Welcome to Week 2 of the One Room Challenge! I'm popping in with an update to show you what we've accomplished this week! But first, let me take a minute to catch you up on the plan.
For this round of the ORC, I'm taking on the smallest room I've ever decorated - the former storage space under the stairs in our basement. We are converting this 12.5' x 3' space into a rockin' playroom for our boys. You can read in the
Week 1 post why this project is so special to me.
Here's the space we are working with, and the design concept:
I'm excited to show you all the progress we've made this week. You won't even recognize the space...
Are you impressed?! Ok, so maybe it looks exactly the same. Seriously though, that box and those bags may not look like much, but we've actually made some pretty good progress this week. Let me walk you through it wall by wall...
First off, I am really excited to announce that I am going to be partnering with my local
Ikea store -
Ikea Centennial - for the art display and storage on the left wall. It's always fun to have an opportunity to work with a brand that I love, and Ikea is one of my favorites. It's hard for me to remember how we got by before Ikea came to town!
As I draw up the final plans for the art wall, my Ikea catalog and I have been spending some quality time together, and I can't wait to head to the store to pick up my supplies!
Next up, let's talk about the ceiling...
Last week, I hinted at my secret plans - but I'm ready to spill the beans. The ceiling is going to be covered in more than 100 records! Aaaaaaaghhh! I am SO excited about this, I can't even tell you!
Our kids don't have any clue what a CD is, but vinyl - well, that they know! They love listening to music on our jukebox, and three-year old Beckett even has my old Fisher Price record player and my collection of books on records in
his bedroom.
Talk about some hip toddlers, right? {Or does that make them hipster?} Well, hip toddlers deserve a hip place to play, so that's just what we are going to give them!
However, getting our hands on the records we needed for the ceiling turned out to be more challenging than I anticipated. Several months ago I stopped in to the ARC thrift store right by our house and noticed that they had hundreds of old 45s. I eagerly spent an hour or so digging through those records hoping to find some good music for the jukebox, only to come away with a mere two or three songs I'd ever heard of. So when we decided on the record covered ceiling for the playroom, I returned to the same ARC hopeful that I'd be able to get all the records I needed in one stop. But of course, they had maybe 10 records total. Darn it!
Scott and I spent an entire afternoon driving from thrift store to thrift store with little luck - a few here and few there. At $.50 to $.70 each, the price was right - but most had black labels {I was picturing a vibrant rainbow on the ceiling}, and even those with colored labels were so badly damaged that most weren't going to look great on the ceiling anyway.
Giving up on the thrift store route, we headed to a used music store where we found a large collection of 45 in the basement.
I had a great time searching through this vinyl, and I found some great new additions to our jukebox collection, but at an average price of $2 each, we just could afford to stock up on the 100+ records we need for the ceiling.
We talked to an employee at the music store about our dilemma, and he offered up the perfect solution. He told us to head to their downtown location where they have large stacks of little-known records that have come in with no sleeves. These sleeveless records are hard for them to sell because most are pretty scratched up - but since we are using them for decoration only, it makes no difference to us as long as the labels look good.
The store owner agreed that, since we were going to buy such a large quantity, we could have them for a mere $.25 each! BINGO! So we dug through the piles and filled up a box of sleeveless vinyl with bright, colorful labels. Next up, affixing all of these to the ceiling... Details on that coming soon.
Finally, let's chat about the plans for the wall on the right side of the future playroom.
I told you last week about our plans to cover this entire wall in sheet metal in order to create a large scale, ping pong ball wall coaster {a DIY version of
this}. We measured the wall and then headed to Home Depot to price out the sheet metal.
Given that I need to cover more than 5,000 square inches of wall space with sheet metal, imagine my disappointment when I discovered that Home Depot does not sell sheets larger than 3' by 4'. That was going to be a lot of individual pieces to screw to the wall, and a lot of raw, sharp edges to deal with. Back to the drawing board...
I started making phone calls, and ended up finding a fabricator right by our house that is making easy work of this sheet metal wall. They are fabricating four sheets of metal for us, and doing so in a way that will eliminate the sharp edges - making it perfectly safe for the kiddos!
The boys and I stopped by the shop earlier this week to drop off the final measurements, and what a fun field trip that was for them. The loved seeing all of the machinery!
Our final, fabricated sheets of metal will be completed this afternoon! I can't wait to pick them up so we can get to work on installing them!
Home Depot may have been a bust on the large scale sheet metal we needed, but after pricing out plumbing part options for the "wall coaster," Home Depot definitely won out over the competitors.
We originally planned to buy white PVC pipes and elbows, but we ended up choosing black pipe instead.
We opted for the black pipe over the white in part for aesthetic reasons, in part because it is considerably lighter in weight, and in part because it's just plain cheaper! Since we aren't using these pipes for plumbing, I didn't really need to know any more than that, but since I like to give you guys all the deets, I Googled it and discovered that the black pipe is actually ABS - Acylonitrile-Butadiene-Styrene. Of course, I then wound up going down the rabbit hole reading articles about the differences between PVC and ABS, recommended adhesives for each, plumbing codes in the US versus Canada, and, and... #bloggerproblems!
So, that's where we are at the Week 2 mark. We've done a lot of shopping, but not the kind I'm used to for the ORC. No furniture or drapes in sight... but I'm a lot more familiar now with our used music scene and I can recommend a good sheet metal fabricator in Denver should you ever need one!
Make sure you stop by Calling it Home to check out all of the other Week 2 updates from my fellow ORC participants! There are so many amazing rooms underway!
Let's get social!
Labels: Ikea Sponsored, One Room Challenge, under stair playroom
