Friday, December 24, 2010

What happens in the Man Cave stays in the Man Cave...

Until I post it on my blog. 

Now that the den is finished, the house is decorated for Christmas and the big family party is over I can finally do a little blogging.

First things first - the den. I have 1 more piece of art to make (a companion to the beetle art I made a while back - this time butterflies/moths)and eventually I'll refinish the side tables, and I'm on the lookout for a large/medium art piece to put on the other blank wall behind the couch, but I like to buy art when it speaks to me, not when I just need something to fill a wall, so this can wait.  I'm calling the room done for now.  Let's look at the overall before and after:


See? Blank wall with lonely surround sound speaker needs something...it will come to me eventually.


We finally hung Adam's Star Wars: Empire Strike's Back poster...on the left there. It's from the original 1980 release and it should have been destroyed (they released a new one because this one didn't picture Billy Dee Williams and it was in his contract that he be on the poster). Adam's aunt used to work in a movie theater and got to take the posters home sometimes, and she gave this one to him. It's pretty hard-core nerd...Nerd-Core if you will. 



Since this is the room where we spend most of our time I put a little mini-Christmas tree in, just so we can feel festive.
Ahhhh...isn't that so much better? The whole room feels much more cozy now. We didn't do a WHOLE lot in here. Just some paint, recovered some furniture, new mini-blinds, new pillows and curtains, hung some art. The paint color, if you're curious, is a 50/50 mixture of Valspar Bullfrog and Valspar Meadowlands. We just couldn't find the right shade of green on any chips or samples we had, and were torn between the two, but neither was just right, so we tried mixing them together (my sister-in-laws suggestion - thanks Christy!) and VIOLA! Perfect shade of green.

The most major project was replacing the trim around the windows. As you can see in the before photos, there used to be really wide planks of wood around the windows. We figured this was just a taste decision on behalf of the old owner, in addition to him not wanting to miter the corners of the trim. 

Ha. 

When we took the trim off we discovered this. 


There was a 2-3" gap between the windows and all the walls, which of course had no kind of insulation or anything, which explained why there was a constant draft from these windows despite them being quite new compared to all the other windows in the house.  Well done previous owners. Seems they bought replacement windows that were smaller than the original ones, and just covered up the gap with wide boards. So first we filled everything with expanding foam to fight the evil draft monster, put drywall pieces in, drywall tape and mudded everything. After all THAT we were able to put up the new trim. 

Some of my favorite things are the velvet curtains, and the pillows. The antler pillows are by far my favorite. Complete with faux bois fabric on the back. LOVE!

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