Your Day Will Be “Better After” You Read This Post

It takes a really unique set of circumstances to prompt you to think turning a fuzzy plastic cactus into a side table is a good idea.

Well, you may remember how last spring we participated in a competition where we received a mystery thrift store item in the mail and had to make it over.

The creative/evil genius behind the “Mystery Thriftoff” is an incredibly hilarious and diabolical woman named Lindsey who has one of our favorite DIY blogs ever: Better After.

Every day Lindsey features amazing before-and-afters that people submit for sharing, so it’s a really fun way to see a steady stream of makeovers that come from bloggers and non-bloggers alike. But the best part of Better After is how freaking funny Lindsey is — we literally cannot read her while we’re at work because we would be laughing way too loudly and conspicuously.

Since Lindsey spends most of her time featuring other people’s projects (and she’s featured some of ours, for which we’re super grateful and flattered!), we thought it would be fun to do a feature on her and some of the projects she’s done in her own home.  And since she’s always so ridiculously entertaining in her posts, we’re going to do our best to channel our inner Lindsey and make this as funny as possible. (But we won’t come anywhere close, so make sure you go direct to the source). Fortunately we’re already on the right track by crafting a funny title that involves a pun, an art which Lindsey has totally mastered.

So without further adieu, our tribute to a few of Lindsey’s awesome projects:

First up, an exploration of one of the fundamental forces of the universe.  Of  course, we are referring to gallery walls.

Gallery walls are everywhere. We both have one, and I think we’re actually behind the trend because we don’t have more than one each. Have you ever read the advice for creating a gallery wall that involves cutting out pieces of paper the size of your frames first and then rearranging them until you figure out what works best? It saves you putting lots of unnecessary nail holes in the wall because you get everything laid out in paper and then just put the frames in their final location.

Unfortunately, it requires an amount of patience that we do not possess. Lurking behind our gallery walls is a hole-to-nail ratio of at least 5:1. But Lindsey is way smarter than all of us: she recently created a gallery wall using magnetic paint.  Yes, she harnessed one fundamental force (electromagnetism) to generate another (a gallery wall).  She is a wizard!

All the pictures have magnets on the back, and now she can move them around however she wants without destroying her walls. Her hole-to-nail ratio is exactly 1:1 an irrational number (zero holes, zero nails).

Next up, a furniture project. Lindsey features a ton of other people’s furniture makeovers, but it turns out she does some pretty impressive work herself. For instance, these bookshelves that she found at a local secondhand shop.

We’ve never met Lindsey in person, so we can’t say for sure whether the bookshelves are huge or Lindsey is really tiny. But in her original post about this project, she claims these are 8-feet tall, so I guess the former is more likely.

Anyway, she was sure to share a photo of the damaged veneer to justify why she had to paint them. Like us, she has felt the wrath of the “painting wood is a mortal sin” crowd.

See! Painting was totally necessary. And paint she did, using spray paint for the entire project to get a nice smooth finish. And now they look amazing and we’re totally jealous. Unfortunately, 8-foot shelves would not fit in either of our homes as we both have 7 – 7.5′ ceilings.

We’re totally not bitter about how amazing these look in her home for giants.

And lastly, Lindsay’s bathroom, which took “simplicity” to the level of “really boring.”  Here’s where she started:

She turned all that right around with a “mini bathroom makeover.” We’re huge fans of the “half” or “mini” makeover, which is basically what we do when we’re too lazy or broke to take on a full makeover of a space (for instance, Naomi’s kitchen half makeover). In Lindsey’s case though, we think the makeover was so mini because that’s all it needed to be totally awesome.

Let’s ignore the fact that in our houses, that chandelier would be hanging below the water line of the tub given our ceiling heights. (Seriously, we’re not bitter.)

The mini makeover brings out the best in the bones of the space (that tub is awesome, and we didn’t even notice it in the “before” picture), but adds a ton of new interest as well. Lindsey describes it as “a small step toward my ultimate master bedroom vision of “Monochromatic and Glamorous!” which is prettier in my head than my words are making it sound.” We think she’s on to something.

Let’s get a close up on that back wall:

It’s a stencil, which is awesome. Sometimes people will do “small updates” and it turns out they’ve spent like $400 on wallpaper, which to us does not feel small. But manual labor and claw hands (the hallmarks of stenciling) are something we can totally get behind.

So those are just a few projects from Lindsey, and we hope you’ll head over to Better After to see what true DIY entertainment looks like. Lindsey, we think you’re awesome and we hope you’re not offended that we somehow managed to imply that you’re either tiny OR a giant. It’s just that you’re flaunting those ceilings and we’re blinded by jealousy.