blogdeedah: room re-do

Thursday, September 6, 2012

Chalkboard Wall: How NOT to DIY (A Step-By-Step Guide)

I'm normally pretty crafty, but someone please take away my hot glue gun, and send me remedial arts and crafts after the wallpaper/paint debacle that was the last day or so.

We have this big empty wall in our kitchen, and I thought it would be fantastic to make a chalkboard calendar (the kind that keeps popping up all over Pinterest) out of it. And here it is, all set and ready to schedule...

This should have been easy-peasy lemon-squeezy.

SHOULD have.

Here's a step-by-step guide on he do's and don'ts on making a chalkboard wall calendar:

Step 1.
DO: Measure, measure, measure: Make sure you check your measurements multiple times before marking and taping.
DON'T pay attention to my bad hair day (boho braid brought to you in full by mommy morning madness)

Step 2: Tape it off!
DO: Have a princess tambourine player on hand to entertain you, as this step is kind of boring.

DO: Enlist your local BFG to help you with the high-up parts

Step 4: Paint (chalkboard paint comes in both regular and spray form)

Step 5: Let dry, then remove tape
DON'T: USE CHEAP TAPE. Seriously, splurge on the type that is guaranteed not to leak. Do not buy the bargain brand or this will happen!

Step 6: Plan B
DO: try various paint removal techniques before throwing in the towel
DON'T: Attempt to 'lightly" scrape any paint off, it may cause accidental wallpaper butchering resulting in this...

And if THAT happens, definitely do NOT decide to remove the wallpaper AROUND the chalkboard like this:

Because if you do, you will spend all night doing so, only to have to wake up, go to the store, get GOOD painter's tape, go home, finish removing the wallpaper, sand AROUND EVERY FREAKING CHALKBOARD SQUARE, re-tape and then paint.

Why not just remove all the wallpaper and start from scratch? Because I will be damned if I'm going to w waste the money I spent on the chalkboard paint (that stuff is expensive!), especially since the majority of the squares didn't run.

I'm not even going to post all the pictures of how bad this got.

If you ignored my previous advice and did this the hard way, or just feel like you haven't F'd your project up enough, go right ahead and hand-letter the days of the week. By this point you will be so tired that you will also probably write them the Canadian way, starting with Monday rather than Sunday, and your handwriting will look like a 4th grader's.

Ta-DA! You now how a chalkboard wall (and possibly a migraine).

Monday, September 3, 2012

New House, New Look

Okay, so in an effort to be less confusing (or more confusing, I haven't decided ;-) all my personal, non-parenting related stuff will now be posted here, instead of over at It's A Daughter's World. What can I say, K and I are generally outspoken, so it only makes sense that we would have too much to blog about to post all in one spot :)

So, I wrote briefly about moving here, but never really followed up with any sort of explanation. Shortly after writing my summer bucket list, we were faced with the decision of either buying the house we were currently renting, or moving on. Needless to say, that was the kick in the tush we needed to go in search of the new Olmstead Homestead. Our little rental house served us well for 3 years, but we would be lying if we said it wasn't too small for our active family, and not as energy efficient as needed in northern VT.

And so our hunt began, and fully consumed the majority of our summer! We closed on our home in a quiet, sweet little neighborhood 3 weeks ago, and couldn't be happier! The room makeovers have begun (who am I kidding, I had that hideous dining room wallpaper- ALL three layers of it- down and re-painted within 2 days). Here are a few peeks at some of our room re-dos, starting with this weekend's hallway project. I still need to photograph the living room, but that is done too. Forgive the poor quality of the 'before' images, I had to take them from the internet listings.