Creative Do-It-Yourself Ideas and Inspiration for Your House and Family. Currently making _______________.
We deciding faux barn beams were the way to go for our particular situation. I hope you caught the first post where we catalogued the whole process of making and weathering our beams. In case you missed it, we joined together three boards to look like one solid beam. However, it’s hollow in order to encase the retractable movie screen. After building them, bashing them and staining them, we’re ready to install them. It’s time to get these puppies onto the ceiling!
Back to the basement. There were a few reasons for making ceiling beams. We have a weird, lumpy low ceiling in the basement. Despite having just told you this, we wanted a way to draw attention away from its imperfections, and ceiling beams do just that. They’re also functional – this I will explain in a bit. And lastly, they just plain look good.
Woohoo! My bookshelf dreams are officially actualized. We are so happy with how this whole wall turned out. DIY built-in bookshelves don’t have to be hard. In fact, they went fairly smoothly. If you missed the original build, check out this post first. Then come back here where I have the easy job of showing a bunch of finished after pictures. I got to play with my new camera Joe gifted me for Christmas, so it made photographing these shelves extra fun.
Alright, I must confess: I was 100% all for jumping on the IKEA hack bandwagon for this project. There are so many tutorials about retrofitting the “Billy” cabinet to make floor-to-ceiling bookcases. But when the dimensions didn’t fit our space, we had no choice but to go for a custom solution. And that’s usually where the best ideas are hiding.
You can ask Joe, this was probably the thing I was most excited about when we moved into the house. It was at the top of my list, but not high priority compared to some other projects.
Before the holidays, we left you with a sneak peek of the start of our movie room remodel. Probably not the ideal time to dive into a remodel, but we made it work! We’re now pleased to say we’re nearly finished and have been fully enjoying the new space. Where we left off, we showed you the barn door addition. That was really our launching off point into this room. From there, we tackled the walls and the floor. I’ll walk you through some of our design choices and the whole DIY process.
I promise we’ll stop with the signs after Christmas, but for now we’re in full craft mode. And we’ve got plenty of basement movie room updates on the way, so hang tight.
Because everybody can use a healthy dose of encouragement and fun, here are some of the signs I’ve been working on. More hand lettering, chalk board lettering, and plenty of mermaids. Check them out!
Here’s a third batch of signs I’ve made leading up to the craft show. We’ve made up a bunch of different wood treatments like you see above, so I have plenty of “canvas” options to choose from. I’m having wayyy too much fun making these. Definitely my new favorite hobby and mode of relaxation.
Welcome to the step-by-step basement remodel! Beginning with the barn door, I guess? Why not start somewhere random, right in the middle? The barn door was the first thing we wanted to build. For no particular reason. I’m glad we did because it informed some of our other choices, like paint color. For a small space or a movie room like this, it makes a lot of sense to build a barn door for privacy, space efficiency, and to block sound and light. It was actually incredibly easy to build this sliding barn door and took Joe only a few hours, including the torching job below.
I wanted to give you a quick update with some more signs I’ve been making. This is my second batch (first round of signs here) and I decided to dry a couple new styles: Freehand on chalk paint and stamping. After helping my friend Nicole with a wedding sign, I kind of fell in love with chalk paint.