Piano

Truman was given this piano free and I have to say even thought I was grateful for the piano, I cringed when he brought it home. The brown and old school look was throwing off the whole vibe of our kitchen/dining room. Something had to be done! So I went to the place of all Do-It-Yourselfer and crafty knowledge...Pinterest...to see if others had painted theirs as well. I was shocked to see how many actually had and I was totally inspired!

I took the piano apart as much as it would go without taking all the keys off. I scraped off the Kimball logo and then sanded everything down really well, it had a thick polyurethane coating on it.  I cleaned it, taped off the keys, and painted it all by hand with a brush. 

I wanted the perfect mustardy yellow color for the piano. I tried two different yellows and then ended up repainting those areas because I was unhappy with it! I did a lot of research and a couple blogs later stumbled upon milk paint. I ended up using Miss Mustard Seed Milk Paint and chose the color mustard seed yellow. Milk paint is very interesting, very cool, and little tricky to work with. Her website has a lot of great tutorials on how to use it to get an authentic chippy look with raw wood pieces and also painting and mixing instructions. It is similar to chalk paint but has some fundamental differences once of which is it comes in a powder as seen above and you mix it with water. The paint  is very smooth and has no tackiness to it which is perfect for the piano because I didn't want anything sticking. Then to finish, you apply a coat of wax  to protect it. I love the flat finish and it has been very durable thus far and it's been more than a year!

 I bought new hardware from Anthropologie for it and went with an aged brass and glass knob

 I'm so happy with how it turned out! This ended up being a much bigger project than I thought. There were a few mistakes and set-backs along the way but I can't complain with the results! It was tricky to reassemble the piano, haha, glad I was able to figure it all out. I love how it went from a furniture piece I thought was so ugly to something that is now sunny and bright and I smile every time I see :).