After we finished the framing of the built-in cabinets in the new office, Rebecca and I realized we better get moving on the baby’s room which included doing a paneled accent wall as well as crown molding.  This weekend was all about the crown molding and we wasted no time diving in the project.  After getting a few corners and long strips of molding in place, Rebecca and I realized we were in over our heads.

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.

Yesterday I shared how we decided on and planned out the accent wall for the nursery. Once we had made all of our major decisions, we headed to Lowe’s to buy some wood. We decided to use solid wood for this project, despite the fact that nearly every tutorial I saw used MDF. We figured since we were being neurotic about having a solid wood crib, it would be a little counterproductive for us to line the entire wall behind the crib with MDF. While MDF would have been the cheaper option, we decided to buy some 1×4″ whitewood boards. We liked the chunkier look of a 4 inch wide board and it was most cost efficient to go with the 1 inch depth. We picked up 10 foot pieces and it ran us about $75 for more than enough wood. Which we paid for with a gift card from Christmas 🙂 But if you wanted to save money you could certainly use MDF boards, or have a sheet of MDF cut for half the price. I’ve also read of some people using lattice or furring strips, which we were open to using but the sizes didn’t work out for us.

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….

I’ve mentioned before how our nursery plans included some sort of board and batten. I’ve always wanted to add some molding to the nursery and I was inspired by Emily’s living room makeover this summer…

(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 🙂

Since I finally put away our Christmas things, I feel as though I need to write out everything we want to get done around here while it’s fresh in my mind. If I could have tackled all of this tonight, I would have. I am so anxious to finally organize this house and make some progress on projects that were put on the back burner when I was busy with school.

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!!!”….

2011 is over already, can you believe it? Since this year was our first full year of blogging (and living in the house), we figured we’d jump on the end of year list bandwagon! So without further adieu, here is a list of our top 5 favorite projects that we completed around the house this year…

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?!