For our wedding, I purposefully bought tall glass vases as centerpieces, planning to later use them for decorating our home(s) for years to come. Fast forward, and now I’m looking around at them and wondering how to change up the look they’ve had ever since. Several have homemade candles in them and so I want them to remain clear, but for a few I wanted to find a way to add some color and/or texture.
Since this one was sitting in our dining room beside a stained glass lamp, I figured I’d give it a go and make the vase look like stained glass. I’d done this before to the glass cabinet doors in our pantry, and I hoped it would work on a vase. Spoiler – it works great! You could do this on any glass vase, no matter the shape, too, so I’m sure there are many, many cool looks you could create using this method.
BEFORE: Plain glass vase.
Supplies:
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Step 1: Clean the glass. My vase was very dusty and had smudges from little fingers, so I first cleaned the inside and outside of the vase really well. The last thing you want is gunk stuck on as you’re painting!
Cleaned and ready!
Step 2: Paint the colors. I had absolutely zero plan for what I was painting, and I ended up going pretty abstract but also making flowery shapes. You could copy a pattern and colors you like, or you could plan out shapes first. There are all kinds of cool stained glass pictures you can find online to replicate!
I used a normal crafting brush, a little lid for squirting out the paint, and the glass paint itself. If you want the colors to be really strong, you might want to let it dry and do another coat, or do it pretty thick as you go. I only painted on one quick coat, and I let it be stronger in some places and more transparent in others.
Painting the colors.
Don’t worry if you think your painting doesn’t look too great at first. Once you put the liquid leading on, it really pops! I also didn’t worry too much about having straight or smooth edges, since I would be going over everything with outlines.
I let this dry a few hours just to be safe (and because I got busy doing other things), but it dries pretty quickly.
Paint on.
Step 3: Apply liquid leading as outlines. If you’ve never worked with this stuff, it’s a bit like puffy paint that ends up looking like the lead on stained glass. It has a sticky consistency that dries pretty quickly, and it leaves a painting with a cool 3D effect.
I was worried at first that this would run down the vase or drip as I went, so at first I turned my vase on its side and applied it that way. But once I had to do the other side, I stood the vase up again and had no problem applying it that way. It does take a second to get used to how much you squeeze out as you go, but it’s pretty easy.
After a while, the spout may get clogged and make it harder to get any out smoothly, so just take a second and clear the tip from time to time.
Outlining with liquid lead.
I outlined between my different colors and also added some lines between the shapes where I could see different brushstrokes.
The liquid leading does look a bit grey as it comes out, but it dries nice and dark – black like lead.
Liquid lead drying.
See how beautiful that is with light coming through?!
That is it! I set the vase in place and let it dry. I’m really happy with how this turned out, and of course now I’m eyeing the rest of the vases and wondering how many more I should do. 😉
Someday we plan to get carpet again for our upstairs bedrooms, hallway, and stairs. For now, however, we have a cat. If you’ve been following along for a while, you’ve seen at least a few projects of mine that came about out of necessity because we needed to get rid of old flooring. I will say, the cat has forced me to get creative. 😜
Around two years, ago, I pulled the carpet off our stairs because of 1) cat and 2) it was 22 years old and consequently quite gross even without the cat’s help. My temporary fix at the time was to paint the stairs white to match the trim work, but obviously white stairs were doomed to fail too. So, this week, I finally got around to making wood-colored treads to hide dirt, crumbs, dog hair, etc.
BEFORE: Gross old carpet.
If you live in a house built in the 90s, you should probably be prepared to not find real, nice wood treads and risers when pulling up carpet. Instead, my treads were like a porous, MDF kind of wood. Also, there was a gap on either end of the stair pieces because of how they left room for the house to settle – my gaps were huge! Like many things I’ve found in our house, the original builders did not have future remodeling in mind when they did what they did.
Anyway, because we do plan someday to put carpet back on the stairs, I didn’t want to shell out $30-80 per stair for real wood stair treads. I could’ve salvaged the existing risers and just put trim on the ends to cover those gaps, but even just buying wood to make my own treads without risers, that was a lot of $$$.
I have gotten weirdly good at making non-wooden things look like real wood, so I decided to give it a go with paint and stain I already had.
My cost for this final part of my stair fix was $0, but even counting the earlier supplies I’d needed 2 years ago, it was still under $200 for this whole stair makeover. That would have been the same amount as about 4-5 stairs if I’d bought treads. I have 14 stairs.
Supplies:
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Step 1: Remove carpet from stairs. This was gross and not fun, I won’t lie. But once I tore it all off and got all the little staples out, it immediately felt worth it. (No pictures of this step because it was a lot of my butt on camera. LOL.)
Step 2: Cover any landings. If you have a landing or two, you’ll want to cover them so it’s not just the rough subfloor. Our staircase has 2 landings, so I covered these with 1/8 inch plywood in a herringbone pattern like I’d done to our upstairs hallway floor. (So, if you need to know how to do herringbone, see that post “DIY Herringbone Floor in a Hallway.”) You could do just one big piece of plywood if you don’t want to bother with the herringbone, but I really like how they turned out.
For the stair-side of the landing, I used outside corner guard molding to cover the edge. I was initially worried about the slight lip this would create, but it turned out not to be an issue. To cover the other sides around my landing where there was existing trim work, I used InstaTrim to cover the edges. But, as I’ll explain below, hold off on the InstaTrim until you’re done painting and staining!
Step 3: InstaTrim. Again, do this step last! But since I’d pulled my carpet 2 years ago, I’d done this step already and so had to work with the InstaTrim already on – hence, you’ll see it in all the pictures. So, I might as well explain how I did it here.
My biggest problem was figuring out how to cover the gaps on the ends of my stairs, because they were not equally spaced and way too wide for any kind of caulk solution. The risers could’ve used normal quarter-round trim, but the treads had curved fronts where ordinary trim wouldn’t have worked. So, I found InstaTrim at a size that would cover the widest areas of my gaps.
Starting at the top of my stairs, I went down one side and then the other, sticking the InstaTrim all along the ends of the risers, across the ends of the treads, over the curved lips of the treads, and down onto the next riser again. It sticks on fairly well with its own adhesive, but I did add a few little nails here and there under the tread fronts to help hold the trim in place. I also had to start a new strip at one point, so I nailed those ends too.
InstaTrim covering gaps.
For a few of the absolutely enormous gaps, I also filled in along the InstaTrim with a bit of paintable caulk.
Once that was on, my end gaps were covered!
The InstaTrim is paintable, which was fortunate for me since mine was already down and I’d need to do touchups once I was done painting the treads and the landings. 🤦♀️ BUT if you wait to add this trim last, that would be way, way easier!!
Step 4: Paint the landings and treads and risers with non-skid paint. Because my stairs were made from very basic materials, I needed to prime the “wood” to make sure knots and other discolorations didn’t show through. I also wanted to make sure the stairs weren’t too slippery when painted. To solve this problem, I used a non-skid paint intended for stairs. It had a gritty texture to it which helped give the stairs a base layer that wasn’t slippery.
If you’ll need to use these stairs while you’re doing this project, it’s a good idea to do every other stair as you work from the top down. That way, you still have every other stair to use while the first set dries. Once those are dry and you can stand/sit on them again, you can go back up and paint the stairs you skipped.
Painting the stairs with this gritty paint was as far as I got two years ago. You can see from my picture below why I needed to do something other than just this white! 🤦♀️ So, I finally got onto the next step this week!
White with 2 years of wear.
Step 5: Paint a base, light brown. Like the step above, you may want to paint every other stair at a time if you need to use them while they dry. I fortunately had shipped my kids off to their Grammy’s for a few days, so I didn’t have anyone using the stairs all day. This meant that I could simply start at the top and do all of my stairs and landings as I painted my way down.
I originally thought I would make both the risers and treads look stained like wood, so I painted both in a light brown color. However, I ended up painting the risers white to lighten up the stairwell again (and it looked better with the trim work of the stairwell). If you KNOW you want your risers white, simply paint those white now instead of brown. Just be sure to use a fine brush to create a straight line where the risers and treads meet at the back of each stair. And if you’re doing white, be sure to paint in good lighting and do at least 2 coats.
For the treads and landings, I applied just one simple coat of the light brown. It doesn’t have to be perfect since the stain will cover and add “character” anyway to cover paint streaks or areas not covered as well.
Brown base painted on.
I let this dry for several hours. You want to make sure the brown paint adheres really well so it doesn’t wipe off with the next steps.
Step 6: Stain over the paint. I thought I’d use a silicone basting brush like I’d done before when making faux-wood beams and my faux-wood light fixture, but that would have taken forever. I decided instead to try just dipping gloved fingers into the stain and wiping it on with my hands, and that actually worked really well! You don’t want to do it too thick, just enough to add a kind of wood grain look over the light brown. It was also nice to use my fingers because I could get right up along the edges. (Yes, too close to the edges, but I knew I’d have to touch up and paint the risers white anyway. You could tape things off for cleaner lines.)
Stain on.
I suppose you could use a brush, but it really helps the “wood” to look natural if you can rub the stain on with your hand. A brush can look too uniform with strokes. Plus, it’s important that the stain gets rubbed into the paint to help it set. I also found that I could make nice, long wipes across the entire length of the treads to make it look like one, natural board of wood without broken up strokes.
I also made sure to wipe the stain around the curve of the tread fronts. I really rubbed it in here to cover the porous texture of the MDF.
Staining curved fronts.
For this staining step, I would definitely recommend doing every other stair if you’ll need your stairs. If you need to step on your landings, leave those until later as well. Long story short, I tried to do it all in one go like I’d done with the brown paint, but the stain needs a LONG time to dry.
If you’re staining the risers as well as the treads, you’ll want to do that as you stain every other stair as well – really, you could stain all the risers as you go, since you won’t be stepping on them while they dry anyway. The stain REALLY ends up covering imperfections like dents, staple holes, etc., so it would look very nice to do both the treads and the stairs. However, for my stairwell, it would have made everything too dark, so again that’s why I ended up painting my risers white.
Step 7: Wipe off excess stain. Once every other stair’s stain has been on for about 6-8 hours, you might be concerned if it hasn’t dried and is still sticky. No worries! Because you were smarter than me and did every other stair, you can take a rag to the top stained tread and wipe off as much extra/wet stain as you can. This actually helps it look even more like natural wood! Work your way down the stairs – standing on the unstained stairs – and wipe each tread and/or riser until you like the look of them.
Stained wiped to dry.
Step 8: Add a coat of polyurethane. You can do this immediately after the above step. I used a brush and took a quart of clear gloss polyurethane to my top tread. Easily and quickly, I brushed a good coat of poly over the stained tread. If you stained your risers, give them a coat of poly too. Work your way all the way down to the bottom stained stair, then let it dry for an hour or two – mine dried really fast.
It would seem that the polyurethane might make the stairs slippery, but the stain and that non-skid paint on the base layer add a lot of texture. In the end, all of this makes the stairs feel more like real wood, too.
Step 9: Finish every other stair and landings. Once the poly is dry, you can now step on these finished treads and go back to stain the treads and landings that you skipped before. So, repeat steps 6-8 for these treads and also any landings. When staining the landings, make sure to wipe one herringbone board at a time to keep them looking like their own pieces of wood. If you do one big board for your landings, just keep the strokes going all in one direction.
Herringbone stained.
Step 10: Touchups. Like I said, I changed my mind and painted my risers white once I had my treads and landings done. Obviously it would have been less work to paint them white before staining. BUT I also liked that I didn’t have to be too careful when staining along the back of my treads, since I knew I could make a nice clean line with my white paint in the end (I don’t always trust tape to give me good lines).
I also had to repaint my InstaTrim, but you should be able to spare yourself that. However, if you make goofs or change your mind about your risers as you go, know that it’s not too late to make fixes! One of the nice things about touching up once the poly is on is that paint wipes off of dried polyurethane pretty nicely with a wet wipe or damp cloth!
Step 11: InstaTrim. Like I said, it would be smart to save this step for last. This way, you don’t get any of your paint or stain on it! (See step 3 for how to attach it.) I will say that, for my landings, the InstaTrim was much easier to put on because I was only dealing with straight lines and no curves like with the treads.
Now my stairs are finally done! This was actually easier than I thought it would be…and should be even easier for you if you follow my instructions rather than guess as you go like I did. 😆
AFTER: Clean, fake hardwood stairs!
Done!
It’s been a few days now with my girls and dogs and husband using the stairs, and I’m happy to report they hide dirt and hair WAY better than my white stairs. Go figure. LOL.
This week, I felt like I’d been a bad mom lately and so decided to spend time with my girls coloring Easter eggs. We started the good-old way with baking soda, food coloring, and vinegar. But after poking and draining about six eggs to color the shells, I’d kind of had enough of that and tried to think of a way to decorate the bagful of plastic eggs we had lying around.
Fun way, but…too much 😆
I’ve wanted to hydro-dip…something (anything really) for a while, and it seemed like painting Easter eggs this way might be kinda cool. So, after a quick trip to Michael’s yesterday, we had all the spray paint colors we could think of and were ready to go.
Is this a particularly kid-friendly art project? Not really. LOL. But my girls were surprisingly helpful and did a great job – the key to my success lies entirely in the plastic gloves I made them wear.
BEFORE: Normal plastic Easter eggs.
Step 1: Spray on a base layer. In order for hydro dipping to really work, I’m told you need a base layer of paint for the spray paint to stick to. So, I took my bag of plastic eggs and popped them apart so they’d sit flat. Then I took a plain white spray paint and sprayed all over the eggs to get a good coat on. I went with white because I figured that would help them look the most “realistic” as eggs when finished.
Supplies:
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Plastic easter eggs
Spray paints
Gloves
Cup or other container
Base coat on.
Step 2: Prep for painting. Once the base coat was dry (I gave mine about 4 hours), I snapped all the eggs back together and took them in a basket out to my deck. This seemed like the best place to do this at the time simply because I wanted good ventilation while working with the girls.
Eggs ready to go!
It’s important to have everything ready to go because the paint will dry pretty quickly in the water, so you want your eggs right there when you start. I made sure to shake up all of my spray paint cans really well too. Because I wanted to dry the eggs inside (it was a windy day), I lay a silicone baking sheet and a few paper towels on the kitchen counter to be ready. And perhaps most importantly, we made sure we had gloves in place.
Cup and gloves ready!
Step 3: Hydro dip! I used a solo cup because I figured the eggs didn’t need a lot of room to dunk them, but you could use a spare Tupperware container or an old whipped cream container or something else entirely. Really, it just has to be a container that’s deep enough to submerge the egg.
I filled my cup a little over 3/4 full of water, then took it to the deck. My girls stood ready with an egg each, and then I began spraying the paint into the cup. I made sure to spray in the center of the cup each time, and I held the can about 6 inches above the cup as I sprayed so it didn’t shoot everywhere. It only took little bursts at a time to get enough paint into the cup to cover the surface.
We found that we really liked the metallic spray paints, and the blue and purple covered the surface really well. I alternated my combinations of colors, and really there was no bad way to go.
Paint ready.
Each time, when I had enough paint to cover the surface, the girls would slowly lower a plastic egg down through the paint. Sometimes we’d have to turn the egg over and do the other side again, but this was no problem because the paint on the egg adheres REALLY fast, so it doesn’t drip or anything. For a few eggs, we also found that setting them to float on the surface and then just rolling them also pulled the paint to cover the eggs, though this took a little longer.
Dipping an egg.
We did about 30 eggs in 45 minutes, so it went pretty quickly. I never had to refill the water, and I never bothered cleaning the cup because the paint you don’t use moves to the edges anyway. The girls had a lot of fun dunking the eggs, shaking off the water, and then running them inside to sit and dry. Our gloves got messy, and I was worried about the paint pulling off the eggs as we set them down, but that turned out to not be an issue because of how fast the paint sets.
I will say that my eggs had little holes at the tops and bottoms, so that helped to drain any water that got inside. Once they were all on the paper towel to dry, I did give them a few hours before using them to decorate.
Eggs drying.
Now we have cool eggs that I can use again next year too! And they were so easy, I’m sure we’ll make more again. 🙂
Today in my workshop/craft room, I found 2 posters rolled in a tube that I’d completely forgotten about! Did I have any frames lying around? No. 😜 But since I’m in a Spring mood and want to change up our decor a bit, I decided I wanted to hang one of these on the blank wall of our basement stairwell. But what to do for a frame?
BEFORE: Blank wall…
I did not want anything heavy. Certain little people like to jump down the stairs to the top landing, and the wall regularly gets slammed. A heavy frame (lord forbid with glass) would be an accident waiting to happen. Really, I didn’t even want anything that would hang normally because the inevitable body slams would most likely knock anything loose. Plus, I’m pretty sure there’s an air duct behind that wall, so nails wouldn’t even really support a hanging frame.
I really, really didn’t want one of those plastic poster frames that works great in a college apartment and/or bachelor pad.
I also wanted to spend $0.
Since I had a bunch of “ugly” scrap 1x2s that were 8-ft long and at least straight, I figured I could make a rustic wooden frame and hang the poster using command strips, then use command strips for the frame over that.
BEFORE: Scruffy 1x2s.
I’ve done something kind of similar in the past where I attached a wallpaper mural directly onto the wall and then nailed decorative 1x2s onto the wall to act as a frame. I LOVE how that works, but this time I wanted something a little more flexible where I could change the poster easily if I wanted without dismantling the frame. My new way would also mean zero damage to the wall.
Supplies:
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Step 1: Measure and cut wood frame pieces. My posters were 24×36. I decided to measure so that the posters would fit about halfway under the frame, like the frames would overlap the sides a bit to cover the edges.
I took my scruffy wood and cut one end at a 45-degree angle on my miter saw. Then I measured from the short side of that angled cut and measured out 35 inches. At this mark, I again cut a 45-degree angle – MAKING SURE the shorter side of that cut was at the 35 inch mark, and also making sure the short sides were on the same side of the wood piece. (These will be inside corners.)
First piece cut at 45 degrees.
Once I had this one long piece cut, I didn’t bother measuring the other long piece but simply held this cut piece over the one I needed to cut, then cut my second piece that exact same size, with the exact same angles.
For the shorter pieces, I measured to 23 inches for the inside, shorter sides of my 45-degree cuts. I again cut one piece of wood to this size, then held it over my second piece of wood and cut the second piece without bothering to measure.
Once these were all cut, I made sure my corners were square by laying the pieces arranged like a frame on the floor. I happened to have 2 T-squares, so that made it easy. If you have anything square, you can just set these in the corners to check that everything lines up.
Testing square corners.
Side note: If you don’t have a miter saw, you can use a little hand saw to cut your angles. The 1x2s are nice, soft wood (pine, I think) and easy to cut by hand if you have to.
Step 2: Rough up and sand (optional). To make my wood extra rustic, I took my multitool and cut off chunks from the front of the wood pieces. You could use a little handsaw too, or a chisel.
Cutting off rough chunks.
Once I had rough parts all over the wood pieces, I took my sander and smoothed down all the jagged spots.
Side note: You don’t have to add these rough touches, but it worked for the rustic look I wanted. You could just stain like normal or paint nice, smooth frames too.
Step 3: Stain. I first used a really dark walnut stain and wiped it over the really rough parts that I’d cut out of the wood pieces. This helped to make these spots look extra rustic and aged, almost like “live edge” pieces.
Adding aged, rustic touches.
Once those dark spots were stained, I took a slightly lighter stain and brushed that all over the wood pieces. I didn’t bother with the backsides that would be against the wall anyway.
Stain on.
Step 4: Assemble the frame. When all the stain was dry (I gave it 4 hours), I lightly wiped it with a cloth just to make sure none of it came off. Then, I set all my pieces in position on my work table. I made sure all my corners were square and that all my 45-degree ends lined up nice and flush against each other.
I considered using wood glue for about 30 seconds before just grabbing Brad (my nail gun). You could use wood glue if you can clamp your corners together well enough while the glue dries, but I’d be more comfortable nailing in a few little nails through the corners too. Or, you could use little L-brackets and screw them into the backsides to connect the corners.
Prepping to assemble.
Using my nail gun, I put 2 nail in each corner to hold the 2 pieces together. I worked my way around the frame, making sure to keep everything square.
That was it for building the frame!
Step 5: Hang the poster, then the frame. It drives me crazy when I don’t hang something level, so I grabbed a level and quickly drew a line along the wall where I wanted the top of my poster to go.
Taking a few command strips, I cut them in half and used the smaller pieces on each of the 4 corners to hang the poster. (Using the full strips seemed like overkill for a light poster.) I made sure to hold the top of the poster along my level line, then pressed the command strips onto the wall to hang the poster.
Poster stuck on.
That done, I put a full-sized command strip at the very top of the two top corners of the frame. Then I held the frame up and made sure it covered each edge of the poster before pressing the command strips in place. (You could also nail this in place if you want added security.)
Done!
AFTER: Easy rustic poster frame!
This was such an easy project that I wasn’t sure whether to even post about it, but a few people have asked how to do an easy picture frame, and this is certainly that! You could make these in any custom size you need if you’ve got an abnormal poster size. And you could use any stain or paint you like, of course. I really like the rustic look I achieved (see how the shadows are cool?), and I think it’ll tie in nicely to wood I plan to use elsewhere later!
A while back, I started working on our upstairs linen closet by making a nice little shelf organizer. I mentioned then that I had an idea for changing up the closet’s bifold door, and now I’ve finally gotten around to it! This was pretty simple once I figured it out, and since I used materials I mostly had already, it only cost me $3 and a quick trip to Lowe’s for the magnetic catch.
Best of all – no more bifold door! (I hate them to an irrational degree. 😜) There are 6 doors in this tiny hall, so making this one look different at least lessens the forest of doors.
BEFORE: Ordinary bifold door.
Supplies:
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Step 1: Uninstall the bifold door and remove the unneeded hardware. First, I reached up to the top track and popped down the little pin with the roller that let the door slide on the track. Then, I moved to the top of the other side and popped down the pin that held that door section on the pivot bracket. This freed the door so that I had to catch it, and I carefully lifted the door’s bottom pin out of the bottom pivot bracket to completely free the door.
It’s important to leave that bottom pivot hardware and the top pivot hardware – these will make the door swing open and closed later. But the first top hardware with the roller is no longer needed because the door won’t need to slide on the track. Also, you need to remove the hinges on the backs that hold the door sections together.
Also, if you have a handle on the door, you need to take that off. (This could be replaced later, but I didn’t want or need one.)
Step 2: Cut door if necessary. My doorframe had a kind of overlap around it to cover the gap between the door and the doorframe. Since a swinging door would hit this, I had to cut my bifold door to make it narrower in order to avoid hitting that overlap. I decided, since my doors were hollow, to cut one inner side and take off about 3/4 inch to make the door thinner. By cutting off the inner side, it would leave the outer sides of the door solid – this would look better and also be more solid for attaching my decorative pieces.
Side note: I could have changed the whole doorframe, but that seemed like a lot of work I didn’t want to deal with. If you want to make a kind of hidden door/bookshelf kind of thing, you could do that too by changing the door frame.
Anyway, I took one of the bifold door sections and ran it through my table saw to cut off 3/4 inch. (If you don’t have a table saw, a circular saw or jigsaw would work too.)
Setting my 2 door sections upside down on sawhorses, I lined them up so that the cut side was on the inside, touching against the solid inner side of the other door section.
Cut and thinned inside edge.
Step 3: Fasten door sections together. To make the 2 sections of the bifold door into 1 solid, swinging door, you just need to put something solid across the backsides of the doors. The easiest way to start this is to use the same hinges that joined the doors before, only now you turn them the other way so they act as solid braces (see picture below). This will hold the doors together, but to really keep them from bending at all…
Taking 3 scrap wood pieces, I put wood glue on each and then used Brad (my nail gun) to nail them in place near the top, middle, and bottom of the door. That really made my 2 doors secure as 1 door now.
Flipped hinge and bracing wood.
(These strips of wood will also be nice if I want to screw in hooks to hang bags or whatever on the inside of the closet.)
Since now is the time to flip the door over so that the front side is on top, this is a good test for how solid the door is.
Step 4: Attach the canvas. You could use real canvas or anything you think will be strong enough not to rip/break. I had an old window shade from my daughter’s room that was pretty long, so I used that. It wasn’t quite long enough, but it was wide enough that I’d have extra to run a strip at the top and bottom to cover the whole door. Since I planned to put decorative wood pieces near the top and bottom anyway, I knew I could use those to cover the seams of my “canvas.”
If you’ve got one big piece to work with, obviously that would be easier. But, this wasn’t a bad way to go if you don’t have something big enough.
After cutting my shade free from the roller, I simply measured so that my main piece would be centered vertically on the door, and then I needed about 6 inch strips at either end.
With this plan, I lined up one side of the shade along the side of my door, making sure that it would be the side of the door that would be swinging open, not the side that would be pivoting. I also made sure the top of the shade was 6 inches down from the top of the door.
Then, I quickly used my staple gun to staple the edge of the shade and hold it in place along the long side. I stapled about every 2-3 inches all along that long side first.
To keep the canvas square, I next stapled along the top, but these I spaced out more because I knew I’d also be stapling the 6-inch strip over it anyway.
Stapled top corner of the canvas.
Next, I pulled the shade tight over the far side of the door and stapled the shade along that side. This way, the shade/canvas would wrap around the door, and these staples would never be seen because it was the pivoting side of the door against the doorframe.
With the shade stapled on, I could now cut the excess off past my staples on the door’s pivot side. Again, this side will never be seen, so I didn’t worry too much about cutting it perfectly straight. I just made sure it didn’t go farther than the back edge of the door.
Stapled canvas on the pivot side.
Next, I took my shade leftovers and lined up a strip to cover the top 6-inch gap. I overlapped my main piece only slightly so it wouldn’t be too thick, and I made sure the end lined up with the edge of the main piece. Then I stapled it on. Once those top staples held the strip secure, I wrapped the strip over the pivot side like I’d done with the main piece, then stapled it into the side and cut off the excess.
For the top of the strip, I wrapped this over the door also. The only difference here was that I had to cut a little away to leave space for the door’s pivot hardware. But it was easy to staple the shade secure around this, and again it didn’t really matter what it looked like because you’re never going to see the top of the door.
Canvas strip wrapped at top.
I did pretty much this exact same thing for the bottom 6-inch gap. I cut around the pivot hardware there too. Again, you’re not going to see the bottom.
Canvas strip wrapped at bottom.
Basically, wrap your door in canvas and staple it on, just don’t wrap the side that you’re going to see when opening and closing the door.
Step 5: Paint your art. This is the fun part, of course. Now that you’ve got this giant canvas, paint whatever you want on it! I’d found inspiration from a painting on Pinterest, and I wanted to use paint colors I’d used elsewhere in the house to tie it all together in our blue and green hallway.
I will fully confess that I spent 3 hours on my first attempt before deciding I didn’t like it and starting over. 🤪 But once I changed out what brush I was using, I began to get the look I was after.
Painting in progress.
Once my painting was dry, I carefully took the door upstairs and replaced it. This meant fitting the top pivot pin in place and also the bottom little pin. This allowed the door to pivot once again, and that’s all it took to hold the door in place so that it would swing open and closed.
Step 6: Make 1×2 decorative pieces. With my door in place, I took a lot of 1×2 scraps and figured out how much I would need to cover the edge along the front of the door where the side of the canvas and the staples showed. This was about 79 inches.
I also needed some to go over the seams at the top and bottom, BUT I made sure I didn’t go all the way to the pivot side of the door because that would get in the way when the door opened against the doorframe. I figured this out by simply opening the door and holding a finger where the doorframe touched the door. Then, I measured across the door to that point – about 18 inches.
I also wanted 2 more strips to go across the door like the top and bottom 18-inch pieces. (More on why later.)
I designed all this to mimic the “picture frame” I’d made for my art on another wall of our hallway. (You can see that tutorial here.) To get the look I wanted, I set my miter saw at 30 degrees and cut a bunch of pieces to make shapes like in the picture below.
Frame inspiration.
With my pieces cut, I sanded all the edges to soften the sharp sides and corners.
Next, I painted the wood pieces a nice “Royal Pine” green color to match the inspirational frame and also my floor. (See that whopper of a floor project here.) I had 2 little girl helpers with the first coat, and then I applied a second.
Painting the little pieces.
Step 7: Attach the decorative wood. When the paint was dry, I took all my pieces up to the hallway closet where the door was waiting. I wanted to attach these in place to be sure it would all fit within the doorframe. And I wanted to use a level and be sure the pieces were attached in straight, level lines if the door hung a little crooked – which, fortunately, it didn’t.
Starting at the bottom, I first attached the piece that went across the bottom seam. To give it extra hold, I used a little wood glue on the back. Carefully, I used a level, held the wood in place, and punched in a few nails with Brad.
Because my knees weren’t ready to stand up yet (lol), I next took a little piece to fit vertically under this crosspiece, filling in the space at the bottom of the door. This piece also started the vertical run along the door’s opening side. I leveled this little piece vertically and nailed it on, making sure it covered the staples and the outer edge of the canvas.
Attaching the first pieces.
With those starters on, I moved to the top and repeated this for the crosspiece over the top seam. Next went the vertical piece at the very top.
From there, I moved up and down between the top and the bottom, adding pieces at each end that matched in size. These met in the middle, and I fortunately had measured correctly so that my pieces met just fine to make a nice straight line all the way up the front edge of the door.
Adding vertical pieces.
Lastly, I measured to find where the last 2 decorative crosspieces needed to go to look even. I glued these again, then used a level to get them exactly right before nailing them on.
Step 8: Finishing fixes. With all these pieces nailed on, I needed to use a little wood filler to hide my nail holes. This was easy but of course looked messy once I was done.
Wood filler applied.
All it took to fix this was quick touchups with my same green paint. (And I painted that one wood end that I’d somehow missed. 🤦♀️)
I also ended up painting the side of the door that opened because it looked better and really helped to hide the canvas between the door and the decorative wood edging.
Painted door side.
ALSO, your door might swing open a bit, since the only hardware is on the pivoting side. To fix this, I got a little $3 magnetic cabinet catch and a scrap piece of 1×2. After nailing the 1×2 to the inside of the doorframe, I screwed the catch on the top, then screwed the metal plate onto the side of the door at the same height.
Magnetic catch installed.
This allowed the magnetic catch to hold the door in place when closed, and it’s completely out of the way and barely noticeable because of the baseboard around the door anyway. Just BE SURE to test the placement, and make sure you pick a size that leaves space for your door to open and close correctly.
Side note: If you must, you can put a magnetic catch at the top of the doorframe. I did this for my bifold-converted doors downstairs, and that works too. I just had a bigger gap at the top of this door, so I didn’t want to have to put a bigger piece of wood up there to fill the gap.
Step 9: Add picture frames. This idea had really started my plan in the first place.
While the touchup paint dried, I grabbed 3 spare wooden picture frames and painted them the same green.
When everything was dry, I found 3 small nails and picture hooks. Gently, I hammered them into my top 3 crosspieces, making sure to center the nail placement across the door – so at about 11 and 1/4 inches.
Picture hooks on crosspieces.
Finally, I hung the picture frames on the nails.
All finished, it looks pretty cool, like layers of art but also like pictures just hanging over wallpaper. These frames will be great for hanging my girls’ favorite artwork on display, and it’s somewhere special that can be just for their art but “fancy.”
AFTER: Art door!
I really like how this turned out, and it’s pretty cool that I don’t even need a handle on the door because of the wood. You could add a handle if you wanted, but I thought it would look too busy. And, this way, the whole door hides a bit as a door and looks like an artsy wall nook.
