0 I See Your Gross Fan and I Want to Paint it White

Many other design blogs are obsessing over brass fixtures these days.  I don't really get it, but in some settings I suppose it works (Jenny Komenda, for example, does great things with brass). Where it definitely doesn't is this weird little fan we have in the middle spare room upstairs.  It's small, fake brass, and with faux wood blades.  But, in a house without central air, fans are a nice feature.  So rather than trash it, I figured I'd paint it.

I don't have a good before shot of it all together - I was too eager to take it apart - but here's a disassembled shot:

You can imagine how awful it was when there were magenta walls and a giant pink chalkboard star behind it.  

My parents were over helping me paint a couple of corner shelves, so I passed the blades on to them, took the rest of the housing and blade arms off and brought them outside for a coat of flat white enamel spray.

The center piece, where the light bulb socket is, does not come out, so I just grabbed a cardboard box, bent to protect overspray and falling paint, and just sprayed it in place.

I reassembled it while the blades dried (the blades took one coat of Killz and two coats of latex paint to cover properly), and already it looked a ton better.

Here it is fully assembled:

About a 5 hour project with drying times.  So easy, made a huge difference, and didn't cost hardly anything.

Waiting for the other shelves to dry, I hung this chalkboard (that used to be in our kitchen in the Leonard house) that we'll be using to track diaper deposits, which is apparently a thing you're supposed to do.