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.
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.
