The one with the... Star Wars Room!

It has been over 2 years since we updated this blog!  We've been working on random things around the house but with 2 kids, we just never have time to blog about it.  And...now we have 3 kids, which means even less time to blog!  These days I put a lot of my crafting projects on Instagram @tadacrafting.  

A few months ago we started redecorating our 4th bedroom and converting our oldest son's room back into a nursery for the new baby!  Big brother Lucas was kind and generous enough to volunteer to give up his room and toddler bed for his new baby brother, so we decided to redo the 4th bedroom for him.  When we asked him what he wanted in his new room, he said without hesitation "Star Wars and bunk beds!"

So we started planning and working on his new room.  The bedroom that we were converting used to have two twin beds and was mainly used as a guest room.   It was also painted yellow and gray and had gray upholstered headboards that we made.  We started the transformation by moving everything out and painting all the walls, trim, and doors in the room to the same gray and white that are in the other two kids' bedrooms. This is a much smaller room so thankfully it didn't take as long to paint! 

Here's what the walls in the room looked like before (with most of the furniture removed):

With my due date being the 2nd week in February, we started painting the room in mid January thinking we'd have enough time to finish everything in Lucas' room and time to convert his room back into a nursery.  But then the baby decided he wanted to come out to play 2 weeks early!  That definitely threw a monkey wrench into our plans!  We were finally able to finish Lucas' Star Wars room 2 weeks after the baby was born, in between sleepless nights and half-awake days...

One of the first projects I had started working on before the arrival of the baby was a Star Wars marquee sign, like this one from Pottery Barn Kids: 

Well I wasn't about to pay over $200 for this thing!  It seemed easy enough to do a copycat and I found another blogger who successfully made one on her own.  I already had these string lights from World Market that I got a long time ago for our screened-in porch but never used.  Dave cut and put together the wood pieces and I used my Silhouette Cameo to cut out the STAR WARS letters out of Contact Paper. This is what it looks like with the Contact Paper on the board: 

  

With the Contact Paper on the board, I first used Mod Podge to lightly coat the edges of the letters so that when I painted it, the paint would not run under the letters and I would have crisp lines.  Then I painted the whole thing with two coats of black paint.  

I waited for the paint to dry and the carefully peeled off the Contact Paper to get this: 

Next I coated the whole thing in Mod Podge and handed it over to Dave to install the lights!  Dave didn't take pictures of that process, but it was actually harder than we thought it would be.  First we had to decide on the placement of each light bulb and then he had to carefully drill each hole so that it was just the perfect size for the lights.  Here is the finished product mounted on the wall.  A Pottery Barn copycat Star Wars Marquee:   

And here it is all lit up! 

We also worked on another light project... a lightsaber lamp!  Lucas had received a toy lightsaber for his birthday and we were constantly taking it away from him because he would swing the thing and accidentally hit his brother or one of us.  So we repurposed the lightsaber and turned it into a lamp.  Dave bought a lamp making kit from Home Depot, took apart the lightsaber, and did something with the circuits in the lightsaber itself so that the lightsaber could light up independent of the actual lightbulb in the lamp all while being plugged into the wall. 

Here is the finished lamp with the lightbulb turned on: 

And this is with just the lightsaber on: 

In addition to the lightsaber lamp, we got a 2nd lightsaber and turned it into a curtain rod.  Dave took apart the lightsaber, got a dowell from Home Depot, painted it, and affixed it to the lightsaber.  Here it is mounted on the wall:

With the curtain installed:

For the art work in the room, I had pinned some ideas of painted canvases. Using my Silhouette Cameo, I cut out the designs on Contact Paper and using the same method as the Star Wars marquee sign, I put down the Contact Paper, mod podged over it, painted two coats, and then peeled the Contact Paper off.  This time the Contact Paper didn't stick as well to the canvas and there was some bleeding of the paint under the Contact Paper.  So I had to fix some of the white parts by hand with white paint.  From afar you can't tell though!     

Another fun little thing I did to decorate some wall hooks was to add  Star Wars characters decals by cutting out regular vinyl.  (Fun fact: I was cutting and putting on the Boba fett decal when I went into labor!)  

The door knob to the closet also got a little bit of Star Wars: 

   

There was still a little bit of wall space next to the painted canvases, so I thought it would be fun to frame and put up pictures of us in various Star Wars costumes/shirts. There are pictures from Halloween when Lucas was 2 years old and we dressed him up as Luke Skywalker, Dave as Darth Vader, Pluto was Yoda, and I dressed up as Leia.

The pictures with the real Star Wars characters are from the Disney Cruise we took that included a Star Wars Day at Sea.  

And the rest are from Lucas' 4th birthday party, which was, of course, Star Wars themed.   

   

Once the frame was up, the wall above the frame looked a little empty so I cut this decal of Yoda and "May the force be with you" to put on top.  (Does anyone else feel the urge to respond with "and also with you" when you hear that?) 

One of the last projects we worked on was a wall mural.  If you remember, Dave painted a space mural with all the planets in Tyler's room.  Lucas wanted a wall mural for his Star Wars room "just like Tyler."  However, this time instead of drawing/painting every little detail on the wall we decided to cut vinyl decals.  Dave came up with the idea to create the famous battle scene from "Episode IV: A New Hope" where the rebels destroy the Death Star and designed this in the open source software program Gimp. He drew out the wall to size in the program and placed the images where he wanted them and to scale. From there he imported the image to the Silhouette software where I worked on tracing and converting the images into cut files that could be somewhat easily cut on vinyl using the Silhouette Cameo.  

This was the design: 

Here's Dave putting the decals on the wall. We learned that if you use a tennis ball to rub the decal into the wall it adheres better.  Heating it with a hair dryer also helps tremendously.  After we learned those tricks, putting up the decals went so much faster!

This is the finished mural, with the Death Star, X-wings, Tie fighters, Darth Vader's Tie Fighter, the Millenium Falcon, and the forest moon Yavin IV.

Close up of the Death Star (you can also see all the little stars that Dave painted on using a Sharpie paint marker):  


After several weeks of working on the Star Wars room, in between working on the new nursery and having a baby, we finally finished everything the day before my actual due date!  We kept the bedroom door locked while the kids were home so they couldn't go in to see what we were working on.  Lucas was pretty patient in waiting for his room to be done!  The very last thing we were waiting on was a dresser from Pottery Barn Kids that I ordered when I was still at the hospital the day after having the baby.  Finally the dresser arrived and I was able to put the finishing touches on the Star Wars room.  

It was a lot of work and we kind of had to rush to finish, but all in all, we're very happy with how the Star Wars room turned out. More importantly, Lucas loves his new room!  When we showed it to him he kept saying "wow" and then named all the characters that he recognized from his Star Wars books and the few Star Wars movies he has seen.  Since that day he has slept on the top bunk every night and he wants all his friends to come over to see it!    

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The one with the... Second Nursery!

Wow, it's been almost 2 years since we updated this blog!  We've been working on projects here and there in the past 2 years, but haven't really had the time to post any updates.  Maybe one of these days we'll get around to it... but in the meantime, here's the latest project we have been working on.  The second nursery!  

We are expecting baby boy #2 any day now (due date is July 29!), so while I still have the time, here are some pictures of the projects we worked on to put the second nursery together.  When we found out we were having another boy, we decided to go with a Space themed room.  Dave has always been a fan of NASA and space exploration and it's different enough from Lucas' nautical themed nursery.

The first thing we needed to decide on was which room to convert to the second nursery.  We have 4 bedrooms upstairs and the two remaining rooms were both guest rooms.  One is much larger and has a queen bed in it and the other is smaller with two twin beds.  We went with the larger room just because we remembered how much time we spent in the nursery with Lucas.  Plus we thought it would be kind of a waste to have a large guest room that is only used maybe 5-10% of the time.  Might as well let the kids have the larger rooms to sleep and play in later.  Here's what the guestroom looked like before:

Dave moved all of the furniture from the guestroom down to the basement so that we could paint.  Speaking of paint, we had to decide on the color scheme!  We liked the idea of gray because it's somewhat neutral, but the hunt for the "right" gray was definitely a challenge.  I borrowed some paint samples from a friend who probably had about 50 shades of gray paint samples in her basement and painted rectangles on 3 different walls in the room:  

       
After hemming and hawing for a few weeks, I decided that I was going to save some money by re-using leftover gray paint from Lucas' room, Bunny Gray by Benjamin Moore. :)   There is a chair rail in the room so we decided to do the same as Lucas' room and paint the top half gray and the bottom half in high-gloss Decorator White by Behr.  

By the time we were done painting, we realized that we had literally painted every surface in this room except for the ceiling and the floor. To no one's surprise the previous owners painted the INSIDE of the closet a yucky salmon color, so that had to get one coat of primer and two coats of white.  The closet doors also had to be painted because they were a faded off white. 

On one of the walls, I wanted to do an "accent" wall with the solar system, an idea I got from this blogger that I found through Pinterest: 

Source: Lemon Drop life

When I showed Dave the picture of the solar system wall and how the blogger used embroidery hoops to create the planets, he said "Why don't we just paint the solar system on the wall directly? It will be much easier and we can paint them to scale!"  Dave took that on as his project and as per usual, he designed it via SketchUp. 

First he searched for a google image of the solar system to get planet scaling.  He then created a 14' wall in SketchUp and stretched the image on that surface and then traced the planet sizes to match the image.

This is what the traced google image looked like in SketchUp:

Then he moved the planets to the sun equator and further spaced them out to show some sense of where they actually are as well as make room for the asteroid belt.

From the drawing with the dimensions above he used a compass drawing tool (like the ones you used in elementary school), to draw circles for the planets on butcher paper.  

In addition to the planets, he also drew and cut out on butcher paper the sun and the asteroid belt.    

Meanwhile we were also busy painting the room and decided that the solar system wall should be a dark dark gray... almost black. In an effort to make it easy for ourselves, we looked at the paint swatch for Bunny Gray and just went across to the darkest shade to get us to Wrought Iron. 

I painted two coats of Wrought Iron on the accent wall and once it was dried Dave started his art work!  In my mind, when he said he wanted to paint the solar system on the wall, I was imagining a big yellow sun, Earth would be green and blue, Mars would be solid red, etc.  But when he asked me for acrylic paint in many colors so that he could do "shading," I began to wonder what he was up to.  This was the sun in progress... 

As you can see, it is a lot more detailed and intricate than I would have done, but I'm no artist!  Below is the sun once he was done!  He even painted in the sun spots and the flares.  

Here is the rest of the solar system all done!  Dave even added stars and constellations like the big and little dippers and some of our astrological signs.  He did a really nice job on the mural: 

Earth looks so tiny compared to the other larger planets like Jupiter and Saturn!  And of course we had to include Pluto (our dog's namesake) in the solar system.  

The rings of Saturn took a bit of thinking and teamwork.  Dave googled it and figured out how to draw them by using string, sewing pins, and a pencil. It required one of us to hold the pins in place with string wrapped around them and the other to draw the spheres with the pencil.  It's hard to explain... 

In the picture above you can see the new glider-recliner that we got for the new nursery.  After spending what seemed like endless hours in Lucas' room in the glider, we decided to get a second one that also reclines and would be comfortable enough for us to sleep in with baby #2.  The glider-recliner is from Costco and it's heavenly. :)  

Another piece of furniture we got was a dresser.  As we did with Lucas' nursery, we purchased a 2nd hand dresser and refinished it.  I had been on the hunt for dressers on craiglist as well as on our neighborhood email listserve and after a few weeks of trolling I found someone selling a wide dresser and mirror for only $50!  So I sent Dave and a friend over to go take a look and pick it up.  

This is the dresser below.  It's made by Broyhill and a little googling showed that it retails new at about $800.   

Overall the dresser was in really good condition, with the exception of some small water damaged spots on the top of the dresser and two drawers that needed replacement tracks: 

A quick trip to Christopher's, our local ACE hardware store, and the experts there gave us tips on how to fix the water spots-- sand them down until it's smooth, apply a few thin coats lacquer, and then paint!  

This is me sanding down the dresser.  Dave made me wear this protective mask...and then later on he handed me ear plugs because he was sawing something for another project in the garage.  

This is what the top of the dresser looked like after I sanded and applied the lacquer: 

It felt pretty smooth and soon with a coat or two of paint on it, you won't be able to tell there were ever water spots there!  We decided to paint the dresser gray and white, similar to how we painted Lucas' dresser:

Because we had such good results with the Benjamin Moore Advance paint on Lucas' dresser and night stand, we splurged and got the same Advance paint for this dresser. As for the color of gray, I went back to that same swatch of grays that the wall colors-- Bunny Gray and Wrough Iron-- were on and picked out Trout Gray.  For the white we just went with Benjamin Moore's Decorate White in their Advance line.  

I pulled out all the drawers and went to work with the Trout Gray. 

You might notice the little chairs in the picture above with the drawers.  We got those for free from a local church and I was also in the process of sanding, priming, and painting them.  

Here's the dresser and the mirror all done with multiple coats of paint! 

On one of the other walls we wanted to do a space-themed alphabet.  If you remember, in Lucas' room we painted wood letters from the craft store:

At first I had lofty goals of painting each letter of the alphabet on small 5 x 7 wrapped canvas, but after doing the math in terms of cost and my limited time, I quickly changed courses.  Instead, I found this Etsy store that makes and sells "Outer Space Vinyl Alphabet Wall Decals"!  You get to pick 3 colors and they customize it and send it to you!  It was quick and easy to place and receive the order.  When it arrived, it came in one big roll along with detailed instructions and even a test decal.  

The first instruction was to cut each letter/square out and we decided that since there were 26 letters we would have 4 rows of 7-6-7-6 letters each. 

We measured the wall and carefully drew out and planned out the distance between each letter, row, and how far from the top and bottom edge they would go: 

Dave taped the wall using blue painters tape to ensure accurate placement based on our calculated measurements and he went right to work:

Dave said that it was quite time consuming and tiring to put up each letter and make sure that they were placed correctly and didn't have any air bubbles!  So he did one row per night for 4 nights and this is the finished product! 

On the wall opposite this one I got the idea to do some DIY painting on canvas of space-related quotes from these Etsy sellers:

 Source: Etsy PepperPaperie

 Source: Etsy Design Creatives

At first I was just going to design everything on the computer and then print and cut out the letters and trace them onto the canvas, but my coworker Caitlin was nice enough to let me borrow her fancy Silhouette machine that cuts out whatever shape you put into their software program.  

This is the rough sketch that I did on PowerPoint:

I actually had to redesign them on the Silhouette software, which wasn't that hard thanks to a quick tutorial and some technical assistance via text from Caitlin. :)  This is what the Silhouette machine cut out for me on cardstock!

I wanted to have a darker background with the white lettering/image on top so I painted all of the canvases first.  I taped the cardstock onto my pre-painted canvas. 

I used pencil to trace the image onto the canvas and I had to make sure to draw in the little circles and shapes in between the letters in a, r, d, b, o, etc.  

Then I took the cardstock off and began filling in the pencil with white paint.

It took a few coats of the white paint because I was painting it on a slightly darker color.  And here are all four of them mounted on the wall:

Another idea that I got from Pinterest was to use a wooden birdhouse and turn it into a night light.  Michael's sells this rocket ship birdhouse, which was perfect for the space-themed nursery!  And thanks to a 50% off coupon, this was only $5! 

Source: Michaels.com

Dave cut two extra holes into the front of rocket and got rid of the little "ledge" that the birds usually stand on to get to the bird food.  He also cut a larger hole in the back where the light will go.   

Painting in progress of the night light:

After a little more tweaking of the paint colors and mounting it on another piece of wood, this is what the final night light looks like:

We got the light socket from Home Depot and it clips easily into the back:

Now onto textiles... for the hardwood floor in the nursery I wanted a nice soft gray rug.  I ordered some swatches from Pottery Barn, but didn't really like either of them.  One looked too blue and the other looked too green.   

I finally settled on the Harper rug in gray from Pottery Barn Kids: 

Source: Pottery Barn Kids

Just like in Lucas' room I wanted to make an adjustable crib skirt that could be shortened or lengthened depending on the mattress height setting.  I was able to repurpose some white fabric that I already had and then just buy gray ribbon to make 3 panels for the crib skirt.  In the picture below, you can see one panel of the crib skirt as well as the Harper rug in the nursery: 

Instead of trying to "paint" curtains again, which turned out to be super time consuming and a pain to do the last time around, we just purchased dark gray curtains from Ikea.  They are pretty thick and does a decent job of blocking the light, but we also installed blackout roller shades to each window to ensure total darkness.  

Source: Ikea

The last project for the nursery was also a DIY...but not by us!  One day I was chatting with my good friend Erin about hand sewing little felt space-themed figurines for the baby mobile that I saw on Etsy.  

Source: Etsy PinkPerch

Erin is an expert at making stuffed felt letters, figurines, ornaments, etc. so when I saw this I asked Erin how hard it would be to make them myself...and she replied with "Super easy.  Even easier if you let me make them for you :-)"   If you remember, Erin had also DIYed this for Lucas' room:

She is super crafty and talented, not to mention super sweet for offering to make the figurines for the mobile.  Of course I said "yes, please!" and about a month later, she came back with the most awesome space-themed stuffed felt figurines ever!  I love that there is a little part of Aunt Erin in each of the boy's nurseries.  This is the finished mobile! Isn't it just perfect!?  

  

Now that you've seen each of the projects and how they came to be, here are some pictures of the nursery so you can see how everything came together!  

What's funny is that when we first discussed working on the new nursery we had decided that we were not going to do as many projects as we did with Lucas' nursery because we just didn't have the time or the energy.  Looking back we probably completed just as many projects and put in just as many hours as we did the first time around.  It just took a lot lot longer because we had to fit in the projects while Lucas was napping, or we took turns working while the other entertained him, or we had Dave's mom or a friend watch Lucas for a few hours so we could get stuff done.  It was definitely harder when you have an almost 2 year old running around!  

And now we wait for Baby G #2 to decide to make his appearance so that he can enjoy his new nursery!       

  

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