Slat Wall Part 1: Prep Work

I think we're at an all-time low for our "before" picture--I had to get a couple screen grabs from an old video for photographic evidence of the way this part of the living room has looked for literally over a decade: piano, torchiere floor lamp, messy coat rack:

For years D has wanted to get the piano off of that wall. It is the "entryway" and really seemed like a bad place for the piano, not to mention the fact that it was right up against our baseboard heating, which was bad both for the piano and for allowing the heat to get into the house. Plus we really needed more storage.  Creating some kind of wall would help us be able to get rid of that tippy, cluttered coat rack without losing all the coat storage. We had an IKEA Expedit behind the sofa (see this older picture, used a few times already including here):

But this only gave us a few cubbies, especially because we deliberately left some cubes open to avoid making the entry way too dark.

We debated a few options:

1. Pony wall (waist high free standing drywall)
2. Different furniture
1. More and bigger IKEA Expedit (now called Kallax)
2. IKEA Pax
3. Vitsoe 606
3. Slat wall

The pony wall was dropped fairly quickly as they are fairly deep (since you need 2x4 + drywall) and not very functional. The more/bigger Expedit / Kallax was dropped as it doesn't allow for hanging clothes. Pax (wardrobe) would create a fairly deep literal wall and would take away a lot of space and light. The Vitsoe 606 is quite expensive (though they seem to hold 100% of their value) and we thought it could give more of a "did we just enter a SoHo clothing store" vibe? 

That left a slat wall, which had the advantages of taking very little space, allowing for light to filter, and giving some flexibility on how / where to hang coats. The major disadvantage being that it would need to be custom-built. 

But before really starting several important questions needed to be answered: dimensions of the wood, the spacing of the slats, and what kind of wood. First, D did a lot of measuring and then some mock-ups with cheap pine, mostly to convince himself (and me) that it was not crazy. Here's the entry view with the initial framing (all press fit, i.e. just held in place with friction) in place for what the space was potentially going to become. 

With the project given the green light (by me), the piano found its new home in the sun room, which really is a much better home for it:

Then we moved our Expedit against the now-empty piano wall (and, cats being cats, this guy had to inspect the area fist):

And now, with the space behind the love seat empty, the project could begin. D continued to use the pine boards for more testing and measuring. We tried a few different variations for the spacing of the boards to get a sense of what we liked. We ended up deciding on roughly a 2:1 opening-to-slat ratio.

D also worked with a few lumber yards and settled on a couple options to consider for our final product. He ordered samples of sapele ("African") mahogany (bottom, the redder/warmer one) and American walnut (top) to see what matched our existing furniture and space:

Hopefully you can see in addition to comparing the wood color itself, we tested how it would look stained/oiled. The left/lower side of each board shows each wood with Danish Oil on it, and the right/upper part shows it completely bare.

We decided on the warmer, redder sapele as the existing cabinets in the kitchen and living room had some of those hues. We ordered quarter-sawn S4S (finished on all sides) 1x6 boards. We paid them to rip most of the 1x6 boards in half to create 1x3 as doing it ourselves would have been annoying. 

And just like that, we were ready to begin...

Princess Desk and Room

This princess room clearly needed a desk space for the little student. As with the rest of the room, the built-ins and the knee walls with doors to our storage cubbies meant that there wasn't a lot of space to work with, so D decided that this built-in should come out and a custom desk would go in. 

Demolition was surprisingly easy, so we didn't get any pictures of it. Just about everything could be pulled by hand or with a pry bar. There were spots that made us go "huh" though, as with any old house. We learned that the trim on the outside of the built-in was higher than the trim on the inside, which wasn't noticeable until we removed the vertical framing. D trimmed a piece from the front of the built-in to fit and inserted it, plus fitted a piece of wood trim. The floor also had missing pieces, and you can see from this picture that he added a small rectangle to fill in where the vertical front pieces of the built-in had been set into the floor:

We found a deeply discounted desk pedestal from Ballard Designs and then created a ledge to the height of that pedestal by screwing some pine boards around the perimeter into the studs. 

The most challenging (well, scary) part of the whole process was measuring over and over and then cutting the $99 "Floor and Decor" butcher block countertop to the right width. Then ripping it (shearing off a thin slice/plane) as it was a bit too deep for desk usage. The Bosch track saw made it a fairly easy process to make it thinner. Then D eye-balled a few different roundover bits we owned and ran a hand-held router across the front and side edge to give a nice rounded effect. He finished with Danish oil. He started with a very old can which was a huge mistake as it just went on sticky. And stayed sticky. So he had to run some mineral spirits across the board to de-sticky it. Then finish it again with a new(er) can. Still took several very smelly days in the basement (as it was winter there was no hope of using the outside or garage to cure) to get the smell in a sort of OK state--enough to put in a bedroom. For a while, we could smell it (from the basement) in most of the main floor of the house:

The middle hole in the floor was especially challenging to fill in because it got wider as you went deeper. I guess the contractor wanted some wiggle room when they installed the original bench / shelves. It was far too thin at the edges to keep as is, so D took a chisel and carefully widened the hole until the existing wood felt sturdy enough. Then he used some leftover oak flooring from our primary suite addition and cut it to friction-fit into the spot. The finish of course does not match, but no one is likely to notice until the next homeowner or future us rips out the desk.

And here it is, in all its glory. There's a charging station (I think my kids have more devices than I do) and lots of space to work (at least when she puts her junk away).

Without further ado, the rest of the room. You'll recognize the dressers and the bed, now with optional canopy attachment, from the guest room. Moving it up here is what allowed us to empty that room out and put in a Murphy bed instead. (The kids both knew it was now-or-never on this bedroom set--either one of them was taking it or it was going to be sold off.) This was my canopy bed and furniture set from the 1980s and apparently the multitudes of unicorn and Strawberry Shortcake canopies of my era just do not exist anymore. (I think they can be a health hazard because of how dusty they can get--so I try to shake this one off and dust the frame when I change the sheets.) This was one of very few I could find on Amazon, but fortunately, the room recipient loves it.

And of course we added another special touch to make the room even more magical:

And so as we enter 2026, I think I have finally caught up with all the bedroom upgrades that we made as a result of the new addition (guest room and both kid rooms). This all took place primarily in the last few hectic months of 2024, so you can see why we were too busy "doing" to be "writing."

Closet for a Princess

 OK well, apparently that was post 498, hahaha. I had two draft posts lurking from 2022, which I just found, affecting the overall post count. That's a little disappointing, but oh well. I definitely have at least two more posts up my sleeve (and hopefully many more), and I don't plan to update the last one with "actually I lied."

A year and a few months late, let's get into it on the room formerly known as the nursery. Here it is, in its green glory after we moved the Stuva wardrobe out.

Did we have to paint these walls, where the closets were going to be installed? D insisted that we did not, because they would be hidden by the build-in closets. However, I had to make sure the green was gone EVERYWHERE. It should come as no surprise that it took quite a bit of primer to get rid of that bright green.

Obviously the rest of the room needed to be painted as well. I took a moment of silence before painting over this mural (with a LOT of primer--even more than the green:

All gone (my babies are growing up!):

The room's recipient also wanted normal white ceilings, much to my dismay (the clouds were always something I wanted as a kid, but clearly not something my own kids wanted--oh well). So here is Sherwin Williams premium ceiling paint tinted Pure White (she allowed me to keep the clouds on the tiny ceiling in the dormer, so they're not gone entirely):

We bought many paint samples from Samplize, which we figured would be a huge upgrade from buying tiny bits of paint and slapping it on the wall. It was great until we pulled some of the hallway paint off removing the stickers...(note that we could not test the stickers in the green room, since the greenish glow would definitely affect the way the colors looked):

She went with Appleblossom, the least "pink" pink (the second up from the bottom) at our recommendation, since we learned our lesson on the green...the brightest color is probably not the best choice.

For a while, the room looked like this, partially painted just enough to start the closet installation.

After a little math work we saw that we could easily fit two Ikea Pax side by side and a have a bit of space behind the door. But....that would require jamming the right Pax against the right wall. Which has a dormer ceiling. So we figured with some sawing, it could forced in. 

The first step was remove the baseboard trim so the Pax could go as flush as possible to the back wall. 

D didn't want the Pax wardrobe totally flush against the  side wall because he was concerned it would be hard (or maybe impossible?) to open the wall-side door enough. Plus it would help to have something solid to attach the side of the wardrobe to, rather than drywall. Especially as he would need to install it in a ... non-standard way because of the extra sawing. 

So D held up the right-side board against the lowest part of the dormer and scratched a line onto the board. Then took it to the track saw and cut the edge. Which fortunately did not shatter as he cut it.  

He used some shims to wedge it all in tight. 

He did the same for the ceiling board - and also had to wedge in a scrap piece of 2x4 to hold it up.

The doors were VERY annoying as they were about an inch too tall to just fit as is. So I had to cut them all a little bit shorter. Then do a very sloppy job covering the top edge up with some leftover mat board, wood glue, and nails. 

Because we used the the 93in PAX doors with the 79in cabinet to line up near the top, D also had to cut a new set of hinge holes:

Getting sort of close!

But there were still a lot of little things to do. Spackling in gaps and installing some new trim (with pine wood quarter round) primed, then painted in semi-gloss Benjamin Moore Simply White. Which some random blog posts claimed was a good match for Ikea white. Which it sort of is (the top is the PAX door, the bottom is the painted trim).

Scrap pieces of the door and sides were used to fill in the top right triangle. Here it is, finished:

Of course we have some features on the inside like some internal PAX drawers, shelves, and bar as well as this custom this hair clip and bow board:

The left side required another scrap piece to close the top of the side (due to the shorter PAX unit and the taller PAX door, pictured above). We primed and painted it with the pink wall paint. 

You'll also see another addition to the left of the closet. Yup, this lucky kid got custom shelving too. It was a small amount of space to the side that didn't fit any ready-made furniture, but seemed perfect for displaying LEGOs (especially since the cats wouldn't find it easy to climb). We started with our favorite shelf base, the Container Store's elfa, which we've used in the living room, office closet, and linen closet. And like in the living room, we opted for our own shelving instead of using the elfa's line. 

D designed and cut a shape with a CNC that would make the most of the space available, with rounded corners so no one poked their eye out. 

The height is adjustable so we can set it to the height of whatever item she wants to display.

We have one more big project in the room and then can show the whole thing off!

A High Bar for 500

 Dear reader,

Believe it or not--and honestly *I* don't even believe it--this is the 500th post to this blog. I did not think, when we bought this house back in September 2009 (with our first post technically before closing, in August of that year), that we'd be going this long. There have been long gaps of inactivity and I'm still not caught up with everything we accomplished in 2024 during the almost year-long set of projects that began with the new addition and ended with upgrades to pretty much every bedroom in the house, but here we are, nearing the end of 2025 with 16 years of posts and, apparently, at number 500.

So it was a lot of pressure figuring out what to say! There's still plenty to write about, what with still being behind. But it felt like this post had to be different somehow. Rather than go into excruciating detail about one of the few big projects remaining to be shared, I wanted to cut to the good part and share a few amazing "after" pictures, leaving most of the in-between for later. Both are sort of an ode to D (ew, I know, emotion, gross) as he's combined his knack for fixing things with his newish hobby of carpentry into something that has transformed our house--and would have cost quite a bit of money if we had hired someone else to do it. Without further ado...

For the room that used to be the nursery, started with this:

Here it is, a quick "in-between" picture without the IKEA Stuva units, just so you can appreciate and compare the full space itself:

to THIS! Built-in closets and customs shelving, all by D (with a little help from his brother on the trim):

Our growing kid now has her own actual closet, instead of just some free-standing drawers...Again, much more to come on the "how D did it" later.

And the second big reveal, since it feels like 500 warrants more than just one, is for our entryway.

Our "before" picture actually comes from before we enclosed the sunroom, but besides that door in the background and the swapped out rug, this is pretty much what this space looked like until the beginning of 2025:

to...

ready?

It's a dramatic shift so I feel like I have to build some suspense...

...

...

...

THIS:

D designed and built a custom slat wall and matching storage bench. 

I told you it was pretty impressive. 

Here's the view from the other side where you can see the cool way it casts shadows on the ceiling, the built-in two-level hooks, and our pretty new loveseat (details later):

In looking back on these 16 years of homeownership, I would say we have upped our game (really, D has upped his game--I'm just here to cut in and edge on the painting and provide input on color and design). 

Here's to 500 more posts (or, at least, a few upcoming posts that go into more details on these two projects)!

Drinking Problem - SOLVED

Wow so this post has been in draft now for 18 months--I definitely thought I already blogged about this one, but apparently I only completed this post in my own head. This is a follow up to a post from three years ago about trying to organize and display our liquor bottles. We found the solution, as usual, at our favorite store--IKEA! The BAGGEBO:

It's a petite display cabinet that had a good amount of shelf space and fit neatly in our dining room as book ends to our sideboard. (Fun fact, it's $5 more expensive now than it was when I took that photo in-store almost two years ago.)

We installed a lighting system on a smart plug that turns on about a half hour before sunset every evening. It provides good ambient lighting and displays the alcohol that we very rarely actually drink. Lately it is more like art:

One problem with this furniture is that the two sides are a sort of mesh, which looks cool but means that the shelves and bottles get very dusty. And it's a big pain to clean. Obviously no display cabinet is air-tight, but having the two sides more-or-less completely open means that the dust builds up pretty fast.

Funny enough, when I started this post, I figured the story was done. But then in a walk around IKEA (did I mention we go there a lot?), we found this beauty:

The BLALIDEN, which didn't exist two years ago when we found our cabinets, actually solves almost every problem that remains. It is glass on all sides (though, admittedly, I like the white metal back on ours) and is taller, meaning one extra shelf to store more bottles--or space out the ones in the case. Still, at $120 each, it seems like an expensive and unnecessary upgrade to something that works almost just as well. Still, will this post have a sequel? Who knows...

In other kitchen news, we recently upgraded our cabinets by installing soft-close stops on them (by "we" of course I mean "D"):

Now we don't have to gently close the cabinet doors--we can just swing them and let the soft-close mechanism take over. This has been especially noticeable on our glass doors. Just listen to this comparison (as I'm sure will be obvious, the soft-close door goes first, followed by one without the soft-close):