A little of this...A little of that

I have not stopped working on this room, it's a nonstop adventure! My husband thought it would be a good idea to move the Memory Making Embellishment Centers into the new room while there was nothing obstructing us. Only problem was, they were loaded to the gills! So in the midst of this mess, I started to take things down...



As with everything involving this room, it wasn't just a matter of removing the embellishments, it meant taking things off the shelf above it so that could be removed! Due to my husband's fear of things falling off the wall, he used the embellishment centers as a brace underneath the shelves that held my paper and books.



Now that meant I had to empty the shelves also! We are not talking about much room up here!!

At first it was an overwhelming feeling, where do you start? I just sat and stared for quite some time. Eventually I got up and moved, started by boxing the ribbon, then the embellishments, then realized, I might as well just leave the flowers around my desk so I can see what I have when it's time to put it all back.

Then I put all the paper from one shelf on the floor, when the center was taken down, I just moved the stuff from the other shelf onto it. Problem now was just what my husband thought, the shelves were starting to sag!

Meanwhile he decided to start putting together the paper storage unit he is building. While he did that I thought, why not save time and start organizing cardstock.

I guess you can imagine that disaster. Is it red or pink, is it blue or green, or maybe grey. How about orange, yellow, gold or even brown? Worst of all is WHITE! Is it white, or is it cream?

It took two days, but I cleaned it up, stored it back in the Cropper Hopper Holders, with scraps in the small ones with labels on front telling me what color is inside.



While concentrating on what color is what my husband decided to put up the embellishment centers. Now I know that two hangers on the back of an item can make it stronger, but do you know how hard it is to get that up on the wall, times three! Increase the problem by making the hooks on the back different on each one, including different heights on the same center! Paper had to wait as the two of us spend the next two hours attempting to get them up, centered, and level!

The end result was a little off center, but really, I'm just relieved to have it done!

Things are Happening!

Whew, things are happening at a nice speed now. Problem is I have too much on my mind! My daughter threw a monkey wrench into my life by telling me she is coming home to work on her wedding in June instead of August like I had thought. This means I have a lot on my plate, but I have a determined husband, and a big mess here, so I am continuing with the room.

Today we designed the unit to hold my paper. I had actually already designed it, so today we ran the numbers, figured the wood, the cuts, everything. Then headed out to Home Depot where a very patient young man spent quite some time making all the cuts we needed.

Next step is painting it.

The floor was ordered this morning. We went with a laminate meant to hold up under wheeling back and forth (me in my new chair).

This evening a friend came by to discuss the formica countertop. The decision was that my husband will actually build the countertop out of plywood, and then the two of then will cover it with formica. Sounds complicated to me, but he said it would be easy, and less costly this way. Besides, it's not a kitchen, it's my scraprooom, upstairs in my house, where except for pictures online, I will be the only person in the room, ever!

Moving Along

Happy Easter/Happy Passover, we celebrate both here, to some extent.

I think I've solved the chair issue. Although I still can't find one in white I am going to order this one from officechairs.com.



Don't get nervous, not in that print! They actually have a nice shade of pink and they even sent me a sample of it!

For the years I have been planning this room, paper storage has been my main issue! I hate the way I have it now, I ruin pages and find it hard and heavy to lift it. My patterned paper is lying flat in the Jetmax Paper Cubes from Michaels. My cardstock is in the plastic holders from Cropper Hopper. The plastic storage does not stand upright for me and keeps falling over. The cube holds so much paper in one section I spend an hour just looking for something.

In my research I had come across Amanda's Scraproom many times...



In her room Amanda says her dad made her paper storage, which sent my mind reeling.

Finally I came across Display Dynamics, http://www.displaydynamics.net/mobile/index.html. What a great site! They have paper storage systems, shelves, anything you can think of!

I decided to order just the stackable shelves, forty of them, they come in cartons of 10 each. My husband will then build a cabinet around it, which of course, I have already designed!





I signed up on Display Dynamics Facebook page and was thrilled to see how responsive they were to questions from customers. After questioning them, they gave me a great buy on the 4 cartons I am ordering, and also some drawer dividers. They were very helpful and I hope to do business with them in the future!

UPDATE

Hours of research and agonizing over which chair to order. Finally decided on the Rooms To Go chair for 149.99. Typing in all my information, agreeing to a very weird delivery schedule, get to page three, where they figure in the delivery charges and taxes. Are you ready for this....$249.99 delivery and set-up! For a chair!! Taxes are then another 35.50. For a grand total of $435.50!! FOR A PLAIN WOOD CHAIR! Needless to say, it's back to the drawing board for me!

Googling my Fingers Off

Wow, I am spending more time on the computer, than working on my room. Good thing I have this amazing husband who is painting for me!

I had decided that I wanted the room a nice deep grass green. Then I would decorate with pink and purple. Make it look like a garden. Also, since the room was originally green, the younger daughter's favorite color, I would keep it in a color she liked and add her older sister's favorite color, purple.

I picked out what I thought was a nice deep green. My husband started to paint and the first thing I noticed was that my daughter's room was not really green before!


(color in picture is a little off)

Her paint was custom made to match her wallpaper and bedding, and for years we said she had a green room, but now I was really making it green!

When the first coat dried, it was a little bit startling at first, but I liked it. My husband on the other hand, did not!



Even though he will never step foot in this room, I decided to go a little darker. Off to Home Depot, where the young man there added something to the paint and made it a shade darker. Which takes us to now, with my husband upstairs painting the room a darker shade on the second coat.

Back to Google and what I have been doing for the last two days! RESEARCHING desks, chairs, paper storage and my last important thing, something for my window.

I saved so many pictures of scraprooms I liked and a lot of them had some beautiful desks in them.

While researching I knew I wanted something in white, and something with nice legs. I found these two desks at Pottery Barn Teens.




Loved them both! Unfortunately, at around $400 each for a 4ft x 2ft desk, I couldn't bring myself to ordering one of them. After talking with my husband a light bulb went off in my head. I had asked him if we saved my old kitchen table, I liked the shape of it, and maybe he could just add legs. We didn't save it. That's when I decided to do a search on kitchen tables, and came up with this one that I ordered from Walmart!



It got a lot of rave reviews, and a lot of people actually used it in Craft Rooms.

Next the search was on for the perfect chair. Do you know they do not make many white office chairs? I found one by, Kathy Ireland, again another item at $400.00 I thought it was a little too much, besides the color of the material was all wrong. Then I found these on Pottery Barn Teens.





These chairs are all around $300.00, not sure they look all that comfortable for the amount of time I will be spending in it!

Somehow I landed on Rooms To Go Kids and found these chairs. The first one, I only paid attention to because it was called the Hannah Montana chair, and I am probably the only woman in the world that has a 27 year old daughter who likes Hannah Montana!



This one caught my eye because it was called the Disney Princess Chair. I think I'm a little too old for this one.



Finally, at Rooms To Go Kids, I found this one...



I know I will now need some sort of pad for it, but hopefully I can match up some material to the room and make it at a later date, like when I get a new sewing machine!

Tomorrow on to the paper storage search....

I Love Michaels

A.C. Moore has always been my choice of a craft store, but Michaels has always been so consumer friendly. For example, a few years ago I purchased my three Making Memory Embellishment centers. At first I told the cashier I was buying them for friends, and did they have to come in because we all had 50% off. No problem, we can ring you up for all three! HUH?? Wow, I was so impressed.

Then today, they made me so happy!

I tossed and turned all night, imagining the room with the pieces of Jetmax cubes I had already bought, and something bothered me, I thought maybe I had a lot more room than I originally thought. So, first thing this morning I remeasured and drew and thought and planned, and came up with the fact that I needed at least TEN more cubes!

So while my loving, darling, wonderful husband painstakingly painted over the dozens of bright blue stars I painted on the ceiling, I ran off to Michaels to shop! I had to buy them now, who knows when they will be 40% off again!! I got to the register and asked the girl if she knew when they were having 20% off entire order again. She said on April 25, but they did not compensate for items you already bought. Ohhhh, ok, it's a shame I didn't purchase these on Sunday, when I received the additional 20%. So the nice girl at the register said, "let me talk to my manager, afterall, you are buying 10 of them". After a quick discussion with her manager, she gave me the extra 20% off! A savings of another $45.00! When you are getting nickled and dimed trying to make your dream room, every penny helps!

No Holes in the Walls

We built this house we live in, mostly with our own hands. So when the girls moved into their own bedrooms at age 5 and 7, they had explicit rules from their father. NO HOLES IN THE WALLS! They hung posters and pictures with tape and for many years were so very careful, always asking permission. If a nail had to be put in, dad was consulted and he went in and did it very carefully.

Time went on, we redid their rooms when they got older, and the rules still held. Somehow they reached the teen years, and slowly, I started to notice a few new things hanging in the younger daughter's room. Not a lot, just a few things here, and a few things there. She is the one that has always been handy with a hammer and nails, so it wasn't a surprise that she stopped asking dad to hang things.

We always noticed when something new went up, and something old came down. I guess we just never noticed how many things she actually did have hanging up!

Until now.....

This was her room on Sunday, after my husband got finished spackling!




Holes of every size all over the place! In the ceiling where she hung up the Lego airplane she made, staples in the wall where she hung up toys in boxes she didn't want opened, holes from art work she purchased and hung up herself. Of course there were holes my husband had made and now questioned "why?" Holes from the corkboard wall, holes from the christmas lights he strung around her ceiling, and those many holes from the different electronics that had to be run around the room.

We had a laugh over his No Holes in the Walls statement of 20 years ago, I guess we both knew it was unrealistic to expect girls not to hang things up (although in her defense, my older daughter has hardly any holes in her walls!)