#DIYfranfam

If you're a friend of mine on Facebook, then you should know that our family had gone DIY-crazy. To those who are not familiar with DIY, it stands for Do-It-Yourself. So what have we been doing ourselves? We've been painting and bringing old, unwanted furniture back to life. What does that mean? How the heck did it all start?

Well, one of our past times is watching shows on HGTV. There are TV programs where average people, just like you and me, take a poor, unfortunate piece of furniture and breathe new life to it. We've watched way too many shows and vowed that one day...yes one day...we'd do our own DIY project. That day finally came.

Our first-ever DIY 

It was Memorial Day Weekend, I had just gotten back from my business trip to New York and New Jersey. I missed my mom's birthday during the week so the family decided to take her to a late breakfast at Hidden Cafe in Camarillo. As we left our house, we noticed one of our neighbors was a having a garage sale. We didn't stop by or anything, but there's a point to why I brought that up! :-)

After our late breakfast, we went back home. As we drove on to our street, there as no more garage sale,  but I noticed that there was a coffee table sitting right outside with a FREE sign on it. I signaled to Nancy that we should pick it up. So after dropping off the kids at home, we walked to our neighbor's front yard, rang the doorbell as a courtesy to advise them of our intent to pick up the item, but there was no answer. Alrighty then. We carried it back to our house (just 3 houses down). As we walked back, I noticed a green sticker and $75 was written on the table. This sturdy table did not sell at $75. Oh darn....my gain!

Nancy and I headed straight to the local Do-It-Center. We bought chalk paint (Coffee Bean and Icy Gray color). We wanted to do a two-tone color for this table. Why chalk paint? I learned that using chalk paint does not require lots of prep work. No sanding needed, no priming. All we had to do was to wipe the surface clean and began painting our hearts out.

This first project took about a couple of hours to paint. It was that easy! It dried quickly. We moved the coffee table to our living room and we're pretty jazzed about our first-ever DIY. 

Memorial Day or was it Labor Day?
The coffee table was painted on Saturday of the Memorial Day Weekend. Still high from our first DIY coffee table project that we painted the day before, the fam bam tackled an old dresser we've owned for over 25 years. I was still single and in college when I first owned this dresser. I've gotten married, moved around the area quite a bit, yet this dresser has stayed with us. I knew that I'd do something to it, and sure enough, that was the day. We used chalk paint again...Devine Black and Lake Blue. This one was far from being easy when compared to the ease of painting the coffee table. We had to tape corners of the dresser, unscrew the handles, and applied quite a few coats on the black paint. Painting took 3 hours. Everyone in the family had a little bit of contribution to the finished product. This dresser is now sitting upstairs and we're very pleased with the outcome.

Nancy worked a 12-hour shift today during Memorial Day itself. I told the kids to write her a note using chalk on our new chalkboard painted dresser. It was a mess, but that's how we roll. Just like a chalkboard at school, clean up was easy.

I've added a hashtag to easily track down our DIY projects. That's it....that's how #DIYfranfam all started.