DIY Mirror Framing

Man have I been busy and I promise that I have some stuff to show for it. As I mentioned before I had some excited stuff coming up, particularly Studio 5 and Rod Works. Well Studio 5 postponed coming to my house until October and Rod Works was going to do a giveaway but somehow lost communication. So now I have something else in the works dealing with this stuff...

and let me tell ya I am excited! More on that later, for now I have been working on a little re-do in the boys bathroom. 

It is still in the works so all I will show you is a little DIY I did....mirror framing! This is such an easy project and I don't know why I was ever intimidated by it! Seriously people you can do this!

Its so easy that it can be done in basically 3 steps.

1. Cut your molding at 45* angles.

 2. Paint. Pretty basic, just make sure to paint the backside as it will be reflected on the mirror.

 

3. Glue. Just apply liquid nails to the backside and stick it straight to the mirror. It really can't get any easier!

Not only is it easy, its pretty cheap and quick! The boys mirror is 40" x 30" so all I needed was one piece of molding. I already had the paint and glue so this mirror only cost me $10 and took me about 30 min!

After one successful mirror I went back to the hardware store and bought 40 feet of molding to do the master bath mirrors.

Now all I have to do is sand the edges and touch them up. 

But not bad for a cheap and quick project!

It's finished!

I FINALLY finished my crown molding!!!

It has been such a pain, and I complained A LOT, but now that it is done I am so happy with the outcome!

I spent DAYS preparing the molding for painting...then I spent 2 days painting. 

As I went around taping, I took a magic eraser and cleaned it. As you can see it was pretty dirty...

This made it so that I really only had to do one coat of paint. 

I chose to do 2 coats just because I had extra paint, but some areas I only did one...like behind the cabinets. 

You cant even tell a difference.

As I said before, our house has many weird angles, so it made sense for us to hire someone to help.

 This edge was kind of tricky, but I love how it turned out.

Here are some before and after shots...

Makes a nice difference, huh?! 

While we were at it we did the Master as well.

 This room is SLOWLY coming along. It is still far from where it needs to be, but crown molding makes everything look nicer.

Crown Molding

Happy late Mother's Day! I hope all of you Mothers out there had a wonderful weekend. My family spoiled me all weekend long :)

I know I have been a bit behind lately so today I will be sharing something BIG. 

For the past couple of weeks I have been working on our crown molding and it has taken all of my free time! I still haven't finished it yet but I want to share the process before the finished product.

Forever my Husband has been wanting to install crown molding in our home. The problem is that our main floor is close to 1500sf and is all connected. So the whole main floor would have to be done, that's close to 400 ft of molding! We also have tons of weird angles and corners that we decided it was out of our ability to do it ourselves. So we brought in our friend Morgan, who does finished carpentry for a living, to help us out. He showed up and within 15 minutes he had his saw set up and his first piece in place.

Eric and Morgan spent about 5 hours one day putting it all up...the caulking, sanding, taping and painting is all my job. Lucky me huh?!?

Morgan did most of the work and also taught us a few things.

First thing he taught us was all about angles. You need to know the angles of the corners you are working on, most corners are 90°. If your corner is 90° then it means your cuts have to be at a 45° angle. That is what the corners in the above picture are. Now the tricky part was our rounded corners.

To get 90° on this corner we needed each cut to be 22.5°, because 4 cuts at 22.5 equals 90. 

Here is how he did the corners: take some wood glue and glue the center piece to your edge piece.

Next he switched nail guns from a standard 18 gauge to a 22 gauge. This gun is the key to getting professional looking corners. Its way smaller and makes tiny hard to see holes.

He uses this gun to nail in the middle pieces of the corners. As you can see from the pics below, he never nails the middle piece into the wall itself. He just glues and nails them to the other pieces.

And there is the basics on putting up crown molding. Now comes the fun part, caulking! It has taken me 3 days of work to caulk all of the molding. The best tip I have for caulking is to use this finishing tool.

This tool will save you life...and your fingers! I used this for the top of the molding but not the bottom. I found that the easiest way to do the bottom was to apply the caulk with a caulking gun and then go over it with a wet rag to remove the excess.

For the nail holes we used this painters putty which was easy to work with and can be applied with a finger.

If you have a large space and you want to add crown molding it seriously would be worth the $ to hire someone. This has been a HUGE project but in the end it will be worth all of the hassle. Hopefully in the next couple of days I will have them painted and ready to post!!

Wainescoting in Master

Alright here is my Husbands favorite project of mine. 

This was my first project after moving into our home so I don't have any progress pics. 

Therefore I will try my best to explain the process.

At the time I had never done molding before. So I called over a friend of mine and together we tackled this room. She did all of the cutting and I did the nailing...I got the easy job :)

The first step was to measure. We wanted to keep it as simple as possible and tried to use nice even numbers. So we decided to put the chair rail at 35" that way we could do 20" squares with a 6" spacing between the baseboard and chair rail. The chair rail was simple. We held up one side, made sure it was level and then nailed it in with a nail gun. Then we would go down the line making sure it was level and nailing it in place.

Once the chair rail was up it was time to do the boxes. Now I'm not sure if this is the "real" way to do wainscoting but its how we did it and it worked great.

The first step is to measure the wall you are working on.

Once you have your measurement you need to decide how many 20" boxes can fit on your wall. 

The wall behind my bed is 202". I did 6 boxes at 20" which was 120". I then subtracted 120 from 202 and got 82. Then I divided 82 by 7 (the number of sections between boxes). This final number gave me my spacing between each box. I then proceeded to do this for each wall.

Once all of your measuring is done (make sure you measure twice!!) you can start the boxes.

Now House of Hepworths has a great tutorial with step by step pictures to help explain this better. The following 2 pictures are courtesy of House of Hepworths.

The best way is to start with the top piece of pencil molding.

Make sure its level and nail it in place.

The next step is to put up one side piece, making sure it is level and nail it on top and bottom. Then move onto the other side. Make sure you only put one nail in at the top.

Now put the bottom piece up and attach it with one nail in the corner of the fully attached piece. The reason you do it this way is because sometimes your measurements are slightly off. This will give you a small amount of wiggle room to make sure your corners match. 

Now nail both pieces in place and your done!

Just caulk and paint and your room can go from this:

To this:

Now our room is still a work in progress, its a big space and needs lots of furniture, so these are the only pics you get...for now :)

the laundry room

My laundry room is probably my least favorite thing about my house. When I first saw it on our first walk through it was almost a deal breaker! Our house has a huge master bedroom and bath, both with wasted space and it was crazy to me that they put the laundry room in a closet. It sits at the very top of the stairs in straight view from the front door. 

After we moved in we started thinking about possibly remodeling and moving or expanding the laundry room. Both options required extensive work and really we weren't sure if it was worth it. So I started adding a few cute things here and there to make it a space that I would love. I can now say that I love my laundry room!

Before I show the before pic, I must warn you! It really was bad. I think I used half a bottle of bleach to clean this room! Ok here it is:

Gross I know!

And the after:

Originally I wanted to take the shelf and cupboard out and replace it with some nice new cabinets. That was really pricey so I just got some molding and my miter saw and went to work. 

 

This is a close up of the cabinet before. It is pretty much the cheapest thing you can find. To dress it up I bought some beadboard for another project and had Lowes cut the leftover piece to fit the cabinet doors. I then got some wood glue and stuck it straight to the surface of the door.

I couldn't for the life of me get these doors off the hinges so I had to work against gravity and glue these while they were still attached.  I used a clamp of each side and let it dry for 30 min.

Once both doors had beadboard I decided to add a trim around each door. I used leftover lattice wood from my bathroom redo found here.

Again I just glued and clamped each section for 30 min.

Once the trim was done, I caulked uneven spots and sanded the whole thing. Once that was done all it needed was a fresh coat of paint and some new knobs and it turned from this:

Into this:

For the shelf I just cut a piece of molding the exact size of the shelf and stuck it right in front. No glue or nails needed. 

On the shelf I have my favorite linen water spray that I used for ironing instead of starch. Its rose scented from L'Occitane.

On the dryer I have a tray with glass canisters holding dryer sheets and detergent. 

On the side wall I made an ironing board holder. I got the idea and vinyl from House of Smiths. Seriously best idea ever! If you haven't checked out their blog then you are missin out!!

The hooks on the opposite wall are used for hang drying clothes.

And here is everything put together.

Eric thinks I should paint the walls, but I'm not sure yet if I want to. The room is so small that I am scared of making it darker than it already is. He says a light gray would be good, but I'm not sure. So far I love it!

This post is linked up to Beneath My Heart's, and House of Hepworth's link party. Check it out :)