Get Creative! Projected Images, Stencils, and Silhouettes

Posted on July 15, 2011August 6, 2019

By Guest Writer, Shannon VandenBosch

When it comes to creativity, I need some inspiration. So I go to a few decorating magazines and/or peruse my “Favorites” list of websites for design ideas. When I feel I have found a few pictures representing the style, image, or technique I would like to achieve, it becomes my muse. This is when I breathe a sigh of relief because the mental work is done and I can begin the process of tweaking the look I have found in order to make it my own style statement.

Recently, I was challenged to take a blank wall in our recently remodeled RepcoLite store in Jenison, Michigan, and create interest, and hopefully, inspiration. This empty wall space was located directly above the counter area where customers would sit and contemplate their own design decisions by beginning to choose a color or palette of coordinating colors.

Immediately, I liked the concept of stenciling or projecting an image on the wall to create a mural. I recalled seeing a large, abstract, flower in a Benjamin Moore color brochure. Aha!! The inspiration, my muse!

I began by taking measurements of the wall space and calculated the size of a single petal needed to make the flower, the length the stem needed to be, and the size of a single circle. Color choices were made to compliment the store’s interior decor. The single petal and circle were cut out of cardboard and then stenciled or traced onto the wall. The stem was drawn free-hand in proportion to the flower. Then the image was painted with interior wall paint. The whole process took about 6 hours. (See picture above–or, better yet, stop at our Jenison store and see it in person!)

As alluded to earlier, other ways to create murals is to use a projector to cast an image on a wall and either trace it and then paint or begin painting the image . Click here and here for more info. You can also check out this site for some more examples of graphic murals. Silhouettes are created by drawing and then painting a picture of something, say a headboard, on the wall instead of actually using a real headboard. This technique is not only creative, but inexpensive! Take a look at current decorating magazines for more information on this technique. Stencils not only can be made but bought at local stores that sell wallcoverings, crafts, or interior decorating items.

I hope you have been inspired to get creative and make the next space you choose to decorate even more uniquely yours.

4 Ways to Speed Up Your Next Weekend Paint Project!

Posted on June 22, 2011August 6, 2019

The thought of tackling a painting project doesn’t always fill us with excitement. In fact, a lot of us dread these “weekend-killers.” Many of us don’t get all warm and fuzzy over the thought of spending tons of time painting. At least I know I don’t.

Oh, the painting isn’t really the problem–that part’s relatively fun. It’s the washing of the walls, the patching of the nail holes, the taping. It’s the PREP WORK that I really hate. And I hate it because it adds so much time to my project.

But there’s a simple fix for this: Do the Prep Work Early!

PATCH THOSE NAIL HOLES

If you’re going to try to roll paint on your living room walls on a Saturday morning, then take 15 minutes on a Monday night and go around the room filling all the nail holes with a good spackling compound. We recommend White Lightning Lightweight Spackle or Crawford’s Spackling. Go around the entire room and fill ALL the nailholes and then quit for the night.

SAND THE SPACKLING

The night after you spackled all your nail holes, take another 15 minutes and go around the room doing a quick sanding of those spots. By this point, (if you’ve truly waited 24 hours) the spackling will be bone dry and will powder nicely as you sand it. This stage of the project should only take you 15 quick minutes as you work your way around that room.

WASH THE WALLS

Every paint job should start with a good wall washing using TSP (TriSodium Phosphate). However, washing the walls down on the day you want to paint can really slow you down–it’ll take a good 30 minutes to an hour to wash the walls and then another 15 minutes or so for them to dry. Avoid all of this by washing the walls down early. Just as we mentioned with the spackling and the sanding, take a night in the week BEFORE you plan to start painting and go around the room, washing the walls down. Doing this will save you all that time on the day of your project.

ROLL OUT THAT MASKING TAPE

Finally, the night before you plan to do your work, apply your masking tape to all your trim and around your doors and ceilings, etc. Of course, if you’re going to do this, you’ll want to use either 3M’s Blue Painter’s Masking Tape or 3M’s Blue (Orange Core) Safe Release Painter’s Tape. Both of these tapes will still cleanly remove after being applied early!

If you tackle these prep work steps early, you’ll have more nights of work–but, each night will be relatively short AND, best of all, when the weekend arrives, all the boring work will be out of the way. All you’ll need to do is pop the top on your gallon of paint and start rolling your new color on your walls.

Accomplishing this work early is a great way to minimize the frustration of a paint project. Give it a try–you’ll like the results!

Don’t Poison the Waterhole: How to Keep Spiderwebs and Dirt Out of Your Paint

Posted on June 17, 2011August 6, 2019

This is Hannah. Never drink out of anything she’s already used. Ever.

OK, the other day I experienced something I hope never, ever, ever to experience again. NEVER. EVER.

Let me explain. It all started innocently enough while I got the kids their dinner the other day. My wife was gone and I was in charge. I made them spaghetti-O’s and then put a pitcher of water on the table.

They ate their food, made a mess, and eventually, finished. I came behind, mopped everything up and wiped the table down and, finally, once they were all taken care of, sat down with my own dinner.

As I ate, the kids came by, one by one, and told me EVERY single thing that happened during their day. It’s great to be loved–for a while–and then it’s just mind-numbing. Story after story went through my ears and eventually, I found myself sitting at the table–my food gone–and Hannah my 3 year old–sitting on my lap–still talking.

My brain was thoroughly exhausted at this point, but I do remember grabbing the pitcher of water that was still on the table from the kids’ dinner and pouring myself a glass. As Hannah went on and on and on about this or that, I took little sips of water and tried to understand what she was telling me.

At some point, in the midst of all of this, I noticed that something wasn’t quite right. I wasn’t immediately aware of what it was, and I tried to ignore the feeling, but my brain wouldn’t let me. I took another drink of water and it suddenly hit me: I was chewing. I was done eating–had been done for a while–there was no food left on my plate . . . but here I was . . . chewing.

Now, drinking water is not normally, a chewing experience. But here I was, sitting at the table, drinking water and chewing it. And the more I thought about it, and focused on it, the more I realized I wasn’t chewing water–I was actually chewing something that was in the water.

Well, naturally, I quickly grabbed my glass and held it up to take a look and when I did, I was shocked–horribly, horribly shocked. Instead of the clear, crystally liquid I had hoped to see, it was grey. And murky. Things were floating in there: something that looked like a part of a meatball and something else that I was pretty sure was a spaghetti-O. And there were other, unidentifiable things as well. It was a smorgasbord of gray food products. All suspended in a liquid that seemed, suddenly, thicker and heavier than simple water.

I put the glass down, swallowed the meatball I was chewing and picked up the pitcher of water. A quick look inside revealed more of the same: floaty things bobbing up and down in some gray, opaque liquid.

And then I looked at the outside of the pitcher. I saw small orange, spaghetti-o sauce handprints on the handle. A closer examination revealed orange lip marks around the rim.

I looked at Hannah. “Did you drink out of the pitcher?”

She nodded and then said, “only twice.”

Well, apparently two times was enough for Hannah to poison the waterhole so to speak. I grabbed the pitcher off the table and brought it to the sink. And, as I did so . . . inspiration dawned: This was a perfect illustration of a common mistake people make when painting.

See, how many times have you started a painting project with some brushwork? You know, you start brushing around the edges–around your windows or your doors or something like that. Inside outside, it typically doesn’t matter. When you do that, what do you typically do?

And Here’s the Paint Point…

I’ll tell you what most people do: most people grab the paint bucket–the gallon of their paint–and carry it with them. They dip the brush into it, wipe the excess paint off the brush on the rim of the can, and then paint. When the brush is empty, they go back to the bucket or more paint.

That’s like Hannah drinking out of the water pitcher. If she had gone to her glass of water for a drink, she’d only contaminate that cup. Everybody else’s water would have been fine. But she went to the source and contaminated that. Once that was done, there was no way to get the spaghetti parts and meatball chunks out of it. The only fix was to pour the water out, rinse the container and fill it up with new.

With water, that’s no big deal. But if you’re doing that with paint, you can create quite an expensive and frustrating mess. If you brush into a spiderweb or pick up some dirt (this happens especially often when people are working outside), and then dip back into your bucket, you’ve instantly contaminated all of your paint. And you’ll find that out when you start rolling it onto bigger areas later. You’ll be picking little chunks of this or that out of the finish and you’ll be very frustrated.

And here’s the Answer…

The solution? Work out of a smaller container. We’ve got some at RepcoLite that are perfect for this, or you can just use an old tupperware-like container. Whatever you decide to use, remember: whenever you do brush work, always work out of a smaller container–it will protect the bulk of your paint from contamination.

Watch Your Back!

Posted on June 9, 2011August 6, 2019

OK, Moms and Dads, has this ever happened to you? It’s happened to me a number of times, but the most recent took place a few Sunday’s ago. We were getting all 5 kids ready for 8:30 church one Sunday morning. And, of course, chaos ensued. However, eventually, because we’re such with-it parents, we managed to get everybody, including ourselves, ready.

Breathing a sigh of relief, we started to make our way to the car, but before I did that, my youngest child–Hannah–came trudging over to me and explained that she needed a hug. Ahh, that’s so cute, isn’t it? Little kids who still love their dad so much they need a hug? So I scooped her up, and hugged her. And she returned the hug–big time–grabbing me tightly and then patting me repeatedly on the back with the overwhelming love only a child can give.

Well, when the hug was over, I ushered her out to the car and decided to give myself a quick once-over in the mirror–just to make sure I looked ok after the hectic morning. Well, after a glance, I realized I was as good as I was ever going to look and so I jumped into the van and drove to church.

When we got there, we talked to some people, found our seats–this time in the front row of the balcony rather than our normal seats in the back–listened to the service, talked to some people on the way out and eventually came home. However, changing out of my Sunday clothes and back into a t-shirt and jeans, I made a shocking discovery. The back of my shirt was completely covered with gooey, dirty, cheeto’s-ee orange hand prints. The front of the shirt was fine, but the back was filthy.

It only took me a second to put it together. Hannah had hugged me before we left and rather than patting me on the back out of sheer love–she was just using the back of my shirt as a wash rag. She cleaned her hands on my good Sunday shirt. And then I went to church and walked all around, sat in the front row, talked to all kinds of people–lived it up and had a big time–all the while with my back covered over with slime and assorted gunk.

That’s happened to my wife and I many different times. Sometimes it involves food, sometimes it’s from other things. But the point is this: we never catch it because we never think to check out our backs in the mirror. And that brings me to the paint point that’s hidden away in all of this– see, I never thought to look at my back in a mirror before I went to church–it never crossed my mind. I looked at myself in a mirror–at the front–to make sure I looked alright, but I never gave the back a second look. A lot of us do this same thing with our homes. Hang with me, here–this is profound–but you’ve got to hang in there.

See, we do this in our homes in this regard: We take good care of our front doors–our main entrances. These are the doors people typically see when they drive up or drive by our homes–so we take care (at least most of the time) and make these entrances visually pleasing. We use flowers, a great door color, little welcome mats . . . all kinds of little things to make the entrance way appealing.

So, we pay a lot of attention to the front–the main entrance. But you know what most of us completely forget? The garage.

Now, this seems like a leap in logic, but it’s not. See, the garage may be, in reality, the TRUE main entrance to our home. According to a recent US survey, “71% of American homeowners with a garage use the garage to enter their homes.” Another survey stated that “45% of homeowners with garages use their garages as the main entrance to their homes.”

What the numbers are saying is this: 71% of Americans who own garages use the garage to enter their own homes. 45% of Americans who own garages encourage all visitors to enter their homes through the garage.

And yet, even though the garage is used repeatedly as an entrance to our homes, it’s often the last place we really think to do any “decorating”. We put all our thought and effort into the front doors (and maybe even the garage door), but we don’t give a second though to the garage itself. It never crosses our minds.

It’s just like my shirt scenario at church–the front was pristine, but anybody watching me walk away realized I was like pig pen of Charlie Brown fame. I was a filthy mess.

So all that to ask a simple question: if folks enter your home through your garage, what kind of impression do they get? Is it a welcoming area?

And even if you’re garage is never used by guests, chances are your family enters the home–at least at times–through the garage. Shouldn’t you have a nice, respectable entrance into your home?

The answer, of course, since I’m selling paint, is YES–you should have a nice entrance in your garage. And the good news is, this doesn’t need to be an insanely expensive, complicated project.

THE BASIC STEPS

WASH THE WALLS. If your walls are painted, go ahead and wash them with TSP (Trisodium Phosphate). This is a great “pre-painting” cleaner that cuts through dirt and grease and rinses clean away. If the walls are not painted, you might want to choose to use a shop vac and remove as much dust and dirt as you can.

FILL THE GOUGES. After cleaning, go around the room with a good spackling compound. We recommend Crawford’s Spackling Paste. It’s a high quality spackle that’s easy to work with.

DEGREASE the TROUBLE SPOTS. Most garages are going to have a couple areas where greasy handprints or smudges stain the walls. Before you paint, make sure you hit these spots with a specific degreaser. There are any number of these specialty products at RepcoLite–just stop in and we’ll direct you to the one that will work best.

SPOT PRIME. If you have greasy smudges on your wall that you have to deal with (as in the above step), it wouldn’t hurt to spot prime those areas with BIN stain-blocking primer or RepcoLite’s own Zip Prime.

APPLY YOUR FINISH. Once you’ve done all the prep work, it’s time to roll on your finish. We recommend a high quality acrylic latex. It doesn’t need to be an exterior product as most garage walls aren’t exposed to the elements. However, you would likely want to consider an Eggshell finish at the dullest and possibly even a Satin Sheen or a Semi-Gloss. The finishes with higher glosses will hold up longer and resist dirt and grime better than a flatter finish.

And there you go! It sounds like a lot of work (I know), but it’s not as complicated as it seems. Typically, you’ll find that the whole project will take only a single weekend.

Bad Days

Posted on May 26, 2011August 6, 2019

Today’s just for fun–and to let you know that we all have bad days. For example: last Thursday, I decided–against my better judgment–that I should go into the eye doctor. I’d been dealing with a goopy right eye for a couple weeks and I was sick of it. I’d talk to people in the store and they would see the tears running out of that one eye and they’d always be patting me on my arm and asking me if I was alright and stuff like that. So, sick of everybody thinking I was crying all the time, I decided I should probably go to the eye doctor.

And so we made an appointment and learned that RepcoLite’s insurance plan has a $15 co-pay for trips to the eye doctor. So, for $15, I figured I couldn’t go wrong. Shows what I know.

See, I made an appointment for Thursday and drove down there. I got into the room and they did all the preliminary stuff including that horrible dilating of my eyes. Then the doctor came in and started doing a full eye exam. I stopped him and said I was just here to figure out why I had goop eye. He didn’t understand, so I showed him my gooey, drippy eye and after literally recoiling with disgust, he leaned in and looked at it. He then asked if I would like a full eye exam.

Once again, I said no. I think he asked me three more times if I’d like a full eye exam and finally, eventually, I convinced him that I was only here to have my infected (or whatever) eye looked at. Persuaded, finally, he leaned back in and gave my eye a serious looking-at. For a long time. Back and forth. Flashing lights and peering in with all sorts of equipment. Finally, he was satisfied and leaned back in his chair. He folded his arms and looked at me. And then he asked me this question in this way:

“Do you ever wash your eyelid with soap?”

Now, the way he said it made me realize that he had discovered something and that it was going to be embarrassing for me–potentially. So my brain started spinning and I started trying to figure out exactly what answer he wanted. At this point, I was less concerned with telling him exactly how things work and more interested in not looking stupid. I tossed all the possibilities in my head: If I say I wash my eyelids regularly with soap, I figured he’d say, “there’s your problem–soap irritation–everybody knows not to put soap by their eye, what’s wrong with you?” However, I also figured that if I said, “nope, soap never gets within 10 feet of my eyelid”, I assumed he’d say” well what’s wrong with you, you pig? You’re filthy. A little hygiene never killed anybody. Just leave through the back door and go straight home and scrub.”

Do you see the dilemma? I didn’t want to look dumb–I needed to figure out what he wanted me to say, but I didn’t know. So we just sat there, looking at each other. My gooey eye made squishy sounds as it blinked repeatedly. Finally, I said, “Nope. I don’t let soap get near my eye.”

And of course, that was the wrong answer.

He said–and I quote–”it wouldn’t hurt to use a little baby soap around your eye–it’s dirty.” He then wrote that on my paperwork–which will now be with me forever: “Patient has dirty eye and displays profound inability to clean himself adequately–use latex gloves when handling.” He wrote that all down, I’m sure, and sent me out to the desk.

At the desk, the next blow came when I discovered the visit wouldn’t cost me $15 dollars, but $45. When I asked why, they explained it was because I didn’t have an eye exam. (Imagine palm slap to forehead).

Now, you’d think that was the end, right? Nope. They gave me those great big horrible sun glass things and sent me on my way. I felt like I was 94 years old driving out of that parking lot and pulling onto the highway. My eye was tearing up, my crazily dilated pupils were sucking in so much sunlight I could barely see and then, at a stop light, I pressed on my brakes and noticed that my foot went straight to the floor.

I though that was odd–unusual–not the way things normally worked–but then the light changed and I started going again. I tested my breaks as best I could and realized that they weren’t working very well at all. Something had gone wrong and now I had extremely limited breaks.

Think about that for a moment: my eyes were dilated to the breaking point, I was wearing those huge sunglasses that shrouded the world in deep and profound darkness, my goopy eye was tearing up and blurring my already limited field of vision and, to top it all off, I was driving down the road in a car that had almost no breaks. If I hadn’t spent most of that drive just trying to stay alive and keep other people alive, I think it would have been hilarious.

In the end, I made it to the repair shop, parked my car, took off my big dumb sunglasses (because I didn’t want to look stupid) and then staggered blindly into the building, waving my arms out in front of me to make sure I didn’t bang into the siding or another person.

When I finally made it to the counter, I dropped my key there and the guy at the computer looked at me. He saw my big goopy, drippy eye and said, in a very conciliatory tone: “Bad day, huh? Well, it’ll be ok. Just tell us what’s wrong and we’ll get it fixed.”

Yeah, I’d been humiliated at the Dr’s office, dropped $45 bucks, lost the breaks on my car, was almost killed at least 5 times all in the hopes of fixing my eye and in the end, people talking to me still thought I was crying.

Paint Your Front Door and Change the Look of Your Home for $30!

Posted on May 25, 2011August 6, 2019

Summer’s getting closer! And with it, comes a natural desire for many of us to get outside and do some work on our homes. There’s just something about nice weather, sunny days, warm breezes, and all the beauty of Spring that makes us want to “spruce” up our homes a little bit.

Unfortunately, money is a little tight for a lot of us right now and the thought of dropping a few hundred dollars on a big paint job can be daunting to say the least.

Well, if that sums up you (as it sums up me!), then consider this: what about a smaller paint project that will still have a huge impact?

I’m talking about your front doors. Doors can be painted, typically, in a matter of just a few hours. The cost? Typically under $30. The results? (To use the over-used formula): Priceless.

A new color on a front door can bring your home from “boring” to hip in just a matter of minutes. A new color on a front door can give your siding–what you may think of as tired and old–a new look. A new color on your door will interact differently with your shutters, your roof, your landscaping, everything.

In short, a new color on a front door can give your entire home a subtle new look. All for under $30 (tools included) and a couple hours worth of work!

So, if you’re looking for a project , but aren’t quite ready to repaint your entire home, give this a try!