Makeover II…Craft Room Project

June 4, 2007 by annadulcekelly.

And now we get to the part where I finally work on getting my own little space with a door with a lock for when I’m feeling particularly antisocial.  If you knew how often this happens, you KNOW I need a door with a lock…probably should have the lock on the outside so I can’t go on a rampage but I figure, if I lock the door from the inside, no one can come in and provoke me.

Anyway, the room used to be the room of princess…which means there have been hundreds of science projects made here.  If mold had eyes, a whole bunch of those little spores or whatever would have opened their eyes and seen this room first of all.  Thank goodness they’re not sea turtles who have to go back to where they were born to lay their eggs.  There is also no telling just how many coats of paint there are on the walls now.  I only added one more.  I didn’t sand the wall down so there are reminders of the botched paint jobs she and her friends did at least twice before.  From what I can tell, this room used to be royal blue.  I don’t know what it was before that.  I think between the royal blue and the paint job you’ll see in the first pictures, there was a fuchsia period somewhere.  Like with the other room, the carpet and walls were disgusting, and here the carpet was…well, crustier.  I like blue, but blue shag with unidentified food stuff firmly embedded in it…that’s just too much.

I thought I’d spend the money and be lazy.  I used Benjamin Moore Aura paints.  At the time I bought them, which was 4 months before the project actually started, they were only available on the West Coast so I had to have my paints shipped from Washington state.  I gave myself a budget of $350 for paint, and I went over by about $20 for 6 gallons, each of a different color…including shipping too.  Why, you ask, is this paint so damn expensive?  First off, there’s a guarantee of needing only 2 coats or less, and no primer.  Now, in the other room, I went over the room twice with the primer, and then twice again with the paint.  That’s 4 coats all told, and countless hours painting.  One or 2 coats of paint with no need for primer is heaven compared to that.  And I only did need one coat…yes, even if I were covering orange and hot pink with light blue, just one coat.  I found that truly amazing.

For this project, I gave a deadline for people to get everything out by Sunday, April 15th, which was 2 weeks after princess got back from her trip to London and Paris.  I thought that was ample time to rest and start moving her stuff down.  Of course, as is normal in this house, nothing starts until a few hours before the deadline.  So Sunday night, DH asked for another day.  I said, what if all her stuff isn’t moved downstairs by Monday?  He said, then you can have downstairs.  And I said, see, that’s the thing, I’m already going to be delayed one day and then downstairs is going to need a lot more work.  So he promised I can start working on it Tuesday morning and he promised the room next to our bedroom.  Of course I was still one day behind my schedule but that’s better than having to work downstairs with all the dark paneling and the parquet.

So here goes…

 

04/17/07, 10:44am, and as you can see, not all of princess’ things were out of that room.  The TV is still there.  I should say her non-working TV that fizzed out after she spilled something on it.  Also we disassembled the bed that morning and I hauled everything downstairs myself too.  Yes, it’s true, the room was orange with white and hot pink stripes, and also, on the right where the wall looks black…it was black, that and the wall across the door were painted with chalkboard paint.  My wall cleaner didn’t get the chalk off.

 

This is the wall directly opposite the one in the previous picture.

 

Just a shot of the carpet I had to deal with.  With the picture this small, it’s not very obvious what is there but you can see the light spots and the dark spots…dark spots were more likely than not spilled ice cream and other liquids.

 

Again the size of the picture doesn’t show the details.

 

Now THIS is a great picture to show you what I had to deal with.

 

And you can see those handprints on the wall with initials…there are 3 of those for each stupid teenager who painted that room, and there are areas with more paint on them than the others so that was annoying too.

 

 

 

If you read the previous entry with the other makeover project this would be a familiar sight by now.  Splatters on the wall from who knows what.

 

 

 

04/18/07, 8:20am, with this project I actually took pictures of the previous day’s work the next morning.  So the day before I got to get the carpet off, clean the walls and start painting the ceiling.

 

I know the ceiling doesn’t look too blue here but it’s because of the orange walls reflecting on it.  Once I got rid of the orange on the walls, it looked a lot better.

 

04/19/07, 8:13am, now the ceiling looks blue.  I left the top parts of the walls alone because I was going to cover those up anyway.  Those corners are a pain and I didn’t want to waste time or paint there.  And yes, you’re seeing 2 different colors on the walls…I used 3, actually.

 

Now scroll back up to how this part of the room was before, and tell me THIS doesn’t look a hundred times better.  Oh, and yeah, I primed the floor.  That simply means that I put some primer on it from my previous project so the tape for the carpet tiles will stick better (lesson learned from the other room).

 

Here you can see the third shade of blue I used on the wall.  It’s not actually that bright…it’s just that the sun was shining and we had all that light coming in and it made teverything look lighter.  And that’s my supervisor off to the left, checking up on my work.

 

I already told you about the floor…primed.

 

04/20/07, 8:47am, I guess I’d started putting up the “moulding” the day before.  I know I started with the easy pieces that needed no cutting.  And like with the other room, these were the same color as the trims…except I don’t think I’ve painted the windows here yet.

 

I know the door and the trims and the closet shelf and rod look white…they’re not.  They are OFF-white.  The color is called November Rain and it’s a creamy beige.  I thought white was too stark and would show dirt really easily, and I didn’t want a grayish off-white either because that would have made the room look too cold.  The creamy beige tint was just enough to counter the tendency to look cold, since the room is all blue.  This picture shows all three wall colors.  For the closet, I used the medium blue I have on the wall opposite the dark one.

 

Baseboard’s the same color as the mouldings and trims, of course.  And there’s my compressor for my nail gun in the middle of the floor…with my trusty little Shop Vac.  I love that thing…I like it a lot better than our Dirt Devil full-sized vacuum cleaner.

 

Of course I painted the vent covers as well.

 

04/21/0, 9:40am, the windows have been painted and I’d started laying out the carpet tiles.  This was an easier job than the last one, because with the last one I had to determine first where the bed was going.  Then I had to lay out the more colorful carpet tiles to go under and around it, then I had to put in the green ones, so there was a lot of triming.  Not so much here.  Basically the grayish ones went around and the blue in the middle.  Again, I bought my carpet from a surplus place and they didn’t have enough of the blue.  This is better anyhow, it would have been too blue if all my floor were the same type tile.  The gray had browns and beiges in it so it tied in with the baseboard and trims and door.

 

I did leave the closet and door area for later because those required measuring and cutting.

 

And there was a strip in the blue area that needed smaller pieces too.

 

4/22/07, 11:39am, I had a bridal shower to attend the day before so all I got to do were fill in the smaller areas in the floor.  And I guess I slept in some too, judging from the time I took this picture.

 

 

04/23/07, 9:31am, I had Scott and his youngest to bring my boxes of unassembled bookcases in from the garage.  They’d been there since December.  These must have been the easiest bookcases I ever had to put together.

 

The floor in the closet is done.

 

Doorway’s done too.

 

After putting up all the “mouldings” I had to touch up the ends with paint.  That way it’s not so obvious where they were joined.

 

Track lighting in the closet, of course.

 

And by the bookcases.

 

 

04/24/07, 7:51am, and I brought my stuff from upstairs, I’d moved some of my older shelving units from upstairs (thank goodness they’re all modular and can be taken apart really easily).  And this is where I basically started moving stuff up, finding room in the shelves upstairs, emptying shelves downstairs, bringing them up, and round and round we go.

 

This is one of 4 almost identical units.  They required 5 trips down and back up the stairs per unit.  It might not be too obvious here but this thing comes in 5 parts.  Oh, wait, I made 7 trips for this…see those drawers?  Two per trip.  I should have counted all the trips I made downstairs to get everything upstairs.  That would have been interesting to know.

 

And the new bookcases slowly fill up with books and magazines and DVDs.

 

04/25/07, 5:32pm, wow, I took this picture late.  Oh, wait, it was a Wednesday, I probably was doing payroll all day.  Anyway, I brought more bookcases up, moved things around, mostly moved books out of the new bookcases as these older ones are sturdier.  The floor is a mess at the moment because I hadn’t brought up all my storage shelves.  And that wooden thing in the middle of the floor?  More shelves, this time for the walls by the door.  There was a good 4″ inch depth that could be used and I intended to use that.

 

I bet you don’t know anyone else who’d buy wood online.  I also bought shelf brackets that were actually meant for shelves that are put right on wall studs.  They worked well for my purpose.

 

I also started putting things in the closet.  I have these clear plastic containers that lock in, looking like honeycombs.  You can take one out from the middle or the bottom and none of the rest will fall.  Plus they’re clear, so you can see right into them.  The ones on the bottom are actually meant for shoes and the ones on top are actually for accessories or sandals and such, but hey, containers are containers no matter what you use them for.  And those hangers are for my clothes.  The closet in the bedroom is not enough for DH and me.

 

I don’t know why I took this picture, LOL.

 

By this time the room is getting crowded and I still have one more shelving unit downstairs.  So I knew by the time I’m done the room will be really cramped.  There’s still room to work, room to set up the sewing machine, room to lay things out on the floor…just not as much as I wanted.

 

04/26/07, 9:07am, the closet shelf is filling up as well.  But right now, some of those are gone…off to better homes, thanks to eBay.

 

 Just more stuff that needed somewhere to go on the shelvs.  And that’s my sewing table folded and standing on end by the window.

 

I finally got all 4 shelving units upstairs and filled them up pretty fast too.

 

TADA!  There’s the wood I ordered online, all screwed together to make shallow shelves for smaller items…and some food.

 

Like the other room, this room had a lot of holes from pins, screws, nails, etc.  So I decided I was going to have cork tiles on my wall to pin stuff to.  This is one of them.

 

04/27/07, 4:10pm, and a few went on the door as well.

 

Yes, it started out looking like a pantry with all the food I had.  But some of those have been consumed and others found a home in the next room, so this area doesn’t look like this anymore now.  Now it has acrylic paint, assorted spray cans, and still a bit of food…just not ALL food anymore.

 

Also I started moving my clothes.  Tops on top and pants on the bottom, of course.   But about half of this is gone now, given away because I realized I had entirely too many clothes.

 

My crowded closet.

 

Whoops, looks like I still am missing the 4th shelving unit.  I guess I just moved the third to make room for the 4th.  I put my mirror up on the side there.

 

More cork tiles, now by the bookcases.

 

These are actually mat board samples.  The size of the picture doesn’t allow us to see the details.  The top ones are just designs cut into them, the bottom ones: 1st one says “Knock”, 2nd one says “hush”, 3rd says “IQ=shoe size, no entry”, 4th says “rant-free”, 5th “+ vibes only” and 6th, “No cats” with the “C” looking like the face of the cat.

 

04/28/07, 4:40pm, it’s a pity the bottom left one can’t be seen too clearly because the flash reflects on the gold.  It’s in gold because that’s the golden rule of this room…Knock.  These things are on the outer side of the door.  And I’d added 2 more here, top right says “(sagittarius sign) rules” and the bottom one says “so…where are your dirty dishes/science projects?”  By now though, the ones with no words on them (first 6 on top) have moved to a corkboard inside the room and I only have the 8 with messages on them left on the door…just so the more simple-minded folks don’t get too flustered.

 

I bought myself a dressform my size.  I intend to learn to make some thing I can wear.  I am aiming for a costume for Renaissance Festival although what year I’ll actually have it done, I don’t know yet.

 

I bought another computer desk identical to one I already had.  I needed something with height and wheels so they don’t take up much space and I can stack things on them…and I can wheel them around, DUH!

 

04/29/07, 2:24pm, and here’s the old one next to the new one.  I have my laptop set up on the new one, and my other stuff on the old one.  All I needed at this point is a new desktop PC to replace the one that died.

 

With buying digicams and tripods online I got free prints.  First one is of my baby Rosie, 2nd is of DH with Blair, and 3rd is of a bunch of peach roses I bought at the grocery and laid on the snow to take pictures of.  I wish I had enough wall to put my pictures on.

 

I took this picture 3 days ago…which doesn’t really tell us anything, since I must have had that hung for a week before I realized I didn’t have pictures of it.  I have 2 of these drapes, one for each window.  I had intended for these curtains to be light, they’re made of osnaburg, some kind of muslin, and some lace that I had laying around.  I had curtain liners I had intended to use with the roman shades I was going to make.  But I thought, you don’t want heavy stuff on the front part of the double curtain rods…heavier loads where there’s more support, right?  So the curtains got the liners.  And I still haven’t made the roman shades.

 

And this is how my computer area looks now.  Pretty messy…well, what did you expect.  On the left you see a bright blue monster-sized unit…that’s my desktop PC and it’s darn heavy.  I almost dropped it getting it to where it is now.  It had to be facing sideways because it would protrude too much facing front.  I got my subwoofer on the top shelf on the left, with my external drives.  My monitor is on the right desk with the keyboard a nd the tablet, and my CD albums on the top shelf.  I got my printers on the bottom shelves…and my speakers all around…white ones for the laptop on the left, black ones for the desktop.  I turn the bass up when I’m getting bass from downstairs.  Can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em.

 

05/08/07, 3:03pm, this is the height of laziness.  I bought curtain rods for my closet because, I’m sure you noticed, there are no doors.  I didn’t really feel like sewing curtains though.  Like I said, those woven panels that went on the closet of the other room was for THIS room.  So…I had some white and blue tulle laying around…I eyeballed it, cut them so I can drape both white and blue together over the curtain rod and back down again.  That’s 4 layers of tulle there.  I had to trim off a foot, I overestimated it when I eyeballed the height.  DH saw it, said it was “fou fou” or fancypants.  So I looked at it and didn’t think it was “fou fou”.  Just so he can say he was right, I cut more tulle and put them on top of the curtains…NOW it’s fou fou.

 

This without the lights on in the closet.

 

Well, this room is still a work in progress.  There are the roman shades to be made, the wooden words that were supposed to go on the “mouldings” where they join.  I have “Peace”, “Dream”, “Create”, “Smile” and “Relax”.  Fitting words, I thought, for my sanctuary.  I’ll get to that sometime.  And maybe I’ll take pictures of those…or maybe not.  We’ll see how lazy I get.

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