Vintage Geek Family Room

I would say my family room project is about 85% complete!  Hallelujah.  The other 15% will probably take another year or more to finish off, so I decided I might as well show off what I have to date.

What I call our “family room” is the “bonus” room of the house—right over the garage.  We’re a one-TV family (we’re not counting all the other personal electronic devices we have floating around here), and this is where it resides.

You’ve already seen the Vintage Geek Gallery Wall (which included the Green Dragon Inn Sign) and the Triple Printer’s Console Cabinet. 

The leather sectional was the big splurge for this room.  It replaced an 11-year-old La-Z-Boy sofa bed and loveseat.  I kind of felt bad getting rid of them, as they’ve actually held up remarkably well over the years, but I was so over the red plaid fabric I picked out and promptly regretted (“before” pictures at the end of the post).

The sectional is the Helena Sectional from Costco.  I had ordered a leather swatch last fall, but didn’t decide to order until January 1 (starting the new year off with a bang!) when it was on sale.  I was SUPER nervous about ordered it sight-unseen, but decided to risk it since I know Costco is so amazing about accepting returns, even months later.

Originally the shipper estimated that it would take six weeks to get the sectional here, and I was OK with that.  Imagine my surprise when, after only two weeks, I was told to expect it one week later!  I panicked and quickly got rid of the sofa/loveseat we had in the room.  Then we waited.  And waited.  And waited!  After waiting a full week, I contacted the shipper to say “what’s up??”  They didn’t bother to answer me, just changed the date back to reflect a six-week delivery time.  And that’s how long it took. We lived without furniture for three weeks!!  I’m still miffed about that.

As for the sectional, I’m quite happy with it.  The leather feels great.  The back cushions are perfectly cushy.  The seat cushions are firmer, but still very comfortable.  I don’t have any regrets!

I also showed off my IKEA hack to store my husband’s Lord of the Rings Lego collection.  Moving those Legos OUT of my bedroom was the jumping-off point for this whole room!  But my dear husband is not loyal to just Lord of the Rings…

…he’s just as crazy (if not more so) about Star Wars!  So in the opposite corner of the room, I built three floating shelves to hold the Star Wars Legos.

In keeping with the “vintage geek” theme of the room, I purchased three vintage-style Star Wars “travel posters” from this Etsy seller to go on this side of the room as well (over the piano).  If you’ll remember, I purchased LOTR posters from a different seller for the Vintage Geek Gallery Wall. 

Here are a few other elements in the room that I love.

I made the curtains myself from this fabric.  I consider it another splurge at $20/yard, but I love them SO MUCH!  They were perfect for the vibe I was going for.  Only drawback is that you can’t see that I added trim to the windows in the room!

I got rid of my dear husband’s big ugly recliner, but knew I needed to replace it with something.  I wanted a recliner that didn’t LOOK like a recliner, kwim??

I found this blue leather Barcalounger at Goodwill for…wait for it…FIFTEEN DOLLARS!  I was pretty stoked.  It may not be THE PERFECT chair, but for $15, it’s darn close. 

The little typewriter table sitting next to it has a story all it’s own (which I will have to share another time).  I refinished it to go with the industrial “vibe” of the room.

I bought these two barrister-style bookcases from an estate sale.  They are reproductions, not antiques, but they were a heck of a lot cheaper than antiques!  I love that they are seven feet tall!  Oh, and see the light saber on the top??  One of these days I’m supposed to mount it to the wall above the Star Wars travel posters.

So, wanna see what this room used to look like??

Here we are at Christmas time.  Plaid sofa and loveseat, big ugly recliner, IKEA rug, goofy kids…

Yes, I know the furniture is in weird configurations.  I moved it around A LOT while I was trying to decide what to do with the room.

Mismatched bookcases, IKEA console.  Nothing on the walls! (Plus the walls and the ceiling were a darker tan, making the whole room feel darker.)

I think I prefer it this way, how about you??

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Common Ground	My Repurposed Life

Vintage Geek Gallery Wall

Time keeps on slipping away between blog posts…I finish projects and then don’t have sufficient sunshine…or motivation…to take pictures!  But we are having a break in the rain this afternoon, so I thought I’d snap a few photos.

I’m happy to say that the family room project is at least 90% complete now.  After long, long weeks of waiting, the new sectional arrived (more on that later), as did the material for the curtains.  While I was waiting for them, I spent some time trying to decide what to hang on the walls…it was not a task for the faint of heart!

I really, really wanted a gallery wall…

…and this is what I came up with.

And although I say “I,” what I really mean is that it was a joint project between me and my best friend in Oregon.   We really burned it up over text messaging!

The first thing you might notice is that I chose the white Green Dragon Inn sign.  It was the first one I made, but originally I thought it blended in to the wall too much, so I made the wood one (shown here).  I will admit that I actually liked it better, but with some of the other things I chose to put on the wall, the white sign ended up working better.

For example, I hung an old printer’s tray on the wall on the left of the television.

It made a fun spot to show off a few of my husband’s Lego minifigs!  (You can see where the rest of the Legos reside in this room here).  If I had used the wood Green Dragon sign, I think it would have been a little too much in close quarters.

As I mentioned before, my goal in decorating this room was to blend some of my husband’s geeky style with some of my vintage style.  It was a challenge!  I purchased some artwork on Etsy, though, that was a perfect fit.

These amazing Lord of the Rings vintage-style “travel posters” won my heart!  (The artist has some other great posters for Game of Thrones and Star Wars as well.)

I surprised my husband with them, and he loved them as much as I did.  They are framed in IKEA Virserum frames.

I made a “Shield of Gondor” to complete this portion of the wall.  It was fun to have my husband get excited about something I was making! 

The other side was simpler…I knew I wanted to include my much-loved metal clock to bring in another industrial element in the room.  It took up a lot of real estate!  The “B” is one of those cardboard letters from JoAnn’s.  I mod-podged aluminum foil onto it ages ago (like this project), but never had the perfect place to put it…until now!

This is the wall you see as you enter the room, and it makes me smile now.  I love my printer’s console, and I love my quirky gallery wall.  It’s just so nice to have this room turning into something other than a dumping ground!

And here’s a little fun for you.  When I ordered my LOTR Travel Posters, a little mix-up led to me receiving TWO Rohan posters. (8x10 size)  I don’t really need both, so I would love for the extra one to go to someone else who will love it.  If you’re interested, either for yourself or someone you love, just leave a comment on this post telling me who you would like to have the poster for, and I will choose a winner at random on Sunday (or thereabouts).

That’s it!  Thanks for stopping by!

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Linking up here:

The Inspiration Exchange	Elizabeth & Co.
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Perfectly Imperfect
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Green Dragon Inn sign

My family room project (first mentioned here) has been stalled out as we wait for my NEW COUCH!   I’ll share more about that later, but let me just warn you…don’t put too much faith in shipping company estimates that send you in a panic to get rid of your old furniture…or you just might spend 2 1/2 weeks with NO furniture!

So the goal for my family room was to be a little more “fun & funky” than is my normal modus operandi.  If it were up to my husband and/or children, the whole room would look like the bridge of the Starship Enterprise.  Or a Tardis.  Or a wood-elf lodge.

I’m already compromising by including Legos in the room (you can see my IKEA hack display shelf here)….but it’s NOT going to be a Tardis room!  However, I am trying to work with a bit of a theme, and I call it:

Vintage Geek

Something for him (husband), something for them (kids), and something for me (me!).

With that in mind, I worked on a little wall art, loosely inspired by the Ballard Designs Pruvost plaque.  I’ve loved the shape of it for.ev.er.  So I used some scrap plywood to make a similar-shaped sign, which is supposed to look like an ooooooollllllddd (that’s the vintage part) inn sign.

I made the white one first, but then I wasn’t sure if it went in the room as well as I wanted…so then I made the wood one.

So how about an opinion?  Which one do YOU like better??

And then a question:  are you geeky enough to know what the “Green Dragon Inn” comes from??

If you want to cheat, the answer is here.

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Note:  I have been getting some questions lately that I can’t respond to because they come from “No-Reply Bloggers!”  If you’ve asked me a question and I have answered, please try again, but include an e-mail address!

IKEA Hack: Lego Display Shelves

So let’s talk more about my family room project, shall we?

I have to tell you something first…

My husband is a big geek.

I mean that in the most LOVING way possible!

But he is.

He loves all things Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, Warhammer, WarCraft, Lego, etc.

Some of those I can sort-of get behind… 

(Legos are cool.  Star Wars is cool.  Star Trek is very cool.)

Some of those annoy me so much it makes my eyeballs itch… 

(Anything that has to do with computer games…or Warhammer…)

But even the “cool” things can be overdone, don’t you think?  For example, when your husband’s collection of LOTR Legos takes over the entire top of the chest of drawers…and then spills onto the bench….and the floor….

It got to be a bit much.

So really, the family room project was born from the necessity of finding somewhere ELSE to put all his Legos.  He suggested I build shelves for them in the family room.  That, of course, snowballed into a MUCH bigger project than just shelves!

But it is the shelves with which we will currently concern ourselves.  I wanted a little bit of an industrial vibe, and I considered many things…floating shelves, built-ins, a rustic display shelf.  But with cost always a consideration, I finally settled on an IKEA Vittsjo “hack” job inspired mostly by this one at Centsational Girl. 

One of my issues was that I had to be able to display my dear husband’s two-foot-tall Tower of Orthanc that was his only Christmas wish.  This hack by EAK! A House gave me the courage to do a little cutting to make the shelf fit my needs. 

The biggest alteration was the I removed half of one of the horizontal cross-pieces in order to make a double-tall shelf.  This was accomplished with the help of a $30 angle grinder from Lowe’s.  Say what you like about IKEA (and I often do)…but the metal this shelf is made of is tough stuff!  It would have taken forever and a day to cut through it with a hacksaw.  The angle grinder was super fast, plus it allowed me to shorten my cut-off piece to use for a new middle cross bar (see above), and grind down some of the integrated brackets that had been meant to hold the cross bar. (I had never used an angle grinder before, but it was fun!  Lots of sparks!)

I was left with one hole in the metal that wasn’t covered up.  So I filled it…with caulk!  I had to give the whole shelf a quick spray-over with black paint to hide the raw metal edges where I ground them down, so it is pretty well hidden during…shall we say… “casual observation.”  (So don’t look too closely, OK?)

This unit came with wood-like shelves for the top and the bottom, but glass shelves in the middle.  I used some scrap 1/4” underlayment I had in my garage to cut new middle shelves, stained with Rustoleum American Walnut stain.  For one thing…I like the look.  For another…it was a lot easier than cutting a glass shelf in half!

So now the LOTR Legos have their own new home…although sometimes, they still have to battle enemies unforeseen by Tolkien….

Geek parents tend to have Geek children who like to alter storylines….

Ta-da!

Now I have to figure out what to do with the Star Wars Legos….

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Perfectly Imperfect
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Triple Printers Console Cabinet

There was a strong temptation for me to entitle this post:  “She’s not dead.  Not yet.”  (And if you know what movie character I’m paraphrasing, you get 10 Chicken Points.)

It has been a very looonnnngg while since I’ve posted, or even been particularly active on the blogs at all.  I seem to have been part of the “where does blogging fit into my life” club…as I’ve found several other bloggers who have also taken long breaks, trying to answer that question!

I think I just managed to burn myself out a little between a summer market, a fall market, and Christmas signs for two shops and one small show.  Then there were Christmas preparations…and finally, a break!  It was delightful.  I loved that week after Christmas where there was really nothing I had to do!  Do you ever feel that way?

With shows and special orders out of the way for a while, I decided to tackle a “home” project…our family room.  When we moved in here (just over a year ago), the family room was the room where we put everything that we couldn’t figure out another place for…it became the dumping ground.  The kids used the room because it was where the TV was, but I almost never went in there, even to watch a movie…I hated everything about it!

So in the past few weeks, it has been my happy-although-at-times-frustrating task to make it in to a more useable, functional, and pretty place for our family to use.  I’ll share some “before” pictures at another time, but for tonight, I just thought I’d share my one major “build” for this room.

I fell in love with Ana White’s Triple Printers Console plans when they first appeared more than a year ago.  It was one of the first items I “pinned” for inspiration to my Family Room Pinterest board (if you visit, you might find some other hints of what is going on in this room).

I knew I wanted a painted finish, however, more like the Pottery Barn Dawson Media Console, and this is what I ended up with (the picture above looks a little greener than real life, I think).  First I stained the whole cabinet with Rustoleum American Walnut stain, then I painted with a DIY chalk paint made with sample pot of Valspar Perfect Storm.  After some heavy distressing, I glazed it all with more stain, then used MMS wax in both regular and dark to protect it all.

This was a challenging build in some ways—namely, the cabinet doors.  There is more of a gap around them than I would like, but it doesn’t bother me as much now that I’ve lived with it for a while.  I discovered that you should NOT buy the cheapest hinges you can find because, well….they’re cheap.  At 22” wide, these door are heavy, and cheap hinges tend to sag…and there’s nothing you can do about it.  I may be a little bitter about that. 

One of the things that made this a simpler build, however, was that I splurged for Select Pine.  It’s significantly more expensive, but SO lovely and smooth—hardly any sanding required!  I still had to hunt…and hunt….and hunt some more (at two different stores)…to find straight 2x2’s, but once I did, it was easy to build nice and square with those perfect corners.

I omitted the center drawer and just put in a shelf to store the DVD player and the Wii console.  Then my other splurge was to buy three Flipworks DVD trays through Amazon.  Each rack screws directly onto the shelves, but then slides out so you can access all of your movies.  We have stored our DVDs in IKEA boxes for a long time, and you had to go through every box to find the movie you wanted (yes, I’d considered labeling the boxes, but there’s no point when you have 6 children who never put anything away properly).

I adore all the label pulls, which I purchased from D. Lawless Hardware (they are VERY reasonably priced!).  I really have no plans to put actual labels in them….I think they are pretty just the way they are!

This new console is really the focal point of the whole room, and it makes me happy every time I walk in there—a far cry from how I used to feel!  I am still anxious to get everything put together so I can show off the room, but it is coming together…piece by piece!

 

Thanks to Someday Crafts, Elizabeth & Co., My Repurposed Life, and Domestically Speaking for featuring this project!

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Linking up here:

The Inspiration Exchange	Elizabeth & Co.
Primitive & Proper	Thrifty Décor Chick
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Funky Junk’s Saturday Night Special	The DIY Show Off Miss Mustard Seed
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Knick of Time	Domestically Speaking
Perfectly Imperfect
Common Ground	My Repurposed Life
From My Front Porch to Yours	Mod Vintage Life