Concrete Idea!

i love industrial & nothing says that to me like concrete.  i'm also a big fan of Benita Larsson over at Chez Larsson & when she posted her response to the Panduro concrete challenge, i just knew i had to do this!

it's an old post of hers, but i love the simplicity of it.  so Nacho & i set off to create our own Door Stops this past weekend. yippee!  you can see Nacho was as excited as i was as he laid out our supplies!

Nacho volunteered i made him help me cuz it involved mixing stuff & i'm just a girl so i knew i'd get it wrong. thank goodness for that! i only bought a 10lb bag of concrete mix & we ended up using all of it - we actually could have used about 2 more pounds though.

so mix it until it's like peanut butter. i would have totally got this one wrong & added too much water. i could tell he was nervous when i took over adding the water.  apparently you have to add it slower than molasses! 

 then i used plain old cooking oil to line my pan with.  i bought a simple organizing tray i found at Target. problem is i like it so much i want to reuse it in the house!

 the letters came from Michaels & i got one for all 4 of us:  Cookie, Baxter, Nacho & me!  put those in the pan backwards.  although in hindsight, because the sides of my pans are not straight up and down, i could have waited & put the letters on top & had just as cool of an effect!

 just add the concrete, holding the letters in place so they don't slide around until you have a nice layer over them.  keep packing the concrete as you go to get out any air bubbles while you work. we used the end of a trowel, but a screw driver end would work too in this container.

 keep adding until you fill it up.  i only did 2 in this container then used a different container that was sort of in use in my kitchen drawers but had a neat bubble design that i thought would look cool.  i used it for the other 2 stops.  let it dry 24 hours then just turn over the forms & let the concrete stops slide out.  i  had better luck than Benita, because my stops slid right out without breaking either of the molds.  i didn't have as much luck picking the letters out of them.  you can see in the photo below that 3 of the letters came out almost entirely in tact, but the N was not so lucky!

inspired by Benita's love for all things white, i was going to paint all of mine white, but decided to repurpose some bright paints i had in the garage - i swear we could put any paint store out of business.

so i started with a coat of outdoor primer just to make sure any colors i did looked good.

here is Baxter getting his bright blue on!

Cookie hard at work holding the bedroom door open

Nacho not really doing much of anything, just sitting there waiting for a job.  i kept mine the plain white that you see above. that's me, nothing special, just plane jane!

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