Industrial Restoration Hardware Playroom

One of the things that made us fall in love with our house was the large open basement!! We loved that it was a huge open space for the kids to play and run around. When we moved in, I went to work to make it a fun playroom for our son, with lots of bright primary colors. See the before!!!!  While it was a great design for kids, trying to sell your house, maybe not so much??

So I give you my industrial playroom, inspired by everything Restoration Hardware!

I repainted our table and chairs white and black! The table top is technically chalk board paint, but I have not let the kids in on this secret! More on the toy storage in a bit! I painted my book ledges gray! And added some large initials of the kids with an awesome star I found at Pottery Barn Kids. Also I added my "when you wish upon a star" artwork!

One of the first things I did, and you might notice in the before is paint some walls!!! The wall to the left in the below picture used to be a red chalk board wall. Once coat of primer and one coat of the wall color, I had a nice and boring (white) wall! The wall to the right, used to be an adorable house wall I painted, but now its a nice and solid black chalk wall (so we still have some fun here!!!)

 Do you not love the red firetruck in the above picture? It completes the room!

I attempted to make some DIY Industrial shelves using pipes! While they are not exactly what I wanted them to look like, they did the trick and I am very proud I tackled this project!!! I broke my ankle (un-related to this project) mid-project, so I never really got any pictures of the during, even though the during was a big process!

These shelves are the perfect perfect size for a car garage for my sons many many big trucks!!!

 Some industrial accessories! The boat was a win at a White Elephant party one year and my son loves this boat.... so it might be here to stay!!!

 I made a matching taller industrial pipe shelf for the non-playroom portion of the room. This side is supposed to be the adult side with the TV and seating area.... though toys ALWAYS find their way over to this side!

 I made all of the below artwork! I love making state nail air! So easy but such a fabulous look!!

 More of the massive firetruck and chalk wall as seen from the "adult" side!

 I would have redo this shelf if I had not broken my ankle. The top and bottom shelf have too much space between the shelves. These were a real learning process and they were so SO expensive to make!!!!

And a wide shot from the back of the room! This room sure is a huge improvement over the mess it was before!!! 

Thanks again to First Moments Photography for these pictures!

Not So Pink Baby Girl's Nursery

I loved the bedding and colors I used for Little Man's nursery 3 years back and (to much surprise to MANY people) I decided to use the same bedding and color scheme for our little girl. So baby girl's room doesn't look all that different from her big brother's nursery, but I just added in the right amount of pink accents! I LOVE pink, but didn't want an overwhelmingly pink room for our little girl.

So here is our not so pink little girl's room!

I spent a while trying to find the perfect letters for her name because I wanted them to be lower case letters and I wanted them to be HUGE! So I ended up ordering them from Craft Cuts and painted them a light pink.

Since I bought this bedding set in 2010, it came with a bumper. I only used the bumpers for the pictures and not while she sleeps in the crib.

I modified this plaque from a Restoration Hardware wall hanging by making an A with fabric and adhering it to the wood. 

Our comfy Pottery Barn Kids rocker, that we spend a lot of time in! I think a comfy chair in a nursery is a must!! I whipped together a pink pillow for her chair!

I created some bird artwork for her room using my silhouette.

 I modified the mobile I made by painting it pink and replacing the blue ribbon with pink ribbon.

Here is a close up of the animals hanging on the mobile. This is still one of my favorite parts of this room.

I love her nursery and how calming it is. We like spending time in it, and she loves sleeping in her crib! Here is how little man's nursery look! It's really not all that different, but I do think it has the perfect amount of pink!

Pink Nursery

Here is a sneak peak of our pink nursery and what I have been up too lately! I have been a bit busy..... but its so worth it!

Chevron Lined Black Out Curtains

I could not find curtains I liked for Little Man's new big boy room, so I sewed my own!! AND since his room is East facing they needed to be blackout curtains!!

So here we have my first time sewing lined curtains!

I also saved some money with these curtains. Little Man's nursery is accented with Silver Sage from Restoration Hardware Baby & Child and it seemed like they were clearing out the color from their nursery lines, I did what any sane person would do!!!! I bought two 94 inch canvas curtains in Silver Sage that were lined with blackout liners for a reality inexpensive price. I planned on using the fabric for many things.... well I am pretty sure I have had the curtains for over a year and didn't touch them until I spent time seem ripping them apart for the blackout lining.....  now I just need to find the time and energy to use the silver sage canvas.....

Assembling the curtains with the liner was pretty easy, the blackout liner is just heavy so its a lot of fabric to work with!

1. Finish the bottom edge of your patterned fabric. I made mine 2 inches wide.
2. Since I was reusing blackout lining, I did not have to finish the bottom edge of my blackout lining, but if you are using new blackout fabric you should do that now! 
3. Pin the right side of the patterned curtain to the right side of the blackout curtain. Your blackout linning will be a few inches shorter than your decorative fabric.
4. Sew the first side together.
5. Repeat steps 3 and 4 for the other long side.
6. Flip your curtain so it is now right side out.
7. You should now have some over lap on the backside of your curtains of the patterned fabric. You may want to iron this edge now.
8. Sew your top edge. I made mine 3.5 inches wide.
9. Determine how you will hang your curtains, in my case I used grommets, so I then installed my grommets.
10 Hang and enjoy!!!! 

Little Man's new curtains in his room!!! Look at all of the light the grommets allow you to have when they easily open!

AND look how they actually do block out the light from outside!!!

Little Man's new big boy room is taking shape!!!! I am so excited for it to be done!

Little Man's Last Nursery

When Little Man was born we rented an apartment in Michigan while Casey finished Law School. The awesome thing about our apartment was we were able to paint (not so awesome when we had to prime it back to white when we moved out!!!) Little Man had a really nice sized room for an apartment, not that he EVER slept in there!!! So this is his first nursery.

I was never a fan of the glider we bought for Little Man's room (and trust me I spent HOUR and HOURS in it trying to get Little Man to sleep!!!!) so I sold it before we moved to Wisconsin (why move something I didn't have too!!) We lived with my parents for about 5 months after moving to Wisconsin and because we did a lot of traveling back and forth with him when we lived in Michigan, they bought a crib and he had his own room. So while living there I helped my mom decorate his room there.

Then we have Little Man's nursery in our new house.

About 6 months in our new house I decided I wanted another glider in his room.  So we have our final and last version of Little Man's nursery. Soon we will move him into a toddler bed and in the not so near future he will be moved down the hall to his big boy room.

So I give you Little Man's last nursery!

I love how it turned out!! And I will be very sad when Little Man moves out of this room. But I am so excited to start working on his Big Boy room and all of the fun that will bring!

Here is how I made the alphabet canvas artwork.

Baby Girl Name Plaque

Over the weekend we went to a Baptism for an adorable 9 week old. I didn't know what to get her and since I didn't get her anything when she was born I decided to make her a wall hanging for her bedroom with her name on it.

A while back I purchased these awesome wall plaques from Restoration Hardware Baby and Child. They are thick 17x17 inches of wood. I had to prime the board to cover up what was there, which meant I only needed two thing coats of pink paint!

I made the stencil with my Cameo Silhouette. I forgot to grab my transfer paper so I improvised and used wide painters tape. It worked in a pinch!

I am loving this plaque and so happy with how it turned out!! 

The boards come with the ribbon attached and I actually removed it before gifting it because the ribbon is brown and the paint is gray (pretend you don't notice that in my picture :) )

Baby Monthly Onesies with Printable

This is a really old project for me since Little Man is 2! But these monthly baby onesies are all over the web, so I thought I would share my version! Now that little man is 2, it is so awesome to look back at these pictures and these really cute baby bodysuits! My awesome fabulous friend put my vision of these shirts to life by creating the graphics for me. Using the iron on transfer printer paper these are so easy to make (just make sure you print them in reverse!!!!) Besides that a piece of cake!

Look at how cute little man looks! And how much he changed from 1 month to 3 months and then 7! If I have a suggestion for creating these for your self... make them all before baby comes. I did not, and it felt like each month I was scrambling on his month birthday or a few days later to create that month's birthday onesie!

I love the simple green and brown colors. Since little man's nursery was done in Restoration Hardware's Silver Sage this green color is based on Silver Sage! ( I still LOVE LOVE LOVE this color!!!) So because they are green and brown, they could go for either a boy or a girl!!!!

Download the PDF files that I used to create my month onesie here!!! Feel free to use them to create your own month onesie or for a friend. Please make sure to give credit back to my blog!

Baby month bodysuit 1 - 6
Baby month bodysuit 7-8
Baby month bodysuit 9-10
Baby month bodysuit 11 - 12

Large Alphabet Wall Art

After re-arranging my little man's nursery I had a very large blank wall so I created some large scale alphabet wall art!

This huge 36 x36 inch canvas that I painted for our first house while I love the colors, does not really fit into the colors of any room in our new house. And since this is a huge canvas I wanted to re-use it! I repainted the whole thing the same dark chocolate color for my new project.

I designed my "design"out in InDesign first before creating the letters in the Silhouette Studio software. I ended up using Arial Bold font size 530pt (so the letters were HUGE)

I then went used way too much vinyl to make this! Luckily I scored 2 rolls of pink vinyl when my favorite local craft store was going out of business for $2.30 a roll, because I used one whole roll and at least half of the second. I tried using contact paper but that's a whole other issue :)

I will admit it was not easy to transfer the vinyl to my canvas because I was working with such large pieces. I found it did help to cut the row in half and work with smaller pieces. Also going back to my being a craft hoarder I saved all of the inside pieces of my vinyl alphabet for a later to be determined project!! The key to laying the vinyl is to GO SLOW and BE PATIENT!!!

To prevent bleeding I then painted with my original bottom color and let it dry!


Then I gave the letters a coat of my Behr Color matched Restoration Hardware Baby Silver Sage Paint.


Since I was pulling up such huge pieces of vinyl I let it dry longer than I normally would. I didn't want to pull up the vinyl with wet paint still on it and have it accidentally land on the print and ruin it!! I also did have to do some touching up on the letters.

Here is the finished product and it nicely shows the size of this canvas!!

I am happy with how it turned out! Little man likes to point to the different letters and it fills the space perfectly!

Personalized Foot Print Stool

This was included in my little man's nursery post, but I love it so much that I thought it deserved it's own post! Little man's nursery has a higher window ledge than other rooms in our house and he loves looking out the window.... so he needed a foot stool!

I found this simple stool at Micheal's. I painted it with the Silver Sage paint I had color matched at Home Depot to match Restoration Hardware Baby and Child's Silver Sage paint.

I then taped off a boarder using blue painters tape and painted a nice dark chocolate boarder. Then I had little man help with his foot prints! I then used my Silhouette to stencil on his name - in case we forget whose feet they are! I still need to add the date - because that is WHAT I will forget!
Perfect for looking out the window!! And perfect size for little feet!