On to the fun part

Our heavily unused second bedroom on the second floor has undergone a bit of a makeover over the last few weeks. It started out as a playroom for the cats, complete with a shredded cat tree. Then, when Justin and I put the king-sized bed in our bedroom, we relocated our queen bed into this room and got rid of the mishmash of cat and craft and couch. But the room lacked trim and the closet was missing doors and an organization scheme. Now it has trim, new paint and a snazzy closet. We put the finishing touches on the paint this weekend and moved all of the furnishings back into the room today, freeing the hallway from the jumble.

Here is the closet, complete with our bargain bi-folds and a homemade closet system.

We have a table for sewing and crafts on the left side of the closet that I'm hoping to put to use soon for curtain and pillow making.

Here's a rare shot of me working. Seriously, I do stuff but I'm also the historian so I'm usually the one behind the camera capturing the moment.

I didn't get any action shots of us painting the walls but the room is small enough that the paint went on pretty quickly and we were done in a day. We've switched to Rodda paint from Valspar, mostly because I had a 2-for-1 coupon at Rodda. But after using it in the master bedroom, I was pleased enough with the coverage to go back. It's a little spendy (~$45/gal) without the coupon but very affordable at 1/2 price.

Here's the room all painted out and put back together:

From a different angle:

So, now we are onto the fun part of picking out some curtains and a duvet and some colorful accents. I think I am going to go with a dark blue and purple. The walls are a light gray that leans to the blue side of the spectrum. I had thought the walls would dry a little lighter but you get what you get. I like it though. I think it will make the room look brighter which is important since that window faces north. We're unlikely to have the blinds open much since the view is the house next door with its peeling paint and other maintenance issues.

Voila

Justin and I have been hard at work, starting projects left and right. But all of this work has left precious little time for blogging so it's time to play catch up.

First, check out a finished project:

We made the bed...no really, we made the frame and headboard. I just couldn't bear the price of an upholstered bed from the store when the materials to DIY the bed were less than $200. So the bedroom is looking a little on the gray side but at some point I'm going to find some red and orange accents to liven the room up a bit.

So, how did we do it? The headboard is a separate piece and is actually mounted on the wall with french cleats. It was pretty easy...we cut a 3/8" piece of plywood and used a frame of 2x2s to shore up the plywood and give it some structure. Then we glued a piece of 2" foam to the front of the plywood and covered the foam and plywood with batting. We fastened the batting to the frame with staples, making sure that the batting was smooth. Finally, we covered the batting with the upholstery fabric, pulling the sides taut and stapling the selvage to the backside. For the bed frame, we cut 3/4" plywood 7.5" wide and to the lengths of the boxspring. We mounted 2x4s to two of the plywood strips to form and "L", giving a shelf for one side of the boxspring to rest on. Then we screwed the plywood strips together to form a box. Next, we added one 2x4 piece in the center of the box to hold up the boxspring (we have a king bed so there are actually 2 twin-size boxsprings). Finally, we attached furniture feet to the box to give it a little height off the ground and a finished look. There are 7 feet on this bed, one on each corner and three attached to the 2x4 in the center. I ordered the furniture feet online. And lastly, we upholstered the frame just like the headboard, except skipping the foam layer.

So, what else have we been up to? Check out those nightstands in the photo. That was another lengthy project. We sanded off the finish from two nightstands that I picked up from craigslist and painted and stained the bare wood to make them look like new. The feet are painted black and the rest of the box is stained a medium-dark finish. This was a lot of work. The sanding was tedious (and because we couldn't easily get all of the nooks and crannies, I decided to paint part of it). The painting took 2 coats + a coat of primer and the staining was a bit of a disaster. Let me warn everyone that you never want to buy the staining product that has stain and polyurethane all in one. It is a sloppy mess. The sheen was inconsistent and the color was streaky. I ended up settling with the streaky finish and going over the whole kit'n'caboodle with clear polyurethane for 3 coats. Luckily, polyurethane goes on and finishes like a dream.

So, there's my $300 of used and homemade bedroom furniture. I hadn't exactly planned to do this so much on the cheap but sometimes it just works out like that.

In other news, we finally have a bathroom door (upstairs). In fact, we have doors for all of the bedrooms and a few closets too now. Justin and I painted 7 doors over the last few weeks and have 3 of 7 hanging in their final home. We still need to attach the doorknobs and other hardware as well as figure out the strategy for hanging the other 4 doors (these require us to mortise out the frames for the hinges.)

At long last....Privacy!

Ahem...

What was that all about? Well, we've been busy redesigning the bedroom.

Check out our new paint color: Pussy Willow, by Rodda.

Justin rolled the field and I did all of the cutting in "by hand"...a true team effort. But wait, there's more: we built our own headboard too! I'll get a photo up in a few days once we have the darn thing mounted. Our new king-sized bed is coming on Tuesday.