. In fact, I rarely get anything right the first time. I think that’s why I am always updating our home. I finish a project and think “okay this is good, but I know it can be better”.
“I might not get it right the first time, but I always get it right the second time. ”
– Allison
Haha, my famous last words. I cannot wait to finish up this living room and share it with you all! I think I’ve even added a few extra projects to the list and want to repaint our walls to a light a gray…so I’ve got a lot of work to do!
What do you think? Have you messed up big time before? Share with me!
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Best post ever!!! (Not just because I was mentioned either ?)
The exact same thing happened to me only it was my living room walls instead of a media cabinet! I painted the entire room SW’s Agreeable Gray but it ended up being too light and had a blue tint to it. Not what I wanted at all. (BTW, the sample patch I had done before hand looked great on all the walls at all times of day. I had no inkling of the blue that was about to happen!). Luckily my fix was easy, if not time consuming. I ended up repainting with SW Anew Gray and it looks great. ?
Yes! Same thing happened when we painted too! The gray looked purple in our house…it happens.
Well it looks great! I hope you are enjoying the new look!