piano bench

I mentioned in this post the dozen or more unfinished projects I have sitting around my house, and I have every intention of finishing each one over the month! As a matter of fact, I just finished this guy:

Please ignore the mess surrounding the bench, my office was in flux at the time!

I had already sanded down the top by the time I remembered to take a photo, but the entire piece was a distressed (and not in a good way) mahogany. So I lightly sanded down the base and began painting it in my favorite go-to color: Annie Sloan Old White.

With a couple layers of Old White, I then distressed the base and left it as is….for months. It didn’t look terrible, it was usable, and I became distracted with other, more challenging, projects. And so it sat. Until this morning.

To add that pop of color that I oh-do love, I painted the interior (yes, the top opens!) in Valspar’s Brushed Orange. I then stained the top in Walco’s Danish Oil in medium walnut, waxed the entire piece in Miss Mustard Seed’s wax, and viola! Finally, a finished product:

Simple and sweet. Or better yet, business on the outside, and a party on the inside!

And yes, those are real tulips you see in the picture – I needed to give myself a little spring hope in this frigid weather…

Oh Spring, where art thou?

Do you ever have those projects that just seem to take forever? Or rather, those projects that you seem to take forever to get to? I have a handful of projects that I have been working on bit by little bit, sometimes over a period of months. And these projects are not huge, overwhelming, or time-consuming by any means. Quite the contrary, in fact! They are the so-simple-I’ll-get-to-them-later kind of projects.

Let me give you a few examples:

I sanded down this piano bench and painted the base in ASCP Old White almost a year ago. The top opens, which I have painted in a lovely pop of orange. I simply need to paint a final layer of orange, lightly sand it, wax the base, stain the top, and viola! Done in 30 minutes. Yet there it remains – still unfinished.

Or how about this large weathered window? I have every intention of transforming this sucker into a mirror, which simply requires cut mirror panes, glazier points, a little bit of caulk, and an hour of my time. Yet there it still hangs – as a window frame.

And this soon-to-be chalkboard was cut and fashioned into a frame a few weeks ago. It simply needs a few layers of chalkboard paint on the board and a weathered stain on the frame. What am I waiting for?!

And finally….

The dreaded curtains! I plan to transform this adorable material into stagecoach curtains, which required very little sewing, a little stapling (to a board that will attach the curtains to the top of the window), and the drilling of two little holes to hang the whole piece. This project has been a over year in the making. Oh my.

Needless to say, I can be a bit of a procrastinator! But I have challenged myself to complete these projects (and a handful of others that I didn’t share) over the next month. You can expect to see them pop up in future DIY posts!

How about you – are you a procrastinator like me? What projects do you have in the works?