A post dedicated entirely to my workshop. ahem... what room did you THINK I was talking about? tsk tsk! This is another LONNNNNNG post, so get comfy!
My craft room was like the game room when we moved in... a mish mash of leftover furniture intended to temporarily do the trick. To store most of my supplies, I was re-using 2 ikea bookshelves that have already served their 9 lives over 3 houses and are still going strong. They started out as the shelving units flanking our tv stand in our old family room (2 houses ago), but one of my many decorating shortcomings is accessorizing shelves, lots and lots of shelves! So once we moved stuff around with our first Christmas, those shelves never came back into the room. One went into a coat closet for extra storage, and one was refinished for the nugget's baby nursery. He no longer needs it in his new room, so the pair of book cases were back together at last to hold my paints, stains, upholstery tools, etc. I stuffed all my fabric into the tall chest that was once part of our old bedroom set (its matching nightstands were refinished and are in the guest bedroom, and its matching dresser was refinished in green and is being used as our tv stand in the living room! I did pick up a new-to-me double dropleaf table on craigslist for $80 so I can push it against the wall when I need more floor space, or I can put up one or both leaves (leafs??) when I need more table space! I had our old kitchen tv sitting on top of the dresser, and I rigged up a cheap shoe rack to store my ribbon out of sight in the walk-in closet.
Here's what the room looked like on any given day BEFORE:
Sadly, this doesn't represent the room at its worst. Like I said, this room was a mish mash, but it made good use of furniture I already had that wasn't being used elsewhere. But, I ran out of space to store everything, so random piles started emerging first in the corners, and then on the work spaces on tables, sink ledge, etc. The first things you had to dodge as you entered the room were stacked up rows of gallon sized paint cans.
Then October rolled around, and I got this insane itch to create. I crafted like a maniac to get the house how I wanted it for Christmas. I had bruised and bloodied hands, broken nails, and more paint splattered clothes than I'd like to admit. The house looked really pretty though!! Through all of that, though, this poor little craft room barely survived what I put it through. I'm not complaining, because I totally realize what a blessing it is for someone like me (a craft nerd that's not playing with a full deck) to have a dedicated space for my hobbies--with a tv and sink, no less! But, that said, it's a relatively small footprint with a large window, large double closet door entry, and a sink that limit how I can lay out the space to work, store stuff, and still get from one side of the room to the other, especially when I usually need a large table set up in the middle of it. It's even hard to photograph. In the past, I never attempted to store all my craft supplies, tools etc in one place. It was usually in storage boxes in various places throughout the house. All our paint was on a dedicated ledge in the garage etc. So I didn't realize how quickly it would add up keeping it all in once place!
I had almost 2 weeks off at the end of December that I had to use or lose, so after Christmas, we started making over my dreamy little workshop to help it live up to its full potential.
LIGHTING
Storage was the biggest issue, and the room couldn't get any bigger, so I decided to go UP! I have 10 foot ceilings in there, but the bookshelves were only about 6' tall, so there was 4' of wasted opportunity. However, I had a track light system on the storage wall that had to come down first. We arbitrarily picked a spot for that fixture when we were building because I had no idea how I was going to layout the room at the time. Luckily, I got the most awesome random Christmas present from mom and dad this year! It's a high intensity work light that's on wheels, with a snake-like neck, that throws off no heat! I so needed this and didn't even know it existed! So we took the wall fixture down and didn't worry about re-locating it. That was an easy electrical project.
WALL-MOUNTING THE TV
The next electrical project was not difficult, but as with most projects Brent and I tackle on the house, we ran into a few complications. We wanted to wall mount the tv, but the outlet and cable were down closer to the floor in the typical location so we had to tie off that outlet and run wire up to put a new outlet behind where the tv would be. The issue is we've got an intense amount of insulation on this exterior wall. So we went and bought electrical fishing rods at Home Depot. They came in a set of 3 and screw together to create a few different lengths. They're "flexible" but not as flexible as fishing tape, which we were afraid was not tough enough to snake its way through all the insulation. However, these rods we got were too stiff to make the tight turn so close to the floor and 90 degrees up the wall. So instead, we had to run the rod down, line it up with the 1/2" hole in the electrical box by trial and error, hook the wire on and pulled it back up. Once we figured it out, it was simple, but we said a lot of bad words and our hands and arms took some good licks in the process. The tv mount was extremely simple. These gadgets keep getting better and better.
STORAGE, STORAGE, and STORAGE
Once the tv was on the wall and out of the way, I emptied all the drawers and shelves and got the old furniture out. That alone was a huge undertaking. While I did that, Brent started assembling the first two medium sized Kallax storage cube units. The Kallax replaced the ever-popular Expedit units in the past year or so for those of you less intimately familiar with the Ikea lineup. This room is almost exclusively put together with Ikea products by the way. :) They stand just a smidge under 5' tall, so we stacked them on top of each other for storage floor to ceiling and mounted to the wall for safety. The medium sized units are 2 cubes wide, and it was challenging to lift the second assembled unit on top of the first unit. The large units are 4 cubes wide so we didn't stand a chance of lifting that one! Instead we brought the first base unit in and then assembled the top unit in place on a ladder. See previous note about ALWAYS finding complexities and challenges along the way. We made a couple mistakes in wall mounting for safety but after sleeping on it I decided to let it be rather than adjusting it. It's safe - but the top left unit overhangs the lower unit by a little bit, and the top right unit is snugged up by the stud in the corner which makes it not flush with the top left unit. I don't even notice it anymore, but I was tired and cranky when we finished and its imperfection was draining at the time.
On the top of our pile of mail I sorted on Christmas day, there was a direct mail piece from The Container Store advertising their annual Elfa 30% off sale! Cue choir of angels singing! I had been stalking the Elfa wall and door pantry rack for a while, but it was pricey so the timing was just perfect for it to go on sale! I customized 2 of these racks for the inside of the storage closet doors to keep ribbon, wrapping paper, and craft paints organized and out of sight! Since we moved, my craft paints were in a cardboard box with only the white caps visible, so I had to pick up about 100 bottles before finding the color I was looking for, not knowing if I even owned the color I was looking for. :)
Mom and I had a lot of fun shopping for little organizer bits and pieces and I quickly found a cube for all of my supplies, leaving only my fabric to be sorted. I scoured Pinterest for ideas on organizing fabric, and most of the ideas are for quilters who have large collections of small amounts of fabric of the same type and width, but I decided to give their techniques a shot anyway and picked up a stack of 100 magazine size (8-3/8" x 11") comic book storage boards. They're sheets of white cardboard with an archival coating so it won't mess with the fabric dyes over time. I folded most of my fabrics, regardless of the width, selvedge to selvedge, and then either folded it in half or folded it to make an 11" piece, and then starting at the end, rolled the fabric onto the board and pinned it. It's like making a mini 11" fabric bolt. That took me an entire night to fold and roll all my fabrics, and I got to see fabrics that had been hiding from sight for a long time! I love being able to see them all, even though they're out of reach. LOVE LOVE LOVE all my storage!
Speaking of storage, I decided I needed a cabinet above the utility sink to store stuff that a) I use near the sink, and b) should be high enough away from hands of my tiny people (mineral spirits, TSP etc). I picked up an unfinished oak wall cabinet from Home Depot cheap when in-stock cabinets went on sale. **Please pardon this brief interruption for a soapbox rant to the hardware industry: You and your new zinc screws suck. Can you please make some screws that are not merely zinc covered play-doh? You know, screws with heads that don't get stripped if the wind is blowing the wrong way. And, if it's not too much to ask, which I suspect it is, maybe some cabinet screws that don't snap with the weight of a mere 24" cabinet? We are NOT novices with a drill! Thanks much! **Rant over. Yeah, we had to use deckmate composite screws to hang it because the wood cabinet screws literally snapped off in the wall not once but twice. Again, please see note about complexities and challenges in home improvement projects! If I had a nickel for every time I knocked my dry paper towel roll from the sink edge into a wet sink, I could afford to remodel this room 3 times over. :) So we hung the cabinet 4" higher than standard to give ample room for a paper towel hanger. That paper towel hanger and the commercial wall-mounted dispenser for my Dawn detergent is life changing!
I used leftover lavender paint on the cabinet-it was actually a paint sample reject for the dining room buffet...and then mint, and white and gray and more lavender and it's the perfect mess of layers!
CURTAINS
I shopped around local stores, and I shopped online and there wasn't a single home dec fabric I felt worthy of my new room. Of all the beautiful fabrics in the world, I couldn't commit to a single one! Either it speaks to the reverence I already had for this room, or it supports my mom's claims that I never do things the easy way. Maybe both?
Eventually, I decided the window really needed a more boho look, so with my brand-spanking new sewing machine I got for Christmas (thanks honey!!) it became my first project in the new space. I've never made a quilt before, so obviously, I should start by making two 120" patchwork quilted window treatments! In one sense it's easier because there's no batting and they only need to look good hanging (one-sided). On the other hand, it was about 4x as many patches of fabric to cut and stitch v. a typical baby quilt, which a mentally healthy person would start with for her first quilting project.
I'd never shopped for quilting fabrics before and was oddly nervous, but I thought I did pretty well on my first trip especially considering I shopped at 2 different stores and managed to find really nicely coordinating colors. However, as I started laying it out, I realized it was too matchy matchy. Originally, all the fabrics were mint, lilac, gray, and periwinkle. I pulled a solid pale pink from my stash on the top shelves and went and bought 2 more fabrics with pink in them. One of them was my "ugly" fabric that didn't really match, yet had just enough in common with the others to work. In my new-to-quilting research I learned an ugly-mismatch is often just what you need to jazz it up! Otherwise I wouldn't have even picked that fabric up at the store, let alone bring it home! And it was exactly what the original fabrics needed!!! Here's what a single panel looks like laid out on my 10' long kitchen island. It's an intense amount of fabric for a first time quilter!
It was a lot of ironing, squaring, cutting, pinning and sewing, but I kind of enjoyed it! Hanging them was a trip, as usual. The window is up against the adjacent wall, and I didn't want the right panel to block any of the window, so I bought a corner connector to hang most of the right panel on the adjacent wall and just come right up to the window opening. I had to buy a 28" rod and use a hacksaw to trim it down so it wasn't excessively long on that adjacent wall. It sounds crazy but wasn't hard.
WORK TABLE
I decided I don't have another use for the Craigslist drop-leaf table I already own and am still on my "keep-furniture-out-of-landfills" kick, so I just painted it and decided it's perfectly fine (for now.) I went with a soft mint because white (and various shades) is probably the paint color I use most often, and I kind of wanted to see the remnants of all my projects build up over time on the table. I realize that's probably very strange for a control freak, but it's true! So white will leave its mark on the soft mint color. I'll probably cover the table if I'm painting with a heinous primary color. It's already got flakes of pink from the next paragraph.
NEW SEAT
My new chair, also from Ikea, comes in lots of pretty colors, but none of them are available right after the holidays. Based on inventory levels, my guess is that every teenager in the DFW metroplex got bedroom makeovers for Christmas this year! :) So I got a blank one. Normal people would call it white. I call it a blank base that's ready for my spray paint color of choice. In this case, ballet slipper pink, because it's MY happy place and a ballet slipper pink chair makes me happy.
On the flipside, the process of getting this thing ballet slipper pink did NOT make me happy. I used a spraypaint that claims to stick to "most plastics." It was Krylon. Friends, polypropylene is not "most plastics." I didn't bother looking up the actual material composition before jumping right into spraying it (the first time). After that first attempt dried I didn't even get it attached to the frame before the paint started flaking off in random patches. *sigh* Then I decided I'd use primer made exclusively for plastic plus paint made exclusively for that plastic primer. These were made by Valspar. Before spraying both I sanded the whole chair and gave it a good wipe down. There were a couple bare spots where paint had flaked off, but even after sanding the rest of the chair, most of the original paint remained. The second pink was not nearly as pretty as the first can. That didn't matter though because after about a week of use, this too flaked off like it was this chair's mission to reject pink like a sorority-mocking tomboy. There is no pink-hating allowed in my household! That's when I decided I wasn't taking any more crap from this chair. So I manually scraped every last flake of paint off of it right down to the white polypropylene! However, there were a couple spots where I couldn't get it off. Do you want to guess where? Yes indeed! The bare spots where the plastic primer was able to adhere directly to the plastic instead of adhering to the first coat of spray paint. So perhaps this specialty plastic spray paint would have worked if I used it from the beginning. My bad! Nonetheless, for round 3 I was taking no chances. After scraping off all the paint, scrubbing it with tri-sodium phosphate, letting it soak in sudsy water in the utility sink and then thoroughly drying, I sprayed it with automotive flexible adhesion promoter. It's what they use to get paint to stick to plastic autobody parts! Take that, chair!! Then, the problem was that this adhesion promoter spray caused the remaining pink paint to lift and bubble where it had originally adhered well. So I had to go back and scrape all that off, clean it etc etc. I got it painted and once that dried, I could see how badly I gouged the plastic when scraping and sanding off the paint. So, I went back to Ikea, and bought another shell for $9.99. DUH! This time starting from scratch I cleaned it, sprayed it with adhesion promoter, and then hit it with the prettier (original) ballet slipper pink by Krylon. I win. Don't you want one in this shade now? :)
The final touch is more function than form, but that shouldn't keep it from ruining the aesthetic of the room, right? On my tippy toes I can reach the top cubes of my storage with a step stool (2 steps). But I can reach a lot easier and with more precision with a taller ladder. And it's nice to have a ladder inside the house for odd jobs without lugging it in from the garage. That said, it was flaming construction yellow and dirty, which simply wouldn't do. So it got a little exfoliation treatment and some paint. By exfoliation, I mean I scraped off all the stickers with diagrams of crash test dummies in idiotic positions that are illegal to remove by order of OSHA. So I hope I don't forget that I shouldn't climb to the top while holding an aluminum rod in a lightning storm! I primed the fiberglass with BIN primer and used leftover "celestial blue" SW paint and spray painted all the metal parts with glossy Rustoleum white. Now it lives a life of luxury in my craft room... total upgrade from the garage!!
But you don't care about any of this, do you? You just want to see the finished room. Ok, here you go!
ELFA STORAGE on backside of closet doors:
STORAGE WALL:
I love this before and after shot side by side:
My craft room was like the game room when we moved in... a mish mash of leftover furniture intended to temporarily do the trick. To store most of my supplies, I was re-using 2 ikea bookshelves that have already served their 9 lives over 3 houses and are still going strong. They started out as the shelving units flanking our tv stand in our old family room (2 houses ago), but one of my many decorating shortcomings is accessorizing shelves, lots and lots of shelves! So once we moved stuff around with our first Christmas, those shelves never came back into the room. One went into a coat closet for extra storage, and one was refinished for the nugget's baby nursery. He no longer needs it in his new room, so the pair of book cases were back together at last to hold my paints, stains, upholstery tools, etc. I stuffed all my fabric into the tall chest that was once part of our old bedroom set (its matching nightstands were refinished and are in the guest bedroom, and its matching dresser was refinished in green and is being used as our tv stand in the living room! I did pick up a new-to-me double dropleaf table on craigslist for $80 so I can push it against the wall when I need more floor space, or I can put up one or both leaves (leafs??) when I need more table space! I had our old kitchen tv sitting on top of the dresser, and I rigged up a cheap shoe rack to store my ribbon out of sight in the walk-in closet.
Here's what the room looked like on any given day BEFORE:
Sadly, this doesn't represent the room at its worst. Like I said, this room was a mish mash, but it made good use of furniture I already had that wasn't being used elsewhere. But, I ran out of space to store everything, so random piles started emerging first in the corners, and then on the work spaces on tables, sink ledge, etc. The first things you had to dodge as you entered the room were stacked up rows of gallon sized paint cans.
Then October rolled around, and I got this insane itch to create. I crafted like a maniac to get the house how I wanted it for Christmas. I had bruised and bloodied hands, broken nails, and more paint splattered clothes than I'd like to admit. The house looked really pretty though!! Through all of that, though, this poor little craft room barely survived what I put it through. I'm not complaining, because I totally realize what a blessing it is for someone like me (a craft nerd that's not playing with a full deck) to have a dedicated space for my hobbies--with a tv and sink, no less! But, that said, it's a relatively small footprint with a large window, large double closet door entry, and a sink that limit how I can lay out the space to work, store stuff, and still get from one side of the room to the other, especially when I usually need a large table set up in the middle of it. It's even hard to photograph. In the past, I never attempted to store all my craft supplies, tools etc in one place. It was usually in storage boxes in various places throughout the house. All our paint was on a dedicated ledge in the garage etc. So I didn't realize how quickly it would add up keeping it all in once place!
I had almost 2 weeks off at the end of December that I had to use or lose, so after Christmas, we started making over my dreamy little workshop to help it live up to its full potential.
LIGHTING
Storage was the biggest issue, and the room couldn't get any bigger, so I decided to go UP! I have 10 foot ceilings in there, but the bookshelves were only about 6' tall, so there was 4' of wasted opportunity. However, I had a track light system on the storage wall that had to come down first. We arbitrarily picked a spot for that fixture when we were building because I had no idea how I was going to layout the room at the time. Luckily, I got the most awesome random Christmas present from mom and dad this year! It's a high intensity work light that's on wheels, with a snake-like neck, that throws off no heat! I so needed this and didn't even know it existed! So we took the wall fixture down and didn't worry about re-locating it. That was an easy electrical project.
WALL-MOUNTING THE TV
The next electrical project was not difficult, but as with most projects Brent and I tackle on the house, we ran into a few complications. We wanted to wall mount the tv, but the outlet and cable were down closer to the floor in the typical location so we had to tie off that outlet and run wire up to put a new outlet behind where the tv would be. The issue is we've got an intense amount of insulation on this exterior wall. So we went and bought electrical fishing rods at Home Depot. They came in a set of 3 and screw together to create a few different lengths. They're "flexible" but not as flexible as fishing tape, which we were afraid was not tough enough to snake its way through all the insulation. However, these rods we got were too stiff to make the tight turn so close to the floor and 90 degrees up the wall. So instead, we had to run the rod down, line it up with the 1/2" hole in the electrical box by trial and error, hook the wire on and pulled it back up. Once we figured it out, it was simple, but we said a lot of bad words and our hands and arms took some good licks in the process. The tv mount was extremely simple. These gadgets keep getting better and better.
STORAGE, STORAGE, and STORAGE
Once the tv was on the wall and out of the way, I emptied all the drawers and shelves and got the old furniture out. That alone was a huge undertaking. While I did that, Brent started assembling the first two medium sized Kallax storage cube units. The Kallax replaced the ever-popular Expedit units in the past year or so for those of you less intimately familiar with the Ikea lineup. This room is almost exclusively put together with Ikea products by the way. :) They stand just a smidge under 5' tall, so we stacked them on top of each other for storage floor to ceiling and mounted to the wall for safety. The medium sized units are 2 cubes wide, and it was challenging to lift the second assembled unit on top of the first unit. The large units are 4 cubes wide so we didn't stand a chance of lifting that one! Instead we brought the first base unit in and then assembled the top unit in place on a ladder. See previous note about ALWAYS finding complexities and challenges along the way. We made a couple mistakes in wall mounting for safety but after sleeping on it I decided to let it be rather than adjusting it. It's safe - but the top left unit overhangs the lower unit by a little bit, and the top right unit is snugged up by the stud in the corner which makes it not flush with the top left unit. I don't even notice it anymore, but I was tired and cranky when we finished and its imperfection was draining at the time.
On the top of our pile of mail I sorted on Christmas day, there was a direct mail piece from The Container Store advertising their annual Elfa 30% off sale! Cue choir of angels singing! I had been stalking the Elfa wall and door pantry rack for a while, but it was pricey so the timing was just perfect for it to go on sale! I customized 2 of these racks for the inside of the storage closet doors to keep ribbon, wrapping paper, and craft paints organized and out of sight! Since we moved, my craft paints were in a cardboard box with only the white caps visible, so I had to pick up about 100 bottles before finding the color I was looking for, not knowing if I even owned the color I was looking for. :)
Mom and I had a lot of fun shopping for little organizer bits and pieces and I quickly found a cube for all of my supplies, leaving only my fabric to be sorted. I scoured Pinterest for ideas on organizing fabric, and most of the ideas are for quilters who have large collections of small amounts of fabric of the same type and width, but I decided to give their techniques a shot anyway and picked up a stack of 100 magazine size (8-3/8" x 11") comic book storage boards. They're sheets of white cardboard with an archival coating so it won't mess with the fabric dyes over time. I folded most of my fabrics, regardless of the width, selvedge to selvedge, and then either folded it in half or folded it to make an 11" piece, and then starting at the end, rolled the fabric onto the board and pinned it. It's like making a mini 11" fabric bolt. That took me an entire night to fold and roll all my fabrics, and I got to see fabrics that had been hiding from sight for a long time! I love being able to see them all, even though they're out of reach. LOVE LOVE LOVE all my storage!
Speaking of storage, I decided I needed a cabinet above the utility sink to store stuff that a) I use near the sink, and b) should be high enough away from hands of my tiny people (mineral spirits, TSP etc). I picked up an unfinished oak wall cabinet from Home Depot cheap when in-stock cabinets went on sale. **Please pardon this brief interruption for a soapbox rant to the hardware industry: You and your new zinc screws suck. Can you please make some screws that are not merely zinc covered play-doh? You know, screws with heads that don't get stripped if the wind is blowing the wrong way. And, if it's not too much to ask, which I suspect it is, maybe some cabinet screws that don't snap with the weight of a mere 24" cabinet? We are NOT novices with a drill! Thanks much! **Rant over. Yeah, we had to use deckmate composite screws to hang it because the wood cabinet screws literally snapped off in the wall not once but twice. Again, please see note about complexities and challenges in home improvement projects! If I had a nickel for every time I knocked my dry paper towel roll from the sink edge into a wet sink, I could afford to remodel this room 3 times over. :) So we hung the cabinet 4" higher than standard to give ample room for a paper towel hanger. That paper towel hanger and the commercial wall-mounted dispenser for my Dawn detergent is life changing!
I used leftover lavender paint on the cabinet-it was actually a paint sample reject for the dining room buffet...and then mint, and white and gray and more lavender and it's the perfect mess of layers!
CURTAINS
I shopped around local stores, and I shopped online and there wasn't a single home dec fabric I felt worthy of my new room. Of all the beautiful fabrics in the world, I couldn't commit to a single one! Either it speaks to the reverence I already had for this room, or it supports my mom's claims that I never do things the easy way. Maybe both?
Eventually, I decided the window really needed a more boho look, so with my brand-spanking new sewing machine I got for Christmas (thanks honey!!) it became my first project in the new space. I've never made a quilt before, so obviously, I should start by making two 120" patchwork quilted window treatments! In one sense it's easier because there's no batting and they only need to look good hanging (one-sided). On the other hand, it was about 4x as many patches of fabric to cut and stitch v. a typical baby quilt, which a mentally healthy person would start with for her first quilting project.
I'd never shopped for quilting fabrics before and was oddly nervous, but I thought I did pretty well on my first trip especially considering I shopped at 2 different stores and managed to find really nicely coordinating colors. However, as I started laying it out, I realized it was too matchy matchy. Originally, all the fabrics were mint, lilac, gray, and periwinkle. I pulled a solid pale pink from my stash on the top shelves and went and bought 2 more fabrics with pink in them. One of them was my "ugly" fabric that didn't really match, yet had just enough in common with the others to work. In my new-to-quilting research I learned an ugly-mismatch is often just what you need to jazz it up! Otherwise I wouldn't have even picked that fabric up at the store, let alone bring it home! And it was exactly what the original fabrics needed!!! Here's what a single panel looks like laid out on my 10' long kitchen island. It's an intense amount of fabric for a first time quilter!
It was a lot of ironing, squaring, cutting, pinning and sewing, but I kind of enjoyed it! Hanging them was a trip, as usual. The window is up against the adjacent wall, and I didn't want the right panel to block any of the window, so I bought a corner connector to hang most of the right panel on the adjacent wall and just come right up to the window opening. I had to buy a 28" rod and use a hacksaw to trim it down so it wasn't excessively long on that adjacent wall. It sounds crazy but wasn't hard.
WORK TABLE
NEW SEAT
My new chair, also from Ikea, comes in lots of pretty colors, but none of them are available right after the holidays. Based on inventory levels, my guess is that every teenager in the DFW metroplex got bedroom makeovers for Christmas this year! :) So I got a blank one. Normal people would call it white. I call it a blank base that's ready for my spray paint color of choice. In this case, ballet slipper pink, because it's MY happy place and a ballet slipper pink chair makes me happy.
On the flipside, the process of getting this thing ballet slipper pink did NOT make me happy. I used a spraypaint that claims to stick to "most plastics." It was Krylon. Friends, polypropylene is not "most plastics." I didn't bother looking up the actual material composition before jumping right into spraying it (the first time). After that first attempt dried I didn't even get it attached to the frame before the paint started flaking off in random patches. *sigh* Then I decided I'd use primer made exclusively for plastic plus paint made exclusively for that plastic primer. These were made by Valspar. Before spraying both I sanded the whole chair and gave it a good wipe down. There were a couple bare spots where paint had flaked off, but even after sanding the rest of the chair, most of the original paint remained. The second pink was not nearly as pretty as the first can. That didn't matter though because after about a week of use, this too flaked off like it was this chair's mission to reject pink like a sorority-mocking tomboy. There is no pink-hating allowed in my household! That's when I decided I wasn't taking any more crap from this chair. So I manually scraped every last flake of paint off of it right down to the white polypropylene! However, there were a couple spots where I couldn't get it off. Do you want to guess where? Yes indeed! The bare spots where the plastic primer was able to adhere directly to the plastic instead of adhering to the first coat of spray paint. So perhaps this specialty plastic spray paint would have worked if I used it from the beginning. My bad! Nonetheless, for round 3 I was taking no chances. After scraping off all the paint, scrubbing it with tri-sodium phosphate, letting it soak in sudsy water in the utility sink and then thoroughly drying, I sprayed it with automotive flexible adhesion promoter. It's what they use to get paint to stick to plastic autobody parts! Take that, chair!! Then, the problem was that this adhesion promoter spray caused the remaining pink paint to lift and bubble where it had originally adhered well. So I had to go back and scrape all that off, clean it etc etc. I got it painted and once that dried, I could see how badly I gouged the plastic when scraping and sanding off the paint. So, I went back to Ikea, and bought another shell for $9.99. DUH! This time starting from scratch I cleaned it, sprayed it with adhesion promoter, and then hit it with the prettier (original) ballet slipper pink by Krylon. I win. Don't you want one in this shade now? :)
The final touch is more function than form, but that shouldn't keep it from ruining the aesthetic of the room, right? On my tippy toes I can reach the top cubes of my storage with a step stool (2 steps). But I can reach a lot easier and with more precision with a taller ladder. And it's nice to have a ladder inside the house for odd jobs without lugging it in from the garage. That said, it was flaming construction yellow and dirty, which simply wouldn't do. So it got a little exfoliation treatment and some paint. By exfoliation, I mean I scraped off all the stickers with diagrams of crash test dummies in idiotic positions that are illegal to remove by order of OSHA. So I hope I don't forget that I shouldn't climb to the top while holding an aluminum rod in a lightning storm! I primed the fiberglass with BIN primer and used leftover "celestial blue" SW paint and spray painted all the metal parts with glossy Rustoleum white. Now it lives a life of luxury in my craft room... total upgrade from the garage!!
But you don't care about any of this, do you? You just want to see the finished room. Ok, here you go!
ELFA STORAGE on backside of closet doors:
 |
| New wall cabinet and soap dispenser! |
STORAGE WALL:
OVERALL
I love this before and after shot side by side:
The colors in this room make me sublimely happy, to the point where I'm genuinely confused why everyone doesn't have a room full of mint, periwinkle, ballet slipper pink, and lavender! For real, why don't you? I'm sure I'll tire of them someday, but here's how I explained it to mom, who is NOT a fan of the borderline messy bohemian style curtains. Jennifer Lopez named her album "This is me...then" back in her gigantic pink cushion cut diamond from Ben Affleck "Jenny from the block" days. To me that just means, regardless of how she'd change going forward, that album defines what that stage of her life was all about. These curtains represent everything (stylistically) I love right now. I couldn't ask for anything more in my own little happy place. Hope you like it too, but I love it enough for all of us.
We just updated mom's bathroom and it looks amazing so I'll be posting about that soon. I just need to get some pictures of it! Stay tuned.
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