Guest Room Project: Turning Old into New

For the next guest room project I sort killed two birds with one stone. I've been going back and forth with the idea of getting rid of the black metal leaf candle holder on our living room wall. The dark metal contributes to the dark of the room that I'm trying to eliminate. Also with the couch, pillows, mirrors, frames, etc I feel that corner of the room is getting a little crowded.

I always try to reuse something if possible before trashing or donating and this was no exception. With a quick coat of spray paint I thought this piece would be a great addition to the guest room.

As I mentioned on Monday's post I grabbed some gold spray paint from AC Moore over the weekend. I took the leaf off the wall and gave it a good dusting (eek!) before setting up camp outside on the deck.

It was gorgeous outside last Saturday so I really lucked out on a perfect day to spray paint with minimal wind. Wind is always a pain when it comes to spray painting, for obvious reasons.

Meanwhile, my little crafting partner was busy with her toys just inside the slider where I could keep a close eye on her. It also only took a minute or so for each coat of paint.

Within a minute or two I had the first coat of spray paint down. There wasn't much of a shiny finish to the metal and it held the paint really well. The only trick was getting all sides of the metal covered evenly since the design is pretty intricate. That and the plate that holds the candle moves, so I needed to make sure I got both sides of that coated well, too.

I'm pretty pleased with how open that corner of the room now looks without the black wall piece. The below picture is without the new pillow covers that I ordered last week. They should arrive within the next week or so. I can't wait to see how they look in the room.

After an hour of drying time I flipped the leaf over and sprayed the underside, careful to fully coat the candle holder.

I repeated this process with two more coats of paint throughout the day.

I let the leaf dry completely over night before bringing it up to the guest room.

I have a few ideas of where to put it, but haven't made any moves to put a nail in the wall. I'm going to wait until I have all decorative pieces for the room together before mapping out where each piece will go. I'm still on the hunt for some vintage gold frames with the hopes of doing a wall collage. I have some great old photos from both our parents' and grandparents' weddings that would be really nice to put on the wall, plus the butterfly print that I bought from Goodeals a few months back. Now that I have the leftover gold spray paint, I may just use some old frames around the house and refinish them in gold.

The detail of the paint on the leaf looks like it was meant to be gold from the beginning, with no traces of the black metal peeking through.

I'm starting to feel like things are really getting moving in the guest room.