B & A: Garage, Part I

We've done a lot to our house in the past 2 years, and the staging area for most of those projects has been our garage.  Everything out there was covered in layers of sawdust, paint splatters and cobwebs.  And while it's true that very few people ever look inside our garage, it is the very first thing I see each time I come home.  Depressing.

So a few weeks ago, we finally got new garage doors to replace our noisy, mouse-chewed ones.  And that was the impetus for a much needed garage makeover. I haven't finished organizing all the shelves yet, but the entry is complete, so I can share that much.  Here's how it looked in-process:

There was carpet on the one step leading into the house, and it was knatty.  

So I ripped it up, sanded the underlying piece of wood, and polyurethaned it.

Then it was on to the door.  I told Scott I wanted to do something really fun with it- to make it like our door was saying "Welcome home!" every time we pulled into the garage.  You know how you feel when you have on zany socks?  No one can see them under your boots, but you know they're there, and they make you happy?  Same concept for the door.  Most people will never see it but us, so I used that as a good excuse to go a little wild.

Image from here.

Scott threw out the idea of painting a bullseye on it, and that was enough to remind me how much I loved the drum kit from Guster's Easy Wonderful Tour. Not to mention I just love Guster, period.  So a welcome home door and a Guster tribute?  Sold.

It would have been a budget buster to get outdoor paint in that many colors, so I narrowed it to eight.

To get the spacing right, I took a razor blade to a roll of Frog tape, then taped out my pattern on the door.  And then, because I'm a nerd, I numbered the colors 1 through 8 and used the random number generator on my calculator to tell me where to paint which colors for a truly random pattern (why, yes, that is an oxymoron).

And here's how it turned out.  Scott said it made him smile when he returned home from a 3-day business trip last night.  And he is not sappy man.  So I consider that mission accomplished!

I also added a mason jar to the wall using plumbing clamps and transferred the artillery basket from the laundry room.  Owen is always collecting rocks and sticks and leaving them around the house and the garage, so now they have a better home.  Who am I kidding.  I collect just as many sticks and rocks as Owen does, so it's for me too!

And even though I maintain that Guster was my muse, it dawned on me that I totally ripped off this Lourdes Sanchez pillow from West Elm.  Oh well. Nothing's new under the sunburst, right?