DIY Superhero Canvases

Here we are, back in Tyler and Landon’s bedroom, AKA the superhero room. Of course, any superhero room needs superheroes! I thought for quite a while about how to best represent different superheroes, on a budget of course. There are some really awesome posters available on Etsy and I was so tempted. But after the cost of the posters plus frames for each, it was just more than I wanted to pay. So I finally decided on creating my own artwork. And of course I just decided to use symbols since they are super simple.

I started by having Landon pick which symbols he wanted, which sounds a lot easier than it actually was. He’s 4 after all. Then I picked up some 12x12 canvases from Michaels. They were about $25 for a pack of 7 and I had a 10% off coupon. But don’t be like me. If you can, wait until they are on sale or until you have a 40-50% off coupon. I live an hour away from Michaels though so I don’t really have the luxury of waiting until I get a good coupon to pop over. My husband was also able to bring home a projector from work, which really made this whole project possible. Seriously, I’m all for the hand painted look but I do not do free handing well.

Here was our little set up. It’s a little hard to see but I rested the canvas on the baseboard and taped it up with a small piece of painters tape. Then I centered the image over the canvas and started tracing the outline. I just Googled the images to find ones I liked. This is what a traced image looked like. I just used pencil and it worked fairly well. Just keep in mind that it took a lot of coats of paint to cover with some colors.


After they were all traced, I got to work painting. I worked in a bit of a haphazard manner. I tried to do as much of one color at a time if I could. Each color needed at least two coats in most places. I won’t lie, it wasn’t exactly a quick job. But I found it pretty relaxing  and had fun doing it so it wasn’t too bad. It ended up taking me a couple days. I even did most of it while my kids were around. A couple times I had them take off their shirts and gave them some paintbrushes and cardboard so they could join me.

I used a combination of these brushes. They are all just from the dollar store but I really liked the paintbrushes with the straight edges. I found it gave a lot more control when doing the details.

To me the most important part of the painting process was outlining each symbol in black. Wherever there was a transition from one color to the next, I painted a black line. I feel like this keeps it looking authentic and instantly makes it look neater. I used the smallest brush pictured above and it really helped me keep the lines uniform in size. Just for contrast here is what a canvas looked like without the black outline.

And again, here is the finished product. Once they were all dry, I took them outside and sprayed them with some clear gloss spray paint I’ve had for ages. This helps protect the canvases since the paint has a very flat finish and will easily scuff. Hopefully this also helps repel dust. I imagine you could use Mod Podge for this as well.

I’m so pleased with how they turned out. And a certain son of mine is too. He was my sidekick the whole time I painted them, watching me closely and asking questions. And making sure that I knew which color went where. He also deliberated for quite some time over their arrangement. Luckily, they are just hanging up with a couple nails so he can easily rearrange them if he decides that they aren’t in the ‘right’ place. (And no, I didn’t paint the Hulk canvas in the middle. That was a Home Sense find that I thought was just too awesome to pass up!)

I love that these were a really inexpensive way to add lots of personality and color to the space. And the great thing is that the idea can totally be adapted to paint whatever your hear desires!

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Forward Facing Bookshelves

We are jumping next to our older boys shared bedroom for a quick project that I absolutely love! I haven’t shared much yet about their room but it is pretty fun! When we started shuffling their rooms, I was a little nervous to have our boys sleeping in the basement, away from us. But I was excited for the possibilities of making this room really fun. Our second son, Landon, just loves superheroes. And he wanted a superhero bedroom. So that’s what he’s got. We worked on a few bigger projects (sneak peak on the right of that picture below) but we really needed some functionality. When we moved the older boys downstairs, we left their bookshelf in their old room for Nash to use. I hung an old IKEA frame ledge beside each of their beds for them to place their bedtime reading and a drink but they still had a lot more books with no home.

Ever since I saw these forward facing bookshelves online, I knew they were something I wanted for their room. Especially because most of the books they are reading these days don’t have a substantial enough spine to tell what book it is. There were so many books that we just weren’t reading, simply because they forgot they were there. Enter this simple, but fantastically practical solution.


I basically followed Ana White’s tutorial. I knew I didn’t want to spend much money so I went with basic pine boards. I used a 1 x 4 for the back and bottom of each shelf and a 1 x 2 for the front. Each shelf is 2 feet long so I was able to use the whole 8 foot board. They cost me less than $15 in wood and screws, which I was pretty happy with. I had them cut the boards down at the store but when I got home, I found they were pretty uneven so I used my miter saw to even them up. I gave them each a quick sand with my orbital sander, wiped them down and laid them out on my kitchen counter to paint.


I painted them grey, an ‘oops’ color I had picked up for another project in their room and just gave all the boards one quick coat on each side. Since I was using cheaper wood, I knew I would never get a perfect finish and decided to embrace their rustic-ness. Besides, with two boys using them daily, they wouldn’t stay pristine for long.


After painting, I assembled them, following Ana’s directions. I predrilled and screwed the bottom board to the back with 1 1/2” screws and then used my brad nailer with 2” finishing nails for the front pieces. Then I figured out the placement I wanted (they ended up being 12” apart), found studs, and screwed right through the back of each shelf.


I’m super happy with how they turned out! I did the whole project in less than a day, while doing all my regular mom duties with three kids around so they were definitely a quick and easy project. I love things that can be completed in one day! And my boys sure are pleased to see all those books they have forgotten about. Just the look on Tyler’s face was enough to make this project worth it. That boys loves his books!

I can’t wait to share more projects in this fun superhero bedroom. Stay tuned!

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Creating a Basketball Mural

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.


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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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!

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Trial and Error: A floor plan story

Prepare yourselves for a gripping tale! Let me set the stage for you. When we bought our house, we spent the first two months renovating it, while living 30 minutes away in my parents’ basement apartment. It was nice, since we went quite a while without having a bathroom in our new house and even longer without a kitchen. But then my parents’ well started giving them trouble and there was suddenly no running water. So we started staying at our new house and hurried to finish up the little jobs so we could move our furniture in. And even though I had been thinking about it for months, when the time came, I still had no idea how we would arrange our furniture in our new living room. You see, it is a little bit of a difficult room. At least we originally thought it was. Here is the 19’x12’ space we had to work with.

It doesn’t look like much but it proved to be a little difficult with two different openings and an off center window. We also wanted to incorporate as much seating as possible along with a piano. We tried a few different configurations the night we moved in, but I soon began to get some dirty looks from my husband and brother-in-law when I started to suggest we try the piano on ‘that other wall.’ So we settled on what seemed to be the best option at the time and there it stayed for over a year.

It was ok but didn’t work great because: a) the couches were pretty close together in real life, b) there was a ton of wasted space in front of the piano, and c) I love my piano, but didn’t really want it to be the focal point when you walk in our front door.

So I thought and thought over a new solution and finally about a year and a half later, I decided enough was enough and it was time to figure it out. So my husband and I started moving things around. The only thing I was really sure of was that I wanted the piano just to the right of the window (where you see the loveseat above). Other than that, we just moved couches and chairs around for a while until things seemed to fit. And this is what we settled on.

The desk was a bit of an afterthought. Once we got everything else arranged, we had a big, empty space in that corner. I also had the problem of nowhere to work on my laptop. So this has been a perfect solution. I love when everything functions well! The whole layout just seems cozier and way more conducive to conversation. Of course this room is far from done. Still on the list is end tables, an ottoman or pouf, a new rug, possibly repaint, and change up the pillow covers. One day…

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Bringing back plastic

We are budgeters. I have a thing for spreadsheets and numbers. Every day I open up that my beloved spreadsheet and enter things in and recalculate things and just bask in the order of it. The nerd in me really loves that it is one thing in life that is just numbers and equations. That part is easy (almost). But you know the hard part about budgeting, the part that everyone hates – actually sticking to it. Bleh.

We’ve tried many things over the years. For a long time we just used our credit cards (paid off every month of course) and bought what we needed to buy. We checked in on the budget every week or so to make sure we were on track. But sometimes it was the end of the month, and the end of the money, but we just needed something. So we went ahead and bought it anyways. Now normally, this would put someone in debt really fast, but my husband earned strictly commission for years and would receive compensation in a few large lump sums over the course of the year so we almost always had a bunch of money in our bank account. Somehow we always made things work until we got paid again.

Then my husband got a “real” job. The kind that deposits a predetermined amount in our bank account every month. The kind that actually helped us to realize that we really needed to actually manage our money. Around that time, I jumped on the Dave Ramsey bandwagon. We didn’t have debt but I knew our budgeting could be a lot better. So I began to withdraw cash and put it in envelopes. It worked pretty good for me. It definitely was a lot harder for me to let go of cash than to just swipe my card but there were a few huge issues for us.

The first is that my husband doesn’t like cash. For him, cash feels like “extra,” since that was the way we had kind of always treated it. With our previous ‘card-swiping’ system, cash always came out of our budget when with withdrew it so it was basically our blow money. If he had cash in his wallet, then it was slowly dwindled away on snacks or treats or who knows what else. We recognized that right away and so he started leaving the cash at home. But then we kept running into other issues. Like how he would pay for something if I asked him to stop at the store on the way home. Or if he needed to get some supplies for his class after school (he’s a teacher). So then he would end up using his credit card and when he got home we’d take out the cash and put it another envelope to be deposited back into our bank account to balance everything out. It was a pain.

But the other issue that really bothered me was that it was hard for us to both be on the same page. Jeff is really great at the big picture stuff. I work better with the little everyday details. So while we talk about our budget in general terms, he trusts me to do the math and figure out all the specifics. The problem with that was that it would often come down to him saying we needed something and me being the downer, always saying we can’t afford it. Because I knew exactly how much money I had left in my wallet but he had no idea. All in all, cash was just not working!

But lest you think that this is just a sad tale, have hope. There’s a happy ending! After a couple months of struggling with cash to make it work (Everyone says that cash is so easy! What’s wrong with us??), my husband suggested that we go back to using our credit cards. I was super hesitant and expressed that while that solved concern #1, it did nothing to alleviate concern #2 and even brought up another concern (being able to see at all times what was left in our budget).

And then my smarty of a husband said, “there must be an app for that.” And he was right. I quickly downloaded a budget app (this is the one we use) and it has literally changed our life. We fill our “envelopes” in our app twice a month and now both of us can use our smartphones and see at all times exactly how much money we have left at any given time. All we have to do is enter each transaction as it happens, which takes about 30 seconds. I know there will be those that disagree (I know this is practically blasphemy to the Dave Ramsey fans out there) but this solution has helped us big time!

So the moral of the story? Don’t give up! Just because one person (even if they are a finance guru!) claims that their method is the best, or only way, you don’t have to do it if it doesn’t work for you. Keep trying until you figure out something that does!

**Just for the record, I do still think the cash system is awesome and can be really useful for lots of people, especially people wanting to drastically change their spending habits. So if you are thinking of trying it, please do! And if you already use it and love it, carry on!

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Cheap Family Fun: Fly a kite!

We’re on a budget. Like a one-income-family, working-on-a-masters-degree budget. In many ways we are very blessed. We own a home, my husband has a secure job, we have no debt (other than our mortgage). But after financially horrific May (we spent over $2000 on car repairs and to buy a new lawnmower. Yikes!) we realized our savings account was seriously lacking. So priority number one for us right now is to build up that savings, which unfortunately does not leave us much for the “family expenses” category. So this summer we are looking for inexpensive ways to have fun together.

Last Saturday we didn’t have much going on. We enjoyed a lazy morning (it’s good to have those every once in a while!) but by the afternoon, we were going a little stir crazy. We talked about going swimming but the pool in our town in closed for renovations this year. And driving to the city (45 min away) not only equals more in gas, but usually leads to eating out and going to Costco and overall spending more money that we should.

So we settled for a walk to the park. We loaded the boys up in the wagon and walked down to a park that’s a few blocks away. Halfway there, I remembered a kite that I had purchased on clearance at the end of season last year. I ran back home to grab it and it turned out to be some of the best 50 cents I’ve ever spent. The boys had so much fun with it!

I’m always amazed at the benefits of thinking outside the box. Taking a trek into the city would have cost us upwards of $50. Flying a kite at the park down the street cost us a whopping 50 cents. And truthfully, it was way more fun!

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