Inspired by Ana White
27 Apr 2011 Leave a Comment
in DIY Home Improvement Tags: all things thrifty, ana white, bathroom, glaze, shelves, stool, west elm
Have you heard of Ana White? She is a girl from Alaska who loves to build things and shares her plans for free! This is how she describes her ideas, “a plan that called for minimal cuts, basic materials, and easy techniques - something I could build despite having a newborn baby.” So keep reading and breathe easy even if you were considering skipping this post because you don’t know how to run a power tool. She makes her plans with the beginner in mind. You can check out her blog here.
My husband built shelves based on these plans found on Ana’s blog. She based her plans on these shelves from West Elm. I am working on adding some stuff to the shelvles – sorry for the empty pics. But I did make that thing that looks like metal (out of toilet paper rolls!) and will post about that soon.
And this is the stepping stool he built so my boys can wash hands and brush teeth. Here are the plans, except that he made it a little easier and excluded the storage.
Both of the shelves and the stool I painted in Benjamin Moore’s white dove and then glazed ‘em (click here for more on that). Be aware though that usually you paint the glaze on and wipe it off, which leaves brown glaze in the cracks and crevices, but since the shelf has straight lines, most of the glaze just wiped right off. So I glazed it again and let it dry for a few minutes and then gently wiped it off leaving a little more behind to dry. Then I added glaze to the edges and did not wipe it off at all. You can see that in the above pic – the edges are chocolate brown.
I glazed the stool too. After glazing using the method described by All Things Thrifty, I used one of my little boys paintbrushes (think paint-by-number kind of brush) and painted on the “V” with glaze. I made a template for the V using Microsoft Word. I forget what font I used, but I blew it up to about 72 and then added the little rectangle type thing by going to “shapes.” I printed this out, cut it out, and traced it with pencil onto the stool. Then filled it in with glaze. I let the glaze dry for about 5 minutes and then ever so lightly wiped it off with an almost dry rag – remember, it is easy to take too much off so start gentle. Stop and let it dry when it looks the way you want it to look.
Last, I did not build these from plans by Ana White, but I did glaze them. I bought this soap dispenser from World Market to tie in the wood on my bathroom cabinet, but the soap pump part was polished silver, which clashed. So I spray painted it heirloom white and then glazed it. No cracks, so I just wiped off what I didn’t want, and let it dry.
Same thing for the toilet paper holder as the soap dispenser.
Even the nails holding in the knobs to the cabinet got a coat of spray paint and glaze. The knobs are also from World Market.
I am wondering if anyone else has glazed an object that was not made of wood? Did it work out like you expected?
