DIY nautical oar art

Friday, June 21, 2013

HEY there! Thanks SO much for all the lovely comments on the powder room post! I’m working on answering your questions so stay tuned if I haven’t gotten back to you yet!

I wanted to show you how I made over one of my favorite parts of the room (there are a lot of them) – the boat oar I found at a vintage mart a few months ago:

vintage boat oar redo

I first showed it to you in this post and as of a few days ago it still looked like that. :) This little redo seriously took about 20 minutes, and that was with paint drying!

I started out by wiping it down to prep it for paint:

vintage boat oar redo

I let it dry and then mixed some white paint (I used my CeCe Caldwell stuff, but regular white paint would do just fine. Flat may work better for this particular look.) with a little bit of water:

vintage boat oar redo

I didn’t want the oar to be covered completely – I wanted it to have a “wash” kind of look and this did it:

paint mixed with water for a wash

The nice thing is when it’s watered down a bit it takes even less time to dry. :)

I let it dry about ten minutes, and then used my delicate FrogTape to start marking where I wanted my stripes:

vintage boat oar redo

That one was on the handle -- I just searched striped boat oar images and kind of winged the design.

I taped off each section, painted and took the tape off immediately. I did that just because I knew even though the paint was dry to the touch it wasn’t cured and the tape may remove it. I take my tape off right away whenever I do stripes anyway so I get a really sharp line.

I moved on to the wider part and did a little stripe first:

vintage boat oar redo

When I pulled off that tape it did pull up a little bit of the paint, but I actually liked the look so I didn’t worry about it. I didn’t want it to look perfect anyway. ;)

Then I made a wider one in the middle:

nautical stripes boat oar

You can see there that I cut the FrogTape down the middle for skinnier pieces. Since I was working so fast I didn’t want to put the tape down over the red paint I had just done – this allowed me to keep working quickly. :)

I did all the red stripes, hung the oar in the bathroom and then realized I wanted to pull in some of that blue tone in the room. I had it over at the vanity/sink, but everything around the toilet was red.

So I grabbed the blue paint I used on this post (it worked perfectly!) and added a few more skinny stripes:

nautical stripes boat oar

I gotta be honest…I squealed a little when I saw how it all finished. ;) It was so stinkin’ cute!:

nautical stripes boat oar

I think adding that little bit of blue was a good call – it ties the whole room together!

To hang it I just nailed a picture hanger thing to the back of the handle at the top.

In the real life you can see much more of the bottom of the oar because you see it from higher up than in the pics:

wood planked wall bathroom So that’s how the cutest little oar art came to be! It was super fast and I used paint I already had – the oar itself was $10. Love it!

The room isn’t exactly nautical themed but I think it still works – you don’t need to follow a specific theme to make something you love work in a room!

Thanks again for all the sweet comments my friends! Have a GREAT weekend!

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