Love Letters

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After hanging the book baskets in Emma and Owen's room, the wall space above them was looking a bit bleak.  I wanted to make some large art to hang above them and came across some inspiration from The Green Palette's instagram feed.

Brent and I set out to make something similar by first sketching our letter templates onto a piece of 1/4 inch plywood.  Using the table saw and a jig saw, Brent cut them out and I sanded them.

Now that we had a template, we wanted to layer a different type of wood on top.  Luckily, we had a 6 foot pallet in our shop!  Brent disassembled it and cut the pallet boards into a few different widths.

To attach the pallet boards to the template, we used a little glue, then laid our piece of pallet board on top, flipped it over and put a nail through it with the air gun.

When all the letters were done, I gave them a coat of Walnut stain.

I wanted them to have a little color so Emma and I brushed on three different colors of blue/grey paint.

 We put the darkest color over all of the horizontal lines to make them stand out more.

We alternated the other two colors of blue/grey on each plank.

After the paint was dry, I sanded each letter to remove some paint and expose the texture of the pallet wood.

 A quick coat of Van Dyke Brown Glaze always seems to tie everything together.  In the photo below, the left side has been glazed and the right has not.

The letters didn't feel finished at this point, so we chose to outline each letter with a small piece of trim.  After the trim was applied, I brushed on a coat of sealer to darken the wood tone a bit.

To hang them, we nailed in some of these clips...

Hanging them proved to be a bit tricky...but we finally got them level.

 I didn't plan on this, but the colors in the letters actually matches the color of the baskets perfectly.

 I guess you could say we all "LOVE" our new art :)

Kids Bedroom Makeover Part 3 - Toy Storage and Curtains

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Spending money isn't my favorite pastime but there is one thing I'm always willing to buy - curtains!  For Emma and Owen's room, I thought I wanted white wood blinds but quickly realized our windows aren't deep enough for standard 2" blinds.  Plus, I was a little worried about the kids yanking on the strings to make them go up or down.  It feels like we are constantly opening and closing curtains in that room for privacy and sunlight so the idea of messing around with blinds wasn't appealing.  So I switched gears towards curtains - something soft with a subtle pattern.

And this is where Target comes in for the win - AGAIN.  I saw these Nate Berkus curtains and instantly knew they were perfect.  Although, I had to order them online so I crossed my fingers that the color would look good with the wall color we had just painted, Revere Pewter.  As a bonus, they were buy 3 get one free so I paid about $17/curtain, which is pretty reasonable.  My heart thudded a bit as I opened the shipment a few days later - but alas, they were a perfect match!

They aren't exactly light blocking curtains, but if they are pulled shut during the day and all of the lights are turned off in the room, it's still dark enough that Owen can get his nap in.

With the curtain selection out of the way, we turned our heads towards the ever growing pile of toys. Now most of the toys are in the kids' old bedroom turned playroom, but I was looking at all of that wasted space under the bunkbeds and knew we could utilize it for storage.

Brent had some old kitchen drawer boxes in his workshop calling my name.  Yeah, I know...who has this kind of stuff just laying around?  We do.  Because you can always figure out a way to re-purpose something so it doesn't end up in a landfill.  Add a set of wheels and we've got rolling toy boxes! And these drawers were pre-finished on the insides so we didn't even have to apply laquer to the insides since that was already done!

Brent added some blocking to the undersides of the drawers and attached the wheels.

At this point, I knew we weren't quite done.  I didn't want the toy boxes to look like boring old flat boxes under the bed, so I asked Brent to cover the boxes with some hardwood flooring out of the attic of our shop.  A friend of ours recently put in new flooring in her home and she let us take the old hardwood flooring that was coming out.  There wasn't enough of it to actually use it as floor in our house but this is the perfect kind of material for smaller projects.

I didn't take any photos of the actual process of attaching the flooring to the boxes, Brent just used a pin nailer to attach the flooring to the box from the inside so there wouldn't be any nail holes visible from the outside.  He mitered the corners and I filled the tiny gaps with wood filler and lightly sanded before priming and painting.

I was trying to pick a shade of green as close to this coffee mug as possible so I chose the shade on the right.  After they were painted, I realized I probably should have chose the one of the left.  It is a liiitttllle bit more green and less yellow.  The rug I ordered with some green in will be here in a few days so I may end up re-painting the toy boxes if the whole rug situation works out.  I'm just feeling like the green I chose is a tiny bit off. 

I glazed the boxes after painting them to pick up all of the horizontal lines.

 The little knobs came off of these old coat hooks we used to have in Emma's bedroom.

 Emma's dolls and their accessories fit great inside of the boxes!

 

So here's how the room is looking at this point.  Lots more projects coming down pipeline in the next few weeks!

Kids Bedroom Makeover Part 2 - Planking

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We're used to planking around the Kruse household - but not wood planking...yoga planking.  So when I told Brent that I wanted to plank a wall in the kids' room he reacted how he usually reacts, with a shrug.  Seriously love this guy!

As I was deep in the throes of painting the walls and trim in Emma and Owen's room, my brain was working overtime to figure out what to do with the recessed wall behind their beds.  It didn't take long for me to figure out what needed to happen.

When this room was Brent and I's, we had these great little wall mount swing arm lamps on each side of the bed, which were our main light source.  They came with us when we moved upstairs which left two lamps on the dressers and the overhead fan light for the kids.  As I was painting, I was getting more and more angry and the lack of light in the room.  It wasn't so bad during the day because there are two south'ish facing windows for natural light, but as soon as that sun went down it got dark in there pretty quickly.  I told Brent that we HAD to figure out a way to make the room brighter.

Our plan was to plank the walls, paint them bright white and add sconces to reflect the light off of the white paint.  Luckily, a few weeks ago we picked up a bunch of 9" tongue and groove planking from the garage attic of a foreclosed property.  At the time, I had no idea what we were going to use it for but I knew it would come in handy.

As I started to sand the finish off of the planks I realized the backside was untouched, so we ended up installing the planks backwards to save me all of the time and effort it would have required to sand everything down.

Brent started by adding thin vertical strips of plywood where the studs were located to give us a place to nail the horizontal planks.

 We left all of the original trim in place so the first piece of planking went right over the front of the trim and Brent notched the plank to fit around the quarter round and trim on the adjacent walls.

 Using a jig saw, he cut out a hole for the outlet.

It didn't take too long until the entire wall was paneled.  I would have LOVED to have kept it in it's natural state because the color was gorgeous, but the wall had to be painted white in order to capitalize on the added sconces.  Remember that light and bright are our main goal for this room!

I filled the nail holes with this wood filler and then lightly sanded them when it was dry.

Shopping for sconces was kinda tricky.  We had two things to consider when choosing them - they had to have a low profile (not stick out from the wall too much) because once the bunk beds got slid back into place we didn't want the lights getting knocked around by whichever kid happened to be sleeping on the top bunk.  The second stipulation was that we needed them to put off as much light as possible, which eliminated any sort of sconce that would force the light down.  Geez - does that last sentence even make sense??  Well...if you get it, then I guess you must "get" me.  We stumbled upon these sweet little mason jar lights at Home Depot for the whopping, bank breaking price of......$5.  I know.  $5.

I suppose if you add in the $3 bulbs that we bought for them and the $5 spray paint, they were more like $9/each.  Before we hung them, I spray painted them silver and then rubbed a brown glaze over the silver parts so they wouldn't look so shiny and new.  The glaze ended up making the silver spray paint look like galvanized steel, so I was happy with that.

We chose the placement of these lights very carefully so that when it's time for one child to move out of this room, we can center the bed on this wall and the sconces will flank the bed.  Side note: every time I type the word "sconce", I think of scones.  And now I'm getting really hungry for a white chocolate raspberry scone with those big sugar crystals baked on top.

Here's the wall after 1 coat of primer.  It looked sort of cool like this, but I wanted it glossier to bounce the light around.

 This is after the first coat of paint.  It is the same paint we used on the trim and doors in the room, Benjamin Moore White Dove.

 Here's after the second coat of White Dove.

 And this next photo is after the third coat of Benjamin Moore White Dove

 And because the little mason jar lights are so adorable, here are some random pictures of them...

To refresh your memory before I show you the final product, here's what we were working with before we got started.

The end result is nothing short of amazing!  It is so bright and happy in here now!  Emma, Owen and I spent a solid half hour dancing to Uptown Funk after we took these pictures because we were so happy to be done!  Well...done with this phase anyways.  We've still got a lot of projects in mind that we'll be starting on this week - so stay tuned for those!

Even without the lights on, it still feels super bright.  And BTW, I begged Brent to let me ditch the ceiling fan for an overhead industrial light but he put his foot down - the fan comes in handy in the spring and fall when we don't want to run the A/C.

The kids are loving their new space!  Lily (our dog) is in this photo - can you find her?  She sort of blends in with all the other stuffed animals.

Shortly after we took this picture, new window treatments went up - as soon as the wrinkles work themselves out, I will be excited to share photos of them!