That Time I Tested Things I Found on the Internet

I love Buzzfeed's DIY page. Some of their ideas are absolute pants, intended for young teenagers rebelling against the four safe walls of their parents' house. But sometimes, something will catch my eye and just strike me as being so easy, so cheap, and so necessary. I scan their page, and Pinterest, and random blog posts to find neat little projects to try out for myself.

Here are some of my successes, and one of my spectacular failures-in-progress (I refuse to give up).

First, I found this link about making hex art using just paper, glue, and a canvas. Whatttt! This looked awesome. So I went on Amazon and got myself a Fiskar's hex punch just like the one used in the instructional blog. I ordered myself some beautiful card stock. After scheming up a color palette I wanted to use, and where my art was destined to hang, I started punching away. I punched out way, way more hexagon's than I ended up needing. The Mod Podge I used to glue the paper down ended up making my shapes curl up on the canvas, so I went back and used plain old hot glue, which worked fine once I picked off all the little stray glue hairs. Here is my finished product, which hangs above the vanity in my bedroom:

SUCCESS.

Second, I found this post on Buzzfeed, and since I love anything that's metallic and glittery, I was all over it. Did you ever read a post like this just desperate to find something - ANYTHING - you can apply it to in your own house? I tread a really fine line with my love of sparkly because I do in fact live with a man that I love and respect, and just as I wouldn't to live in a house full of taxidermy'd heads, I wouldn't make him live in a house that could double as a background on Dance Moms. I also really love my refrigerator and Hunter boots and would never disrespect them by modifying them in any way, but a plain old black planter? Who cares. If I messed up and it looked awful, I would just spray over the metallic paint with plain old black and no one would know the difference.

I bought this paint (from Amazon, natch, because otherwise I would have to actually leave the house. Yeahhhh right). I put a trash bag over my plant and used painter's tape to secure it to the top of the planter, which I decided I would keep black like a little accent or something. Then I went to town with the spraying. This is the result:

Verdict: Not Ratchet

I LOVE it. And my husband didn't notice it when he came home, which means at the very least that it doesn't look bad, right? I had such a good time with the planter that I started looking around for anything else I could make look fancy and metallic. My amazing brother-in-law fulfilled my life long desire to own a Chia Pet, and after the actual chia withered and died, I cleaned that bad boy off, and gave it a new, fancier life:

Chia? More like brilliant idea, am I right?

The can of spray paint wasn't huge (it ended up being about the same size as those cans of novelty hair spray paint that they sell at Halloween), so I wasn't able to do much more than these two things. I did make a small bathroom plant look fabulous, and then I loved my work so much that I bought another can and revamped an ugly gold sunburst in my bathroom:

PLEASED.

And then, there was this idea, which I'm sure you've all seen on Pinterest or Facebook at some point. The idea is awesome - by using cheap little curtain rods and brackets, you can hang your trash bags up and out of the way. My husband and I have our recycling bin out in our garage, and I constantly let it overflow because my idiot brain just thinks that going into the house to retrieve a new bag is just too much work (I should add that it's like maybe fifteen feet away from the bin). I liked this idea because I figured if I had a roll of trash bags right above the recycling bin, I would be more likely to keep the bin fresh and empty. So, I ordered this set of 2 brackets and this set of 2 curtain rods. When they arrived, I installed the brackets (easy day), and then went about inserting the curtain rod into my roll of trash bags. Um, how did these people make them look so nice? Did anyone ever actually take the bags off the roll and then, one-by-one, re-roll them onto the new rod? Ain't no one got time for that. My rod got shoved through the center of the roll and it's ugly but whatever, it works:

And, I actually do keep the bin empty, so this little idea is pleasing to both me and the man I married, who haaaaaaaaaaaates it when I let the bin overflow. It's a win.

You should know already that I love organization and matching and predictability in my house. If there isn't a designated spot for something around here, it's going to either get shoved, or lost, or both. Our mail and keys are no different. I found this post about how to make neat key holders for your house and I realized I didn't have to have a boring little solution for this.

I wanted an area in my kitchen where my husband could come home from work, drop his keys, wallet, and sunglasses, without them being in the way, without them getting lost. So I needed a key holder and also some sort of catch-all. Blam and blam, with this bad boy for good measure, since mail also started to accumulate on my countertops. Did you think I could abide by three different colored things hanging in the same spot in my house? Nope. So I took a pot of sample paint I had left over from when I painted the two murals upstairs (another post, I promise), cleaned off my finds, and painted them. This is the result, in use:

Organized chaos, sure, but at least we always know where our thing are!

And now, I will show you my shame, my fail.

My master bathroom was super boring and basic and my husband I wanted to redo it pretty badly. However, spending the money on swapping out the tub and the counter and the sink and fixtures just wasn't going to happen, so I set about creating a low-cost plan to revamp our space. I painted the walls, hung some shelves and pictures, installed a double-curved shower curtain rod and made some decorative curtains for them, and then I found this post and thought PERFECT. This is the way I was going to give my beleaguered tub a facelift. However, I don't love the bead board, and since I was going to eliminate it, I didn't think I needed to build the framing with the 2x4's.

I used Smart Tiles on the outside wall of the tub, and they ended up looking super cheesy and obviously stick-on. While painting the walls, I knocked the paint can over and the paint puddle went all over the fake tiles. In my attempt to clean it up, it ended smearing over just the tiles and not the fake grout, and ended up looking pretty good. So I kept it. Then I went about installing the PVC board shelf and trim to the ledge of the tub.

I measured twice and cut my board once, including the notches to accommodate the curves on the wall of the tub. Then I used an entire tube of Liquid Nails to lock it into place, and placed two boxes of tiles on top while it cured. I left it alone for a week.

Then, when I thought it was safe, I went to give the dogs a bath, and this happened

If you can't tell what's going on there, that white rectangle is the PVC board that's supposed to be up on the ledge of the tub, where that fat streak of dried Liquid Nails is instead.

So I'm going to scrape all the Liquid Nails off, install some heavy-duty brackets in the walls and PVC board, anchor them in there like they're going to endure a massive earthquake, cut the notches in deeper so that less hangs off the edge, and hope and pray it works. Because the rest of my project turned out pretty darned good.

Let me see your successes and fails! Got any things you've seen lately that you want me to try out? Let's hear it!