DIY Decoupaged Wall Plates

I originally published this tutorial over at Crafting a Green World.

You’ll have the prettiest, most mitchy-matchy wall plates with this easy upgrade!

The cheap plastic wall plates that cover every light switch and outlet in my house are also veeeerrrrrry old, which is obvious from their dingy off-white color.

Unless interior designers in the 1980s were super into everything looking like it smoked two packs a day?

Yes, new wall plates are cheap, and even cute wall plates are pretty cheap. But that’s part of the problem, because even if I donated my gross old wall plates and bought cute new ones, nobody is going to then buy *my* chainsmoker-chic outlet covers and light switch plates when they can also buy cute new ones for just a few cents more!

The good news is that I’m not dealing with any of that nonsense. Instead, I decoupaged my wall plates, and they now look awesome and, most importantly, like they’ve never touched a single cigarette in their entire lives!

Decoupaging a wall plate is one of the simplest DIY projects there is, and even simpler if you’ve ever done any kind of papercrafting. But even if you haven’t, this project is SO easy that it’s pretty much impossible to mess up.

Here’s how to decoupage yourself a new outlet cover or light switch plate!

Step 1: Source your materials–especially terrific paper!

For this project, you will need:

• wall plates, squeaky clean and dry. Oils from fingers can disrupt proper adhesion of the glue, so wash your wall plates with dish soap and water, then let dry. And don’t forget that safety always comes first! Cracked or undersized wall plates absolutely DO need to be replaced.
• paper. This is going to be the star of the show! ANY paper that can handle glue will work for this project. Scrapbook paper is fine, but so are old book or magazine pages, sheet music, or anything with a similar weight. For this particular project, I’m using vintage wallpaper samples from a sample book I thrifted once upon a time. I never really found a great use for the contents of the carpet sample book I thrifted at the same time, but I have used the snot out of that wallpaper sample book over the years!
• Mod Podge. Any PVA glue can be substituted, because you’ll be sealing the decoupaged plate separately, regardless.
• water-based polyurethane. I spray clean and disinfect my light switch covers, so I need a beefier sealant than Mod Podge. I love to keep a quart can of water-based polyurethane kicking around my supply closet at all times to serve all my sealant-based needs!
• scissors, craft knife, and awl. You can use a sharpened pencil instead of the awl, but you can’t get by without the scissors and the craft knife.

Step 2: Glue the front of the plate to the back of the paper.

It will feel upside down, but I think the paper adheres more evenly if I lay it face down on the table, coat the front of the wall plate with glue, and rest it face down on top of the paper.

Press evenly on the back of the plate to make sure that the entire front is adhered, then flip it over and use your fingers to smooth out any bubbles by coaxing them off the edge of the plate.

Finish by trimming the extra paper away from the plate, making sure that you leave enough around the edges to cover the sides of the plate.

If you’re doing proper decoupage by adding additional layers of paper or cut-outs or other embellishments, you can wait and do it as the last step before sealing the finished plate.

Step 3: Cover the sides of the plate.

When you trimmed extra paper away in the previous step, you left enough to cover the sides of the plate. One side at a time, coat the back of the paper with glue, then use your fingers to press it down and mold it to the narrow side of the plate. Don’t tuck it under the back–you can trim any extra again after the glue dries.

Each additional side you work on will require you to fold the edge of the preceding side’s paper under, just like you’re wrapping a present. When you get to the last side, you’ll need to fold both edges under, so add extra glue as necessary.

Step 4: Cut open the holes for the light switches or outlets.

You’re also going to cover the interior sides of these openings with paper, but it will be easy!

Face the plate down on top of a self-healing cutting mat, then use the craft knife to cut through the paper covering each opening as if you’re cutting pie. If your opening is rectangular, you can get away with four slices of pie, but if your opening is circular, you’ll want to cut it into more slices.

Coat the back of the paper with glue, then use your fingers to fold each paper pie slice neatly over the side and to the back of the plate.

Trim as needed to avoid covering any screw holes.

And speaking of those screw holes…

Step 5: Open up the screw holes.

From the back side of the plate, use the sharp tip of the awl or a sharpened pencil to make a tiny pinprick or dent in the paper covering each screw hole, then from the front use the same tool to poke a proper hole. No glue needed!

Step 6: Seal the wall plate.

Follow the directions on your glue package for the drying and curing time of the glue, then follow it up with two or more coats of your favorite water-based polyurethane sealant, also following the directions on the package for dry time and cure time. My polyurethane, for instance, required additional coats separated by at least two hours from the previous coat, and a cure time of a full week before subjecting the wall plate to full use.

My light switches themselves are clearly still gross (any tips for getting old paint spills off of a light switch?), but the light switch plates are beautiful!

P.S. Want to follow along with my unfinished craft projects, books I'm reading, cute photos of the cats, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!

How to Clean and Refinish Antique Door Hardware

This tutorial was originally posted over at Crafting a Green World.

My house is… well, let’s call it “well-loved.” Door hardware aside, the house as a whole is wonky and inconvenient, quirky in a way that modern houses just aren’t, and whatever its quirks, I generally either genuinely like them or politely ignore them.

I do get curious about some things, though, and the four antique mortise locks on the four doors in the original part of my house are among those curiosity-inspiring objects. Although their keys are long gone, their keyholes are delightfully Victorian, but all the exposed pieces, plus the equally interesting door hinges, are covered in several thick layers of sloppily-applied paint. I don’t have any kind of yearning to restore my wonky old house to its original condition, but it would be pretty cool to clean and refurbish just those antique door fixtures, just to see what they actually look like…

So that’s what I did!

Step 1: Make sure you’re not going to get lead poisoning. 

Lead poisoning is not worth playing with, so my first step before messing with ANYTHING old, from thrift store dishes to the awesome windows I found by the side of the road last fall, is to check it with a lead swab. These came out lead-free, although I tested again every time I uncovered a new layer of paint.

Sooo… these fixtures look awful. Once you realize that I’ve been living in my house for approximately 8 years and never before so much as blinked an eye at the pitiful state of these pieces, you’ll understand how house-proud I apparently am NOT.

Step 1: Remove the fixtures from the door. 

For me, this involved muscling through five layers of paint to even get to the screw heads, and then muscling against those layers of paint to unscrew each screw. Fortunately, just a quick spray of WD-40 was all it took to get each rusty, painted-over screw turning.

You don’t need the water to be THIS soapy. I just like bubbles!

Step 2: Remove the paint. 

There are a few methods for removing paint from old hardware, but the easiest, most eco-friendly way is simply to grab a beat-up old crock pot and boil the snot out of everything. I did this out on my back deck one sunny afternoon. Set the crock pot to low, add a squirt (or fifteen squirts, in my case…) of dish soap, and walk away. A few hours later, you can fish each piece out with tongs, set it on a piece of clean newspaper, and peel away the paint or gently scrape it off. If any paint still seems stuck, put the piece back in the crock pot for another couple of hours.

When you’re finished, your piece won’t look pretty, but it WILL look paint-free!

Step 3: Get distracted and therefore make more work for yourself. 

You’re supposed to thoroughly dry each piece after scraping all the paint off. But… I don’t know. One kid might have needed help factoring a polynomial, or the other kid might have wanted me to drive her to pick up holds at the library, or maybe a friend texted me, or heck, maybe I saw a squirrel. Who knows? Whatever happened to interrupt me after paint scraping but before thorough drying, it resulted in me eventually wandering back by the deck and noticing that all of my nice door hardware that I had spent all that time cleaning off had rust ALL over it.

Pro tip: Your cleaned pieces will rust VERY quickly if not dried thoroughly!

Step 4: Remove rust from the door hardware. 

If your piece doesn’t have any paint on it, but it’s dirty and rusty, you can start here. Or if you’re like me, and you have the attention span of a gerbil, continue here! Fortunately, removing a thin layer of rust is SUPER simple. I put my metal pieces in a shallow dish, covered them with vinegar, and let them sit for a couple more hours on my deck.

After a couple of hours, I took the pieces inside and used a soft cloth and cool running water to rub away the residue and rinse off the vinegar.

THEN I DRIED EACH PIECE THOROUGHLY.

Step 5: Polish the hardware. 

Your end result isn’t going to be a gorgeous, like-new piece of door hardware. I mean, fifty years ago someone first painted over that piece for a reason, right? So I was a little disappointed, sure, but not too terribly surprised that my clean, rust-free, paint-free door hardware shows a lot of wear. The pieces are also brass-plated, not solid brass, and the brass plating has worn away in several spots.

You actually CAN re-plate antique pieces, but I’m not going to. Instead, I polished each piece with #0000 steel wool. You’ll find this in your local hardware store with the sandpaper, not with the cleaning supplies, because this is fine steel wool for polishing, not scrubbing.

Step 6 (optional): Repair and restore. 

after I had cleaned and polished the pieces, I was actually able to see a manufacturer’s stamp on the hinges that were previously completely covered with paint and crud. That particular stamp was only used between 1920 and 1934, so I’m pretty stoked!

Unfortunately, I can’t find any specific information on my mortise locks, although I do hope to restore those to functionality. Here’s a site that sells parts for several varieties of antique locks, and another site that sells skeleton keys that, while they aren’t guaranteed to work on any particular lock, aren’t so spendy that they’re not worth gambling on.

Step 7 (optional): Seal the hardware.

I did not seal my door hardware, because I’m willing to live with it a while first. My area doesn’t get terribly humid, and I’m curious to see how the hardware will fare without being sealed. If its condition starts to deteriorate, I have no problem with the extra steps of popping it back off the door, cleaning the rust off (again), and sealing it.

However, if you want to ensure that the pieces that you worked so hard on stay as nice and shiny as they look right this second, you can coat them with any sealant that works on metal. None of your options are particularly eco-friendly, but if it keeps an antique piece out of the waste stream and allows you to get by without buying new hardware, it’s a net good.

The final result isn’t door hardware that looks brand-new, but it IS door hardware that looks clean, feels authentic, and is much, much, MUCH preferable to what it looked like before!

Now I just have to scrape those same five layers of paint off of the door, too…

P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, road trips to weird old cemeteries, looming mid-life crisis, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!

A Tree Fell on My House

 

Have you ever heard of a derecho? I'm positive I had at some point, maybe during a grade school science class, but I couldn't have told you what it was.

I can now!

Here's a radar image of the straight-line wind that came through my yard in late June:

The official report is that this derecho had top wind speeds of over 100 mph in some places. I don't know the top wind speed in my yard, since it destroyed the anemometer on my roof (it's this one, and it's so good!) AND knocked the power out for over two days, but I can say that visually, my partner and I were outside puttering in my garden when I saw a line of dark clouds appear on the western horizon. 

I was all, "Shoot, a storm is coming," and decided I had time to just finish putting the last few shovels of compost in my raised bed before heading in.

I swear it was just seconds later that the sky was black, the wind was INSANE, and I was running into the house. My partner had for some reason decided to run around the house and go in a different door, because the man, unlike a derecho, clearly cannot take a straight line if his life depended on it, so he was still outside when my second-favorite elm tree hit the house so hard that it shook. 

A second later, my partner wandered in the back door and was all, "It's so windy out!" 

Like, yeah, DO YOU THINK? 

Ugh, my beautiful backyard elm tree! The one with the kids' tree house in it! AND it took out our Covid lockdown trampoline on the way down!

I mean, I know my kids are grown/nearly grown, but did it really have to destroy so many of their outdoor playthings? This used to be a yard that kids played in constantly, and now not only are those children too grown-up to play there, but the only evidence that kids ever once did play there is the back deck slide.

But at least for a while, the fallen tree, itself, did make a good piece of outdoor climbing equipment!

Actually, it was also a great setting for some outdoor family portraits. If you like taking family photos, I highly recommend finding an elevated spot like this, where you can take interesting photos from below of your family silhouetted by the sky.

Look at that identical body language, lol. Can you tell that these two are related?

We climbed around and posed dangerously in a short break between near-constant storms for the next two days, so constant that the tree removal people also had to keep taking breaks to go sit in their trucks while storms blew over. They'd cut and haul some tree branches--

--it would start to rain and they'd ignore it, it would start to pour and they'd ignore it, lightning would strike so they'd go sit in their trucks, then it would calm down so they'd drag all their stuff back out and work for another thirty minutes while racing the next storm:

Goodbye, DIY Tree House! It's probably for the best that they removed you before the insurance adjustor arrived!

This is what the outside of our house has looked like, then, for the past two months:

I don't know where the chickens were during the derecho, but they were fine!

I don't know if we accidentally picked a shitty construction company, or if they all move this slowly, but I *think* they might finally start work next week? They've got to rebuild some of the framing on that part of the house, and roof it, of course, and then they've got to tear out and rebuild the inside walls and floors and ceilings because of all the water damage. Those ceilings, in particular, now look like this:

Here's a photo of me taking a photo of the ceiling, because for some reason my phone is always in selfie mode?

More selfie mode!

This is the really bad one, and is probably why I've had a low-grade cold for the past several weeks despite having an air purifier running continuously:

Also, for those of you who've been playing along at home for a while, this is in my bedroom closet. You know, part of the space that WE ALREADY HAD COMPLETELY REDONE IN 2022?!?

Yeah, that space. Two new sets of flooring in two years; how fun is that?

P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, road trips to weird old cemeteries, looming mid-life crisis, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!

Remodeling Two Teenager Bedrooms: The Dorm Loft Bed Edition

The balancing act is worth being able to paint all sides at once!

I discovered how cutely people were styling their loft beds while researching all the crap we needed to buy for our first-time college student. I am also going full-on dorm-style in her tiny bedroom at home, because it turns out that these dorm room kids have the best ideas for making the most of tiny spaces. 

And her sister, who we're simultaneously moving into her own HUGE bedroom, also wanted the same kind of dorm loft bed, because she has all the hobbies and all the crap to go with those hobbies, so wants as much floor space as possible.

By dorm loft bed, I LITERALLY mean a literal dorm loft bed. I looked everywhere online and all the commercially-available loft beds either looked flimsy or were ridiculously expensive. But then Matt went to our local university's surplus store, spent two hundred dollars on four loftable beds that used to be in a dorm, paid another twenty bucks to a local machine shop to cut the steel pins you need to loft them, then a little more on a couple of 2"x4"s to make the braces for the lower half of the beds, and just like that we've got two loft beds and two metal mattress frames that I'm seriously considering using as garden trellises. 

The teenager who is VERY picky about her room insisted that she wanted her bed painted black. I was extremely hesitant about this, but once Matt and I had finished the project, I had to admit that it looked good. Like, REALLY good.

So then I dragged the college kid's loft bed pieces out into the garage and painted those, too! And they also look good! Will I never cease learning about the wonders of a fresh coat of paint?!?

The next day, the teenager and I spent the afternoon listening to an audiobook of The Iliad (those gods cannot let the mortals alone to live their own lives for a single freaking second!) and touching up all the paint in her bedroom:

--and then while she was at ballet that night, Matt and I got her bed installed.

It holds a human!

It was also terrifyingly tall, though, so the teenager had to wait for me to order and receive a guardrail before she could actually sleep in it.

The college student's bed got assembled next, and now we're ready to style them!

Here's my dorm loft bed inspiration:

The benefit of buying dorm surplus is that these pics are all of the exact same basic bed that we now own. I love seeing what other teenagers have done with these beds!

Both of my own teenagers want their desks under their loft bed. I personally think it's too dim there even with supplemental lighting, but I guess if you've got the sharp eyesight of youth, you might as well take advantage of it! My older teenager has consented to shop our home and let me move the well-loved IKEA table that used to be in their playroom into her room, but the picky younger teenager remains picky, and even with the promise of a miraculous fresh coat of paint, none of the tables we already own suited her.

So we're still working on that, I guess.

Here are some other things that I think would be SUPER cute to style under their loft beds:

I haven't been to a garage sale since COVID, but I guess now I've got an excuse to get up early on Saturday, withdraw some cash from the ATM, and take a little tour around town... or at least I will when the weather finally stops being ridiculous. I'm ready to move Proper Spring, but the weather here keeps insisting on continuing to swing wildly between Second Winter and Swamp Spring. If this keeps up, I won't be able to get any decent yardwork done before Here There Be Tornadoes Month!

There's a New Fence in the Yard

 

Ugh, I wish we'd done this a decade ago.

The other night I was texting back and forth with my college kid, telling her about Luna's day in my care (we had a nice walk, then some breakfast, then I turned my electric blanket on high so she could lay on it all day, then Matt and I took her for a hike and she saw some deer, then I let her try out the new lick mat that I bought her, then she curled up on the couch so I tucked her in with her favorite fleece blanket, etc.), and she accused me of taking the opportunity of her absence to spoil her dog.

RUDE!

Also true. I mean, my kid's not here, so other than texting her all day and Zooming her once a week and playing Stardew Valley together once a week and watching a couple of episodes of Schitt's Creek online together once a week and sending her monthly care packages with curated treats and toiletries and little handmade gifts inside what am I SUPPOSED to do with all this obsessive parent energy?!?

Spoil the one other creature in the family who misses my kid as much as I do, of course!

It's telling, ahem, that I have thought for the entire decade+ that we've lived in this house that a front yard fence would be great for the kids--the whole family, really--and I didn't get around to insisting on it hard enough to make it happen until the kids were grown and the main ones who'll benefit from it are me and the dog.

Whatever. It's here now, and I LOVE it!

The fence guys for sure side-eyed my instructions for the fence, but the lead guy said, "I just do what I'm told and don't ask questions," followed in the same breath by "WHY do you want a privacy fence only on one side of the yard?"

Because this beautiful privacy fence side--

--faces the street! My across-the-street neighbor is delightful, generous, and kind in person, but he's got lots and lots of Trump flags facing our house, and he's got two absolutely GIANT lamps at the end of his driveway that he never, ever turns off and whose bulbs never, ever seem to burn out. They just burn, bright as the sun, all through the night directly into all of our bedroom windows.

As a bonus, this is where I hang all of our laundry to dry, seasonally, and now I don't have to worry that someone will drive by, become consumed with jealousy of my beautiful handmade quilts and clothes, and sneak into the yard to steal them:

The other two sides of the fence are your basic chain link--

--because they face other parts of our property and I didn't want to cut that off visually.

THIS side even faces the south!

I *think* I'm going to move all of those raised garden beds to live next to this fence, although lord knows how I'm going to water them because I already own the longest hose that Menards even sells. 

I'm pretty excited about planning new garden elements to fit in with the new fence. This is my Late Winter of Optimism, my favorite gardening time of the year, before I have to come to terms with the fact that the parts of the property that I can garden on just don't get the amount of sunlight needed to make whatever I want to do possible. If anyone wants to throw out any great gardening and landscaping ideas for me, feel free! I've got an east-facing hill with morning full sun and afternoon full shade that I'd like perennial coverage on to the extent that I never have to risk my life mowing it again, and a south-facing yard that I'd be happy to have raised garden or bed plants in that gets morning full sun and afternoon dappled sun through the branches of black walnut and persimmon trees. 

Tell me daily that berry bushes will not live in either of these spots. I need to hear it every single day or I'll plant them and be sad.