Dart Board Upcycle Inspired by Pottery Barn Art

Hi and welcome back! As it turns out Oklahoma summers are HOT.  We sorta figured they would be, but after being in Washington St. and Virginia the past 12 + years, it’s taking some getting used too.  For me, anyway.  My husband is one of those people you see running when it’s 100 out and loving it.  And by that I mean, my husband is crazy.  That being said, we are spending more time indoors these days and getting some use out of our living/game room area.  We finally got the pool sticks hanging on the wall, and I jazzed up the billiard cue holder a bit.  You can see that post HERE.  But then I needed to update this dart board.  I ordered this years ago, thinking the cabinet would be nice to have, which it is!  But I wanted it to look a little more like wall art when closed and less like a cabinet for darts.

A while back I pinned this post I loved from Remodelaholic.  Anytime you can redo a Pottery Barn look for next to nothing, count me in!  ‘

 

I thought this would be a great project for the dart board.  Mainly because darts, numbers…see where I went there?  Anywho…I started by taking off the doors and peeling off the horrible vinyl-y stuff that was stuck to the doors.  Then I sanded them down and painted them the same gray color as the wall.  I had some contact paper that I bought forever ago and never used, so I decided to put it to use.  I printed some numbers of varying sizes in Word and traced them onto the contact paper.  Then I cut them out and placed them around until they looked “right”.

I may or may not have included all of our ages, along with some random numbers.  My kids may have loved that :).

Then I painted it all black.  The contact paper didn’t stick great, but it worked here for the distressed look I wanted.  I peeled the contact paper off while the paint was still wet and used a bristle brush to pull the paint across.

 

After it dried, I put a couple of coats of polyurethane on and reattached the doors.

 

So, I thought that was good until my husband sent me a picture of this happening…

 

So, as you can image there were a few holes under the dart board in my newly painted walls.  I decided I was going to need something to go under the dart board to protect the wall a bit.  I bought a 24 x 36″ cork board from the craft store for about $14.  I held it for a couple of weeks trying to decided how I was going to paint it.  I was stumped until I saw THIS post from Patina Paradise.

I loved it!  As it turns out, I’m going for a bit of an industrial vibe in here, so I decided to give this a try.

I started by spray painting the whole thing with Rustoleum Metallic Aged Copper.  Then I used these guys, which I found in the hardware section at Wal-Mart, and a square to put a border in.

Okay, so this pic will show that I tried to go a different way, but it didn’t go so well :).  The great thing a paint is that you can paint over it.  After I nailed all the little guys in, I spray painted the whole thing with 2 light coats of Rustoleum Metallic Oil Rubbed Bronze.  I used Lucy’s technique and I taped off a very thin paint line and first painted a line with FolkArt Metallic Gunmetal Grey acrylic and then went over it by a sort of “dotting” and blending motion with FolkArt Metallic Antique Copper.

This pic is a good representation of how the two spray paints look layered over each other.  Anyway, I used the same gray and copper paints to touch up any spots that the tape messed up and to add a bit more “rust”.

 

Here are the paints I used.

I bought this stencil a while back from Amazon and used it to put a few more accents on.

 

I added a couple of coats of protective spray enamel and that was it!   It looks like a metal sheet but functions like a cork board.

 

The second part of the room is coming together.

See the other half of the room HERE.  And check out that blanket holder HERE.

Thanks so much for stopping by!

 

April

Dart Board Upcycle

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