DIY :: Stripes meet sconces!

As we toured the main floor of the treehouse yesterday, I pointed out the bizarre wood moulding that surrounded some of the windows and doors.

I just couldn't wrap my head around why this moulding was necessary.  As I mentioned before, I can only imagine that it was there for curtains, but still.  Why???  Thankfully, we talked to Carol (our landlord) and she gave us the okay to verrrrrrry carefully remove the protruding pieces of wood.  So that's exactly what we did.  
With 2 weeks to go before moving day, we set out to do the following: 1. Remove moulding around the windows and balcony doors. 2. Patch & Sand. 3. Remove tv mounted on the wall. 4. Patch & Sand. 5. Paint a fresh coat of white paint on every surface, including fireplace front (cream colored in before pics?) and the sconces in the dining room.
During that two weeks, this happened.

And then this.  SO much better!!!!

And just one week after we moved in, the dining room looked like this:
Not bad, right?  Now due to time limitations (read: me being impatient) we decided to go the big box route for dining room furniture.  Not the norm for us, but in this case, it worked.  We pulled this look together from Cost Plus.  Instead of going super matchy matchy we purchased the table and its' matching bench, but then opted for wicker chairs for the opposite side of the table.  We use the 2 yellow chairs (also from Cost Plus) you see there in the background when we need extra seating at the ends of the table.  We've easily got seating for 8 and in a pinch, we've squeezed in 10 people.  It's fine for now but truly, I'd like to replace all of that seating.  The table is great but I'm not in love with the chairs (any of them) or the bench. Who knew benches were so uncomfortable???  All in due time I suppose...all in due time.
So that photo was a week in and it's pretty much stayed the same since.  Still no color on the walls and not a lot of art.  But, we are definitely working on that! I'm hesitant to paint in there.  Actually all of the upstairs has these crisp white walls (except for our BLACK powder room to be discussed at a later date).  The space is so open and the ceilings are peaked.  Color just doesn't feel right in there; in our upstairs living and dining areas our furniture is neutral and the color comes from the greenery outside the windows, some of our painted furniture pieces and artwork.  But hold on.  I'm getting ahead of myself again.
Right around the holidays I made the first attempt at spicing things up in the dining room.  I thought about replacing the existing sconces but in the end I decided to keep them and have some fun with paint instead.   Playing it safe, I knew that if I did anything that looked especially horrible that I could simply paint them back to white again. Now if only I hadn't had the brilliant idea to paint stripes on curved sconces.  Oh the headache!!!
I had no idea what I was doing so I kind of figured it out as I went along.  I used small pieces of 1" Frog Tape as a guide. And then I tried my best to follow those small pieces around with 1 long piece of the frog tape.  But that was WAY more challenging than I was counting on. At times I had to piece together the "sripes" with tape and tried to get the edges pressed down as much as possible to prevent seepage.  I just knew it was going to be a total shit show when I removed the tape though, so I did the best I could and planned on doing a ton of touch ups later.  I don't think it was the Frog Tape's fault (that product usually works great); I think it was just the nature of the beast really.    I used Rustoleum's Metallic Gold Paint and I love it, although I wasn't prepared for the watery consistency.  Never fear, I just glopped on a million coats and everything turned out dandy. At least I think so.  Metallic gold stripes, meet my sconces! Here you can see I've been doing some touch ups but it looks like it hasn't fully dried yet. But lookie here...  So pretty!  And they were up and ready to go just in time for our holiday party!   I may or may not be just a teensy bit in love with them.  Who wouldn't like gold striped sconces in the dining room???  Now of course, this is just Phase One of the master plan to "spice up" the dining room.  There's plenty more progress to see including a fab DIY string art project.  I'll have that for you tomorrow!