ikea | Operation Home

I love how one awesome find has the potential to trigger that giant metaphorical ball to start arollin’. This happens to me a lot. I’ll just stare at a space for a while and do absolutely nothing to it. Then, out of nowhere, I’ll purchase one item that leads to a much more finished space in no time flat.

Last, we spoke about our dining room it looked like this….

We’d changed out the light carpet for ebony laminate, and basically plopped down our stuff on moving day. A good start for sure, but the room needed a large dose of softening. STAT. I’d discussed my plan for the space in this post, which was as follows…

Paint table white
Hang white curtains high and wide
Add a large, natural woven rug
Hang Ikea floating shelves above Drex

And thanks to that one teeny (well, super large) item, our plan now looks like this:

Paint table white
~~Hang white curtains high and wide~~
~~Add a large, natural woven rug~~
~~Hang Ikea floating shelves above Drex~~

…which happened all in one day.

See, I stopped by Lowe’s one fateful morning and saw this fantastic indoor/outdoor woven rug with a simple black striped border. The border was the kicker for me. I didn’t even know I wanted a border until I saw it. Then, I knew. Must.have.border. The durable indoor/outdoor quality made it ideal for a dining space what with accidental spills, crumbs, etc. Plus, the quality was nice… it didn’t look or feel cheap to me. And the price tag was FABul-oooouuusss!!!

$118 for an almost 8×10 rug!!!!! And I had a 10% off coupon!! I took him home and tried him out, which (warning!) may cause spontaneous hanging of curtains. And requests for already-busy husbands to stop what they’re doing to hang floating shelves….

Which left us here…

RIGHT???!!! So much better!!! I love the texture provided by the rug, and the height of the curtains makes the room seem grand.

For anyone wondering about the specifics for hang brackets and shelves, I generally follow these processes….

Curtain rod brackets: I measure 3 inches down from the ceiling and drill my holes for the brackets. This allows enough space for the curtains to be hung without crowding the ceiling. Now, if my curtains aren’t long enough to allow for this, I hang them as high as possible while still allowing them to graze the floor.

Shelves: This is a tricky one. I eyeball placement depending on the space, but I ALWAYS tape out the potential locations with painters tape first (as shown three pics up). I use a tape measure to measure out the exact length of my shelf on the wall, then I apply my tape from one mark to the other using a level to ensure that my tape is level and straight (basically, I hold my level with one hand and guide my tape with the other). Note: This is WAY easier to do with two people. But, I’m impatient and Joey wasn’t home. I always end up doing this when he’s not home for some reason. These shelves ended up being about 18″ apart and I think they’re perfect for this space.

Next up will be styling the shelves and painting the dining table white. Bamboo blinds beneath the curtain rod are also a possibility if I can find the right color. I also need to hem the curtains.

It’s funny that even though there’s still more to do, I feel like this space completely skipped crawling and went straight to walking in the span of a day. Of course, like I said, it’s nowhere near done yet, but it’s getting closer by the minute. And it’s definitely a far cry from this…

And although this is a totally dark picture (it was dusk), I have to show you our view from the breakfast nook through the dining space…

I friggin’ love this house.

Howdy folks! So, the last time I posted about Lucas’s Room was when we added a pair of Expedit shelves with a little pop o’ green behind them, which transformed the “play-zone” part of his room into this…

Back then, I stated something along the lines of “next will be shelves between the units”. And I’m happy to say that a whopping five months later “next” is finally here!

This is gonna be more of a “before and after” post rather than a tutorial since I was a bad blogger and didn’t take proper pictures. It all started when I found two shelves on clearance at Target for $4 a piece (marked down from $14.99). They were the perfect size and color (similar to the Ikea white of the units) for the space above Lucas’s toy trunk. So, I possessively shoved them into my cart and chauffeured them home.

I threw a few ideas around for brackets, but in the end, cheap won out. I purchased four of the brackets below from Lowe’s for just over a dollar a pop…

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I spray-painted them gold with leftover spray-paint that I had from when I created my Target-inspired bench. I wanted the brackets to play off of the gold accents on Lucas’s toy trunk…

The pic above was taken about halfway through painting. After the brackets had cured, Joey hung the shelves above the toy trunk, level with the shelves on the Expedit units…

I’ve thought about dabbing the screws with a smidge of gold paint, but really… they don’t bother me that much. Once the shelves were hung, I loaded them up with a few accessories that I’ve been saving for this very occasion…

…A few jugs to play off of the other orange accents in the room, a two-dollar painted mirror from Goodwill to bounce some light around…

…his little guitar that had been precariously teetering in his closet for far too long, a wooden dinosaur that we brought back from Mexico and some model cars (of course). 🙂

Here are a few wider shots…

And just as a reminder of where we started… a before shot taken just after we moved in…

Here’s a pic with the toy chest lid open just to demonstrate our reasoning for shelf placement…

There’s plenty of space for Lucas to rummage about his toys without the shelf crowding the lid.

I’m pretty much loving it. The new shelves provide additional storage and brightness and offer a great space to display larger items that were taking up space in his closet. They also act as a visual bridge between the two Expedit units which makes it feel more cohesive. For a smaller bedroom, I really feel like we’ve made pretty good use of the space for storing Lucas’s toys in easily accessible ways, which in turn, leaves more room for concealed storage in the closet. Win-win in my eyes. Thus, I hereby dub this play-zone complete (for now). 🙂