Play Room

I worked until the wee hours last night getting the playroom organized. I'm not ready for the final reveal but here is one of my favorite storage solution to date and I made it with things lying around the house! I have a huge problem with messes. I don't like pieces and parts floating about. I do love flash cards but hate the mess that comes along with them. The little cardboard boxes don't hold up and they end of here and there and everywhere. I found a bag of these plastic clips while I was unpacking. I also noticed they were sitting close to and empty picture frame and I picked one up and got to wondering what to do with the flash cards as I whirled the clip around in my hand on a nail. DING!!! Idea!
I took and old set of sheets and used the fabric to create a nice pretty surface over a piece of cardboard the same size as the back of this poster frame. Then I just nailed holes in an orderly way, sorted the pile of cards, clipped them together and here we have my storage solution!





I decided I like the idea of the sheet as fabric so much, I cut more fabric off the sheet and started gluing (with fabric glue) the same material to my existing baskets for a different look.

Home Office Part 1

I'm pretty sure that's the last time I attempt to decorate three rooms at once. My craft room is still a disaster, the playroom is mostly boxes but I got my home office done; well almost done. Turns out the filing cabinet I had for in there was way too big! I'm going to redo the existing credenza we have and I need two more picture frames and she will be done. We did all the trim white and I've got nice blinds on the windows now. Keep checking back for more pictures of the final product!

BEFORE:




AFTER:
Here's proof I have eight years of schooling and invested thousands of dollars


This is a wall of memorabilia from athletes I have treated




The main reason these rooms are taking me forever is because I'm missing essential items like frames and storage solutions. I spent part of the thrift shopping looking for fun odds and ends for all three rooms. I did come with a few goodies for projects later. I can't wait to share here soon!

Just a Month Late...

I'm still working on getting those 3 rooms put together But it's taking much longer than I had anticipated. I'm also stuck in a creative block which seems to happen on Tuesdays. Since all three rooms look like piles of half emptied boxes and I've only got enough frames to hang two pictures on the walls right now, I thought I'd go retro and introduce a few Valentine's crafts I did a while back.

1)Heart Pillow



I was thinking, after looking at this craft again, that it would be really cute to do for St Patrick's Day too; a clover would look adorable! I simply bought a bag of similar color button and sewed it on one half of a piece of fabric in the shape of a heart. A quick way of hand stitching the buttons on is by quadrupling up your thread so you don't have to secure the button so many times. Then I just sewed it into a pillow.

2) Owl Heart Pillow/ Tooth Pillow



I wanted to make the girls something special for Valentine's Day that had hearts on it and would last a long time. I'm not sure why, but it seems like owl show up around this holiday and they always have a heart shaped breast and I thought I'd just run with it. Next thing I know, I'm staring and my left over batting from the pillows I'd just made and a pile of felt and I just started cutting and sewing. Before long, in less than a nap time, I had made a cute little owl pillow toy. I made the little heart on their chests a pocket. I thought these would be adorable tooth pillows for the tooth fairy some day. So yay... two crafts in one!

Three in One Blow

I am exhausted!!! J and I painted three rooms today; the playroom, my craft room and what we are no calling my home office. (The home office was originally another guest room but, due to a boom in business, I don't feel comfortable taking people upstairs to the sitting room/office area.) J spent Friday evening and last night putting the final touches on the trim while I agonized over paint colors. I feel the hardest part of this renovation has actually been deciding on colors.
In fact, as much as I love the upstairs hall color, I fell in love with a different color last night and we will be repainting. Because I have been asked several questions about what color paint I use and what brand, I have added all paint color choices to a separate tab on the homepage.
Since all we did today was paint, sadly, I don't have the greatest photos to share. All rooms are sitting empty as we were too tired to unpack and we didn't finish painting until after 9pm tonight. So here are just a few teasers to show progress on those three rooms.

Half Way done:


I haven't been able to get to these boxes to unpack yet! That's what I'll be doing tomorrow after work.


Great work on the trim J!!


This yellow is what we are attempting to paint over:

Projects From the Past

No new projects were started today due to work and a 12 hour seminar then more work from home. Since this blog is new, I thought this would be the perfect opportunity to showcase some older projects from the past. WARNING:these pictures were taken before I ever thought I'd share them with the world! I don't have step by step photos but I did provide written instruction. Just grin and bare with me!
1) BOOK PAGE FALL WREATH

This is a wreath I made for my mother-in-law out of an old book and collected fallen leaves. I took a wire hanger and bent it into a "U" shape. Then, I took one of the leaves that I collected from outside and made a pattern on cardboard. I hit up Goodwill for a really old book with yellowed pages and traced the leaf pattern and cut out individual leaves. Next, I took a 6" piece of craft wire and tucked it between two cutouts and glued them together with a glue stick. I added a real leaf to the stem I made on the book leaf and wrapped them with floral tape to secure it together in a bunch. I did this for about 200 leaves until I had a huge amount of bundles to work with. Than, I began wrapping the wire stems of the bundles around the "U" shaped hanger for for a full wreath. I wrapped the top with a simple ribbon and a bow.

2) TWO FRAME FAMILY TREE

For this project, I took scrapbook paper and cut out half of a tree on two sheets. I turned them to mirror one another and placed each one in identical picture frames. I spent the next hour or so cutting out leaves from two complimentary green paper sheets. I also made red apples from paper as well. I wrote the family member names on the leaves; men on one color, women on the other and any children between them were writen on apples. To personalize the family tree, I took a paper clip and scratched/carved the names of the gift recipient into the trunk. The idea here is "the apple doean't fall far from the tree". I really wish I had better photos of this project I made!

3) FOOT PRINT BUTTERFLIES


This project is easy as pie and messy fun for the kids! I laid out a sheet of paper on the bathroom floor and sat the kids on a stool in front of the paper. I took acrylic paint and a cotton ball and dabbed it on one foot at a time. I lined up where I wanted their foot to go and had them stand. Then, I washed the painted foot and repeated the above steps. I took a paintbrush and added a swirly body and drew a face with a sharpie when it was all dry.

Time for a DIY

I spent most of today painting...again. The problem with painting today wasn't that I got to spread a new color on a beautiful made over room. No, I got to stand in a damn closet and paint something that no one sees. BORING!!! I then proceeded to paint a laundry room. Not a fancy one; that would be fun! I painted your standard accordion door, in a hall, nothing spectacular laundry room. BLAH!
So basically, it's been raining all day, my work has been blah so I needed to spark my creativity because I was doing that thing I used to do as a kid today. You know that thing! That thing where you feel like petting your cat, but you are really bored and don't really want to be petting your cat, but instead be running with your dog and the pent up energy results in petting the cat way to hard and it runs away fearing its life? Ha.. okay, so maybe that was just me. What I meant, by totally going off track, was that all I could think about was doing something else and I got impatient and was slopping paint all over the place. Either way, no animals were harmed in the making of this next post!
Because J has been prepping the playroom, I thought I'd have some creative time making art for the playroom walls. In the old house, I had giant poster frames of their drawings and I will do that too. I just wanted something cute and personal of them over where I will have their art station and easel. I had seen floating around Etsy some crayon art. That's when I got my idea. For this project, you will need the following:


(Crayons in a big pack of 120 or two boxes of 64, Black scrapbook paper, hot glue and lots of glue sticks, scissors, a HEAT GUN and two canvases)

Next, I browsed my computer for pictures of the kids playing and blew them up and simply printed them in black and white on standard old computer paper my printer. I put the black paper underneath and cut out the silhouettes of the kids.



Then, I laid out crayons so that they were the length of the canvas in shades of blue, gray, black and white. I had just enough from the giant pack of crayons. I glued these down, one by one, to the top of the canvas with the labels all facing the same direction.



I put my silhouettes on the canvas at the bottom and modge podged them on. As you can see, I was going for the look of the kids running through the rain.



Here's where things get tricky and messy. This was my first time doing this and I had it down by the end of my project. I wish that hadn't been the case and I like the way the second one came out better. However, listen to this advice to avoid common errors I made. I have no pictures of this process because I needed two hands. Lay newspaper down on your floor. I work best from my floor for most of my projects. Pull a chair or trash can or something up to your work space so that the canvas can lie at and angle and rest against it. Hold your heat gun (NOT HAIR DRYER unless you want to splatter wax everywhere) about 1-2" from the TIPS of the first few crayons below the paper line. If you heat above this point, the wax seeps onto the paper around the crayon and it doesn't look as good. It takes a few seconds for the wax to start dripping but have a hold of your canvas when it starts to run so you can tilt it back to slow the dripping. Do this carefully along the length of your canvas and when you're done, you will have something like this:



I followed my advice for the second canvas creating a rainbow effect:

Painting Moulding

We spent tonight prepping the playroom for paint. Moulding/trim paint that is. I've had a few questions about the trim so, before I get into my little art project for the room, let me try and answer all those questions in one post. First, the trim in our home is solid oak. Because it is more expensive, being a strong wood, compared to polymer or poplar, we didn't want to spend the extra money replacing it all with solid wood painted white or something cheaper and more affordable like the polymer. It has a lacquer on it and it's NOT painted.
We started in E's room because we had never taken on a project like this before and figured most won't see the children's' rooms. We bought a heavy duty sprayer from home depot with a warranty. We always do the extended warranties and again, I"m glad we did. By the time we had reached H's room, the sprayer quit working properly, even after troubleshooting. Basically, the machine wasn't built to last as long as we needed it to. Not even a full two rooms!
J talked to his friend, a contractor, and he brought by his commercial spray machine for us to borrow. It sprays much wider compared to the one bought at home depot and the quality of the spray is over all much better. What we have discovered through trial and error is that there must be two coats of a product called gripper on the trim before we paint it. We do not sand and we do not try and strip the lacquer off of it. The gripper provides a special grip for the paint and makes it durable for normal wear and tear and it won't crack, peel, or smudge later. You MUST wait a long time in between coats though. It will become tacky if you don't and it's important to put a light coat on and then heavier coat the nest time.
We have only been using the Behr Ultra Premium paint with primer and we chose the ultra white in a semi-gloss. I've talked to other contractors who say they use a muted white but I feel like it looks dirty so I really like the BRIGHT white myself. We will be replacing the carpets next year but still, we didn't want to get paint all over it. I shared a tip earlier, while doing E's room, about using vertical blinds and cardboard to slide under the trim and carpet. This is what we did and then we covered the floors and glass part of the windows with plastic. We removed all the doors and hardware and sprayed these separately in our unfinished basement. We also taped plastic on the backside of the door to create what looked like a scene out of Dexter.


You definitely want to wear a mask and goggles because, even though you have sealed everything off, paint dust gets EVERYWHERE!! I am still cleaning up paint dust. It get in, on and around the barrier you create and it's a mess no matter what you do. I couldn't imagine having the kids here for this. It's on everything and is such a mess!! But, we are only paying for paint and although it is taking time, we are saving lots of money. And, I like doing this kind of stuff a lot!!
I would recommend renting a commercial grade sprayer if you attempt this project at home. I'm sure you could remove the trim first and spray it somewhere else. You would have to be very cautions not to break it while removing it or damaging it though. Then, you have all the finishing nails to buy and making sure it's level and filling holes. It's really up to you and what you want to attempt. I'm not a professional, I'm just a girl who takes on big projects and figures out what works best!
If you have any more questions, feel free to contact me. We only get better at it the more we do it. I'm really excited to get the living rooms done here soon because I am so happy with the outcome thus far!