The Pretty + The Brave: Pop Goes the Boys' Room

I admit it. I have totally neglected the boys’ room. Partially because I knew our current digs is temporary and partially because I didn’t have a vision for the space. Well, thanks to *sound the trumpets: dun, dun, dun, duuuuun!* Pinterest I found a solid foundation on what I’d like to build the style of each of the boys’ rooms around, but the problem is that they currently share a room *whomp, whomp, whomp, whooooomp* (I really need sound effects for this post). So I’ve decided to simply get started on a few small projects that will work in the shared space for the next few months as well as work for their own individual rooms when they get ‘em.

You can check out the boards I have for E’s and Owen’s rooms on Pinterest to get a better idea of my starting point, but to be honest, a lot of the design for their rooms is simply stored in my head.

I’ve recently started to dig distressed, unperfect looking art and furniture so for E’s room I envision the focal point to be a huge piece of art hung above his full size bed. To be exact, I want to do a painting of an American flag but give it a distressed look. I also want to do some sort of wall-mounted shelves to display his knick-knacks on. And this kid has a lot of display worthy items, namely Legos. He has a future in architeture, I tell ya. So in addition to the shelves I plan to one day make I was keeping an eye out for other awesome, vintagy pieces that I could turn into a cool display piece.

In comes Craigslist. Holla!

It’s hit or miss with Craigslist when it comes to finding neat-o things. But when browsing the site one day I came across this:

It’s an old pop crate. A Pepsi bottle crate to be exact. Super cool. And with a price of a cool 20 bones I had to jump, I didn’t even barter with the guy, I wanted it thaaaat baaad. What’s even better was that the guy actually had two of them that he was getting rid of. Can I get a 'what what'?!

The crates are old so they already have that rustic look that I’ve been envisioning. So all I did was give ‘em a good wipe down and slap some poly on it.

Now don't let the sentence "all I did was give 'em a good wipe down" fool you into thinking that this was a ten minute process. The bottoms of the inside of the crates were filthy with...I guess it was dust. It looked like it had been sitting in someone's basement for years and just collected layers upon layers of dust on the inside. So I washed them with water, sprayed cleaner on them, scrubbed, rinsed, and repeated about three or four times. Then I had to let them dry for a day and a half to make sure they were totally dry before putting the polyurethane on them. And the poly just helped to warm up the color of the wood, so they still have that rustic look.

Four screws later and I’ve got myself some spiffy looking shadow boxes.