Spackle & Sawdust

With the days of (relative) sanity in our home rapidly coming to an end — the impending birth of our third child — I was eager to finish his bedroom. For our first child, I pulled out all the stops. With no children in the home, time was a commodity we had in spades. When our son was born less than a year later, I settled on a “Flying Ace” theme with a much simpler build process — primarily a rather simple painted mural. For this child, I was determined to see the design through a bit more fully than I had for Sean’s room. But what to do?

Credit where due

After a few discussions we settled on a “circus” theme. Before I even began the design process, my lovely wife pointed me to the Pottery Barn Kids site’s “Circus Friends Theme” — perfect. It consisted of a simple paint process and some decorative elements. I’ve never been a big fan of painting, so the simple stripes easily executed with masking tape and rollers was very appealing. My (very talented) sister in law was generous enough to stop by and handle the freehand curves for me. After a week of evenings, the painting was complete.

Accessorize

I’ve always loved IKEA. I fondly recall my first visit, spending a few hours wandering around the labyrinth of room settings, finding a new bargain room accessory or kitchen implement around every corner. I took this first trip without two toddlers.

The dresser project at LumberJocks

On Sunday we packed up the kids in the car and set out to accessorize the new baby’s room. Mostly they were very good. Annalise typically didn’t stray very far, but after an hour of shopping, Sean was done. In spite of this, I believe we managed to find some really interesting and appropriate pieces for the room, including draperies, a super mod/hip/colorful desk lamp for the dresser, and some inexpensive paint-able frames for the PBK matching circus prints my folks gifted the new baby. I also found the time (thanks, honey!) to build a room-length 6″ ledge for the far wall and enlisted Aunt Kathy and Kaelin to assist with hauling his new cherry and walnut dresser into the room.

Pictures, please!

The small size of the room made it difficult to capture much of the it in any single frame, but I’ve attempted to show as much as possible. I’m very pleased with the result and hope our new son finds it inviting — and, if we’re incredibly lucky — sleep-inducing!

Budget ceiling fan from HD with reversable, reb/blue blades

Prints from Pottery Barn Kids (thanks, Mom and Dad!)

Groovy lamp and cherry/walnut dresser

I had higher hopes for the finished room — some custom cabinetry and perhaps some painted details — but in the end, I settled for “neat, organized and finished.” On a friend’s suggestion I hacked off the lower two cabinets from an old built-in desk unit that was in the basement (and before that in the previous homeowner’s kitchen) and mounted it at counter height along the back wall to act as a planting station for my wife. I bought a Rubbermaid hanging organizer system for the side walls, which worked out fairly well. Overall, it’s nothing terribly special, but it’s functional, organized and clean. Here’s a before/after picture set:

Before

After:

I’m nearly done with the initial design phase of the basement remodel and hope to begin blogging about that in the very near future.

This past weekend, Mother’s Day weekend, I gave my wife what every mother wants: a silver “mother and family” necklace and a freshly-painted garage!

Mixology

Originally I was planning on heading out to HD and buying a gallon or so of “oops” paint (ya know, the stuff that they mix by mistake and sell dirt cheap) for the walls. But then, a woodworker/remodeller friend of mine suggested a better approach. He keeps a 5 gallon bucket that he uses for all of his left over paint. When he has paint that he no longer needs, he just dumps it in the bucket and uses the mixture to paint non-critical areas — like his garage walls. What a great idea! It also just so happens that I had a dozen or so paint cans of mainly light, neutral-color paint left over from the previous homeowner. Since all of the rooms that used this paint have since been repainted, there was certainly no problem with disposing of the stuff in this manner. I also had just emptied my 5 gallon bucket of “ceiling white” repainting the garage ceiling. So, off goes the bucket cover and in goes the hodge-podge of leftover latex — numerous brands, sheens and colors. The end result — the perfect shade of beige/tan. It was honestly about as close to the color I had in mine as I could have gotten. What luck.

Floored, Redux!

The floors were next. We purchased the house nearly 5 years ago. The original homeowners had taken very good care of the place, including painting the garage floor a lovely shade of battleship grey. Unfortunately, by the time we got it, it had seen better days. About 4 years ago I rented a floor sander, stripped it down and applied a coat of Rust-Oleum’s Garage Epoxy. This looked nice, but I chose a bad time for doing the job. The epoxy pot times vary based on air temp…and the outdoor temperature that day soared to over 80 degrees. This resulted in a rather short pot time — which I exceeded. I found myself running low on usable paint by the end of the second bay. This resulted in pretty poor adhesion in spots.

To prepare for the fresh coat, rather than take the time and money to rent another sander, I decided to use my belt sander on my hands and knees and some 60 grit belts. This worked pretty well (and didn’t hurt nearly as much as I had feared!) And this time, I paid a bit more attention to the kit directions. The weather on Saturday was perfect - it stayed in the 60’s all afternoon. This meant a total 2-hour pot time…plenty of time to finish the job. Some of the spots where the previous coat was removed more completely soaked up the new layer a bit more, resulting in some lower-sheen areas. However, overall I think it looks terrific.

Dressin’ Up the Joint

Finally, I installed a motion-sensitive light switch for convenience, an Insteon-enabled switch for the outdoor lights added to my dusk/dawn timer routine, and replaced the wall plates and the old, dusty GFCI outlet with a new model. I dressed up the window by installing some inexpensive faux-wood blinds.

Hiatus…

Next up, I’ll be moving the refrigerator down off the shop steps and back onto the floor…and then putting this project on hold for a bit so I can move on to the basement remodel. We’ll be turning our basement into a kid’s playroom with a Broadway/”Peter Pan” theme, which I’ll naturally blog about here.

After that’s done I expect to turn back to the garage and put up some cabinets and work surfaces.

Now that the shop is pretty much complete and the weather’s turned a bit more spring-like, I’ve decided to tackle the garage. Since I no longer need it for woodworking, save the odd large-piece assembly, we’re going to revert the space back to a more traditional use: car, bike and outdoor-kid-toy-storage. In addition, we’ll be adding a workspace and storage for gardening tools andn supplies. I also plan to repaint the floor…hopefully this time it’ll last a bit longer without the heavy tools and constant traffic from woodworking. Here are the before shots:

You can see the old lumber rack on the right-hand side. This is being replaced with something a bit more compact and likely moved to the other side.

This weekend I’ve managed to clean out the clutter and apply the first layer of joint compound to patch the myriad holes and nicks in the drywall.

As for my “scrap wood” pile: the DuPage Children’s Museum is a great place for kids — our 1 and 2-year-old really love it there — and they have a spot for wood donations. As I had piles of hardwood and 2×4 cut-offs that I really didn’t want to store in a corner somewhere during the remodel, I ran these over to their donation bin. Much better than tossing it out!

Next up: painting the ceiling, walls and floor!

Over the long holiday weekend I only managed to sneak in roughly a day and a half of work on the shop. Between Friday afternoon and Saturday I secured the base cabinets, assembled the “floating” top for the DeWalt 706 miter saw, and built the three countertops. Not too bad considering the time.