Expedit Room Divider

I have a giant master bedroom.  With consent from my husband, I partitioned a part of our bedroom into my crafting and sewing area.  I used to have a whole bedroom dedicated to my hobby in my old house, but now I only have two bedrooms in my townhouse and I just don't have the space anymore.  I used a 5X5 cubby Expedit from IKEA to create the partition and also provided a ton of storage.  The only problem is the Expedit is open storage, which means there is no backing to the unit.  I didn't want our bedroom to look like my craft room with a bed in it, so for a while I covered one side with a curtain rod and an old duvet cover.  My husband said that it looked sloppy and we need a better looking permanent solution.  I thought about modifying the duvet cover to fit perfectly on the back of the Expedit, but thought it would still look sloppy.


Then one day I was looking through the IKEA hackers site and found a post about how someone used laminate flooring on the back of a Pax wardrobe to create a room divider.

Inspiration from Ikea Hackers

This was the perfect solution to my problem, but I didn't want to spend a lot of money to achieve it.  I was walking through the "As-Is" section of Ikea one day found packages of the Slatten line of laminate flooring marked at $5 a package.  Apparently the Slatten line of laminate flooring was horrible as flooring and they were clearancing out their stock.  I bought two packages and got my husband to working (you will notice that my husband is very supportive of my creative exploits and usually performs the part of the job that involves power tools.)

I emptied the Expedit, and laid it on the carpet.  Then my husband laid out the flooring and secured the boards with finishing nails.  You may wonder why we used finishing nails instead of adhesive and the simple answer is we needed to take the unit apart one day.  The color of the flooring was light brown and probably would have gone with the color scheme of the room, but I wanted to put a little more pizzazz to the wall.  I found a pin on Pinterest where someone did a painted wall paper technique pattern on a wall.  I was itching to  try to technique but wasn't brave enough to paint it on an actual wall in my house.  I thought it wasn't too much risk to use the technique for my partition though.

Pinned Here, Orinigal Post

I painted the flooring the same color as the walls in my room (Liberty Blue by Behr) and bought some silver paint by Marth Stewart at Home Depot.  I downloaded the template from the Jones Design Company website and got to tracing with a pencil.

Me tracing the template

Originally when I was reading/looking at the directions from post on the Jones Design Company website, I was thinking that tracing was going to be easy.  This is because on the post she shows her three year old son tracing the design.  I didn't read the part where she had her son pose for the picture and that of she would never have her three year old trace something like that on the wall.  So I wasn't careful of spacing and levelness of the template.  I had to readjust and erase/retrace a little bit, but it was still crooked in some places.  Since I'm an impatient person, I went with it anyway and started tracing the lines with the silver paint.

You can see the unevenness of the brush stroke and the general sloppiness of my tracing.   I got better towards the end so I should have started on the edge by the wall.

 I texted a picture of it to my husband and he thought it looked awesome.  I was afraid when he came home that he would look closely and pick out the less than perfect parts (because he's a perfectionist like that.)  But he said that if you look at the overall affect it doesn't look too bad.  I have to agree with him and now when I look at the all, I try to look at it as a whole and not too closely.  It looks like how Cher describes a Monet in Clueless.

My finished wall

  So now I have a pretty wall to partition off my craft/sewing area and cost run down was:

• $10 for two packages of Slatten flooring from Ikea
• $8 for the tub of Martha Stewart brand paint
• $2 for a paint brush from Michaels
• $0 for finishing nails (left over from another project)
• $0 Expedit (already existing)
• $0 Liberty Blue Behr Paint (left over paint from painting my room)
• Total cost for Expedit room divider = $20

Gardening

I'm a huge fan of Pinterest and have found many different recipes and DIY ideas to try out.  One of the pins that inspired me was the "Grow 100 lbs of Potatoes in 4 square ft."  Sometime in March, I recruited my husband to help me build the box so that I could try this growing technique out.  We built the box and bought purple and yukon gold seed potatoes and planted them.  I've been very excited about the progress, carefully watering and burying the new growth.  I've had a lot of new growth and have added 2-3 layers of boards to the box so far.

Potato Box, Spring 2012

Unfortunately, I just googled "growing potatoes in a box," and found a slew of videos showing unsuccessful potato harvests.  Do I cut my losses and let the box grow out but stop burying the plants in hopes of potatoes growing on the stems?  I'm thinking I probably should build small planter boxes and grow other veggies instead of adding to my potato box.  We will see what the harvest looks like... to be continued...

On the same weekend that we built the potato box, we decided that we needed  a raised bed so that we can plant more veggies.  We filled it with free compost from the dump, but got paranoid that there might be less than desirable chemicals and items in the compost.  So I nixed the idea of planting veggies for the first year and plant flowers instead.  Back in 2008 at our North Carolina home, I planted in raised beds with all compost with great success.  As you can see in the picture below, the random selection of flowers and plants were thriving and this picture wasn't at the peak of the craziness.  Side note: I also grew crazy gnarled potatoes in this bed by accident, but because the bed was watered with rain barrel water, we didn't want to eat the potatoes.

Raised bed filled with compost in North Carolina, summer 2008

This year at our California home, I planted ranunculus, snap dragons, and iceland poppies in the new bed and they are not doing so hot.  They're wilting and dieing off which is so sad to see money and effort wasted.  I think the difference between the bed in North Carolina and California is the quality of the compost, but I could be wrong.  I'll probably have to mix in some real garden soil into the bed either later this summer or next year to see anything grow successfully in the bed.

Raised bed filled with compost in California, Spring 2012

I did get some great poppy and ranunculus pictures from this bed before they died.  But I have a feeling the other flowers that come up will not be that fantastic.

Poppies and Ranunculus in California, spring 2012