Tuesday, June 18, 2013

A Second Nursery



 I know I promised you a trip to IKEA and gosh it feels like I’m doing a lot of under delivering here on the ol blog but we just couldn’t make it there.  I honestly think that my brain registers us having a lot more time than we actually do.  For starters, both my girls are sick – not over the top sick but stuffy sniffly annoying sick - they take after their dad this way and they are the biggest sucks.  Don’t get me wrong, I love me a good snuggle but it’s extremely hard to snuggle twin girls while trying to move a couch out of your house and into someone else’s.  Not only that but my sweet innocent little girls have turned into maniacal crazy kids.  I don’t know what happened to them but they are fighting us over everything – eating, sleeping, playing.  It’s crazy town up in here

So basically I’d like to have a bunch of really amazing projects to show you on here but because I’m lucky to walk out of the house in a clean shirt dressed each morning it’s becoming increasingly difficult to get to the projects.  Which is super frustrating because I have SO MANY IDEAS in my head!! I also blame the weather, it’s really hard to tear down a side deck and build a play space or lay interlocking bricks or finish a porch in the pouring rain. And that’s ALL.IT’S.BEEN.DOING. raining! So basically what I’m telling you is please don’t leave on me now because we WILL be doing projects and you WILL get to see some cool stuff on here.

OK rant over – get on with it already!!

Because my girls are part of the reason that I can’t get anything done, let me show you what I did get done before they came along…namely their nursery!!

When we first moved in this room was what I can only describe as sea foam green – pretty disgusting.  I knew it was definitely changing for the girlies.  And like I said in this post our original nursery room wasn’t going to work out and we needed to come up with a new idea.  Pinterest became my new best friend and let me tell you I found inspiration EVERYWHERE! 

This image was one of the first ones I pinned and it stuck with me through to the end.  I knew I wanted something a little edgier for my kids and the dark grey walls really made me happy.  But I knew I had to lighten it up a bit since their room is at the back of the house and doesn’t get a lot of natural light.  That’s when I found this nursery.  It is fun and sophisticated and will transition nicely as the girls get older – and I really did love it because I actually painted the room the exact same colour Porcelain Shale by Valspar. 

I also knew I wanted a little definition in the room so instead of just a chair rail we did a little board and batten action on the bottom.

Again we turned to pinterest.  This time I found a bunch of different ways to board and batten - tall, short, thick, thin wanna see what I mean?
 

 
crib corner
via 


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Hubs and I went back and forth trying to figure out the best way to do this.  There are a million DIY tutorials online and some of them use thicker boards and others use thinner boards.  I’m of the school where it’s gotta feel right so for us it was a thicker board (I think they are 4inches thick) with a smaller space between them.  This step probably caused me the most stress – I tend to put too much pressure on myself to get things perfect but this time I put WAY too much pressure on myself.  I was trying to do math (which I should never try really I’m that horrible) to putting marks on the wall – seriously it was painful.  Then hubs in his infinite wisdom recommended that we lean the boards around the room to get a feel for what we thought would look best. Halla freaking lula this man is smart!

OK but before we could do that step we needed to cut the board. Hubs bought 1 inch thick MDF board at home depot and then he took it out to the farm to cut into 4 inch strips for the horizontal boards and 3 inches for the vertical ones on the table saw.  Home Depot will do this for you but I think they charge $1/cut which may be worth it because this stuff is MESSY.

Once it was cut into long strips and we affixed the horizontal boards to the wall we needed to cut the vertical board to the height.  Hubs did that at home and I got to sanding……and sanding……and  sanding.  By the end my hands were killing me but it’s definitely a step not to skip or you won’t end up with a smooth finish.  Then we put the boards on the wall.  Some people recommend gluing the boards to the wall but we didn’t want them to be super permanent in case down the line the girls decide they hate my decorating skills and want to take them down – you know how girls can be. But we did use small nails (probably too many based on the number of holes I had to fill) which worked great on the studs but even held pretty well in just the drywall.  I think we angled the nails a bit into the top rail when we were attaching a board between studs to secure it really well.
Once that was done we were left with this


I know the colour is horribly - dark room late at night shooting towards a window - all makes for really bad blog photos. I really need to work on taking better photos



Then came the filling of the holes and joints to achieve a smooth seamless finish.  Make sure you get the paintable kind or it’s going to be a big ol pain in the butt.  I won’t bore you with this stage – it wasn’t fun fill sand fill sand. You get the picture.




We used the same sized boards for the trim in the room and around the windows - we thought about putting the old trim back but decided this made the room look more intentional - and it started us thinking how great it would be to use flat trim in the rest of the house!


 You can see that we ran into a bit of an issue when it came to the electrical.  We got lucky with the lower wall plugs and didn't have to move the boards around them but for the light switch we decided to build the boards around the switch and put the plate on top of that.

This looks about as good as any place to stop for now but I’ll be back with the next stage of the room – painting the bottom white and filling it up!

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