COST: $10
EFFORT: 1 out of 5
RESULTS: 5 out of 5
My sister and her husband have a beautiful, modern home in north-end Halifax. They’re child-free so everything in their home is very nice and stays that way — except for the glass coffee table that my children cover in smudgy handprints every time we visit.
Everything is their home is either brand-new or the cool kind of vintage, which is why I was surprised when my sister asked me for a bit of DIY assistance.
They wanted to overhaul the colour palette in their living room. They’d used teal and aqua as their accent colours ever since they moved in several years ago, and they had lots of neutral decorations in warm creams and browns.
(My sister has always been convinced their beautiful velvet sofas are “chocolate brown,” but I have insisted they are charcoal grey. It’s so funny how differently we all see colours!)
Now they wanted to repaint the walls (from a creamy beige to a cool crisp white), focus on deep greys instead of browns and bring in mustard yellow as the primary accent colour.
They had no trouble picking up two $5 mustard yellow pillow covers from IKEA and putting them over the turquoise throw pillows on the couch. But they weren’t sure what to do with some of the trickier pieces, like the artwork and a blue-patterned ottoman.
They were still very fond of the metal-and-wood wall art they’d bought together years ago at HomeSense, so they didn’t want to sell it or donate it, but they didn’t want the warm earth tones and distressed wood finish anymore. Could I paint over it for them, they wondered? Of course!
The piece was made of a bunch of geometric wooden shapes arranged between brass spokes that formed different-sized triangles. I knew I’d need to paint over every wooden shape, since even the white ones — a colour they wanted to keep — were sanded and streaked with a distressed finish.
I grabbed an armful of jars of paint and a few brushes and got to work, setting up shop on top of my washing machine lid — very professional. I painted over the white shapes first, using a nice crisp white bright. I painted a couple of the shapes a deep charcoal grey, used black paint on a few smaller ones and painted a single shape a lighter shade of grey.
It was the mustard yellow that threw me for a loop.
I started with a deep yellow paint I’d used for other projects (“Prairie Sunset” by Fusion Mineral Paint), but it didn’t look mustard-y enough. I mixed in some grey and tried again. Nope. Ditto with mixing in some brown and red. I Googled “how to mix mustard paint” and still couldn’t nail the shade. (By this point, the three yellow shapes had about five coats of paint on them.)
In the end, I did what I should have done originally. I looked through my expensive tubes of acrylic paint — something I’d not normally use for a larger project like this — and found one labeled Yellow Oxide. It was the perfect shade of mustard yellow. Whew.
My sister and her husband loved their “fixed” wall art and new mustard yellow pillows, and they’re preparing to paint their walls white soon.
In the meantime, I’m working on another project that I’ll share with you soon: reupholstering a very complicated ottoman. Wish me luck!
