Guest Bathroom: Board and Batten

Back in March, right around the same time we were making some changes to the guest bedroom, we finished making some updates to our guest bathroom. I STILL don't have it decorated or anything, but the major changes have all been done. Someday I'll get all the little stuff taken care of :)

Ever since we got everything done, I've been meaning to do a post about it and possibly even explain how we did some of the stuff we did. But now that it has been six months since we did it, I really don't even think that I could remember all of the details anymore... I pretty much followed the steps as outlined on this post from the blog Thrifty and Chic and I'm pretty positive that she does a heck of a better job explaining than I would, so I'll let her do that part of it :)

Up until this point, for the first year and a half that we lived in our house, the guest bathroom had been just a poor, neglected room that just got all the random basics that we had from our old apartment. My motivation for actually doing something with the bathroom came from the fact that Jocelyn was going to be living with us for a few months, so I had to figure out the measurements of the room, go out and figure out the best materials to buy, and just get it done!

Here's the room we were working with:

I started by painting the top part of the room in the color Polar Star (Valspar) in a Satin finish. It is a gray color with a little bit of a blue undertone. The bottom part of the walls is Ultra White (also Valspar) in a semi-gloss finish.

The wood that we ended up going with was primed MDF from Menards. The vertical pieces were 1x2s and the horizontal pieces were 1x4s with 1x2s sitting perpendicular on top of them (except for the section above the toilet which had a 1x4 on top of a 1x4). We also removed the baseboards and replaced them with 1x4s so there wouldn't be any overhang from the vertical pieces. 

Trent removing the baseboards

Each piece of wood was attached to the wall with either glue or nails or both. Not all of the pieces were perfectly straight, so when there were gaps between the boards and walls, we fixed it with caulk before painting over the bottom again. (We actually caulked around each board in every place it was attached to the wall to prevent any water from getting behind it, but just paid extra attention to the places where the gaps were larger than normal.) The floor also wasn't level, so we had to fill some spaces with wood filler. After everything was up on the walls, I painted over it all again with the white semi-gloss paint. 

A gap that we filled with the wood filler.

The whole thing has a lot of flaws and isn't perfect by any means, but hopefully it's good enough that most people wouldn't notice... 

When all the painting was done, we hung up some new hooks on the walls and a new shower curtain. I wanted to hang the shower curtain higher than the old one was, so that required me to find a longer one. I didn't have much luck finding a shower curtain that was long enough as well as being a price that I wanted to pay. Lucky for me, while I was perusing Target one day, I was checking out the clearance items on one of the end caps and saw a table cloth that was a pattern I liked and happened to be some dimensions that I could work with. So for less than $10 I had found my new shower curtain. 

The only other items that I have in the bathroom at the moment are two candles that match the color in the shower curtain and some new rugs, but hopefully some other things will join it in the near future... I also want to frame the mirror like Thrifty and Chic did here, but at the rate I'm doing anything lately, we'll see if it ever gets done!

So for now, this is our guest bathroom. Much better than what it used to be!

And some before and afters:

 

Linked here!

Linked here!

Five on Friday! {8.15.2014}

Happy Friday! I hope everyone reading this had a great week!

ONE.
Last week I cleaned our kitchen sink with the baking soda and salt combination I've seen on Pinterest and Facebook. Worked like a charm! It's super embarrassing how gross our sink was! These pictures don't even show how disgusting it was, but I guess I always just thought cleaning with a disinfectant was the best I could do... WRONG. It's sooo much better and the layer of gunk is all gone and it's all shiny and pretty now! After I cleaned it, I just wanted to stand there and stare at it for a while.

Top is before and bottom is after (if you couldn't tell)

TWO.

I'm getting ready to hang a gallery wall in 'my room'. Jocelyn helped me pick out a bunch of frames at Michael's a few weeks ago, and we tried a few layouts on the living room floor to get a feel for what it was going to look like. My next step is picking out some pictures to go in the frames, so I can be sure that I have the frames going the right directions and then I'll be ready to start getting it up on the wall. I'm using my printables that I got from the SheReadsTruth Bible studies in white 8x10 frames and then filling in with different patterned/textured frames with pictures and things. It's been a very slow project (I've only been working on gathering all the pieces for it since the end of May!) but I'm looking forward to seeing it up on the wall!

THREE.

This weekend ends wraps up my summer of concerts! We're going to the Iowa State Fair and I have the pleasure of going to the Lady Antebellum concert on Saturday night with my mom, Jocelyn, my brother, and his girlfriend, Kenzie, and the Styx/Foreigner concert on Sunday night with my mom. We're all spending the day at the fair on Saturday, as well, along with other members of my family, so it's going to be a fun weekend! I love the fair! I'm looking forward to doing all the things we do when we go to the fair (and eating some cheese curds, among other things). I really just hope the weather is nice!

FOUR.

We got our family room and kitchen repainted this past weekend with the awesome help of Trent's parents. It really didn't take us that long with four of us going at once and it was a good time to be productive and have some good conversation at the same time. We also found some time to go out to eat at Roja on Saturday night, watch a movie, go to church on Sunday morning, and make a trip to Nebraska Furniture Mart. I am loving the new color and trying to figure out where I want to rehang things. When I get it all finished, I will share the 'after' pictures. But with the way I have been about sharing house project pictures, who knows when that will be! :)

Here's a sneak peek - the whole room is a tan/gray color (Aspen Gray) and just the fireplace corner is Navy. We tired Mattie out with all the painting, too!

FIVE

I think that I am done with the first of our 'Fredericksen Yearbooks' that I mentioned last week!! The first one I did was for the years 2009-2010 together. I started with the summer of 2009 because that was when Trent and I had our first date and when we officially became an item. I do still want to swap out a few pictures that I got off of Facebook with the actual original pictures from Trent's computer, but beyond that, I am just waiting for a super sweet deal before I order it! Now I am starting on 2011! Only like 4 years to go until I'm caught up!

You can check the book out here.

Guest Bedroom: Before and After

And finally! Here are the pictures of the whole guest bedroom... 

Pretty sad that it took me over 2 months to get all this posted... :)

We still need to get curtains up and I am eventually going to change out some of the bedding, but what we had worked with the time frame and the budget I was working with.

I also painted the closet the same coral color as the dresser. It looks a little more pink than the dresser does in this picture, but I promise it's the same!

Dresser: From my mom's house. Painted with DIY Chalk Paint

Night Stands: From Thrift Store. Painted with DIY Chalk Paint

Head Board: From Nebraska Furniture Mart, June 2010. Painted with DIY Chalk Paint

Pictures: Frames from Michael's. Pictures from Etsy shop, Antinoro Pixel Prints

Lamps: From Goodwill. Spray Painted with Glossy Rustoleum Spray Paint in Navy

Guest Bedroom: Glossy Spray Painted Lamps

My last project for the guest bedroom was painting some lamps. The ones that I had in there were small and skinny, so I knew that I wanted two matching lamps that were bigger than what I had. I didn't want to spend a bunch on them, though.

Luckily, I found some lamps that matched at Goodwill for only $10 a piece. They didn't have any lamp shades on them, but I figured that I'd probably want to replace the shades that came on them anyway, so that was fine with me.

They really weren't much to look at the way they were, but if I've learned anything from the blogs I read, it's that if you find two matching lamps that work, buy them! So I did!

After committing to buy them and starting to walk from the back of the store to the front where the checkout was, I had three different people tell me that I had found some beautiful lamps! After the third person said that, I started to feel kind of guilty for wanting to paint them ... but that only lasted a second or two... I found them first :)

I decided to paint them with a navy blue, glossy spray paint, and after I realized that I could separate the bases from the body of the lamps, I decided that I would paint the bases a brushed nickle color.

I started by taping off the part of the cord that was showing and the part where the light bulb goes in with a grocery sack and blue painters tape. I then primed the lamp and base with a gray primer. I figured this would help the glossy paint stick to the glass on the body of the lamp better.

I think I did two or three coats of the primer and then, after letting it dry for a while, I painted the base with the brushed nickel color a few times. When I was sure that was dry, I covered the bases with a plastic sack and started painting the body of the lamps. It needed a few coats, and it was during this process that I really messed up. 

I did one or two coats on a Saturday night and then, after church on Sunday, I decided that I would do one final coat and be done with it. Turns out that it was a super windy day and it was a bad idea to leave lamps with wet paint out in the driveway! They ended up with flecks of dirt and gray paint flakes that had come off my tarps in the wind... Major fail!

So, the next night, I had to sand them down and try it again! This resulted in some far from perfect lamps (as it goes with many of my projects) but I just tried to turn them so the imperfect parts were facing the wall in the bedroom. Problem solved :)

I had found some lamp shades at Target that I thought worked well, so that's what I used to finish them up.

Here's what they look like now!

Other Guest Bedroom Projects:

DIY Chalk Paint - Headboard and Night Stands

DIY Chalk Paint - Coral Dresser
DIY Drawer Liners from Wrapping Paper

Guest Bedroom: DIY Drawer Liner Using Wrapping Paper

My next project for the guest bedroom was to put some drawer liners into the dresser and the night stands. I knew that if I was going to expect Jocelyn to actually put clothes in that dresser, the drawers were going to need to be lined since the dresser really isn't the greatest quality and no one wants to find little splinters in their clothes or have the wood pull at the clothes at all.

So, being the person that I am and not really liking to spend money, I searched Pinterest for some DIY ideas to make my own drawer liners. I found a couple ideas and the one I ended up going with used wrapping paper and clear contact paper. I got the contact paper from Wal Mart and the wrapping paper at Party City (It was the only store I could find wrapping paper that fit my color scheme).

To get the sizes I needed, I used an Observer to measure out the drawer sizes (The Observer can be used for SO many more things than just for reading!) and then used that to mark out the dimensions on the wrapping paper before cutting the wrapping paper down to size. It was easier to get the newspaper into the drawers than it was mark it out on the roll of wrapping paper.

I then cut the contact paper down to the length that I needed it to be, leaving some extra at the end so I would be sure that I had enough to wrap around the ends, and then attempted to get it started as straight as possible and rolled it over the wrapping paper (that wasn't always successful). 

After I had them all done, I trimmed them down where needed to so they would fit into the drawers and put all the drawer back in. Since both the wrapping paper and the contact paper were rolled up, the edges of the liners stuck up in a few places, so I ended up using some painter's tape to keep the corners down. I probably could have put them under some books or something for a while and gotten them to flatten out, but I'm impatient, so I went the tape route.

I think it cost me less about $8 for the supplies and I have wrapping paper and contact paper left over for other things as well.

Here's the finished product!

Other guest bedroom projects:

DIY Chalk Paint - Headboard and Night Stands

DIY Chalk Paint - Coral Dresser