Meg vs. the Bed: Refinishing done!

Three coats of finish and two layers of topcoat later, here she is. It is nice to have one project checked off. Now I just need to get the room done so I can put the bed together and see the whole thing! Also, you can see the back of the wardrobe I picked up today (a Craigslist purchase) with a great deal of help from my siblings--my sister babysat and my brother did the heavy lifting (and was mostly my bodyguard going to a strange house in Oakland. Turned out it was a small-ish middle-eastern lady, but you never know). The wardrobe will go in that room as well, and my mom is staining my old desk and bookshelf to match all of this so it will all go together. Now I just need to hunt down one more wardrobe for the second bedroom and all the furniture will be ready!

Meg vs. Renters: Staining a new bed.

We found renters! I have been so consumed in finding a place/finding renters/creating leases/getting the house ready that I haven't taken time to post my goings-on, but I will try to catch up a bit, since I really have been chipping away at the projects.

Anyhow, we are going to be renting the house out to three students. We realized that to compete with the rest of the housing market for local students, we need to leave the house furnished. So I have been on a Freecycle kick finding the additional things we will need to turn our little boy/baby rooms into grad student rooms. And once we move, I will be on a new Freecycle kick trying to replace everything we left behind.

I got a full-size bed for the front bedroom that has storage in the headboard and underneath, which is perfect because then I don't have to buy a separate dresser! It was a light honey maple color and pretty worn, but I was planning on leaving it as-is because, well, I didn't really have time or space to do anything about it. Then John reminded me how much better it could look if I stained it the same color as the bathroom vanity, and said that if we put that old bed in the room after re-doing all of the walls and making it look nice, it would "automatically date it ten years." So...I ordered a bigger can of stain from Amazon. Last night I put on the first coat:

And tonight the second coat:

It really does look so much better, and I think it will be a really beautiful piece of furniture, so I'm glad John talked some sense into me, even if it means I won't sleep for a few nights...

I used General Finishes Java Gel Stain (disclaimer: that is an affiliate link), and am following this tutorial from Monica Wants It, just like I did for the bathroom vanity. I love this stuff! Only a very light sanding required before you get to slap that stuff on. Just the way I like a project! Now I just need to get the room done so I can put the bed inside! It is still looking pretty scary in there, and I have less than 3 weeks to moving day. Wish me luck!

Meg vs. the Walls: Patching

I spent the night patching all the gaps and holes in the bedroom walls created when I pulled off the wood paneling. Just me, my putty knives, a gallon of spackle, and my iPod. It is looking only very slightly better, but by tomorrow night hopefully I can start priming, and then we'll be making real progress. Our friend has a texture sprayer and is going to come help us out with that part once I have the room primed and taped and prepped. We are so lucky to have a friend who knows everything and has all the tools! I am looking forward to these projects being done so I can stop pulling all-nighters. That is just what happens with little ones to look after all day!

Meg vs. The Walls: Removing Wood Paneling

I did this to the front bedroom today:

Before. This doesn't quite portray the ugliness of the painted-over,

falling-off-the-wall wood paneling.

After: Yikes! It always gets worse before it gets better, right?

Right?

So before Thursday when two more girls come to see the house, we hope to patch the walls, sand everything down, do a coat of primer, spray texture on the walls, and do a second coat of primer.  Then paint and moulding... Phew! I am tired already, and I need to clean out the garage before the contractor comes to measure for the new door on Wednesday.

As I was attacking the paneling, I was thinking about how nice it would have been to have done this earlier and been able to enjoy living in the finished house. But then I thought about how busy and preoccupied I have been these last couple of weeks trying to get everything done, and I am glad that I wasn't crazy focused on the house so that I could focus on these guys, who were relegated to the tent today:

Meg vs. Organization: Pinned It, Did It Shirt Drawer

I saw this pin

and thought of my husband's drawer of tees (that is all he wears unless he absolutely has to dress up), which looked like this

and so I did this.

He says he likes it. It will make my life better, because I am the one who does the laundry, and I hate opening the drawer and having all the shirts get stuck and rumpled up. I think I will do the same to my drawer of tees/camisoles.

Now if only I could get the rest of the house clean... It was nice to get one thing put in order; it made me feel in control (that doesn't happen very often). No wonder people get hooked on organizing (not that I am likely to get hooked, I'm just saying)!

Meg vs. The Nursery: Chain Link Baseball Card Frame

I am a little excited about this one because, like my headboard, I actually thought of it myself! Of course, I had a little bit of inspiration via Pinterest...

A couple of weeks ago, I saw this and thought it was super fun:

You can check out all the fun bedroom ideas here at Itsy Bits and Pieces.

I didn't know where to get an old chain link gate, and I had no intention of going to all the effort of trying. So I thought I could make something that brought in a little more color and invoked the sporty feeling of chain link.

Saturday I found this frame at the Habitat ReStore for just a couple of bucks:

I gave it a few coats of red spray paint, then brought it in and turned it over on my table. My toddlers quickly jumped in to help with Toby the steam tram and a Shinkansen car.

I poked thumb tacks in about every three inches around the border of the frame, making sure they were lined up with the tacks on the opposite side. Then I started weaving a chain link with some 1.2 mm steel wire.

I have to admit, the process is super annoying if you are as impatient as I am (which most of you aren't). I suggest just barely poking in the tacks at first to mark your spot, then pushing or hammering them in as far as you can once you have the wire wrapped around it. I found the easiest way to do the weaving was to pre-fold enough wire to go up and down the frame one time so that it looks like this:

Then weave it in and out of the last row and wrap it around the tacks at the end. That may not make sense when you read it, but if you try it and get start it, you'll figure it out pretty quickly. If I can, you can.Here is the finished product from the back. It's plenty uneven and crooked, but once it goes on the wall and the cards go on, it isn't too noticeable.

Next time we head to my in-laws' house we are going to pick out some of John's favorite childhood cards to put up, and in the next few days I'll spray paint the clothespins in coordinating colors, and then we'll be done! To break it in, I had to do my dad proud and order this card on ebay.

You got that right, folks. Hideo Nomo. The only time my Japanese dad ever watched American sports religiously was when he came to LA. Other than that it was all rented videos of sumo championships.

I wonder if they have sumo trading cards in Japan? Hmmm...

Meg vs. the Bedroom: DIY Gathered Headboard

As I hinted a week or two ago, this project started a while back and was going nowhere (in part because I realized our staple gun was several hundred miles away and had to be sent to us, but mostly because I was angry with my sewing machine, er, my lack of sewing patience), so I bagged it for a while. It is so hard to pull out a project once you put it away! But I forced myself to do it. It helped that the alternative was doing the dishes and cleaning the house. I will always avoid that.

Background story: We bought a mattress, a box spring, and four wooden feet at Ikea when we got married. We figured any real bed we could afford would not survive the moves we knew we would be making during our first few years of marriage (sure enough, it has been five years, and we have moved 7 times or so--I'm losing track). We never really decorated beyond a couple of propped on our dresser or on shelves (I never felt like making holes only to fill them a few months later). Now that we have our own place, I am itching to make it feel like we have settled down, though for all I know we may be moving again in a matter of months. So I had to make something easy, inexpensive, and portable.

Enter seven bazillion headboard tutorials on Pinterest.

I actually think that number is a low estimate. Apparently everyone makes their own headboards these days. Why not me?

I decided I wanted something soft (no old window panes or barn doors) that had some visual interest but wasn't overwhelming, since I am going for a calm, neutral, airy feel.

My materials:

*1 plywood sheet, cut to 4 feet by 5 feet (we have a queen bed, which is five feet wide, and I decided I wanted the headboard four feet high. I actually think I might have liked it better a little lower, but perhaps I just need to adjust to having anything there at all.),
*1 piece of upholstry foam, 2 feet by 6 feet, bought at the only fabric store in town.

*2 yards of silvery grey fabric that I initially bought to cover a bulletin board in our church nursery, until the nursery leader decided she wanted to do something different.
*Spray adhesive
*Staple gun and staples

I wanted to sew ruffles at regular intervals across the fabric, and had read about a thousand different "super easy" ruffle tutorials so I thought this would be relatively simple. Not so. For the life of me I could not get this very large piece of fabric to gather nicely when I did the pull-the-bottom-thread technique, and then I couldn't get it to stay ruffled when I tried to go over it again to fix it in place. My matching thread was apparently junk and kept breaking, so I would have to start over again. I don't really know how to use my sewing machine, so I kept messing things up. Finally I just went with the only idiot ruffle technique that I can manage. The down side to this technique is that you can't control the final length of the ruffle. The up side is that I can actually pull it off. And I lucked out that it gave me just the right width, which was a little more than half of the original width of the fabric.

I have no pictures because I was far too angry at the universe and was wanting to trash the whole thing, so I apologize for that. Here is the technique:

1. Set the tension on your sewing machine as tight as you can (my tension dial goes up to 9, so I set it at a 9. I don't really know what that means, and have never cared to figure it out).
2. Set your machine to the longest possible stitch.
3. Feed the fabric through like normal, and the machine will do the ruffling for you.

I ended up doing half of the gathers with my matching thread, then going back and fixing all the broken spots and doing the rest with my more sturdy white thread. Luckily the clashing thread isn't too noticeable.

Next I got out my board and put it together. This took all of about 10 minutes, in part because, as you will see, I did not pick up the toy room before I began. What can I say? I have no shame.

I sprayed both the top of the board and the back of the foam with adhesive and stuck them together, like so.

Next I pulled the foam around the sides and stapled it down thusly,

resulting in this:

I draped my gathered fabric over the top (it has character, doesn't it? [That is poor code for it is crooked and poorly done]),

I stapled the fabric around the back,

added a few staples at the bottom on the front, and ta-da!

I hauled it into our room and shoved it between the bed and the wall. At some point we will probably secure it to the wall, but it isn't as wobbly as I would have expected.

 Now remember, our bed used to look like this:

Now it looks like this:

Better, right? The effect would be superior if I took a broader picture of the room, but I'll just come out and say I didn't feel like cleaning so I just cropped it out. Still, don't look closely; I think you can see some shoes and a baby hoodie halfway under the bed. Headboard! That's what we want to see!

I honestly don't think this is going to be a keeper in the long term just because the sewing job is bad and the gathers will come undone over time. But for the now it fits the bill, the price was right, and I am really happy that it actually came out just as I envisioned it.

Meg vs. The Bedrooms: Free Furniture!

Thursday: Pick up new furniture from our friend? Start packing for our vacation.

Check. Now to paint it and get it all in place (or at least get it out of the way until that is possible).

Meg vs. The Nursery: Painted dresser.

My apologies for dropping off the planet for a few days. There was really no reason for it, except I was in survival mode while John took his last exams of the year, and I also made the mistake of starting to read Anna Karenina. But I did my jobs! Here is the dresser after the first coat of paint (I forgot to take pictures after I primed).

I thought the brush lines would bother me a lot, but I actually kind of like the look. Here it is after the second coat. I may still put on a third before I finish it off. And of course tonight my husband is bringing home another whole furniture set that needs painting. Oh, the fun!

Monday: Prime the dresser! Do a quick sanding.

Tuesday: Paint the first coat on the dresser!

Wednesday: Paint the second coat on the dresser.

Meg vs. The Nursery Dresser: Liquid Sandpaper

Tuesday: Finish cleaning and coating baby dresser with liquid sandpaper.

As it turns out, the cleaning was significantly more difficult than the liquid sandpaper. That was due to the horrid tape that the previous owners used to hold the drawers shut when moving it. There was still a lot of residue left even though I had worked on it for a significant amount of time last week.

This is what I broke out to attack the goo one last time:

The dryer helped to soften up the adhesive, and I suppose it's obvious how the blade helped... It didn't end up perfect, but it was significantly better when I was done.

Next it was time for my Liquid Sander Deglosser! My other tools were: (1) rubber gloves, and (2) a holey sock.

It is so, so easy, and I have read good reviews on it. It took me about 5 minutes to coat the whole dresser and all of the drawers. In the photo you can just barely see that there is a little bit of a film left on the wood. It should be just enough to help my bonding primer to stick. More to come next week once I stock up on supplies!

Meg vs. Assorted Unfinished Business: Finishing up

Thursday: Clean up the painting stuff and put the bedroom back together. Put a final coat of paint on the living room bench.

The first half mostly was done because my husband felt bad and did it for me while I was washing a giant mound of dishes at 10pm. The second I did during nap time (the only time I was home before dinner all day!). It is nice to actually have something finished rather than in progress or waiting to be done!

Meg vs. The Bedroom: Done Painting!

Wednesday: Do a second coat and/or touch-up in the master bedroom as needed.

This morning John and I decided I should just touch up the walls and skip the second coat. Then during nap time I got to work, and of course the more I touched up, the more annoying spots I found. It didn't take long before I decided to ditch the touch-up effort and slap a new coat on as quickly as possible. And I finished the whole room during nap time (about 2 hours)! My arms are killing, but I'm glad to be done. I think I'll need a while to regroup before we tackle the next room. I'll post a final photo of our room once things are put back together.

Meg vs. The Bedroom: Still more painting.

Tuesday: Tape and paint the master bedroom walls.

I taped all morning, I did 3 walls during naptime, then the last wall and the hallway after the kiddies were asleep. When I was done at 11pm I still needed to go grocery shopping, as we were almost completely out of milk (with my 3 housemates, that spells disaster). So now, at 1am, I bring you, two fuzzy pictures of the day's work:

My first 3 minutes of work up next to our paint samples. 

The same wall at the end of the day. It is lighter than it seemed like it would be from the sample, but I'm glad because we bought the same color for all of the bedrooms, and it is fairly unassuming. I think once the green tape is down you'll be able to see the contrast better with the white ceiling; in this picture it all looks white.

We are debating on whether to do a second coat. John votes no, mostly because he wants me to be done already. I am not convinced, because I know how annoyed I'll be when I start noticing discolored spots. We agreed to decide in the light of the morning. We'll see how hard or easy tomorrow's goal will be!