{So Much Painting...Our April Project}

Well...we painted our bookcases...and it was quite the job! 

This was a pretty long time coming. 

When we bought this system three years ago, I wanted to white version, but the white version for some reason was more expensive {at the time the system was like $800 and the white was $870} and being the cheap newlyweds that we were, we bought the dark version. Bad idea! 

I immediately regretted not getting the white version, but sucked it up. 

Finally, three years later, I talked myself into the huge task of painting these suckers, and I am insanely thrilled with how they turned out! 

This is how they looked a few months ago during Christmas! 

Now painting Ikea furniture is tricky, because it's laminate and paint doesn't stick well to laminate. 

So this is the trick right here...Zinsser shellac primer. 

It's super thin, dries fast, and sticks to pretty much everything!  

So for a solid two weeks our garage looked like this! 

Oh did I forget to mention...I had to sand and clean all of this too? 

Oh...yeah...that's why it took so flippin' long! 

After sanding everything and then wiping it down, I finally got to start painting. 

I ended up doing two coats of the primer on everything {it dried so fast that I just did it in one night, painted everything then went over everything again}...

Then we did two coats of Valspar White in a Semi Gloss

THEN we did two coats of polyurethane to seal everything in! 

Yes...the answer to your question is yes...it took a lot of work! 

But it was so very worth it! 

We also got a new "coffee table"...it's actually a storage ottoman from Ballard Designs and I love it so much! 

It was a definite investment piece, but we're super happy with it! 

Now we're actually looking into purchasing doors/drawers for these {like this}...not sure if we can do that after the fact, but I guess we'll find out soon! 

We have saved all of our fortunes from sushi/Chinese restaurants and it is beyond hilarious to look back and read them! So many incredible memories over the past 9.5 years!  

This rose...Wendel gave it to me an anniversary early in our dating years...always will be a special thing in our home. 

This was apart of our 2014 New Year's Resolution challenge to complete one big project a month! 

Here's our January Project

Here's our February/March Project

And now on to the next project...tiling the bar downstairs...fingers crossed it turns out well!