I’m excited to show you all the progress we’ve made this week. You won’t even recognize the space…
As I draw up the final plans for the art wall, my Ikea catalog and I have been spending some quality time together, and I can’t wait to head to the store to pick up my supplies!
However, getting our hands on the records we needed for the ceiling turned out to be more challenging than I anticipated. Several months ago I stopped in to the ARC thrift store right by our house and noticed that they had hundreds of old 45s. I eagerly spent an hour or so digging through those records hoping to find some good music for the jukebox, only to come away with a mere two or three songs I’d ever heard of. So when we decided on the record covered ceiling for the playroom, I returned to the same ARC hopeful that I’d be able to get all the records I needed in one stop. But of course, they had maybe 10 records total. Darn it!
I had a great time searching through this vinyl, and I found some great new additions to our jukebox collection, but at an average price of $2 each, we just could afford to stock up on the 100+ records we need for the ceiling.
The store owner agreed that, since we were going to buy such a large quantity, we could have them for a mere $.25 each! BINGO! So we dug through the piles and filled up a box of sleeveless vinyl with bright, colorful labels. Next up, affixing all of these to the ceiling… Details on that coming soon.
Given that I need to cover more than 5,000 square inches of wall space with sheet metal, imagine my disappointment when I discovered that Home Depot does not sell sheets larger than 3′ by 4′. That was going to be a lot of individual pieces to screw to the wall, and a lot of raw, sharp edges to deal with. Back to the drawing board…
I started making phone calls, and ended up finding a fabricator right by our house that is making easy work of this sheet metal wall. They are fabricating four sheets of metal for us, and doing so in a way that will eliminate the sharp edges – making it perfectly safe for the kiddos!
The boys and I stopped by the shop earlier this week to drop off the final measurements, and what a fun field trip that was for them. The loved seeing all of the machinery!
Our final, fabricated sheets of metal will be completed this afternoon! I can’t wait to pick them up so we can get to work on installing them!
Home Depot may have been a bust on the large scale sheet metal we needed, but after pricing out plumbing part options for the “wall coaster,” Home Depot definitely won out over the competitors.
We opted for the black pipe over the white in part for aesthetic reasons, in part because it is considerably lighter in weight, and in part because it’s just plain cheaper! Since we aren’t using these pipes for plumbing, I didn’t really need to know any more than that, but since I like to give you guys all the deets, I Googled it and discovered that the black pipe is actually ABS – Acylonitrile-Butadiene-Styrene. Of course, I then wound up going down the rabbit hole reading articles about the differences between PVC and ABS, recommended adhesives for each, plumbing codes in the US versus Canada, and, and… #bloggerproblems!
So, that’s where we are at the Week 2 mark. We’ve done a lot of shopping, but not the kind I’m used to for the ORC. No furniture or drapes in sight… but I’m a lot more familiar now with our used music scene and I can recommend a good sheet metal fabricator in Denver should you ever need one!
Make sure you stop by Calling it Home to check out all of the other Week 2 updates from my fellow ORC participants! There are so many amazing rooms underway!
