Monday, February 7, 2011

Carlie's Bedroom - DIY corkboards

When we moved into our condo, we rented it furnished. Now that we're buying it, I've asked the landlord/owner/seller to move out some of her furniture so I could bring in more of my own.

The most recent thing to go was the bedroom furniture in Carlie's bedroom. She was living large with a queen size bed, which is completely inconvenient in this small condo where space is at a premium and she needs to be able to buddy up with her sister or a friend or whoever might be crashing here.

I wanted to move her into two twin beds, and I wanted to find something vintage and fabulous. But I couldn't. And believe me, I looked. I ended up buying two ghetto $99 captain's beds from Big Lots which are actually quite nice and serviceable platform beds without headboards. Even though they came from Big Lots.

I thought about doing upholstered headboards. But that requireds, like, tools and such. Long story short, blah blah blah, I decided to go with cheap and easy and DIY. And thus, the corkboards.

I found these two horrible "paintings" at Goodwill for $14.00 and a roll of cork at Fred Meyer in the clearance bin for less than $5. Add a tube of trust E6000 glue and we're ready to rock and roll.

These pictures are not canvas. The "art" is on a piece of hard board in the frame. So I decided to glue right over the top of it rather than remove it and replace it with cork. This made the project even simpler than I had planned. I covered the "art" with E6000 and laid out the cork.
I pressed the cork down smooth and then used sophisticated crafting weights made for this type of work. The right tool for every job is essential.
Because I do everything in a semi-half-assed fashion, if you look above you'll see that my cork is not perfectly measured nor perfectly cut, thus leaving a little bit of a gap around the edges. I closed the gap by gluing a piece of ribbon around the edges.
And voila, gilded corkboards, ready to hold treasures in a tween girl's bedroom.
Carlie immediately announced that she hates them. Hates them very much. Because they are "too gold" and "too fancy." My response: when you move out, you don't have to take them with you.
So the room transformation is complete. The dresser between the two beds is from my childhood room in the 60s. For real. I used this dresser as a changing table for each of my kids starting in 1987 and also for grandbaby Iris when she was born in 2007.

And a quick tour of the rest of the room, because it's small and there's not much else to see. Here's Carlie's desk/vanity table.
And even her closet got a quick makeover with storage shelves and bins.
For all I know, she is hatching an egg in that laundry hamper.

The end.

Linking up to some crafty blogs (for the first time ever!)

5 comments:

Keetha said...

squeeee!

How cute! I love the corkboards. Carlie can give them to me if she still hates them.

Anna Whiston-Donaldson said...

Yay! I love corkboards. You did a great job! Let me ask you for your opinion on doing this for a HUGE frame I took out of someone's trash lately. Do you think the rolled stuff will work or will it look too "seamy"??? Does that stuff come in MAMMOTH sizes?

Yankee Girl said...

What a great idea! And they look amazing!

Kate said...

My grandmother painted those. My evil sister cleaned out her house after she passed and got rid of everything! She'd always been jealous of my close relationship with my grandma. I've been scouring Ebay and Goodwill for years trying to recover at least a couple of her pieces. I hate to ask this, but I think this really was a sign from the universe, can you send them to me? I'll send Carlie some awesome Target bulletin boards to replace them, but those paintings? Oh, it would mean the world to me to bring them back into my family.

Swear.

viagra online said...

Is really cool actually, a few years ago i went to a frame place and buy some empty frames and the owner asked me about why and i told him that i will use my own designs but i guess that he thinks i was a painter or something haha