I took down a hideous cork board from my upstairs area this week. It was old and worn down, and I don’t mean that in a good way this time. It was a nice sized board, though, and my brain cells quickly went into overdrive trying to decide if I could salvage the board and turn it into something sexy and useful.

Into my garage went the cork board. Here it is, right after I began its ‘renovation’:

If the paint color looks somewhat familiar to you, after following some of my projects, you’re right. It is the same gorgeous hue that I used in transforming my purple painted desk. I  didn’t write a blog post about it, but I posted a pic on my Facebook Page, which you can access here.

Here is a picture of the desk I transformed in the same burgundy color:

Here are the before and after shots of the desk:

Back to the project at hand, the color used is identical. After covering the cork board with several layers of paint, I wanted to add some pazzazz with my fun Moroccan stencils. Here they come again.

The cork board turned out quite unique, I think. Here it is:

Ch, Ch, Ch..

(.. Changes)

Another fun transformation I recently did..

and redid..

and redid..

.. was this very unique and old wall hanging meant to be displayed in a room’s entrance, such as by the front door. I found it at an auction and immediately knew it needed to be in my hands for a refinishing job.

Here it was, in its initial stages, after I removed the mirror and hangers and painted the first coat of Graphite, which was what I had initially intended the piece to be covered in:

(once again, no true ‘before’ shot of this one)

When the paint dried and I slid the mirror in, I did my usual step-back and didn’t like the way the dark color looked on the wood. It seemed to call for a more bright layer and so I grabbed my white paint and slapped that on top followed by a rough distress and also a bit of aging with some dark wax.

Next came the hard part: deciding on the color of the hangers. This step took much longer than I thought, with all the changes that followed. My initial thought was to make it mellow with a dull silver color and that is just what I did:

Meh.
I found it just a bit boring. Nice, but boring.

I wanted to turn things funky and the next idea was to add stripes. Striped hangers. Here they were (yikes):

Notice the areas where the original hanger color shows through. This issue arose when I pulled off the painter’s tape I used to make the stripes. Not sure how to avoid this. Let me know if you can think of any.

Here was my next color choice for my hangers: copper. Now this wasn’t terrible, especially not hanging in my son’s room with all of his beautiful colors, but still..

It just wasn’t working. So finally.. I posed the question on facebook and got some great suggestions from my page followers (if you are on facebook, come ‘like’ my page by clicking here!)..

The winner was a very dark gray called graphite, which was the original color I had painted this piece with. Here it is, all finished and ready to hang in someone’s entranceway!

Tomorrow’s blog post will feature another, more direct shot of my home’s bold front entrance as well as one of the sitting areas of my living room.