A Painted Piano

Check out my newly up-cycled piano project! I am literally obsessed with it and feel like I am living in a brand new house every time I walk into my living room!

I lucked out and found this piano on craigslist. I had been looking for an old upright to bedazzle for a while, so when I saw this one I offered them $80 and by some miracle they said yes! Win! Even more of a tender mercy was the fact that originally it was a dark cherry color, and the nice folks I bought it from had done some serious work and white washed it into this lighter color.

What this meant of course, was that I could dive right in and start painting! And by I - I mean my husband. So we went on a hideous outing with our 3 screaming/whining/overly tired children to Lowe's late that night to pick up the perfect can of bright canary yellow paint. Because in my wildest dreams it was my hearts desire to own a shiny brightly gleaming yellow piano.

We came home, and my dear sweet manly Bob Villa of a husband went straight to work. He removed the front panel, taped off the keys, and started rolling out mustard yellow paint + primer in one. Well... long tory short - the yellow was a disaster. It looked more like...a nursing baby's diarrhea. It was greenish, and see through, and not working at all.

So we repeated our heinous shopping trip once more and went screaming down the paint aisle looking for an alternative color. And then there it was. In all its Valspar glory:

High Gloss Cosmic Green!

I knew it was perfect. My 6 year old daughter knew it was perfect. The paint mixer at Lowes on the other hand...not so much. He pretty much thought we were insane. But, in an effort to evict my crazy 3 year old that likes to use paint sticks as eye gouging weapons from his store, he had our paint ready to go PRONTO!

Poor Gabe had to work with these two little rascals "helping out" which consequently resulted in green paint all over my house and little people. You can see in the pictures that we ended up priming the piano first. (We voted the paint + primer in one totally useless after trying it in yellow.)

And here my friends was the final painted product. I found these truly adorable sleeping fox knobs at Anthropologie, along with the white knobs for the lid.

Finally I began the fun part of scouring my house from top to bottom for some whimsy to add above it as the finishing touch. I am smitten with the incredible Cents of Style beast horns (available here) that are the centerpiece of my wall collage. A quick trip to Marshalls supplied my faux sheep skin rug and a few decorative frames.