Even though we’ve been in business for 9 years now, we still get asked if we will paint furniture that our clients own. The answer is yes! We have a professional grade air sprayer and can get a beautiful finish for your treasured furniture! This week’s Tuesday’s Treasures is a perfect example of that.
Joseph reached out to us to see if we could paint this buffet.
We were happy to help him with this project! We ended up painting the base Gray Shower 2125-30 by Benjamin Moore. Then we sanded and stained the top with classic gray by Minwax. Joseph wanted to keep the original hardware. Then we sprayed the whole piece with protective clear coat.
This was done as a custom order so it’s not for sale, but you can check out new pieces on our For Sale page:
Custom Signs
Kitchen Cabinet Painting
Black with Wood Front Dressers
Gray Hutch
Interior Design
White Buffet with Wood Top
Please sign up for our weekly newsletter by adding your email in the little box below my picture.
Happy FunCycling Friends, Sarah ;)
If you like what you see, please like FunCycled’s Facebook page to keep up to date on the newest finds, vote on colors and give your input on our creativity. We also offer interior design, kitchen cabinet painting, and custom built tables, barn doors, and furniture. We can deliver for customers in upstate NY and also help you ship throughout the US. Send us a note with what you would like using our contact page. Or buy something that we’ve already designed from our online shop.
We all made it through 2020! I’ve been reading highlights of 2020 from my friends on Facebook and Instagram. Even though this year has felt hard in so many ways, reading the joys has been so beautiful. I thought I would share some of the bright moments that this year held for us as well. As I scrolled through my phone to pick – there were too many to choose from. TOO MANY good moments and it made me cry.
In a year that felt so dark, I forgot about all the joy that also filled so many days. The highlights for us in 2020. The biggest dream come true for me out of this has been more time with my extended family. I would say to John often how much I adored our family time together and how I wish it was more of a priority for everyone. Life happens… we all get too busy. Well, God slowed us down a bit in COVID and gave us time almost every weekend with my whole family. We had decided early on that we would be each others group of support throughout this and try to limit exposure to others as much as possible. It was a gift I hope never stops – the cousins grew closer. I grew closer to my nephews and nieces. Such a special gift!
We started the year with a trip to visit our friends Marcie and Bobby in South Carolina. We were so thankful for that last trip before the world shut down. We try to visit them every year and a year without their face to face friendship wouldn’t have been the same.
The week in mid March when COVID shut down the world, we were supposed to close on our first ever commercial property. We ended up having one delay after another until it closed in June. Which was a huge blessing because we didn’t have to cover a mortgage and rent at our storefront for quite as many months.
Shortly after the shutdown, we decided it would be the perfect year to add chickens to our homestead. New life and baby animals were a great distraction for the kids throughout the initial isolation.
We took the slower work months and finished our kids bathroom March-May. Finishing just in time to close on our new building at the beginning of June.
June 2 – August 2 we spent what felt like every waking moment working. We completely remodeled 3 floors of our new building (if you haven’t seen it, you can check it out here: https://funcycled.com/category/funcycled-stays/) We would joke that if we were going to lose so much of our lives to work, it might as well be during the year when there wasn’t much fun allowed anyway. :)
We opened up the airbnb, and then, at the end of August we went away to our annual Ocean City Vacation. The world felt normal for one sweet week. Sunshine, swimming, family, and delicious food. This is a yearly tradition I enjoy so much!
In September we added our kitten Phoebe to the Trop-stead.
We also decided to home school this year. A very tough decision; how would we juggle it all? But it’s one of my favorite new changes in 2020. I love having more time with my kids and I love that we have flexibility to do more when John is free or has a slow week.
We got back to work in October converting the 1st floor of our building into the storefront that we would move FunCycled to.
We decided to risk it and go on a trip to the Grand Canyon early October for my birthday to get some much needed relaxation from the hard year. The price was right and my brother was going so we joined. Little did I know, that would be the worst decision of the year… because I contracted COVID, became a super spreader, and while hiking in 7k elevations and glamping in the dessert, I realized this wasn’t just a cold… I couldn’t breath. With no health insurance, I was hospitalized in Flagstaff. We then couldn’t fly home because I found out I was definitely COVID positive. Let me tell you, there’s nothing quite like a 36 hour drive across the country with COVID and pneumonia. That took everything I had and all the prayers of every friend to not lose my mind. I came through it needing counseling, with greater compassion for anyone who has to endure this, and realizing some relationship changes that needed to be made. It was a true eye opener. It took 2 full months before I had energy back. Once I was off quarantine, tired or not, we had to finish the storefront because our store lease was up at the end of November. I cried many days and night, but you know what? It’s done and for that I’m thankful! Grand opening was December 5th!
Once that was done, we decided to not add on any house or work projects outside of what we needed to pay the bills. Having weekend free this month has been so wonderful… so rich and filling. When 2019 ended, I had pulled back on many of my commitments. I felt like God wanted me to focus on family and business in 2020. I had no idea why then, but I believe He was lovingly preparing my heart for what was to come. He allowed me to let go of so many things that would have felt like they were taken away by COVID. The conviction to focus on family and business became truer than I could have dreamed. We started marriage counseling. We had time with the kids to work through character development, not just academic and having fun. John and I both grew in a way I don’t think we would have without a year like 2020. So… for all of this and more, I’m choosing thankfulness and I’m finding joy to end 2020.
What are you all thankful for in 2020? I love hearing the good so please comment below!
This week, I’m sharing a room that is a fan favorite at our airbnb. It’s on the top floor of the building with ceilings that makes the sound bounce around and makes your ears happy to be there. :) First, let’s start by showing you the room before. We actually didn’t do a lot of changes to this room.
Here’s the room when we went to look at the building to purchase it:
Movie Room Before
I felt like the recliners were too bulky so I switched them out with two click clack couches that can be either in the reclining position, all the way down or upright. I also love that there’s a center arm on the couches that have cup holders in them. Perfect for any movie night at the airbnb.
We get the most question about the couches in this room. Even though they have a high end look, they are pretty inexpensive. The reason I went this route is because I needed something that would fit up the narrow, angled stairs (normal couches wouldn’t). These just barely fit even without the legs on them. I also wanted something that was reasonably priced to replace if need be because it is a movie room and accidents happen. If you love them and want to order one for your home here’s the link.
We also redid an antique record player to be the entertainment center for this room, but it wouldn’t fit up the stairs. So John built this beauty in about 3 hours as a deadline emergency piece (opening was the same week). I love how it turned out and said we should offer this as a custom order for people. Do you all agree?
The TV is a smart TV – we decided to go with faster internet in the airbnb and not do cable. So we bought smart TV’s and it allows guest to sign in using their own credentials to watch the shows they would like.
You can’t see it in the pictures, but there’s also a microwave for popcorn and a skylight with a little bench to soak up some sun mid day if people want. The LED lighting on the floor makes everything pop when the lights are out and the movie is on!
It would mean so much if you would share this link with any friend you think might be interested. You can book your stay on Airbnb’s website today!
We loved being able to do all the design for this space. We focused on using as much repurposed items we could for accents and furniture throughout the space! Making it green, beautiful, and one of a kind for your home away from home stay.
If you’d like me to help you with design in your home (can be done virtually to help anyone in the US) or if you see anything in the photos you’d like in your home locally, let me know. We made most of the signs ourselves and build many of the furniture items throughout the space.
Merry Christmas! I debated on sharing this kitchen on the week of Christmas, but it’s so bright and cheery that I thought it might be a fun way to start your week. Even if it looks more like summer than winter! We all could use a little extra sunshine, am I right?
Sue reached out to me for a design consult and for painting their kitchen cabinets. Last year, we redid Sue’s daughter Brielle’s kitchen. You can check out Brielle’s kitchen here. In 2020 Sue decided that she wanted her cabinets redone, too!
Here are the before pictures:
She wanted the walls to be a really bright yellow so she went with Flutterbye by Benjamin Moore. We painted the oak cabinets with Benjamin Moore’s color Revere Pewter and sealed them with a protective clear coat. We also added new hardware which really helped and installed subway tile with gray grout for them to make everything pop.
Ready for the afters?
Could your kitchen use an update? We’d love to help!! We can help pick out colors, finishes, products, and do the cabinet painting, tiling, and install shiplap. You can use our Contact Us form to request our design services or a quote for painting your kitchen. Please check out other kitchen projects on our For Sale page. We’ll need to see a picture of your kitchen, a list of how many doors and drawers there are, and where you are located to email you an estimate. This change ups the value of your home and gives you a whole new look at a fraction of the cost of new kitchen cabinets!
Check out some fun new furniture for sale in our store now:
Black and Wood Front Vanity
Black and Wood Front Dresser
Gray Hutch
Interior Design
White Buffet with Wood Top
Secretary Desk
Please sign up for our weekly newsletter by adding your email in the little box below my picture.
Happy FunCycling Friends, Sarah ;)
If you like what you see, please like FunCycled’s Facebook page to keep up to date on the newest finds, vote on colors and give your input on our creativity. We also offer interior design, kitchen cabinet painting, and custom built tables, barn doors, and furniture. We can deliver for customers in upstate NY and also help you ship throughout the US. Send us a note with what you would like using our contact page. Or buy something that we’ve already designed from our online shop.
How are you? We are doing well! This week, I wanted to share a quick custom order project that we redid for a design client of ours – Kathy. She had this steamer trunk:
She loved it, but wanted it to have a more modern look. She asked us to paint it Sherman Williams high reflective white and spray it all with protective clear coat. She also wanted all of the original black to be left as is. Believe it or not, that was the most tedious part about this makeover. We taped off every single spot of black and then painted everything else white.
This was done as a custom order so it’s not for sale, but you can check out new pieces on our For Sale page:
Custom Built Signs
Gray Hutch
Black and Wood Front Vanity
Black and Wood Front Dresser
Kitchen Cabinet Painting
Interior Design
Please sign up for our weekly newsletter by adding your email in the little box below my picture.
Happy FunCycling Friends, Sarah ;)
If you like what you see, please like FunCycled’s Facebook page to keep up to date on the newest finds, vote on colors and give your input on our creativity. We also offer interior design, kitchen cabinet painting, and custom built tables, barn doors, and furniture. We can deliver for customers in upstate NY and also help you ship throughout the US. Send us a note with what you would like using our contact page. Or buy something that we’ve already designed from our online shop.
Thank you so much to everyone who came out to celebrate the opening of our storefront over the weekend!! What a fun couple of days this has been!! A huge thanks to each of you who were part of our ribbon cutting and grand opening this week! We all know 2020 hasn’t been an easy year so ending it with this celebration was an absolute delight. We loved seeing the smile in your eyes and getting to catch up with so many of you. Here’s to all good things ahead!! We’re ready for you 2021!
This week, I’m excited to share some photos of our new store for those of you who couldn’t make it this past weekend.
We made it so much easier to order custom items.
Our custom signs are numbered. You can just pick your number and we’ll select one from the back for you or custom make it for you if we are sold out.
We also have table legs in stock with different finishes the you can choose from for any custom built table:
We have mini barn door examples so you can easily pick the the style and color you’d like.
One of my favorite additions; we have a kitchen cabinet area where you can see our most popular cabinet colors. We can meet with clients when they want us to paint their kitchen cabinets, show counter top options (compliments of Klassic Stone), and offer our favorite hardware options (we can order those for you now, too). It also shows the style of exposed shelves that we offer. We can build the shelves for you to install or we can install them for you.
The ribbon cutting was a special time for family, long time customers, and friends. We had to limit our numbers due to COVID, but we were so thankful that Mayor Madden was able to be part of the event.
Mayor Madden and Deputy Mayor Monica Kurzejeski
A huge thanks to Pam (our store manager) for her hard work with making signs and setting up to be ready for this event. We did a lot of long hours over the last couple of weeks to make this happen.
We would love to have you stop by our new location! Check out our location page for hours, parking and direction information.
And for the transformation this week, I wanted to show you the before and after of our storefront!
Here’s the building the day we bought it:
Here it is now!
We plan to paint the red brick a different color either next summer or the summer after that, but it was in good shape so we kept it for now!
So pretty, right?
Please stop by and shop local! This pandemic is not an easy thing to get through as a small business and we are so thankful for each and every one of our FunCyclers. We couldn’t do this without you!!
Looking forward to all the exciting things ahead in 2020!
For this week’s makeover, I wanted to show you another room in our FunCycled Stays airbnb! If you’re looking for a spot to stay while visiting anyone in Troy, Ny, we’d love for you to stay with us! You can also check out other completed rooms in the airbnb here.
Here’s the game room from the day we went to go look at it to consider buying it:
Most of this room was changed with new furniture and flooring. The green rug had to go!! We ripped it up first thing and installed a new flooring. Since this room was narrow, we were able to use roll out sheet vinyl for this space. It was super easy to lay and is really durable for this area since it gets a lot of traffic.
What a difference it made!
In this picture, we had just laid out the vinyl and painted the window trim white.
Then we brought back in the air hockey table, installed baseboard, and added all the decor.
Boho Game Room in the Urban Industrial Airbnb
This whole room design started with the couch. It’s a vintage velvet couch that my friend Monica gave me! It was her mom’s for years and in perfect condition. Thank you, Monica! I loved the lines of the couch and the rich rosy color. The next step in the design was finding a rug. I couldn’t find one online that I liked. I knew I wanted it to be bohemian, but I also wanted it to have some of the rose color in it. I took a trip to Home Goods and found this adorable rug! It was perfect! Had all the colors, the style and the size I wanted. I was so excited!!
For the coffee table, I wanted to do a narrow piece and we had this old reclaimed wood board at our house. So we added the hairpin legs onto the table. Bam – repurposed and adorable.
We painted old lockers, removed one of the doors and added wooden shelves to the middle.
We replaced the fan and added wooden blinds which really helped bring warmth to this space, too.
Custom Made – Time to Relax Sign
It would mean so much if you would share this link with any friend you think might be interested. You can book your stay on Airbnb’s website today!
We loved being able to do all the design for this space. We focused on using as much repurposed items we could for accents and furniture throughout the space! Making it green, beautiful, and one of a kind for your home away from home stay.
If you’d like me to help you with design in your home (can be done virtually to help anyone in the US) or if you see anything in the photos you’d like in your home locally, let me know. We made most of the signs ourselves and build many of the furniture items throughout the space.
How are you? I hope you’re having a great week so far!
I could jump up and down with excitement over this week’s kitchen makeover. It’s one of my favorite in 2020! Lynn started by hiring me to do a 1 hour consult for her kitchen design and then had us paint the kitchen cabinets and install all the new tile for her as well. It’s so helpful to make a solid plan before starting work in any room, but especially in the kitchen. Making sure the counters, backsplash, wall colors, cabinet colors, backsplash, and flooring all blend together well before you purchase anything will save you money in the long run. Trust me! The consult is worth every penny.
Here’s the kitchen before:
Kitchen Cabinets before PaintKitchen Cabinets before Paint Kitchen Before
The granite was in wonderful shape so we didn’t want to change that out. We pulled colors from the granite for the island and painted the island Chelsea Gray by Benjamin Moore.
She replaced the valance with a bamboo roman shade and I think it’s so beautiful.
All new hardware always helps to update as kitchen, too. I love the matte black hardware in this kitchen, too.
4×12 subway tile with a medium gray grout was a perfect compliment to the counters, too!
We painted the cabinets with Benjamin Moore’s Advanced paint; color White Dove, sealed it with a water based protective clear coat, and added new hardware. The island is BM’s Chelsea Gray.
Could your kitchen use an update? We’d love to help!! We can help pick out colors, finishes, product and do the cabinet painting, tiling, add new hardware. You can use our Contact Us form to request our design services or a quote for painting your kitchen. Please check out other kitchen projects on our For Sale page. We’ll need to see a picture of your kitchen, a list of how many doors and drawers there are, and where you are located to email you an estimate. This change ups the value of your home and gives you a whole new look at a fraction of the cost of new kitchen cabinets!
Check out some fun new furniture for sale in our store now:
White Buffet with Wood TopGray Secretary Desk Teal and Wood Front buffet
Please sign up for our weekly newsletter by adding your email in the little box below my picture.
Happy FunCycling Friends, Sarah ;)
If you like what you see, please like FunCycled’s Facebook page to keep up to date on the newest finds, vote on colors and give your input on our creativity. We also offer interior design, kitchen cabinet painting, and custom built tables, barn doors, and furniture. We can deliver for customers in upstate NY and also help you ship throughout the US. Send us a note with what you would like using our contact page. Or buy something that we’ve already designed from our online shop.
We have a week of big announcements for you! We’ve teamed up with two other local woman-owned businesses to take the guesswork out of the holidays… and it just so happens that these incredible creators are family! My two sister-in-laws.
Bring a little lightness and joy into someone’s year with a box full of thoughtful and carefully-made goods — home-roasted coffee and hand-poured candles. To order yours today, head to Thoughtful Gardner website. You can order online and have it shipped to anywhere in the US. Or you can choose local pick up to get the set at our store and save on shipping.
How are you? I hope you’re doing well! Want to know a little trick for getting all those little projects around your house done? Just have your local newspaper ask to feature your house! That’s what happened to us and sent us rushing to wrap up all the little left over details in the rooms that were ALMOST done in our house this week. It was actually a good thing because I’m not sure we’d every finish them without it. lol! Now I can share our master bedroom makeover with you all, too!
Grab a Times Union newspaper or checkout their website this Sunday the 15th to see the article about our house in the home section. We learned so much about our repurposed idea house when we did some research for the article, but I’ll save that for another time.
Let’s start with the before pictures of our master bedroom. As you could see… it didn’t lack in wallpaper or mint green. lol!
Headboard wall before
Whoa baby!!! My eyes are tired. 😂 My mom came to help me remove the wallpaper but there were soooo many layers and they didn’t want to come off. So we ended up ripping out all the lath and plaster was a really good thing. Once we ripped it out, we realized there was no insulation in the walls. So we insulated everything, too! Right after we bought the house, we also had all new windows installed.
We painted the walls Stonington Gray by Benjamin Moore. Instead of adding a headboard, we installed a full wall of Shiplap where the headboard would be and paint it Black by Benjamin Moore. I actually wanted to keep the mint accent color in the room so we left the mint doors and I incorporated that color with accent pillows from Hobby Lobby. We added all new baseboard and trim and painted all of that Simply White by Benjamin Moore.
We ripped out the carpet and found beautiful wood floors underneath that we refinished as well. Then we added this area rug under the bed.
I wanted a very specific dresser set so we waited quite a while to find a mid century set on Facebook Marketplace and then refinished it to give the look I wanted for this room.
The plant in the corner was actually from the original owner. I’m trying to keep it alive since it came with this house!
If you have any questions about other elements in the room, please comment below and I’d be happy to help! I would love to hear what your favorite part of the redesign is!
You can use our Contact Us form to hire me to help with design work in your home. Check out our Interior Design page for more information about the process.
Please sign up for our weekly newsletter by adding your email in the little box below my picture.
Happy FunCycling Friends, Sarah ;)
If you like what you see, please like FunCycled’s Facebook page to keep up to date on the newest finds, vote on colors and give your input on our creativity. We also offer interior design, kitchen cabinet painting, and custom built tables, barn doors, and furniture. We can deliver for customers in upstate NY and also help you ship throughout the US. Send us a note with what you would like using our contact page. Or buy something that we’ve already designed from our online shop.
