2014: My Favorite Posts

It was nice to have a good break and be with family! I hope you had a great holiday too. 2014 was a busy year of projects in our home and taking care of four little girls. We've lived in our home for almost two years. It's a beautiful builder's grade (the hubs, Steve and I) we are trying to make feel cozy and our style. Here's a recap of some of my favorite projects and posts this year:

                   I gave our sconces a makeover with Rub N' Buff  and love how they turned out.

Steve and I made this frame for our daughter's room. 

In the winter, I was a contestant in the Creating with the Stars contest where Steve and I made this Melrose knock-off table. 

Color Block Dining Room Hutch: A week after the table project, we did a makeover to a dresser/buffet and added a hutch on top painting the whole thing in different shades of blue.

I love how this old tv stand turned into a stylish bar cart. Also, I show how I made this gold leaf mirror. 

Our tween daughter's room turned out to be navy, coral and white. Love it!

                         In the summer, we brightened up our front entry by painting and adding trim.

My sisters and I worked together to create this nautical loft space for our family home on Martha's Vineyard.

                         In the Fall, I got organized the paper clutter by creating a command center on a skinny wall.

Steve and I made these bookshelves out of plywood for Home Depot and organized our home office.

             Our laundry room now feels pretty, and organized with some hooks and built in cabinets.

I made this mirror into a large statement piece for our living room. You won't believe how inexpensive it was to make.

Lastly, this sofa has a long story that will be told soon, but I'm glad she's done! My tips for reupholstering furniture and getting over your fear of it are coming up soon. 

I have to admit, this was a bit therapeutic for me to look back at some of the things that happened this year. If you're new to Right Up My Alley, I hope you'll stick around. Onto new adventures and projects for 2015! It's going to be a good one!

One Room Challenge- Week 5

Here we are at week 5 of the ORC! We have one week left to work on our makeovers and I'm far from done. However, our laundry room re-do has made some good progress this week. Check out our board shiplap wall with hooks! I'm loving this look. I'm working on what to hang above the hooks, and those two vintage botanical prints will probably make the cut. The laundry room is right off the small hallway from the garage so I wanted to extend the "mudroom" by putting up hooks for all the kids' gear. 

We also put up our DIY cabinets this week and the folding table. Between the two cabinets we will be installing two open shelves. The sink needs it's skirt still which I'm still working on making. I'm also going to work on adding some texture to the folding table by possibly making it look like Carrera marble. Another thing to add to the list!

With one week left I have to be realistic. I wanted to paint the floors, but we'll see if I have enough time. Do you think it will look good with a black and white runner and call it a day? Or do you think it would look better painted, with a rug?

Things to (still) do for the laundry room makeover:

-hang art
-install two shelves
-install hardware
-poly coat cabinets
-finish and install wood bead chandelier
-sink skirt
-put in new rug
-probably more things I can't think of right now

Let's see how the progress of everyone else's rooms with the 20 main participants and the linking participants of the ORC. Can't wait for next week to see everyone's reveals.

Staircase, All Trimmed Out

This summer Steve and I worked on our entry and staircase to give it more character. I started lightening up the staircase by painting the risers white.

We added trim to our stairway and painted it white which made it look like white paneled walls. We also stained the banisters black.

Here's what it looked like BEFORE as I was starting to paint stair risers. It's a beautiful stairwell- it just needed a little oomph!

To stain the banisters, I started by lightly sanding where I wanted to stain (and I mean it was quick- it's just to rough up the wood). After wiping up all the dust, I used green Frog tape to wrap around all the spindles. This part took awhile! I used some cheap throw away brushes to apply Miniwax Polyshades in Classic Black. This product is great because it already has a poly coat in it. The end result was fabulous and required fewer steps than priming, painting, and applying poly.

Once the railings were stained black, I worked on the lower half of the banisters.

Now for the trim!

The trim is 1" x 2.5" pine. We thought this width looked good in proportion to the overall space. We bought 1" x 6" trim and then ripped (cut length-wise) the boards on a table saw.

First, we first laid out where we wanted the trim to go by marking each piece on our walls with a pencil. We tried a couple of different layouts before deciding on a final layout. The shortest section was between the floor and the stair landing. We essentially split that section in half and the space between boards ended up being 22". We used that same spacing for the other two walls. The height of the trim is the same height as the banisters.

Finding the angles between the trim pieces and the inclined staircase was a little tricky. It took some trigonometry to figure it out.   My husband is a math geek so he did this part. Or, you could just cut a couple of scrap pieces until it looks right.

You'll notice the trim is thicker than the baseboard trim so we also tapered those ends with a 45° cut. When the taper was on an incline, we used a compound miter cut.  Once we had all the angles and layout, we cut them on a miter saw.

We used Liquid Nails and a trim nail gun to affix them to the wall.

Once all the trim is up, we caulked where the trim met the wall and we sanded any rough edges. We then painted with one coat of Zinzer water-based primer and two coats of white trim paint.

I still need some art work on that one wall going up, so I'm sure I'll show you what I put up there soon. I'm also probably going to paint the dresser in the corner (still working on that one too).

Here's the back side of the stairwell. 

Everything looks better with some flowers. These lime light hydrangeas have done well this year in our yard and it's fun to bring them in and enjoy them.

The cost of this project was under $100 for the stain, paint, wood, caulking, and glue. Not bad! I really like the white paneled look and it brightened the whole entryway. What are some ways you have found to brighten your entryway?

How We Built Our Library Bookshelves

This has been one of the most involved projects we've worked on so far but it has been totally worth it. After figuring out the look we were after, my husband drew out a plan of how to make it. Essentially, the library consists of 5 cabinet bases, 5 bookshelf tops, and some trim to finish it off. Since this is a built in library, we will talk about how we made it starting with explaining how to build one bookshelf. If you have a larger or smaller wall you would need to adjust accordingly. Here are the basic steps we went through.

Tools we used:

• Table saw
• Skill saw
• Router
• Sander
• Craig Jig
• Air compressor
• Nail guns
• Screw gun
• Drill
• Wood clamps

Supplies we used:

• 2"x6" pine for the foundation
• 3/4” Birch cabinet-grade plywood for cabinets and bookshelves
• 3/16” laminated plywood for cabinet backing
• 1/4" barn siding plywood for bookshelf backing
• 3/4” poplar trim (various widths) for styles and rails
• Wood glue
• Screws

For the cabinet bases and bookshelves, we used ¾” birch plywood (cabinet grade). For the trim and doors, we used poplar, which holds paint well and is an easy wood to work with. For the bookshelf backing, we used “barn board” plywood. For the cabinet backing, we used 3/16” laminated plywood. We got everything from Home Depot.

To start, we removed the baseboard trim and crown molding in way of the built-ins. Be careful when removing the trim because you’ll end up re-installing it when the built-ins are complete.

The cabinet bases are made of 4 main pieces: the two sides, the bottom, and a shelf. We used a router with a ¾” bit to carve out slots for the bottom and the shelf. Our workshop is in our unfinished basement, which we plan to finish someday soon. Here is a picture of the main pieces prior to assembly.

We then assembled the pieces using glue and screws and then added a spreader (the top horizontal piece) and finished it off by nailing a 3/16” plywood backing to the cabinet. We did this 5 times.

Meanwhile, back upstairs we made a foundation out of 2"x6" pine lumber for the cabinet bases to sit on. We made the foundation height such that the top of the installed baseboard trim would come about 1” below cabinet bottoms. Then we set the cabinet bases on the foundation and re-installed the baseboard. We then added poplar styles and rails to the cabinet bases. 

The cabinet top is made of the same birch plywood with a ½” baton of poplar to hide the end grain. The hole in the wall is where the wiring comes out. There was a switched outlet on the bottom left of the wall which we planned to use for power for the sconces.

The next step was to make the book shelves. We used the same router bit to cut slots for each shelf. We made the shelf spacing 12”. We chose 12" based on the largest books we had and what we wanted to put on the shelves. 

Then we assembled the pieces using glue and screws. 

And repeat!

If you are going to do something similar, I recommend painting the bookshelves BEFORE installing the backing. It will save you a TON of time. The backs were made of barn siding plywood and is relatively inexpensive, but rough. However, once you sand it down, it looks amazing. On another side note, while we were sanding, we had a crazy visitor. I have no idea what this bug is called but it freaked me out. It was HUGE!

After the backs were sanded, we primed, painted, then nailed them to the back of the completed cabinets.Then we brought the bookshelves upstairs and put them on top of the cabinet bases. The spaces between the book shelves are for the wiring.  

The next step was to start adding the trim. We started with the top rail. We made the top rail fairly wide because it would also serve as the backing for the raised crown molding. Then we added the stiles (vertical boards) which covers the bookshelf joints and holds the sconces. The lighting we got at Overstock. At first we were looking at swing arm lamps that were gorgeous, but out of our budget; especially since we would need five. Then we decided on sconces since we would then only need four.

Nothing (not even this project) would stand in the way of making our kids practice piano. That is why the piano never left this space. We had to move it around quite a few times but it all worked out.

Then we added the rails for each shelf out of 1 ½” strips of poplar and attached them using glue and nails. We then put the rest of the crown molding back up.  

All that is left now are the cabinet doors. These were the hardest part. My husband would write a whole post just about these doors but to make a long story short, here is how we did them.

Each door is made of two stiles (the vertical pieces), two rails (horizontal pieces), and a center panel. The slot in the middle of each stile and rail was made with a table saw. The rails also have “tongues” (also made on a table saw) which fit in the slot of the stiles. Here is the resulting frame prior to gluing it up.

 We then glued the door pieces together and sanded.

We primed and painted each door in the basement before installing them. We went with Blum Euro-style hinges from Amazon which require blind holes in one stile.

We also covered the entire built-in with a protective polyurethane coat. 

We added the doors to the cabinets and added our kitchen knobs (we decided to put some pulls in our kitchen, so this was an easy way to re-use knobs we already had). You can see our library reveal post here.

 And then we took a nap. 

***Updated March 3, 2014***
Here's how she looks now all decked out-

You can see my post on how I styled this beauty  in this post and the transformation with the sconces using Rub N' Buff here. 

I'm entering this project in Creating with Stars Contest! Come check it out and other amazing D.I.Y projects.