1. We made a trip to Ikea on Monday (thank god for 3 day weekends!). It was only the second time we’ve gone since Easton was born, so it was nice be back in the land of Expedits.

While there we restocked our frame collection for another gallery wall and bought some ledges for book storage in the playroom. We grabbed quite a few of these new (at least to me, it’s been a few months) glossy gray Ribba frames.

(via Ikea)

I’ve made it my own resolution to hang these things ASAP so they don’t sit around driving me nuts. But…

2. It’s Pinterest Challenge time again, so I have an excuse to be unfocused! Probably for the first time since these things started, I know exactly what I want to make… a play tent for Easton. Wish me luck as I buy dowels and sheets this weekend…

(from Twirl via Pinterest)

3. We’ve been behind on posting Easton’s monthly laundry basket pictures, but we have them hanging around on a memory card. I’ll get them all caught up on one post soon.

Yeah he doesn’t even fit laying in that basket anymore and he’s, um, almost 9 months now. Whoops.

4. We recently lowered Easton’s crib to the middle setting. Just as I was going to tweak the no sew crib skirt I made to fall flat with his crib, I woke up to this at 2am yesterday.

The face says it all, he’s not a morning person either. Luckily, I didn’t take a picture of my face at that moment. My hair was sticking up way more than his

We lowered the crib fully yesterday and now I have to decide how to work the crib skirt for the small amount of space left. Seriously, the nursery feels like it will never be “complete”. Every time I plan to take room reveal pictures, something happens, like I ram a vacuum into a piece of molding…

I’m such a jerk.

5. Speaking of my baby growing up, his first birthday isn’t too far away (3 months! only 3 months!! ) so all of that planning is stashed in the back of my head. I don’t want to do a set theme, but I’ve been playing with his Zany Zoo beads and I think I’ve settled on a color scheme…

Aqua, orange, lime green and royal blue/navy (whichever I can find more easily). My only expectation is that it be fun and fit for a one year old. I’m not trying to win any Pinterest party planning awards here. A happy baby and some full bellies works for me!

Considering all of these are on my to-do list, I’m obviously not doing a very good job at my New Year’s resolution to streamline my life. Good thing my current resolution is to get more sleep, though my miniature boss is in charge of that one.

We picked up 12 foot pieces of molding so that we had less seams to caulk. We started simple with the 3 walls that didn’t have bookcases.

Seemed simple enough, though the wall was longer than 12 feet, so a seam was inevitable.

You can read all about the details of how we made our cuts in this previous post. Though we realized we must really be horrible at installing crown because it was impossible to match up the corners of these long 12 foot runs. The chances of our ceiling being level from end to end are slim to none. The pieces have some flexibility to them, but it’s still hard to get everything matched up to a point where gaps are caulkable. Therefore, we once again ended up breaking some of the longer pieces down to match up the corners perfectly. I think we’d rather build 5 more bookcases than have to install crown again, but at least this shorter wall was easier…

If you notice we didn’t nail the ends right away so that we could move the pieces to match the corners. We learned this trick the hard way last time

So that was the easy part, next was adding the crown to the top of the built-in. We thought it through a little (okay, not really too much) and decided to start with a straight run of molding across the top first.

When we did the paneled wall in the nursery, we topped it with a straight cut of crown and coped the side pieces into it. We thought we could go with the some method. We called it a quits since I had a baby to feed and we got all of the long pieces done. All that was left to do were these smaller pieces around the bookcases…

But yeah, that didn’t work. First, we need to put that top piece at more of an angle. We tried to install it so that we could avoid making cuts around 2 vents that are on the ceiling.

After that, we have to figure out how to make an inside corner and an outside corner in an incredibly small piece of molding. We’re not sure that coping was the right choice, since that piece is so small to begin with. Mike tried solving it for a bit today, but the little hamster that runs on the wheel in his head got tired and he came downstairs. I think I saw some smoke coming out of his ears from all of that thinking…

If we can ever figure this out, all we have to do then is caulk and paint the built-ins and trim! Then we will finally be able to start moving in to our new workspace… and Easton will have his playroom

Wish us luck for a speedy recovery solution!

Anyway, this post is about the last two pieces of crown molding that we put up this weekend using the good old coping method. Last we left you with one straight piece running along our paneled wall, which needed two coped angled pieces to make the corners.

We started by cutting end of a piece at the 33.85 bevel and 31.65 miter that we explained in this post. Which left us with this (this is for the left side of the paneled wall when you’re looking at it, so a left inside corner)….

Then, as most tutorials tell you to do, we traced the line of the molding so we knew where to cope, like so….

Then Mike took off the back chunk of wood at this sort of angle (you just want the front face of the molding to show, if that makes sense)…

I was supposed to be the coper, as I like doing tedious things by hand, but after the first piece I realized that it was going to take way more strength than I could muster so I passed the torch to Mike. I had the very important job of sitting on the piece of molding while it was on the bench to act as a human clamp. I excelled at this.

After that’s all chopped off, it looks something like this…

Then we put it up and it was all done! Almost. First time we put this piece up we realized it was a smidge too short. Which actually worked out well because the ceiling was very uneven and the corner piece was not meeting up with the 8 foot piece next to it. So we decided to cut the corner piece down to a smaller piece to be able to gradually adjust for the crooked ceiling…

Then we cut the next piece and worked some nail gun magic to get everything lined up.

We did most of the room like this where it was necessary. There may be more seams, but it’s less caulk magic to work and less of a risk of having a bulging piece screaming for help in the end. We did the same thing on the other side after we coped that piece (though the ceiling wasn’t crooked over there)…

Then we were officially done! Though coping wasn’t extremely difficult, after using both coping and non-coping methods, it’s way more convenient to just cut both sides of a corner at an angle and avoid coping. Next time we tackle a room we will do all of our corners the non-coping way.

It’s nearly impossible to get a full room shot in this small room, but I did clean out all of the extra stuff in there to make it easier

We also added the quarter round molding to the baseboards this weekend, which took no time but makes such a difference…

I also completely emptied out the baby’s closet in anticipation of painting it an accent color and adding an organization system like we mentioned here.

We have also decided to remove the doors and go with… curtains! We toyed with double doors that open outwards, french doors or curtains and decided that some chevron curtains would look best (though I can’t reveal what color we decided to go with!) Hopefully we can get the wire rack removed, closet walls spackled and everything caulked/filled this week so we can paint the this upcoming weekend!

We still have yet to finish the last two long pieces of crown (they they will be insanely easy to do) because Mike needs my help with those. We had childbirth class last night (eek), so we didn’t get a chance to do it. But thanks to this new fancy light we installed in the nursery, we can work in there at night and I can come home and snap these pictures to share…

Works for now! Anyway, now you can see the paneled wall coming together with the crown and baseboards integrated.

In hindsight, I probably would have added a smaller board at the top of the paneled wall rather than the additional 4 inches we put at the top and bottom. The crown is only about 4 5/8″ while the baseboard is 5 1/4″ I believe, so the amount of paneled wall showing at the top and bottom is not symmetrical. Though the bottom will have furniture in front of it so it’s no biggie.

And the piece over there on the left of the picture has a piece of quarter round sitting up against it just to give you an idea of what the molding will look like once we add it.

Here’s another shot of the two moldings by the closet…

Mike also filled all of the nail holes, sanded and caulked the paneled wall. All that’s left now is to prime the raw wood boards!

Normally this is where I would zoom out and give you a full room shot, but we currently have an island of boxes hanging out in the middle of the room…

There’s a stroller, our Jonathan Adler giraffe sconces and a box of other baby stuff hanging out and acting as a table for our caulk and whatnot. I don’t want to unload anything else into the closet because we’re planning on giving that a makeover as well.

We’re hoping to choose paint colors this weekend and get going on that in the next week. Weeeeee! Wee wee weeeeee! Just call me a pig on a zipline…

We left you with our paneled wall looking like this…

The plan was to add 4+ inch crown molding to the top that would extend all the way around the room, hence the additional 4 inch board up there. We actually struggled at first to find crown that was larger than 3 5/8″. We knew it existed because… we have it all over our house! We just wanted to match the crown we currently have and finally found it at Home Depot, in primed pine. I was okay with using MDF for the moldings because a) I wanted them to match the other moldings in the house, not because they touch or anything but because I liked them and wanted some consistency and b) there is so little molding in the room and the baby won’t be sleeping directly near it (like a crib or the paneling behind it). But, the 4 5/8″ inch crown was only available in pine at the time (we later found it in MDF), so it was a good excuse to use the solid wood stuff But we did cheap out with some MDF baseboards.

We started off simple…. we added a straight cut of crown to the top of the paneled wall…

We did the seam the same way we did our chair rail pieces– just a 45 degree cut at each end. Worked like a charm

To get the corners, we referred to this video from This Old House. In the video, they use straight cuts like ours above then an angled cut, which they cope, on just one side. To make their cuts, they angle the molding on the saw as if it was sitting against the wall and ceiling and make a 45 degree cut, like this….

(via This Old House)

Seems simple right? Well, we ran into a problem off the bat.

Our 4 5/8″ crown was too tall to fit under the blade of our Ryobi 10″ compound miter saw. We cursed this saw for a good hour as we took a lunch break. During our break, we figured our next plan of attack was to a) see if there was a way to make these cuts using the saw we have and b) if not, buy a $12 miter box and do it by hand. I asked Mike if we had the instruction manual to our saw and sure enough, there was a section on how to cut crown molding. Whew!

The funny thing is (there will be a lot of funny things in this story), for months Mike has been telling me that the bottom of our saw is not adjustable, despite these numbers marked on it…

The conversation went something like this:

Me- “If it doesn’t move then why are there angles marked on it?”

Mike- “I don’t know but it doesn’t move”

The instruction manual settled the score and the answer was… it moved! And that’s how you cut crown using this saw, with the molding laying flat. Mike “read” the manual and said we had to move the bottom measurement to 31.62 degrees, which is clearly marked on the saw…

So off we went, making cuts with that one simple adjustment. Which left us with this picture Mike showed you yesterday…

We thought this messed up corner was the result of our awful coping skills, but we realized that the molding touches at the bottom, but not the top. We decided to try a new method and can the coping, so for the next corner, we cut both sides at a 45 degree angle, rather than using one straight cut with one coped 45. We got this…

Definitely not right. Our pieces were meeting at the bottom, but not the top. We knew this had to be something with how the angle of our saw was set, but we didn’t know which angle was making it not meet… the miter (bottom of saw) or the bevel (angle of the blade)? So I decided to pick up the manual for the first time and I realized that Mike missed a very important part… Okay maybe he missed the entire crown molding section and just scanned for the 31.62 measurement because I found this…

Complete with detailed instructions that explained that while the miter was set to 31.62, the bevel should be set to 33.85 and NOT 45. That was our exact problem.

We had to move our blade from the 45 that it’s set on in the picture above, to the 33.9 measurement (and just a smidge less to make it 33.85).

In this handy dandy instruction manual, I also found this little table which I lovingly called the bible. It saved our lives.

Yes, it tells us exactly how to get every single cut we need, which we had to think through before hand. We always play the “save the left or right?”,  ”molding upside down or right side up?” game when making cuts. This little table took out any guesswork and thought. We officially declared this saw that we were cursing hours before as the best saw in the whole world.

We left our other cuts, as Mike told you, assuming we would just caulk the heck out of them. We cut another corner and guess what? No match. The angles were much tighter, but still weren’t meeting as they should. Just by looking at them, we could tell that the angle was too obtuse and decided we needed to make an adjustment in the miter (bottom) measurement. Mike played with some scrap pieces, adjusting them to make them slightly smaller, but they still weren’t meeting. He asked me to go look at the saw and figure out what angle we should use (I was trying to stay out of the room with the obnoxiously loud saw to protect my poor baby’s undeveloped ears). One look at the saw and I immediately noticed something….

See where that 31.62 is? I knew it was where the red dotted line was, but I could almost guarantee that Mike was using the bolder line just above the 31.62 (which is 35). I was right. Granted, it is confusing and they should have put the 31.62 in red so that you would know that it corresponds to the red line.

That tiny little adjustment gave us this absolutely perfect corner…

We still hit some bumps with the next 3 or so corners since our ceiling isn’t completely even, but all of the gaps are very much caulkable and nothing like what we had before!

So let’s recap for anyone who has a similar saw that doesn’t allow you to stand up your molding to make cuts…

1. Set your bevel (saw blade) to 33.85

2. Set your miter table to 31.62 (either to the right or left, depending on your cut)

3. Lay molding flat (either upside down or right side up, once again depending on your cut)

4. Follow this chart for specifics!!

With these directions, we only had to rotate the miter (bottom) angle to the left or right and kept the blade set at the same 33.85 the entire time. I should also mention that the left and right in the chart above are the angles when you are looking at the corner.

We also decided to make small cuts for the corners and cut both sides of a corner at the same time. That way, we could wiggle both pieces simultaneously to get the best fit and not have to worry about whether the other end of a piece matches its corner. That is why this wall looks so choppy…

All we have left are the two long runs (about 8 feet each) that meet up with the paneled wall, which should take us no time. We planned to finsh them up tonight, but unfortunately Macky had his first seizure since starting his meds around 3pm today. He’s been a little clingy and jumpy, so we didn’t want to break out the compresser, nail gun and saw tonight. The vet told us not to worry and to just keep an eye on him for a change in behavior, so we wanted to be able to judge that as best we could by keeping his environment normal.

With the last two pieces come our second attempt at coping… yikes…Had we known at the beginning that we could angle that initial piece on the paneled wall we would have. We’ll add it to the list of lessons learned, but at least we broke the crown molding ice around here.

There were gaps everywhere and it felt like we were resorting to the “yeah, we can caulk that, right?” line over and over again.  Heck, I joked with my brother today there there would actually be more caulk on the walls than actual molding.

It was that bad.

You see, I was never one to really read manuals or the fine print.  So when I was reading the manual on how to cut certain angles, I overlooked the section on HOW TO PROPERLY CUT CROWN MOLDING CORNERS.  Good thing Rebecca is the brains around here, but bad for me since I’m essentially becoming my mother more and more these days.

After doing a celebration dance, Rebecca made ANOTHER discovery of my stupidity.  Not only does the manual tell you how to make the cuts, but the necessary angles needed are marked on the miter saw.  I knew this, but I didn’t realize that where the numbers are wasn’t exactly where the saw needed to be — instead the saw needed to be on the tick-mark that represents the numbers.  Numbers were off to the side of the tick-marks; an additional 3% of space.  Silly me.  At one point Rebecca asked me how I graduated high school.  Then she realized I copied off of her my senior year of math class.

SO ANYWAYS.  We ripped down the round 1 of molding  (including that horrible example of a corner above) and decided to start over with our new found knowledge (thanks to Rebecca).  We decided to start on the opposite side of the room and sure enough, our first corner with the proper cuts was absolutely perfect.

We worked around the room and finished about half of it.  There are some spots where caulk is needed, but these areas are the result of the ceilings not being totally straight.  I can say that confidently now.

I’m off to buy some more molding tomorrow to finish the room (yeah, we wasted way too much crown with attempt #1).  Then we’ll do some caulking and give you another update.

Once we got the boards home, we sanded the fronts and sides with our new sander, which we also got for Christmas.

Since we bought decent boards and were picky about the ones we chose, we didn’t have to do too much sanding and used 220 grit paper. We mostly just got rid of the rough edges and made sure the fronts were nice and smooth. I even got to play with the sander, since it was extremely user friendly.

I have no face! The only way you can tell it’s me is by the exceptionally tight non-maternity jacket I am still squeezing into. Every week I think it will be the last for that coat and a few weeks ago my belly actually busted the zipper. But I managed to get the zipper back on track and continue to squeeze myself into it. Anyway, despite the fact that I had a dust mask and goggles nearby, the new sander sucks up the dust as you sand so there really was none. Pretty fancy

When we researched how to get the boards onto the wall, we saw that most people glued and nailed their boards. Knowing that our solid wood, 1 inch thick boards were larger and heavier than most other tutorials, I thought gluing and nailing was our best bet. But then we were back in the VOC predicament… here I am, the lady who emailed Baby Appleseed to ensure that the crib we wanted did not use glue that contained formaldehyde and I’m about to glue a bunch of boards to my nursery wall. After a little visit to the Liquid Nails website, I saw that their “Projects” product worked on wood and molding and came in a low-VOC, green certified, no toxic fumes and safe for use around children, version. We picked some up and put some on each board.

Yeah we have no light in the baby’s room so we’re working with a single Ikea lamp for the time being. Please forgive the poor quality pictures until we buy a light fixture.

We started with the bottom boards, then added the top boards. We made sure that these 4 boards were nailed into studs and well, we nailed the hell out of them. We wanted to make sure that the weight of the 10 foot board was not going anywhere.

Then we added the two boards to either side.

At this point, as you can see in the picture above, we decided to trace some boards to make sure our interior boards would work. We ran into 2 very minor issues… #1- there is an outlet on the wall and #2- 1×4″ boards are actually smaller than 4 inches wide.

In my sketch, the two interior horizontal boards are 12 inches from the frame. The vertical boards are 24 inches apart.

There is an outlet in the bottom box on the left hand side, about 12 inches from the bottom board. We easily fixed this by making each of the horizontal boards 13″ from the frame rather than 12″. Like I said, easy fix.

For the vertical boards, since we couldn’t nail them into studs, we decided to make those our “choppy” pieces that we cut in 3 pieces to keep them lighter. We kept the horizontal boards (which could be nailed into multiple studs) whole. Since we did this, it was easy to cut the 3 top small pieces and adjust them to compensate for the slightly thinner boards. Here’s Mike measuring before they were actually attached to the wall…

I think each gap ended up being around 25 1/4″. Then we just lined up the remaining vertical boards to make sure they matched the top ones, leveled (plumbed?) them, and we were done!

Mike filled all of the seams and nail holes with wood filler and it’s just waiting for a sanding.

Then we need to add crown molding to the top, base boards to the bottom, caulk, prime the boards, paint… and we’re done!

Really this wall was incredibly easy and took us such little time. We spent maybe 2-3 hours on it Sunday before the Superbowl, which allowed us to sand and install the boards for the outside frame. Then last night we spent another 2-3 hours sanding and installing the interior boards and that was it! Oh and included in that is the time I spent sitting on a chair eating Thin Mints….

(via Decorchick)

I figured we’d do something a little higher than chair rail height like hers, but all the way around the room. Here are some nursery versions I’ve seen around Pinterest…

(from Sweet Tea Paper on Etsy via Pinterest)

 (from The Fickle Pickle via Pinterest)

I’ve always liked this idea because I figured it would add a pop of white for me to put dark nursery furniture against. It would also allow me to add some darker colored walls than I would if the more classic molding was not there. But, I didn’t want to do a simple vertical board and batten and I liked the design of Emily’s wall in the first picture the most.

When I started to think about how I could make our board and batten more interesting, I realized that the multiple lines in the first design, the part I loved the most, would get kinda busy and clashy with the crib and straight dresser. I debated whether or not to keep my board and batten as the usual horizontal boards on top and bottom with vertical lines in between, but I didn’t want it to compete with the wainscoting we started to add to our entryway, which will be right outside of the baby’s room. I didn’t want our house to have a molding identity crisis!

So just recently, like the past week or two, I started thinking more about keeping the molding limited to just one accent wall, like Rambling Renovators did behind their bed in their master….

(via Rambling Renovators)

And Emily did in her stepson’s room…

(via Decorchick)

I thought this would be a great solution because the dark, curved back of the crib would fall in between all of the horizontal lines of the molding, so they would not compete for attention. The problem was that I didn’t know how many boards to add or how it would look in our room. I’ve used both Photoshop and Google SketchUp before, but I am not used to either and they take me for.ev.er. So I decided to just sketch it out by hand to give myself an idea of what design we could do.

Then I got a better idea… I could draw it to scale with some graph paper!

First, I printed off some free graph paper from PaperPrintout.com. I used the 1/4″ sized squares so that I could draw it to scale without it being too small or too big. The wall we are adding the molding to is 8′x10′, so I counted each box as 4 inches. So I needed my wall to be 24 boxes by 30 boxes on my graph paper.

After a trip to Lowe’s and some googling, we decided to use 4 inch wide by 1 inch thick boards for our molding. I’ll explain that decision a little later, but then each board in my sketch took up either a row or column of boxes. I kept it as easy as possible

Note that the 3 vertical boards in the middle ended up being smack in the middle of a column of boxes! Just my luck, though still easy to sketch

The top and bottom boards are doubled- there are two 4 inch boards stacked on top of one another. This is to integrate 5.25 inch baseboards and crown molding with the rest of the room. Once those moldings are added, the seam between the 4 inch boards will be covered and we can still have higher and beveled crown and baseboards on the other walls of the room. We wanted to ensure that everything sat nice and flush.

Having everything drawn out made the process so much easier… and it took me a whole 5 minutes to draw. And spoiler! We finished putting the boards up tonight and will snap some pictures and share more details tomorrow

Oh, and we have a baby coming in May so many of these items are marked urgent. Some are just marked as “they are bothering us and we’d like to do them ASAP”. Since we realize we have to prioritize (I’m approaching the third trimester here, eek), I’m putting them in the order we’d like to do them.

1. Finish built-in bench in new office

We scratched our heads and shopped for wood this weekend, but hit a standstill when we realized we need to buy a table saw or something. And we’re cheap a–es. Solution pending.

2. Move office furniture in

Mike needs this room to work in and be organized and our goal was to get him somewhat settled in the new office before the baby comes. We’re going to use the furniture we currently have with some potential hacks.

3. Remove wire rack from the baby’s closet, paint, stencil and add closet system

(from Roomzaar via Pinterest)

I put this as first in the baby’s room progress because the closet is the most needed to start to organize some of the stuff we already have. Hanging tiny little clothes in a huge closet is killllling me. Must. Make. Closet. Pretty.

4. Add board and batten to the baby’s room

(via Decorchick)

We plan to add molding high and all the way around the room, like Emily’s living room. Pattern to be determined

5. Add crown molding to the baby’s room, paint, add furniture, etc.

I know this category is huge and can probably be another to-do ist in itself, but we kinda have to wait until we get through other stages to work this part out. We have furniture in mind and a general idea of where we’re going, so we’ll share as much of it as we can as we go along (being sure not to spill any gender specific details )

6. Replace playroom carpet

We originally planned to do this before Christmas but that didn’t happen. Since it’s not a space we’ll be using right away, we put the new office and the baby’s room first. But this carpet has got to go. If carpet wasn’t so expensive, we probably would have committed to this already.

7. Add bookcases to playroom

(via Centsational Girl)

We want to add some Ikea bookcases to the wall where the shelving is in the picture above and make them look built-in, like Kate did with hers.

8. Finish up the molding in our entryway

We need to add the box portion underneath our chair rail in the entryway and upstairs hallway. Mike is itching to finish this one but we reeeally need to do the baby’s room first. We’re just dying to get to number 8…

9. Start our gallery wall(s)

(via Sawdust and Paper Scraps)

I’ve shared this inspiration picture from Sandra before and we’ve been slowly accumulating frames to hang all the way throughout our entryway. We haven’t hung any yet because we figured we’d have to take them down to nail into the wall to finish the molding, so we wanted to do #7 first.

10. Build outdoor kitchen

Despite the fact that we’ll have a newborn, we’re hoping to make some progress in our backyard this year. We seeded back there in the fall and we hope to do something with the landscaping and start working on the built-in grill we’ve been dreaming of (and drawing in Paint )

Um anyone else overwhelmed by this list? I’m about to have a Jessie Spano freak out moment and start screaming “there’s never enough time!!!”….

5. Powder Room Paint Job

Though painting is nothing all that special, we took a flying leap out of our comfort zones with this near-black paint choice. I think it paid off

4. Pencil Eraser Art

This was another project that didn’t take me long, but had a big impact. I still love looking at this thing and I’m thinking of ways to use some pencil eraser art in the future.

3. Entryway Chair Rail

This was our first molding adventure and we got a serious high off of conquering those funny angles. Therefore, we loved it this year.

2. Stamped Concrete Patio

While we did not attempt this one ourselves, we definitely did not expect to have an awesome patio this year. It’s a reader favorite so our wood plank stamped patio gets the runner up position on our 2011 list!

1. Office stripes

Measure once, measure twice, okay measure 5 times then level, remeasure… 18 hours later peel off tape and have clean stripes! The amount of blood, sweat and tears that went into taping this room and the almost perfect finished product (we needed a few touch ups) make this our favorite project of 2011. Plus looking at the stripes through our french doors everyday makes it even better!

Honorable Mention:

The Baby.

Look at the little chin chin! I couldn’t resist the baby bomb

Hopefully 2012 will bring even bigger and better projects. We’re really surprised at how many things we’ve checked off our to-do list this year. We have a bunch of things to get started on for 2012 ASAP! What should we tackle first?!