Banishing the White Elephant (in which I celebrate the start of spray paint season)

Let’s talk about the elephant in the room.

No, not Ken. That’s a whole other thing. 😉

I’m talking about the actual elephant in our living room. This guy:

Yes, I realize he’s already been the topic of his own blog post, this one here, where I spray painted him white. He’s actually a plastic Target dollar spot toy, but he can really pull off the white paint.

But the white paint was getting old, and, well, it’s spray paint season.

Did you catch that? Let me reiterate, because it’s important. IT IS SPRAY PAINT SEASON.

Here in Michigan, there is a very narrow window for spraypainting stuff. The whole process works best when your fingers aren’t completely numb and when the paint can actually dry in *normal-ish* temps.

To celebrate the start of spray paint season, I spraypainted. (Appropriate, no?)

And the white elephant was the victim.

Now he’s looking a wee bit shinier, which is never a bad thing, IMO.

You’ll see in the below picture that it seems that the yellow task lamp that I painted for the Pinterest challenge has regressed back to black. Although it appears that way, don’t worry: I just blogged about things in the wrong order. Life happens. Bonus points to you if you noticed the silver elephant in the lamp post, though.

 

I think I’ve said this before, but the long term plan for that deep bookcase (and it’s twin, not pictured) is to paint it or strip and restain it. But I can say with almost 100% certainty that that project won’t happen until we move into our next place. Which we have no immediate plans to do until that graduate guy gets a job…unless someone wants to give us a house. Anybody? Anybody??

So. In conclusion, get outside and spraypaint something. That is all.

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Elephant Decor (in which I walk the thin line between eccentric and whimsical)

whim·si·cal [hwim-zi-kuh l]//ec·cen·tric [ik-sen-trik]

I love phonetic spellings. This may be because, as an avid young reader, much of my vocabulary came from the written word and not the spoken word. This lead to MANY an embarrassing mispronunciation when I tried to use those learned words in everyday conversation. I still fear there are words lurking in my subconscious waiting to pop out of my mouth incorrectly, just waiting to embarrass me at the most inopportune moment, like at a work meeting or something like that.

Annnnnd that was way more than you needed to know about me. Moving on.

A few months ago, I adopted this little rubbery-plastic elephant from the Target dollar spot and knew just what to do with him (thanks to Pinterest, obviously, and my new Young House Love book that Santa DID bring for Christmas!).

He was nice as-is, but I was looking to create a piece of decor that was a little more refined-looking. Enter spray paint (about a billion coats since I didn’t use primer).

He now lives north of our record player and south of our collection of cookbooks. Yes, we definitely have a “Venison Lover’s” cookbook. That was one of my husband’s many contributions to this marriage.

I’m still trying to decide if this little guy is whimsical, which I could work with, or if it is moving into the eccentric side of the spectrum, which I usually try to avoid. Usually without a lot of success, but still.

At some point, Ken and I have plans to refinish those two matching bookshelves we have (one pictured above), but I think that will happen once we have a more permanent home. I want to paint them white or a light gray, which would blend in with our off-white apartment-colored walls. And we are not painting in here, since we’d just have to paint it back once we move out. So I settle for painting the bookshelves’ contents white instead.

The books are next.

Ha! Just kidding.

Probably.

Terrarium Menagerie (in which I battle an infestation of the plastic variety)

 

 

I’m just gonna get it out there…

I’ve already killed one of the plants in my terrarium.

Now that it’s out in the open, we can move along to more fun things.

Like plastic animals.

The turtle I recently adopted from Massachusetts, but the little elephant and dinosaur were Kenny’s when he was a youngster. I had way too much fun going through his action figures to select the ones that would come home with me.

I picked these up from his parents’ house so I could disguise the gaping hole that was left in my terrarium after the recent plant death.

The elephant in the back, though he would look awesome and majestic in a terrarium habitat, is meant for a different crafty idea.

It’s sort of weird–all of the plants were thriving and I was quite proud of myself, but then one day I noticed a dead leaf on one of the plant. The next day, it was 5 dead leaves. The next day, the whole thing was a withered mess. I will spare you that picture.

But check out the height of the tallest plant–it’s totally grown!

See? Here’s the original terrarium pic. Yes, it was the finger-like one that died.

I miss those groping fingers…

…but am quite enjoying the company of those new disproportionate critters.