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!

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

Guest Bedroom: Coral Painted Dresser with DIY Chalk Paint

After I got done painting the headboard and night stands in the guest bedroom, I moved on to repainting this dresser:

The dresser came from my mom's house. It was in the basement of her house when she moved in last December. It wasn't pretty or even that functional, but I knew that I could make it work somewhere in our house. 

Again, I used the same recipe for chalk paint that I had used on the headboard and night stands but this time I used a coral color called Blaze Orange by Valspar. This worked out well so I didn't have to worry about sanding or stripping the dresser first. I just wiped it down to get rid of the dust and other gunk that was on it and then started painting.

Here is what the dressers after a coat or two of paint. 

This dresser took me quite a few coats as well. I think it ended up being 5+ coats (followed by 2-3 coats of polly). I think it took more coats with this dresser since the brown underneath was so dark color as the base and since the paint wasn't white this time around, the Plaster of Paris lightened the paint, so it took a few more coats to make it as dark and bright as I wanted it to be.

For the pulls, I just used the same flat black spray paint that I had used for the night stands to change their color. I thought about getting new ones all together, but I decided that I'd rather save the money and just used the ones I already had.

I put them in a box on nails to be able to paint them better.

In the end, here's what it looked like all put back together.

Stay tuned for more projects to come!

Other guest bedroom projects:

DIY Chalk Paint - Headboard and Night Stands

Guest Bedroom: Painted Headboard and Night Stands with DIY Chalk Paint

My cousin, Jocelyn, has moved in with us for eight weeks while she is on her final rotation for PT School. When she's done in Omaha she will be DONE with school and will be Dr. Jocelyn! How awesome!

Well, knowing that she was going to be moving in with us inspired me to actually do something with our guest bedroom and bathroom finally. Those two rooms have stayed the same ol' blah rooms that they were when we moved in for the past year and a half so I'm excited to change them up a little finally.

Here's what the bedroom looked like before I started making all the changes:

Not bad, but definitely nothing special -- that's for sure. 

I'm not going to show the finished quite yet, but I'm going to share a few projects that I've done for the room for now and then I can share what it looks like all put together!

First off, we painted the whole room. It changed from the "builder beige" it was to a gray color "Rope" by Behr.

Right after we were done painting the room, I got to work on painting some of the furniture. 

First up was the headboard. Trent had bought me the headboard for my 23rd birthday, my first birthday after moving to Omaha and living in an apartment that wasn't a dorm room. I felt kind of bad for wanting to paint it, but I'm glad that he gave me the go-ahead to do what I wanted to it. 

After I was done with the headboard, I also painted the two nightstands that were in the room the same color. I had bought the nightstands shortly after we moved into the house from some thrift store. They had gotten a bunch of the nightstands from an old hotel that was closing or remodeling or something like that. I was just happy to get two matching night stands for a pretty decent price.

I used a recipe from Pinterest and made my own chalk paint to paint these pieces (not to be confused with chalkboard paint). The most famous of chalk paints is Annie Sloan's Chalk Paint. This paint was a little too expensive to me, so I made my own using regular Valspar paint in Flat finish, Plaster of Paris, and water. I used my go-to white paint color, "Honeymilk" 

The benefit of using chalk paint is that it rarely requires any preparation of the surface such as sanding or priming and can be used on pretty much any surface including furniture that already has some type of varnish or something on it. It ends up with a very nice silky finish as well (I used poly to cover it, though, so it didn't stay that way). I also like it because, when it dries, all the brush stroke lines that are on it from the brush dry flat, so it definitely gets better as it dries.

I used the recipe of about 3 cups paint to 1 cup Plaster of Paris to 1/4 cup water. I mixed the Plaster of Paris and the water first to ensure there weren't any lumps and then mixed in the paint.

The paint is a lot more watered down with this mixture, so it took me about 4 coats to cover everything good enough, but it dried fast so I could pretty much just paint continuously without having to wait for it to dry and it was better than having to sand or strip the furniture before I painted.

After I got the number of layers on that I wanted, I topped it off with two coats of Polycrylic.

For the night stands, I just spray painted the hardware with a flat black paint and put them back on.

Here's what both of those pieces look like before and after:

You can kind of see in this picture below what it looked like after a few coats. You can still see the wood through the paint and you can see the brush strokes as well. I just needed to keep going until that was all gone. I got quite a few episodes of Damages watched on Netflix in the evenings while I was painting 4+ coats on 3 different pieces of furniture! 

Now I know that this wasn't a very exciting post, but there will be better before and afters after I get through all the little projects. :)

Stay tuned for more projects I did for the guest bedroom!