So if like me you have an automatic roller door on your garage and you are wondering how do you paint a roller garage door, then I have a solution! It’s tricky to decide whether to paint the door with standard exterior paint or whether this will withstand the door rolling open and shut. The roller door itself seems to be made of metal so I thought a metal based paint would be what I needed. I did actually google whether there was a special garage paint available, and in fact there is, but the reviews on it were all one star and made me think twice about buying it. Continue reading How Do I Paint a Roller Garage Door?
Category Archives: Home & Garden
Ipswich Double Glazing Glass Replacement
If you are looking to replace the glass in your double glazed windows, rather than replacing the whole unit which can be a costly thing to do, then I have just used a great outfit called the Glass Shop. Continue reading Ipswich Double Glazing Glass Replacement
Missing Cats in Ipswich
There has been a massive increase in cats that have gone missing in the Ipswich area in recent months, and the rate at which they are disappearing does not seem to be slowing. Continue reading Missing Cats in Ipswich
Painting Furniture with Chalk Paint
There is a trend right now for painting old furniture to give a shabby chic effect. There are many people out there doing this professionally but if you want to you can also get similar results on your own old and worn furniture.
The way to paint old furniture is to use chalk paint. There are two main manufacturers of this kind of paint – Annie Sloan, which seems to be the most popular make at the moment, and Autentico which is slightly lagging behind. Both paints come in a range of colours so that you have a great choice of matching in your revamped furniture.
One thing you do need to look out for though is the possibility that you might need to put an undercoat on the furniture you are painting. One of the misconceptions of painting with chalk paint is that you can paint on anything. Well, some dark wood furniture in particular will bleed through if you just paint on top of it. Both manufacturers also have an undercoat/sealant that you can use but you can also try using something like PVA. A lot of painting furniture is to do with trial and error, so try and paint a hidden part of the furniture you have first to see if it needs sealing.
You should not need to sand the furniture beforehand as the whole point of the chalk paint is so that you can just paint it straight on. If you do sand down the furniture first then you could just use a standard primer and paint and that will save you a lot of money.
Once you have applied the chalk paint to the furniture you will also need to seal it with some wax and again the 2 manufacturers supply their own wax products. If you want an ‘aged’ look to your furniture then apply a dark wax over a light coloured paint.
Annie Sloan paints are generally only available from appointed suppliers, some of which sell it online but Autentico paint can be bought from Amazon:
How to Freshen Up Feather Pillows
So I recently moved house and I had to store a load of stuff in my garage for a few months after moving, due to lots of renovation work being done in the house itself. A fair bit of this stuff I didn’t really want to keep in there due to the fact that it might get damp, but as the garage was watertight and it wasn’t going to be for too long I figured it might be OK.
Unfortunately when I brought the spare pillows back into the house they had a bit of a musty smell about them. As they were not that old I didn’t really want to throw them away so went hunting online for a solution to freshen them up. Most posts that I found (in fact pretty much all of them) said to put the pillows into the tumble dryer with a new tennis ball (sure of the significance of that!) but the problem was that I don’t actually have a tumble dryer!
Also I think that if the pillows had been filled with foam or other similar material I could have put them in the washing machine, but of course the ones I had were feather down.
I think most of the issue is that they just need airing. If it had been summer then I would have tried to hang them out on the washing line for a few days to see if that would do the trick. I might still do that again once summer is here. But in the end I just decided to lean them against a radiator. I kept turning them round so that both sides would get an airing and after a few days I did find that the pillows had lost that musty smell. I might also try spraying some fabric freshener on them but at the moment the radiator seems to be doing the trick.
