Creating a Basketball Mural

>> Saturday, August 30, 2014

Well, surprise! We’re having a baby! And we couldn’t be more excited. But that has meant some major changes around here in the past couple months. As you can see in my floor plan post, we have three fairly small bedrooms on the main floor and it has worked out great for us for the past 3 years. But with baby #4 on the way, there just wasn’t enough space any more. So we are switching things up. The oldest two boys are moving downstairs to a fun new room (that I can’t wait to share) and our third son is moving into the larger bedroom (Bedroom 1 on the floor plan) so we can prepare his nursery for the new baby.
 
So let me tell you a little about this third son, Nash. He is 2 and he loves basketball. With a passion. At 18 months, we would go to my younger brother or nieces basketball games and he would sit on my lap and watch the whole thing. While his older brothers were running up and down the aisles and needing distractions in the form of snacks and my phone, he was enthralled. So when we asked him recently what he wanted in his new room, of course his answer was ba-ball. Now, I’m not usually one to dive into a theme-y type room but really, how can I resist that request?

Here is how the room started out.

Creating a Basketball Mural | Ladybrook Crescent
Actually, the sad thing is that this picture was taken more than two years ago and really it hadn’t changed. I still hadn’t made those headboards I had planned and there was almost nothing on the walls. There was, however, quite a bit of damage (it’s amazing what two little boys can do to some walls in two years!). So our first order of business was clearing things out and getting a fresh start. We bought new bunk beds for the older boys and so we were able to just leave one of the beds in here. We disassembled the other one and stored it in the storage room. It will come in handy in a couple years when this baby is ready to graduate from his/her crib.

Creating a Basketball Mural | Ladybrook Crescent

Once we had all the walls patched up, I gave everything another coat of paint. I touched up the caulking, baseboards, window molding, door and walls. I told you, my kids are hard on this poor house!

And then the fun began. I have to preface this next part by saying that I am not artistic. Seriously, the first time Landon asked me to draw a cow for him, he laughed at it. He was two. So when I say that if I can do it, anyone can, I’m not joking.

First, I got the idea from this pin on Pinterest. But obviously baseball would not work here so I used a cute little t-shirt from Children’s Place as my inspiration.

Creating a Basketball Mural | Ladybrook Crescent

Please excuse the wrinkles. I may or may not have pulled it straight from the laundry pile to take a picture for reference as I was working.

I started by making my outline. That part was fairly easy. I picked a center point and taped a piece of string to the wall. Instead of drawing it out right away, I just used some painters tape to get a general idea of size and location. I just kept playing around with it until I liked it. Here’s what I ended up with.

Creating a Basketball Mural | Ladybrook Crescent

Then I used a pencil to actually draw an outline. And then came the fun part. I sketched in the other lines of the basketball. It wasn’t too hard but I definitely had to redo a few lines. For the record, a magic eraser is your friend when trying to remove pencil marks from walls. Unfortunately I don’t have a picture of this part; the lines were too light to show up.

Next I used a sample pot of paint left over from another project to paint over those lines. This was the first draft.

Creating a Basketball Mural | Ladybrook Crescent

I was happy to see that it wasn’t totally skewed but it was also looking pretty rough so I started doing another coat. I just used a cheap foam brush. But, as you can see, the edges were still pretty rough so I went over some of those places with a smaller artists brush.

Creating a Basketball Mural | Ladybrook Crescent

It did take a few hours but it wasn’t too bad. I just turned on some music after the kids were in bed and went to work. And here is the finished product.

Creating a Basketball Mural | Ladybrook Crescent

Creating a Basketball Mural | Ladybrook Crescent

Obviously, there is still a lot of work to be done in this space but we have one happy little guy to have a place just for him. Stay tuned for more updates as we continue to chip away at it.

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A bird’s eye view–Main floor

>> Friday, August 22, 2014

I put together a floor plan of our main floor, just to give you an idea of what we are dealing with. To put things in perspective, our home is around 1200 sq ft so the rooms aren’t huge but it is just perfect for us right now! While we did renovate the entire main floor, we made hardly any modifications to the original floor plan. The first thing we did was to open things up in the kitchen/stairway area. This technically didn’t change the footprint of the walls but we were able to get the flow we wanted by opening things up a little. We also put in a wall that had been removed at some point between the Master bedroom and Bedroom 1. I’ll go into more detail on both of those in a later post. So without further delay, welcome to our home! I’ll try to get some before and current pictures up soon but I wanted to have this as a reference point. Next up will be the basement!first-design (1)

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