Designs By Jeannine: November 2013

Easy Charlie Brown Christmas Decorations

To come up with your Stencil simply:

- Find a picture of your favorite character.

- Using a ruler draw 1 inch by 1 inch grid on your picture.

- Look at each square and draw only what you see in that square on a blank sheet of copy paper.

- Once you have done this for all the squares, tape your pages together, and cut the outside edge.

- Now that the excess paper is off your picture, you now have a stencil!

How to make your decoration simply:

- Lay down a sheet of plywood, and trace your picture.

- Take a skill saw and cut on your lines. Being careful to cut on the line. When the saw is cutting in one direction, you will notice it doesn't turn in the other direction easily. Just stop the saw, pull the blade out of the wood and start sawing in the other direction to obtain the desired cut.

- Once your object is cutout, sand the edges with an electric sander. If you don't have an electric sander you can use a handheld manual sander. Dust off your cut out once you are done sanding.

- With a pencil draw in your pictures inside lines. This will show you the paint lines.

- Once your lines are drawn, my favorite part begins ... painting! Use craft paint (the paint found in little tubes at your local craft store). I recommend 3 coats of paint.

- For the outside edges, and details use puffy paint. (Again found in small tubes at your local craft store).

- Once paint is dried, attach backing. This will keep decoration standing up. Attach a strip of plywood 4" by (your desired length from your board to the ground). Just use a tape measure to obtain your desired length.

- If you live in a windy climate, you can drill a small hole at the bottom of both sides, and attach to a tent steak in the ground.

It's that easy! Now I am off to make more Peanuts characters. Stay tuned I will post others and I complete them.

Happy Painting!!

~Jeannine

Easy Trailer Kitchen Remodel

Follow along to see the entire Motorhome remodel.

When I decided to remodel the Motorhome, I decided the kitchen needed a fun look. I headed out to my favorite discount home decorating store. After a lot of fun shopping for my inspiration I found the curtains you see in the above picture....the color scheme was found.

You can use shower curtains (made with material not plastic), drapes, or find your favorite material. The price of material being as expensive as it is these days, I try to find other options for inexpensive material.

Here is the Motor Home Kitchen Before (yuck!)

The first step, was to remove the ugly outdated wallpaper. To my surprise there were two layers of wallpaper to remove. Once I was able to remove the bottom layer, the wallpaper came off easily. I used a razor knife to cut the wallpaper at the ceiling, and around the countertop trim. This allows the wallpaper that is behind cabinets, trim, and countertops to remain in place.

I will paint over the wallpaper inside cabinets so I didn't want to remove the wallpaper in some areas. When it comes to remodeling Trailers you just need to decide what is worth removing vs. what is better to keep and just paint over. I wanted to keep the trim installed on the countertop, so cutting the wallpaper off around the counter was necessary. If I pulled the wallpaper off around it, it would have pulled off the trim.

Removed the old curtain track system from all windows. Some needed to be unscrewed. Most of track could be removed just by pulling it off.

I taped off the oven and started painting the upper and lower cabinets.

If your cabinets have any detail, paint the detail with a brush first. Then you can use a small roller. For the upper and lower cabinets I used BEHR Premium Plus Ultra with Primer, color: Vast Desert.

I taped off the oven, sprayed the oven, and oven vent with High Head Rust-oleum Gloss Finish. The Matte finish will make it difficult to clean. Gloss finish helps to be able to just wipe it clean.