Music Nook

Okay, technically I shouldn't be blogging about this yet, because it's not completely finished...but I just can't help myself, I'm so excited with how well things are coming along!

One of the aspects we LOVE about this house is the amount of storage.  There is a large clothing closet in the living room which was probably intended to be a coat closet--but since we have the mud room, we decided to convert this other closet into a "Music Nook".  (I bet you won't be able to guess who's idea that was!  ha ha!)

BEFORE

This little space needed a TON of TLC.  So it took MUCH longer than I had anticipated, but I hope you'll agree all the work paid off.

There were nicks, gashes, holes, and globs that needed taken care of before we got painting.

None of these projects have been done without guidance from Dad.  I usually email him picks and questions like this:

And then we get on the phone so he can explain away what all we get to do to solve our problems!

Isn't it amazing what a fresh coat of paint does for a space?

I wanted this nook to be a focal point for the room, so I looked into some painting ideas to give the wall a 'pop' and decided to go the stenciling route.  I was too cheap to by a $50 stencil, so I decided to make my own for $2.50.  Such a feat would NOT have been possible without Geoff.  You know when you were sitting in Geometry class and wondering, "When am I ever going to use this stuff?"...well 20 years later, I can answer that question!  I was so close to figuring out how to make a geometrical stencil that could be repeated over the surface of the wall, but no matter what I did, it never aligned correctly.  I spent several hours on this problem before Geoff came home.  When he arrived, I showed him the work I had done up to that point and expressed how frustrated I was in not knowing how to make it line up correctly.  He literally looked at it for 20 seconds and said, "Oh, that's easy, all you have to do is shift the thickness of the trim over half the distance of the radius."  What?  Well, I won't go into an explanation, I'll just let you know: Geoff was 100% correct and I had a perfect template for my stencil.

I cut it out and took some advice from Pinterest on how to go about painting with a stencil.  I think this idea saved me from a disaster:

Yes, I taped a level to the stencil to ensure I didn't get off and create an abstract mess.

It's nice to have walls that haven't been painted yet, I was able to practice with the stencil in the dining room before I officially started painting the music nook.

When I started painting, I wasn't sure if I was going to like it or not.  I decided to use a flat paint for the entire wall and then stencil with the same color in high gloss.  After I stenciled a few patterns, it wasn't looking promising, but Geoff and I agreed to keep going and see how it looks when it's done. 

 

And boy, do we LOVE how it turned out!

 

 

Oh yea, we painted the stair risers, too!

So you're probably wondering what else needs to be done, right?  We're going to mount my cello and add a music quote to the wall...hopefully we'll get that figured out sooner than later--but in the meantime, we'll just enjoy our pretty wall.

 

 And here's the light fixture that caused our computer woes.  Yes, it looks much nicer than what was there before, but I wish it wasn't such a costly install.